Interview With Gudrun Smith

Why High Performers Burn Out (And How to Stop Burnout Before It Stops You)

On today's show I have the pleasure of welcoming Gudrun Smith, psychologist, certified resilience and executive coach, and founder of START-with-Gudrun, to talk about how entrepreneurs and professionals can regulate stress and build real resilience before burnout forces the issue.

For years, Gudrun Smith looked like someone who had it all figured out. A trained psychologist. A certified resilience and executive coach. The person other professionals turned to when their stress was getting the better of them. Underneath that, she was running on adrenaline and willpower, delivering results and showing up for everyone else while quietly falling apart herself.

Gudrun is a psychologist by training and a certified resilience and executive coach by practice. She lectures, she consults, and she's spent years working with professionals across industries and leadership levels, coaching in both German and English through her practice SMITH-Consult. Before any of that, she built a career on being the person who could handle anything.

The turning point wasn't dramatic on paper. A health scare, nothing catastrophic, but loud enough to stop her. She realised she'd built a successful career at the cost of nearly everything else: her sleep, her relationships, her sense of who she was outside of work. She'd told herself she'd slow down after the next project, the next milestone, the next quarter. Her body made the decision for her instead.

Out of that, she built START-with-Gudrun. It's not about becoming someone who never feels stress. It's about learning to recover, regulate, and perform sustainably over the long term, using evidence-based tools drawn from cognitive behavioral techniques, mindfulness, and emotional regulation. She tested every piece of it on herself first, before she ever brought it to a client.

Her clients are the ones living the life she used to live: entrepreneurs and professionals whose workday never really ends. Emails after dinner, racing thoughts at midnight, weekends that don't feel like weekends. They're constantly available but never fully present, and the boundary between work and rest has quietly disappeared. Gudrun helps them find it again, not through a pep talk, but through practical, science-backed strategies that fit into a real workday.

Her work and insights have been featured across media and professional circles focused on stress management and resilience, and she brings the lived experience of recovering from burnout herself into every session she runs.

To learn more about the topics discussed, or to contact Gudrun directly, click the link below.