Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Rest
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired September 6, 2026 Dr. Charleanea Arellano has spent over 30 years as a clinical psychologist and leadership coach, but the framework she's best known for now, the Embodied Narrative Framework, didn't come from a textbook. It came from putting away laundry five years ago and noticing her own body bracing for impact, for no reason at all, at age 55, after decades of actually being safe. Dr. Arellano built her career studying how high-achieving women lead while carrying nervous systems shaped by trauma, and by the added weight of managing how their race, sexuality, or gender is...
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Why Business Leaders Need Negotiation Skills
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 23, 2026 Annette Mullin spent 24 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, nine of them as a crisis negotiator, eventually leading one of the busiest negotiation teams in the country — averaging over 100 call-outs a year. She worked patrol, sexual assault, internal affairs, and homicide, becoming LVMPD's first female homicide sergeant, before spending her final years as the department's director of employee wellness in the aftermath of the October 1 Mandalay Bay shooting, the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. Now a negotiation instructor and coach...
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Why Comedy Might Be the Best Medicine For Mental Health
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 16, 2026 For over a decade, Dave Mowry couldn't get out of bed, couldn't shower, and couldn't walk to his own mailbox without waiting until dark so a neighbor wouldn't catch the look in his eyes. In 1994, a psychotic break sent the successful businessman and family man into a depression so deep it cost him his house, his career, and 14 years he calls his "lost years." He slept in his clothes for months at a time. At parties, he'd stand against the wall and pray no one came over to talk to him. Then, at his wife's urging, he walked into a stand-up comedy class for people...
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Why Imposter Syndrome Keeps Leaders Stuck
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
In this episode, Dana is joined by Kurt Bush, a trauma-informed coach who helps leaders move from imposter syndrome to authentic confidence. Kurt shares his own journey with imposter syndrome, from feeling like a fraud in corporate leadership meetings to realizing his true calling. He explains that to make a change, the pain of staying the same must become greater than the pain of changing, a threshold many of us fear crossing. Kurt introduces the ERT (Encounter + Reflection = Transformation) framework, a practical approach to help you get unstuck. He reveals why the first step to moving...
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Your Midlife 'Crisis' Might Be Burnout (with Jody Brooks)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
A midlife crisis isn't actually a crisis. That's the challenge Jody Brooks puts to anyone who's ever felt lost, restless, or quietly convinced something's wrong with them somewhere around 40 or 50: what looks like burnout, and what people love to write off as a freakout, is more often a calling. His own arrived at lunchtime at the office, buzzing canteen and all, when he found himself sitting in a restroom cubicle, crying so hard he could barely breathe. No brutal meeting that morning. No disaster. Just the quiet moment his body picked to file its formal complaint: burnout wasn't a "rough...
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How You Can Find Hope After Rock Bottom (Aaron Ryan)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Two in the morning. Sitting on the toilet, clothed, bawling into a pillow, because a broken PC was the last thing standing between him and the self-employed life he wanted so badly he could feel it in his teeth. That's where my guest this week hit rock bottom: not one dramatic collapse, but months of computer problems piling on top of a dream that felt like it was never going to happen. A client shared one quote with him that day, and Aaron Ryan has carried it in his back pocket for almost twenty years since: "The temptation to quit is always greatest just before your greatest success." Aaron...
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How Your Body's Intuition Can Heal You (Rebecca Russell)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Four years of chronic pain. A fibromyalgia diagnosis. Muscle relaxers, pain pills, migraines, MRI after MRI. And through all of it, my guest this week kept hearing the same quiet voice: something doesn't fit. Rebecca Russell listened to it anyway, tracked down a neurosurgeon, and asked for one test nobody else had run: a discogram. It found the bulging disc that had been the actual problem the whole time, and eighty-five percent of her symptoms disappeared after surgery. Rebecca is a metabolism and lifestyle coach, certified essential oil specialist, and author who's spent more than three...
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Why Successful Entrepreneurs Set Boundaries (Chris Shurian)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
My guest this week has a word for himself I'd never heard before: "entrepreholic." Over 39 years, Chris Shurian has built, operated, bought, broken, and resurrected companies in remodeling, construction, manufacturing, real estate development, foreign investment, hospitality, restaurants, and retail. He's also survived cancer and finished two Ironmans. And in 2008, when the economy crashed, he was so extended, so "all in, all in, all in," as he puts it, that he spent the next two years meeting with his banker once a week just to survive it. We talk about what it actually felt like to launch...
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Why Loneliness Hits the Young Hardest (Dr. Anthony Silard)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Picture a hand-written sign taped to a bus stop in Japan: "I'm 87, I don't have a family. Would some family take me?" No one answered. He died a couple of months later. That story, from my guest this week, is the starkest snapshot I've ever heard of what loneliness researcher Dr. Anthony Silard calls a global epidemic, and the twist is who it's hitting hardest: not the oldest of us, but the youngest. Anthony is a professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and an internationally recognized authority on relationships, emotional intelligence, and personal transformation, and he's the...
