Beyond Burnout: Grounding In and Breaking Free with Laura Hartley

Episode 40 Description

Laura Hartley is an activist, a life coach, and founder of Public Love Education, an online school for changemakers. She has a deep passion for seeing individuals and communities break free from toxic systems and works to foster social healing and community thriving. Today on Yes! We Rise, Laura and Christine explore what true resilience looks like, healing from burnout, and the discovery of your inner compass. In this episode, Laura gifts us all with endless wisdom, encouragement, and possibility. Welcome!

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Key takeaways

Inner growth to external impact, and the role of resilience

Laura Hartley is no stranger to personal development and spirituality. Born and raised in Australia with a mother working in life coaching, she was taught from a young age about agency and choice. This also led to a deep sense of service and moral responsibility to care for and restore the earth.

As Laura grew up, she noticed how in the midst of important inner work, systemic issues and structural realities were often neglected. Patriarchy, white supremacy, climate change, and capitalism were often ignored.

Moving into climate and environmental activism Laura began asking hard questions:

• How do we navigate grief for the world
• How do we hold these incredible crises that we’re facing AND activism?
• How do we start to make change from a really deep and embodied place so that it’s both within us and is out there in the world?

We must look at the underlying causes to the problems with our systems and policies. Yes, there is a time and need for personal growth work, AND, there is a need to reflect on how we show up in the collective, in relationships, and in community. 

Laura has noted time and time again that passionate folks are reaching burnout within a year due to a culture steeped in what Laura refers to as internalized capitalism. People often correlate their worth and value to their productivity. Resulting in overexertion and feelings of scarcity, Laura too, had to navigate this experience.

But we can shift out of this belief! It is done through awareness and making new choices. Instead of staying in our thoughts and perpetually doing, we can shift into our bodies and become present.

Laura points out how often we mistake resilience for endurance. It’s not about pushing forward or tolerating toxic circumstances. Resilience is when we expand and return stronger; it is the result of thriving. The potential for transformation and growth is in the overcoming, whether that’s an individual or community. What’s learned through struggle is where the magic happens.

Overcoming burnout and grounding into our truth

Laura is creating a Cultural Wayfinding program and has been offering free one-on-one calls. What she’s noticing is that many folks are moving toward burnout because they’re unfulfilled by their work.

When looking to make change in the world, Laura breaks it down into three categories:

1. Disrupting: shedding a light on what is happening
2. Aiding: healing and helping those impacted by the current systems
3. Building: creating new structures that outlast the current ones as they fall

In her work, Laura merges personal development with systemic analysis. Instead of either/ or, it’s both/ and. It means having lives that give us meaning, while also creating the world that we want to have.

We need people following their callings, and Laura’s work is about bringing people back to their body compass and what is true for them. She helps people break down beliefs, distinguishing between what’s cultural, systemic, patriarchal and what’s actually true for them. From there, the work is embodiment of those supportive beliefs and transforming it into next steps.

Laura does this work with individuals and in groups. Her program, Internal Revolution, looks at the different components of burnout and resilience, and how to shift back into thriving. She teaches skills in reconnecting with self, finding safety, and revealing what is truly wanted. 

With climate activists, Laura also helps reevaluate the drive for their work. Instead of stemming from a perspective of saving the world, can it be done through a lens of love and service to the world?

Soon she will also be offering a group on Business Beyond Capitalism which explores entrepreneurship apart from capitalism. Her latest project, Cultural Wayfinding program, will focus on freedom and collaboratively creating a different world.

In her words, Laura’s work is about “empowering changemakers with the tools to reimagine how they want to do activism and what is important to them in their lives, so that they can go forward from a stronger place.”

Breaking Free and Trusting our Inner Compass

When reflecting on what she hopes for, Laura has a beautiful vision for people to experience freedom. She believes through freedom from toxic, cultural elements like false expectations and standards, people can then come home to their truest selves. She dreams of communities finding what lights them up and the freedom to follow wherever that leads.

