The Burnout Nobody Talks About

I wrote a lead magnet in an hour.

It took three months to get it out the door.

Not because the content was complicated. Because everything around it was. The landing page. The thank-you page. The email sequence. The form integration. The tracking pixels. The testing. The fixing when things didn't connect the way they were supposed to.

By the time it was live, I'd forgotten why I was excited about it in the first place.

When I started talking to coaches about how they run their businesses, I expected to hear about client challenges. Difficult sessions. The emotional weight of holding space for people in transition.

That's not what I heard.

Instead, I heard about friction. The invisible stuff that surrounds the coaching but has nothing to do with it. The admin. The tools. The endless toggling between systems that were supposed to make things easier.

And here's what made it worse: most of them had been told this tech stuff was simple.

The gurus who recommend tools and talk about how they're "not technical" make it sound like anyone can do it. They show you their polished funnels, their seamless automations, their effortless content calendars. What they don't show you is the hours of troubleshooting when those tools don't talk to each other. The integrations that break at the worst possible moment. The workarounds that become permanent fixtures.

They're not lying, exactly. They just don't remember what it took to get there. Or they have teams handling the parts they've conveniently forgotten.

So when it feels hard, you assume you're the problem. You must not be technical enough. You must be missing something obvious.

You're not missing anything.

Take posting on social media. It sounds like one task. It's not.

First, you plan your themes and content types. Then you find or create an image... but wait, first you need to update it so it fits your brand. Then you write the post… oh wait, you need a good hook and CTA with a URL that has a meaningful UTM so you can track what’s working for each platform you post to. Then you schedule it, or go into the tool to manually enter everything. You hunt for the right emojis and hashtags, if they're applicable to the platform. You publish. You write a first comment. You come back to engage with responses. And if you're not paying for a third-party analytics tool... you pull the metrics post by post, manually.

One piece of content. A dozen micro-tasks across multiple tools.

And that's just social media. Multiply this by client onboarding, session scheduling, invoicing, email marketing, and all the other "simple" things you're supposed to be doing, and you start to see the real picture.

"I dread the time it takes to just execute," one coach told me. "It's [her process] not stable enough that it's automatically like, okay, this person moved from a potential client to a real client."

Another described her tools as "piecemeal." A third said she's stuck in "this in-between zone" where she doesn't have enough time to do it all herself, but can't yet afford to hire help.

One coach called Canva her "nemesis." Another admitted she'd forgotten an automation she built because she has so many systems she can't keep track of them all.

"I need one spot to have it all managed," someone said. And honestly, that sentence has stayed with me.

Here's what struck me most: nobody complained about coaching. Every single one of them described friction around their coaching. The admin. The switching. The low-grade dread of tools that should work but don't quite.

I got curious and did a little digging. Turns out there's a name for what coaches are describing.

HRD Connect's analysis of workplace burnout puts it bluntly: "mental fatigue, cognitive strain and decision friction are now the leading indicators of burnout, surpassing workload volume for the first time."

Read that again. It's not how much work you do. It's the friction of doing it.

The research backs this up:

Those 1,200 daily toggles? Each one costs just a couple of seconds. That sounds survivable... until you realize it adds up to four hours a week of your brain just reorienting. And when a real interruption pulls you away entirely... a client call, a scheduling fire, a broken integration... that's when the 23 minutes kicks in. Not seconds. Minutes. To get back to what you were actually trying to do.

Coaches aren't imagining this. The systems they're using are literally designed in ways that fragment attention and drain energy. The exhaustion is real, it's measurable, and it has nothing to do with how hard you're trying.

Here's what makes this so insidious: people get used to it.

"I go here, then I switch to this tool, then that tool." It becomes routine. Invisible. You stop noticing the friction because it's just... how things are done.

I've talked to coaches who couldn't tell me how many tools they use. Not because they didn't want to, but because they genuinely didn't know. Some things had become so automatic they didn't even register as tools anymore. The browser tab that's always open. The app they check without thinking. The spreadsheet that's been there so long it feels like part of the furniture.

When something is invisible, you can't question it. You can't ask if it needs to be this hard. You just keep doing it, and wonder why you're so tired at the end of the day.

This has a name. You can call it tool fatigue. Decision friction. Admin overwhelm. Whatever term resonates with you.

The point is: it's real. It's measurable. And it's not a personal failing.

You didn't become a coach to troubleshoot integrations at 10pm. You didn't train for years in transformation work so you could spend your Sundays wrestling with a landing page builder. The friction you feel isn't a sign that you're bad at technology or need to try harder.

It's a systems problem. And the first step to solving it is seeing it for what it is.

If you're curious, we put together a quick checklist called The Coach's Tool Trap. It helps you see what's been invisible... and gives you steps to start simplifying.

Grab your free copy below.