You didn't burn out because you weren't strong enough. You burned out because the system wasn't built to sustain you.
Burnout has been treated as a personal failure for too long — something to push through, recover from quietly, and never mention in a performance review. But the data, the experience, and the human cost tell a different story.
In this CoLab Conversations session, two practitioners who've spent decades inside organizations — and inside the reality of burnout themselves — are pulling back the curtain on what's actually driving depletion at work, and what leaders and HR professionals can do about it.
Rebecca Hawkins, founder of Regenerative Workplaces and an executive coach with nearly 30 years of business experience, has worked at the intersection of culture, psychological safety, and human sustainability inside Fortune 100 companies and beyond. She knows what it looks like when high performers quietly collapse — and what it takes to build something different.
MeChelle Callen, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, Director of Learning & Development at Purple Ink, brings over three decades of HR experience across healthcare, finance, and organizational development. She's a three-time recipient of Training Magazine's Top 125 award and has spoken at SHRM stages nationally — and she's done the hard work of helping organizations build L&D strategies that actually account for the humans doing the work.
Together, they'll explore:
Why burnout is a structural problem, not a personal one
What sustainable performance actually requires from leaders and organizations
How to have honest conversations about capacity, culture, and care — without losing credibility
What you can start doing differently this week
This isn't a session about self-care tips. It's a conversation about redesigning the conditions that make people feel like they're failing when the real problem is the environment they're operating in.
Come ready to think differently — and leave with something you can actually use.