124. Finding Your Reason to Breathe with Sarah Ross


The Do a Day Podcast from Bryan Falchuk

Who do you have a more intimate relationship with? Your Phone, the coffee machine or your Partner? Did you even consider yourself as an answer? Sarah Ross was on the brink of suicide with Burnout and Stress, but a dying orphan saved her life, showing her that she had a “Reason to Breathe”. Now, Sarah is the UK’s leading Burnout Recovery Expert, International Award Winning Speaker, Executive Mentor and Bestselling Author, who uses her own experiences to help business professionals “Maximize their Mental Health” and build a fulfilling life of purpose with themselves as a top priority in it!

Medium

Burnout can destroy your life, but with little changes, you feel like you are on fire again! Sarah Ross was on the brink of suicide with Burnout and Stress, but a dying orphan saved her life, showing her that she had a “Reason to Breathe”.

Sarah is now the UK’s leading Burnout Recovery Expert, International Award Winning Speaker, Mentor and Bestselling Author, who uses her own experiences with Burnout, Stress and Mental Health to help others avoid the dark place that she found herself in. She  founded “Your Reason to Breathe” as a way to show those burning out at work that there are steps that can help turn the dark and depressing into an empowered and fulfilling life.

She mentors Executives and Entrepreneurs on how to Reset, Recharge and Thrive after Burnout using her signature models “B.R.E.A.T.H.E ™”and “Priority Happy” 

Key Points from the Episode with Sarah Ross:

  • Sarah helps people deal with burnout and stress, and finding their reason to breathe, which is how she talks about our purpose in life
  • There’s a power to deciding to keep going, to take that one more breath
  • Since breathing isn’t something we have to think about to do, actually thinking about brings more focus to the decision to live
  • Sarah was on a typical corporate career path, working hard to climb the ladder of responsibility and salary
  • She had become the Chief Compliance Officer for a pharmaceutical company, working insane hours and traveling nonstop
  • Her body started to rebel, as she started suffering from increasingly-frequent migraines
  • She left her dream job to move with her significant other, but found herself miserable and their relationship fell apart, leaving her in a place she didn’t want to be in a job she didn’t care about and a relationship that broke down
  • She started to isolate socially more and more to avoid feeling worse about herself by all the comparison to people thriving around her
  • Her migraines had increased to hitting her 25 or 26 days of each month
  • She ended up leaving her job, but only when her boss called out that she was suffering from burnout and needed to stop
  • That voice inside her that had been telling her she was a failure had yet another reason to talk down to her
  • At 37, she decided that she had had enough, and didn’t have a reason to continue living
  • She decided to take what money she had, and spend the next six months seeing places she had always wanted to go to and seeing the people she wanted to see
  • For her, this was a planned goodbye before the date she had set to take her life – January 31st, 2015
  • Once she made the decision to go through this process and then end her life, she felt freedom and peace
  • She didn’t want people to know what she was planning, so she went so far as to create a facade of a business she was going to start, building a website and creating marketing materials
  • The final part of her trip was to spend her last Christmas in an orphanage in Vietnam
  • Despite it not being a Christian country, Sarah found a Santa costume and gave out gifts to the orphans that day, and spend the entire day happy and laughing for the first time she could remember
  • The final child to see was one who was dying, and was close to taking her final breaths
  • Sarah leaned toward the crib the girl was in, and just watched her breathe
  • Sarah found herself overwhelmed by the idea that this little girl who had been abandoned by her family because of her disability was still deciding to breathe
  • That forced Sarah to take in this message to keep breathing and lead her to find her reason to breathe
  • Something Sarah realized was that it wasn’t just about finding a reason to breathe, but having someone help you find it
  • She stopped the path she was on, and started her path of creating a life that she wanted to actually live
  • She started investing in herself, and finding her voice to share her message
  • For years, she didn’t have dreams, but as she went through this process and got in touch with what her soul actually needed, she found herself dreaming again
  • As the day came that she was going to take her life, she ended up spending it in Cambodia in killing fields from war, which really brought the power of the day to Sarah
  • The next four anniversaries of that day came and went without incident, while the fifth she spent in a conference focused on planning the next decade of your life
  • This was the shift for her where she changed from viewing what happened as not killing herself and instead saw herself as living

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