UnBecoming with Elena Joy

Episode Title: When Love Meant Being Saved Episode Summary: Have you ever mistaken being “rescued” for being loved? In this deeply personal episode, I share the story of how I learned to stop relating to people as someone who needed saving—and what happened when I finally showed up as my whole self. We’ll explore how our patterns of relating shape our confidence, our ability to connect, and even our risk of burnout. If you’ve ever ...

🎙 Show Notes – When Was the Last Time You Got Radically Honest With Yourself?

When was the last time you ripped the duct tape off your own mouth and said the truth you’ve been avoiding?

“I hate my job.”“I don’t want this life I’ve built.”“I feel numb and lost.”

This episode is about the kind of honesty that feels dangerous—the honesty we avoid because once we admit it, we fear everything will have to change.

Here’s the twist: saying t...

🎙️ Episode Title:Emotional Constipation: A Leadership Epidemic

📝 Show Notes:

What if the real reason you feel disconnected—from your team, your partner, your life—has nothing to do with your workload… and everything to do with your emotional backlog?

In this episode, we’re talking about Emotional Capacity—what it is, why most of us were never taught how to build it, and how the lack of it quietly erodes our leadership, relationships...

I was 37. Married. Stay-at-home mom to four kids. But mostly, I was Mormon.

The Mormon church saved me when I was 16. Or so I believed. They showed me the exact to-do list that qualified me as worthy of God’s love. They said as long as I checked off the worthiness list, God had to love me forever. Those were the rules, and having full control over whether I was loved or not sounded real good to me. So I told them,

“Dunk me.”

Baptized ...

🎙️ UnBecoming with Elena Joy

Episode Title: The Energy It Takes to Be Understood

Subtitle: How High-Achieving Leaders Burn Out Behind the Mask

Episode Summary: Welcome back to UnBecoming, where we say the things no one’s teaching you about leadership and life. In today’s episode, I’m reading the second installment of our burnout series, diving deep into Cognitive Capacity—what it is, how we burn through it without realizing it, and w...

In this episode, I read aloud my latest Substack piece: Stop Reading My Face. It’s about facial masking, trauma, ADHD, and the cognitive cost of constantly performing clarity for others. If you’ve ever been misunderstood because your expression didn’t match your intent, or punished for how your face looked while someone else was speaking, this one’s for you.I share how a smile in the wrong moment led to a full-circle realization ab...

I love that Juneteenth falls during Pride Month. While I could highlight the countless humans of color who have been instrumental in both LGBTQ+ and civil rights, that’s not the best offering I can give on a day like today.

Instead, let me show you how I’m finding my racism and deconstructing it. It’s the most honest contribution I can make.

As a middle-aged white queer woman whose internalized bias nearly took her life, identifying...

Burnout in 2025 hits different. The workload is heavy, sure. But that’s not what’s breaking us.

It’s the fact that every conversation feels like a transaction. Every meeting can feel like a pitch. Every interaction is another moment to brace yourself, smile politely, and perform. It’s giving relational poverty and it sucks.

For HR and Procurement leaders especially, vendor meetings can feel like one more sales gauntlet to run. For c...

TLDR:Burnout prevention at the executive level isn’t about time management. It’s about noticing the masks you’re wearing—and finding real ways to take them off. Sustainable leadership lasts because it’s built on something real. And as CEO coach and HR lawyer, Terry Flores says:

“Leadership should be about helping people. If you don’t have a desire to help, what are you doing?”

A Tale of Two Leaders

Picture this: A new VP is walking do...

Let’s be honest. In 2025, allyship burnout doesn’t feel like a slow simmer. It actually feels like a moral reckoning. Will it explode or implode?

In this special edition of Joyful Office Hours, I named what most leaders are too tired to articulate: the unique depletion that comes from advocating for inclusion while navigating systemic backlash. From DEI bans to personal identity threats, many leaders are walking around with invisibl...

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