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Avoiding Failure Guarantees It (with Mark DeCarlo)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Picture a high school track meet: a sixteen-pound shot put thrown the wrong direction, a burst spleen, three weeks in a hospital bed. That's how my guest this week learned, at sixteen or seventeen, that avoiding failure is exactly what guarantees it. Mark DeCarlo woke up after three days unconscious to a doctor telling him ten more minutes and he'd have been dead, and he's spent every day since orienting his choices around one question: will this make me more happy or less happy? Mark is an Emmy award-winning comedian, bestselling author, and in-demand corporate speaker and leadership trainer...
info_outlineWhat does it actually take to make someone stop long enough to overcome burnout instead of just pushing through it? For Jessica Hallahan the answer was a hospital bed at 24: covered in hives, twenty pounds lighter in a month, her knees too swollen to zip her own jeans, and fighting to keep her eyes open on the drive from her day job to her night shift bartending. Doctors tested her for Lyme disease, thyroid disease, and diabetes before her primary doctor finally asked the real question: when's the last time you sat still long enough to actually feel your own feelings? That, boundaries sojourners, is what burnout recovery starts with, and it doesn't knock politely. It runs you off the road.
Jessica has a master's in public health and now runs Journey to Yourself, the coaching practice (and podcast) she built out of that reality check. We get into why "I have to do it all" is a lie your nervous system eventually sends you the bill for, why the transactional version of helping people ("I'll do this so you'll do that for me") is quietly exhausting you, and why 80 percent of workplace stress traces back to one fixable thing: you not saying the thing out loud.
You'll walk away with Jessica's litmus test for knowing when a "yes" has quietly turned into resentment (hint: it starts with an eye twitch), the case for treating two minutes of peace like a non-negotiable meeting, and a reminder I give my own clients constantly: nobody else is coming to keep you together. That job is yours.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxz8VuTGGZU
In this episode
- Why saying "no" is a form of self-care, not selfishness, and how to spot when helping has slid into over-committing
- The hospital-bed wake-up call that turned a burnout-and-a-car-accident scare into Jessica's life's work
- Why 80% of workplace stress comes down to miscommunication, and the two things (tone and body language) most of us forget to manage
- How to break a people-pleasing pattern with a coworker who keeps dumping work on you, without becoming the office villain
- Why boundaries are flexible, not a ten-foot cinder block wall, and how to check in with yourself before you say yes
- The mindfulness reframe (minus the buzzwords) that makes staying present in the moment actually manageable
Timestamps
- (00:01) Welcome and guest intro: meet stress educator Jessica Hallahan
- (02:24) The rock-bottom story: hives, swollen knees, and falling asleep at the wheel at 24
- (04:24) Why so many of us, women especially, put ourselves last
- (09:03) The transactional trap in relationships: "I'll do this so you'll do that"
- (11:46) Mindfulness minus the buzzwords: presence without judgment
- (14:58) What actually happens when you set a boundary (hint: not rainbows)
- (18:56) Breaking the pattern: what to do when a coworker keeps dumping work on you
- (21:25) Why enabling isn't kindness, and what it costs a team
- (25:53) What happens when we expect people to read our minds
- (27:16) The 80% workplace-stress stat, and the fix hiding in plain sight
- (31:48) Where to find Jessica and her free resources
About Jessica Hallahan
Jessica Hallahan holds a master's in public health and works as a speaker and stress management health educator. At 24 she was hospitalized because of burnout, and she built Journey to Yourself, her coaching practice and podcast, to help other people work through the same thing.
Find her free resources and ways to work with her at Jessica's site, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Favorite quotes
"If I don't make time for me, who will? That's on me." —Jessica Hallahan
"Statistically, 80% of our work stress is caused by miscommunication." —Jessica Hallahan
"When we assume, we make an ass out of you and me." —Jessica Hallahan
Resources mentioned
- Journey to Yourself: Jessica's website, blog, and free resources, including the podcast of the same name
- Jessica Hallahan on LinkedIn: her Journey to Yourself 101 page with regular stress and boundary-setting reminders
Related episodes
- How to Spot Burnout Before It's Too Late: pairs directly with Jessica's story, digging into the early warning signs before you land in a hospital bed
- How to Reclaim Your Energy When You're Burned Out: the recovery-side follow-up to the burnout Jessica describes surviving at 24
- People-Pleasing and the Sticky Rope: goes deeper on the "put yourself last" pattern Jessica names as the root of her own burnout
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Learn more about Phoenix and Flame, connect with Dana, and listen to more episodes here.
Curious where your own boundaries stand? Take my free Work Boundaries Quiz: danaskaggs.com/quiz