“I’m proud of my time-blocking superpower,” Nancy McClelland admitted during a recent episode of She Counts. Co-host Questian Telka nodded in recognition. They both lived by elaborate color-coded calendars that managed every minute of their days.
But their guest, burnout coach and CPA Lynnette Oss Connell, was about to challenge everything they thought they knew about professional efficiency. What followed was one of the most honest conversations about burnout you’ll hear in the accounting profession.
Nancy and Questian were upfront about why they brought in an expert. “This is something where we both feel completely lost,” McClelland explained. “We don’t have advice for others because we’re both struggling with burnout ourselves, at times sort of teetering on the edge.”
Lynnette, known as “the Burnout Bestie,” built and sold her own successful CAS practice before becoming a coach for accountants struggling with chronic stress. Her story reveals why our greatest professional strengths often become our biggest vulnerabilities (and what we can do about it).
The Efficiency Trap: Engineering Your Own Over-functioning
Lynnette’s story starts exactly where many of us find ourselves. She had what looked like the perfect setup: a thriving firm, organized systems, and the ability to juggle multiple roles with precision.
“I had engineered a life of my own over-functioning,” she explains. Her elaborate time-blocked calendar enabled her to serve as a firm owner, CFO of several companies, and soccer team manager for her kids. When other parents marveled at her ability to manage it all, she’d think, “I just time block—it’s a superpower, right?”
But here’s the problem she discovered: despite all her backup plans and support systems, everything still required her to function as the central hub. “I thought I had done all the right things,” she recalls. “My mom is my backup with the kids, I have a neighbor who’s a backup, and I have employees with tasks. But at the end of the day, all of those systems relied on me to keep them going.”
The most deceptive part? By traditional metrics, Lynnette had achieved work-life balance. She worked only 3.5 hours per day running her successful firm. But those remaining hours weren’t filled with rest. They were packed with equally demanding caregiving responsibilities.
“I’m working the rest of the time, too,” she explains. “Your family work is work, too.”
This led to her biggest realization: she had trained herself to override her feelings “like a light switch.” Whenever she felt resistance or exhaustion, she would do what she calls an “analytical assessment” by asking herself, ”Does this feeling serve my goals?” If not, she would simply shut it off and continue with her perfectly planned schedule.
Energy Auditing: The Game-Changer You Haven’t Tried
This is where Lynnette introduced the concept of energy-blocking.
While we’ve mastered scheduling when we do things, we’ve completely ignored whether those things give us life or drain it. The energy audit reveals what’s really happening within each role we play.
“Within your role, are you balanced?” Lynnette asks. “There needs to beintentionality around what gives you life. Am I pouring out and receiving in?”
This isn’t about achieving a perfect 50-50 balance in every task. It’s about recognizing that some aspects of our work energize us while others deplete us, and being deliberate about maintaining that balance over time.
The efficiency trap is particularly seductive for women in accounting because our profession rewards exactness and the ability to manage complex systems. But what we’re actually doing is creating increasingly sophisticated ways to make ourselves indispensable and irreplaceable when everything falls apart.
Community vs. Connection: The Support System You Truly Need
Lynnette’s next revelation cuts deeper. “I have community,” she explains. I have friends, I have work friends, and I have family who cares about me deeply. But what I didn’t have was conversations around what happens when life gets lifey.”
The problem isn’t a lack of people in our lives. It’s that we prioritize efficiency over intimacy in relationships. We collect connections like productivity tools: broadly and systematically, but without the deep investment required for them to support us when our systems fail.
This lesson became crystal clear during Lynnette’s son’s medical emergency. After spending all night in the hospital, she found herself at 8 a.m. in the parking lot, calling a client to explain why she couldn’t make their regular appointment.
When her client—a father himself—learned what was happening, his response stunned her: “Get off the phone right now. I don’t want to hear from you for a week. Why did you even call me?”
He wasn’t upset at her absence. He was upset that she even thought she needed to work while her child was in the hospital.
