Insights

When Work Stops Feeling Sustainable: Understanding Burnout Before It Costs You Your Career

Over the years I have spoken to thousands of people about their working lives. Some conversations are about ambition, opportunity, and progress. Others are quieter and far more concerning. They often begin with a sentence like, “I think I’m burning out.”

What Anxiety Is Really Doing (Therapist Team Breakdown)

Why Your Career Often Stalls Because Your Mind Is Too Full

Over the years working in recruitment, I have noticed something interesting about people who feel stuck in their careers. It is rarely a lack of ability. It is rarely a lack of opportunity. More often, it is something much simpler: their mind is too full.

When Anxiety Shows Up at Work: What Your Mind Is Actually Trying to Do

Anxiety is often treated as something purely negative. Something to eliminate. Something that signals weakness, lack of confidence, or inability to cope with pressure. Yet over the years, working with thousands of candidates and employers, I have noticed something interesting: many of the most capable professionals I have met experience anxiety at key moments in their careers.

The Career Skill Nobody Talks About: Learning the Art of Detachment

One of the most common patterns I have seen over the years in recruitment is how emotionally attached people become to outcomes they cannot control. A candidate becomes fixated on a single job opportunity. A hiring manager becomes convinced that only one specific candidate will work. A professional ties their entire sense of progress to a promotion that may or may not happen this year.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that settles in when you realise a role is no longer right for you.

It does not arrive dramatically. It builds quietly. You notice it when the Sunday evening feeling starts creeping into Saturday afternoon. When a 25 minute sight test feels like an hour. When conversations in the staff room turn from light-hearted to loaded. When you begin to question whether it is you who has changed, or the practice.

Is your job aligned with the life you want, or just paying the bills

This question can sound bigger than it is. It isn’t really about ambition, or whether you secretly want a different career, or whether you should be grateful for what you have. It’s not even about loving your job. Most days in practice are too busy for that kind of thinking. It’s about something quieter and more persistent: the gap between how your working days actually feel and the kind of life those days are meant to be supporting.

Is work spilling into your life more than it should

This question isn’t really about time management, or resilience, or whether you’re organised enough. It’s not about whether you care too much, or whether others seem to cope better than you do. It’s about something quieter and harder to pin down: the way work can start to follow you home, not in your diary but in your head, and how normal that can begin to feel without you ever deciding it should.

Have you normalised stress that should not be normal

At first glance, this question can sound like a personal failing. As if it’s asking why you haven’t coped better, or why you’ve let something slip. But that isn’t what it’s really getting at. It’s not about resilience, or toughness, or whether you’re cut out for the work. It’s about how easily a certain level of strain can become the background noise of an optician’s day, so familiar that it barely registers anymore.

Are you running on commitment instead of motivation

Most people don’t ask this question because they’re feeling flat or disengaged. They ask it because something feels oddly hollow even though they’re still showing up, still delivering, still holding things together. In an optician’s practice, that can be easy to miss because the day keeps demanding things from you regardless of how you feel. Clinics run, patients arrive, decisions still need to be made. The work continues whether you’re motivated or not.

Are you tired, or are you burnt out

This question sounds simple, but it rarely is. In practice, it isn’t really about sleep or resilience, and it’s definitely not about whether you can “push through” a bit more. It’s about something quieter and more uncomfortable: whether the tiredness you feel still lifts when the pressure eases, or whether it’s started to feel like part of who you are at work. In an optician’s practice, where care, pace, and expectation sit on top of each other all day, that line can blur without anyone noticing.

Does your job give you energy, or drain it

It sounds like a simple question, but it rarely lands that way. It isn’t really about whether you enjoy your work, or whether you’re good at it. And it definitely isn’t about whether you’re grateful to have a job. It’s about something quieter and harder to admit: what it costs you to keep showing up as yourself, day after day, in a practice that never really slows down.

Are you proud of the work you do every day

It sounds like a simple question, but it rarely is. It isn’t really asking whether you enjoy your job, or whether you had a good day today, or whether someone thanked you at the end of an appointment. It’s asking something quieter and more uncomfortable. It’s asking whether, when the doors are locked and the lights are dimmed, the work you did still feels like it belonged to you.

Straight-Talking Advice: 9 Thinking Patterns That Will Wreck Your Career (and How to Fix Them)

Recruitment’s a mental game. Your mindset drives performance, relationships, and results. These nine thinking traps quietly kill confidence and clarity - whether you’re a consultant, candidate, or client. Let’s call them out and fix them - Mark Goode style.

Most of us live our lives believing our thoughts are telling us the truth.

If you feel anxious, you assume something must be wrong. If you feel flat, you assume life is dull. If you feel frustrated at work, you assume the job or the people are the problem.