For many people instead of a firework of passion, this light can look like a small spark –  something you keep coming back to. You will feel it in your body. It could be a sense of lightness or energy. It may feel like openness or expansion. These sensations in our bodies are guides that we can root into and trust as our internal compass.

Laura explains how, “getting free is what allows us to then choose a different path for ourselves. It gives us more opportunities, it gives us agency and it ends our participation in a system.”

In this it is also important to acknowledge privilege in this work, and often those folks are the ones we need to use their freedom and privilege to disrupt systems and change policies for the betterment of all.

Breaking free is about breaking out of toxic systems, patriarchy, and the western neoliberal paradigm. Culturally, we are seeing growing burnout, perfectionism, a sense of time scarcity, increased depression and anxiety. But Laura encourages that as we step away from what’s harmful, find communities and spaces that create safety, and tune into our inner compass, it is then that we can live from our true selves.

Notable quotes from Laura

“I have agency, I can choose my response to the world around me. And I can choose how I want to show up in the world.” 

“I started to see this disconnect a little bit with the personal growth movement. There’s some wonderful teachings out there that focus on the inner work, but completely ignore systemic issues or structural realities. They’re not talking about the reality of patriarchy, they’re not talking about the reality of white supremacy.”

“Activism at times was a little bit tunnel focused. It focused purely on the structural issues. It focused on the systems and the policies and these really important things that need to change, but it missed the spiritual wound, or the psyche that was actually underlying or creating these conditions.”

“You have amazing people so passionate about changing the world and your activism, and within a year, they’re burnt out, and they’re stressed. And this was me as well.”

“I refer to something called internalized capitalism. It’s the equation of our worth, or our value with our productivity, or with what we produce. I’m only valuable when I’m doing X, Y, and Z.”

“Where does the inner work come to play, because we’re all trying to make incredible change here. But we’re all doing it using the same energy that we’re trying to disrupt, or we’re trying to dismantle.”

“We need people in every single different field starting to reimagine what it is that’s right for them. We need people following their callings and doing what’s true for them. So I help people come back to their body compass, come back to what is true for them.”

“My vision, my wish, my dream, my intention for all of us, is to get free from all of those things that we think we are supposed to do, to get free from those toxic elements of culture and to return to what is true for us.”

“Getting free is what allows us to then choose a different path for ourselves. It gives us more opportunities; it gives us agency and it ends our participation in a system.”

“Rituals are deeply lacking, deeply missing in our culture. They were markers, they were signposts, and they held spaces and experiences for the community that offered us something at the individual level and at the collective level.”

“When we change the way that we approach change, we have more possibilities. We have more opportunities, and that’s on the outside as well as the inside.”

LINKS/RESOURCES MENTIONED

Discover more of the important work Laura is doing through her school, Public LovED. Also be sure to look at her group program Internal Revolution. Laura is also on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Hear more of Laura’s powerful wisdom on her podcast: The Public Love Project!

The Yes! We Rise podcast features solutions-seekers, change-makers, and those creating a resilient future. We share stories and strategies to inspire action to build resilience and community transformation. To create change, people need to feel like they belong and that they are part of a growing movement. They need to know their voice matters and that they have the inspiration, agency and ability to transform their lives and their communities. They are the key to a resilient future.

From the Navajo Nation to the mountains of Appalachia, incredible work is being done by community members and leaders. Change is often sparked by inspiration: seeing what others have done, especially in similar situations and places. People see that when someone looks like them or lives in a place like theirs, and has created real, true and lasting change, change that will allow their granddaughters and grandsons to thrive — they begin to imagine what might be possible for them. No longer waiting for someone else to come and save them, they realize they are the ones they have been waiting for. But what creates that spark? What creates that inspiration? Learning through stories and examples, feeling a sense of agency and belonging, and getting fired up to kick ass creates that spark.

We Rise helps community leaders and members learn to forge a new path toward creating resilience and true transformation. One person at a time, one community at a time, one region at a time, the quilt of transformation can grow piece by piece until resilience becomes the norm instead of the exception. Together, we rise.