When we talk about startup runway, we obsess over finances, how many months until the money runs out. But what about the founder's emotional runway? That invisible reservoir of energy, resilience, and motivation that keeps a company alive even when the path forward seems impossible?

In this deeply personal and practical conversation, Claudia Naim Burt, Co-founder and COO of Keep Company, shares how she discovered the concept of emotional runway through her own struggle to sustain herself while building a venture-backed startup. As one of only 250 Latinas to raise over $1 million in venture capital, Claudia brings a unique perspective to the challenges of entrepreneurship, motherhood, and maintaining wellbeing when everything feels urgent.

The emotional runway framework offers a strategic way to think about personal sustainability. Just as financial runway helps you make business decisions, emotional runway helps you make intentional choices about your time and energy before hitting burnout. Claudia shares her process of conducting an "energy audit" to identify activities that drain versus replenish her, and how making seemingly indulgent choices (like taking hour-long walks) became non-negotiable investments in herself as a key business asset.

Throughout our conversation, we explore powerful frameworks for extending your emotional runway:

• Reframing choices through values rather than guilt
• Recognizing the spectrum of burnout rather than viewing it as binary
• Making needs explicit rather than implicit
• Finding connection with peers as the ultimate antidote to isolation.

We also dive into how these principles apply differently across various seasons of business and life, and the importance of regularly renegotiating your contract with yourself about what matters most.

Ready to extend your emotional runway? Listen now and discover practical strategies to protect your wellbeing while leading through challenging times.

Your business and the people who depend on you will thank you for it.

Whether you’re running a business or building a career in corporate America, if you’re ready to extend your emotional runway, 🎧 Listen now.

If you enjoy the episode share it with a friend, leave us a review and don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

If you are ready to take your career and business to the next level, apply to join our community of professional women, all eager to help you get there and stay there. Learn more at www.VESTHer.co

How many times have you ended the day exhausted, only to wonder what you actually accomplished? That feeling of spinning your wheels without moving forward is a signal that your workflow isn’t working for you.

At VEST, we recently explored this challenge with our members and uncovered some powerful lessons worth sharing.

In this episode of the VEST Her Podcast, we’ll walk you through how to evaluate your current workflow, identify blockers, design a system that works for you, and reset with confidence when things go off track.

Why Evaluate Your Workflow

Most of us live on autopilot, answering emails, sitting in meetings, or reacting to client demands. Rarely do we stop to ask: Is this the best use of my time and energy? Through time audits, members discovered surprising patterns about when they feel most focused, what drains them, and how much of their time is lost to tasks that don’t actually move the needle.

What Gets in the Way

The most common culprit? A false sense of urgency. We often mistake busyness for productivity, rushing to put out fires while our real priorities sit untouched. Other blockers include living in our inbox instead of our priorities, overcommitting, and the guilt of saying no.

Designing a Better Workflow

Creating a better system isn’t about rigid control, it’s about clarity. A few simple strategies can help:

• Time blocking: Schedule focused work, admin, and rest.
• Priority buckets: Sort tasks into must do today, can wait, can let go.
• Non-negotiables: Protect what fuels you, family time, exercise, quiet moments.

When members applied these approaches, they found they could finally protect what matters most and reclaim a sense of purpose in their work.

At VEST, we believe your workflow should work for you, not the other way around.

Tools and resources we discussed

Time Tracking Evaluation

Workflow Resetting Checklist

If you enjoy the episode share it with a friend, leave us a review and don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

If you are ready to take your career and business to the next level, apply to join our community of professional women, all eager to help you get there and stay there. Learn more at www.VESTHer.co

Burnout has reached epidemic proportions among professional women. The numbers tell a sobering story: 43% of women leaders report feeling burned out compared to just 31% of men at the same level. What's driving this disparity? Our powerful conversation with the VEST Team reveals two key culprits: perfectionism and people-pleasing.

Research from the University of British Columbia shows that perfectionism is strongly linked to anxiety, depression, and chronic stress. Multiple studies also show women are more likely to engage in people-pleasing behaviors at work, often out of fear of being seen as difficult or unlikable.

Join us as we dive into the science behind these patterns, exploring how perfectionism correlates with anxiety and depression, while people-pleasing gradually erodes our boundaries until we're running on empty. The most illuminating moments come when our team shares their personal struggles with these tendencies, from the pressure to be "supermoms" and "super workers" to the fear of what might happen if they stop doing so much.

We discuss what rest actually looks like in different seasons of life. For those with young children, it might be just an hour to choose what you do yourself rather than responding to others' needs. We share simple but powerful strategies: replacing "should" with "could," taking a pause before automatically saying yes, time-blocking to ensure dedicated rest periods, and perhaps most importantly, getting comfortable asking for help.

We also talked about how perfectionism and growth cannot coexist. When we demand perfection from ourselves, we create an environment where learning and authentic connection become impossible. By reframing rest not as a luxury but as an essential professional skill, we open the door to greater creativity, better decision-making, and sustainable success.

Whether you're a chronic people-pleaser, a perfectionist, or simply feeling the weight of trying to do it all, this episode offers both validation and practical tools to break these patterns. Join our conversation and discover how establishing healthier boundaries can transform not just how you feel, but how effectively you lead.

For the VEST Team full bios, Self-Awareness Exercise and Show notes click here.

If you enjoy the episode share it with a friend, leave us a review and don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

If you are ready to take your career and business to the next level, apply to join our community of professional women, all eager to help you get there and stay there. Learn more at www.VESTHer.co