“I was living in this tunnel where I was holding myself to these impossibly high standards,” Lynnette reflects. By failing to give people credit for basic human decency, she created a world where no one was allowed to show up for her.
The solution requires what Lynnette calls “controlled vulnerability”—sharing appropriately about where you’re struggling and observing how people respond. This creates a sense of “who your community really is, who you can go to, and who has the capacity for it.”
Why Women Burn Out Differently: The Biology Behind the Breakdown
When Nancy mentioned that many of her high-performing female friends have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and panic disorders, Lynnette’s response was both validating and alarming: “The research shows that those are all symptoms of burnout.”
The biological differences in how women and men respond to stress explain why traditional burnout advice often fails us. While men typically experience “fight-or-flight” responses dominated by testosterone and cortisol, women’s stress responses are dominated by oxytocin, creating “tend-and-befriend” behaviors.
“Women feel threatened, and so we nurture,” Lynnette explains, referencing research from “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle” by sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA. When accounting deadlines loom or client crises emerge, instead of getting forceful as male colleagues might, we internalize the pressure and respond by taking on more responsibility.
“Women don’t tend to get forceful or demonstrative in our stress until several more notches down the burnout journey,” Lynnette notes. “We instead internalize.”
By the time anyone recognizes we’re in trouble, we’ve already done significant damage to our nervous systems. The three warning signs to watch for are:
- Emotional exhaustion. Bone-deep depletion from constantly nurturing others while your own needs go unmet.
- Depersonalization. Suddenly resenting work you once loved because you’re running on fumes.
- Lack of accomplishment. Feeling like no matter how efficiently you work, you’re always behind.
“I could be hugely efficient for hours on end and leave the day and be like, darn it, I feel like I didn’t get ahead,” Lynnette recalls.
Building Prevention and Recovery Plans That Actually Work
The solution isn’t just better time management; it’s creating systems that work with women’s biology, not against it.
“I want everyone to respond to the stressors in their life, instead of reacting to the stressors in their life,” Lynnette explains. When you’re reacting, you’re putting out fires with a heightened stress response. When you’re responding, you’re coming from a grounded state, approaching challenges as a capable person with options.
Prevention strategies include:
- Energy audits to balance life-giving and life-draining activities
- Deep community relationships that provide practical support
- Regular exercise that metabolizes stress hormones and adrenaline
- Quiet practices that help you reconnect with what actually serves you
But equally important is having a recovery plan. “You don’t just take a break and go back to ground zero,” Lynnette warns. “You need to heal from burnout, because it’s a whole body experience.”
Recovery means knowing exactly who to call for different types of support, having scripts prepared for difficult conversations, and allowing yourself to scale back without shame.
The most profound insight is reframing resilience. Instead of viewing recovery as returning to who you were before, Lynnette challenges us to see it as “traveling through change in a way that honors who you’re becoming.”
The Bottom Line: Sustainable Success Starts with Honest Assessment
If you recognize yourself in this conversation—the proud efficiency expert, the person everyone counts on, the one who’s engineered elaborate systems of over-functioning—you’re not alone.
The question isn’t whether you’ll eventually hit the wall. It’s whether you’ll recognize the warning signs soon enough to choose your own path forward.
Start with an energy audit of your current roles. Which activities energize you? Which drain you? Begin shifting that balance deliberately. Practice giving people credit for their capacity to show up for you. Build movement into your routine as essential medicine for your nervous system.
Most importantly, challenge the metrics by which you measure success. The goal isn’t to eliminate efficiency—it’s to become efficiently sustainable and build systems that preserve the system builder.
Listen to the full episode to hear more of Lynnette’s story, including the difficult decision to sell her firm and her husband’s role in recognizing their diverging paths. You’ll also get practical scripts for difficult conversations and deeper insights into building the kind of community that can actually support you through crisis.
What does burnout look like to you? Share your experiences in the comments on the She Counts LinkedIn page. Your story might be exactly what another woman in accounting needs to hear.
Find Lynnette Oss Connell at burnoutbestie.com and follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram for practical burnout prevention tips.