What Female Founders Need to Know About Burnout, Faith, and Starting Over

When your values are your greatest asset — and your biggest liability

There’s a version of burnout that doesn’t get talked about enough.

It’s not the kind that comes from hating your job. It’s the kind that comes from loving it too much. From being so grounded in your mission, so clear about your values, so committed to the people you’re trying to serve, that you forget to stop. You forget to rest. You forget that the work requires you to still be standing.

This is the burnout that lives inside purpose-driven work. And it’s exactly what Catharine Montgomery, founder of The Better Together Agency, and I unpacked in Episode 9 of Just Rest.

Catharine has rebuilt her professional life more than once — leaving a position at a supposedly progressive agency after experiencing racism that leadership refused to acknowledge, building her own communications firm with venture capital backing, discovering that her investors were operating in ways that directly contradicted her mission, and ultimately walking away from her own company in a hotel lobby in Toronto. She started a new business the next day.

Her story is not a cautionary tale. It’s a map. And if you’re a female founder, a faith-driven entrepreneur, or someone burning out inside a system that was never built for you, I think it will feel very familiar.

Your Purpose Is Protecting You. It Might Also Be Depleting You.

Research supports what many of us already know intuitively: having a strong sense of purpose creates a buffer against burnout. When your work feels like it genuinely matters, the hard days are easier to absorb. The setbacks feel survivable. The grind is more bearable because the why is always visible.

But there is a shadow side to this … one that purpose-driven founders, nonprofit leaders, and mission-aligned entrepreneurs rarely talk about openly.

That same sense of purpose gives you permission to override the signals your body is sending. It makes “just one more thing” feel justified. It reframes exhaustion as dedication and overwork as commitment. And because the mission is real — because the people you’re serving actually need what you’re building — it’s almost impossible to argue with.

Catharine named this directly, without prompting: “I love what we’re able to do, but the stress and the anxiety and the staying up late — the business side of it is still the same. The work we get to focus on is a privilege, but the backend of how to do that is like every other company.”

Values alignment doesn’t make the QuickBooks easier. It doesn’t make the client pipeline less stressful. It doesn’t eliminate the weight of wearing every hat in a small business. It just makes you less likely to ask for help, because somewhere in the back of your mind, you believe the mission requires you to keep going.

It doesn’t. And the sooner we name that, the better.

When the System You Built Stops Serving Your Mission

One of the most striking parts of Catharine’s story is not that things went wrong. It’s that they went wrong inside a structure she had chosen precisely because it felt aligned.

Her venture capital backers were not strangers to social impact. The partnership felt values-aligned at the start. And then, quietly and incrementally, it wasn’t: Loans taken out against the company without her knowledge. A CFO fired over WhatsApp. Board meetings held without her. A growing pressure to prioritize the interests of two investors over the communities her agency was built to serve.

“The way they were making me focus on two white men instead of the people I was trying to help — I just, one day I was in Toronto at a conference and I was sitting in the hotel lobby and I just said, you know what, I can’t do this. And I quit.”

For founders and leaders who have experienced this — the slow drift between what you built and what it’s becoming — Catharine’s story offers something important: permission. Permission to recognize when a structure has stopped serving the mission, and to walk away from it even when that structure has your name on it.

Starting over is not failure. For some of us, it’s just what integrity looks like in motion.

The Theology of Hard Times: Does God Have a Plan?

This is a part of the conversation I didn’t put on the outline. It’s also the one I’m most glad we had.

Catharine grew up Baptist and Methodist, with a grandfather who was a Baptist preacher. Faith is woven into who she is. And yet, like many women navigating genuinely hard seasons (racism in the workplace, a business upended by bad-faith investors, the exhaustion of rebuilding from scratch) she has found herself wrestling with one of the oldest questions of all:

Is there a plan? And if there is, why does so much of it feel like this?

“I’ve been listening to that song for so many years, and it doesn’t feel like it gets to that point of like, okay, you’re going to have bad days, but you’re still going to be sustainable. It’s not going to uproot your entire life.”

I’ve sat with this question myself. And what I offered Catharine — not as an answer, but as an invitation — is that maybe the plan doesn’t have to look the way we were taught it would. Maybe God, or the divine, or whatever language fits your life, is not moving us around like pieces on a chessboard. Maybe the presence is real even when the plan isn’t legible.

What the oldest traditions across cultures and faith backgrounds have always known, and what hustle culture has always refused to learn, is that rest is not a reward at the end of the hard season. It is the practice that makes it possible to survive the hard season. Rest is sacred. It is not earned. It is how we stay in the fight.

For female founders and leaders for whom faith is part of their foundation, the takeaway is this: Your theology of rest matters as much as your theology of work. And if the tradition you were raised in only taught you to keep going, it may be worth asking what it left out.

What Starting Over Actually Looks Like

Catharine has done it twice. And what she describes is not a triumphant pivot. It’s something quieter and more honest than that.

It looked like exhausting her personal savings. Like leaning on her parents. Like thinking she could skip the grief and go straight to rebuilding … and discovering a year later that the grief had been waiting for her the whole time.

“I thought I was like superwoman. I could get out of this situation, get into another, and I didn’t need a break at all. And then a year later I was just like, what is happening? I can’t handle all of this.”

What she’s doing differently now is worth naming, not because it’s revolutionary, but because it’s real:

• Taking one half-day per week entirely for herself — not for productivity, just for rest
• Working with an executive coach to process what happened, not just plan what’s next
• Journaling as a tool for reflection, not optimization
• Building community with other women who went through similarly brutal years — because she discovered they’d all been suffering in silence

“It wasn’t until after that it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve all been suffering in silence. And we needed that community together.”

Simple practices. Consistent ones. The kind that don’t make good content but actually work.

Born Inclusive: Building Technology That Doesn’t Replicate Bias

One of the most forward-thinking parts of Catharine’s work is what she’s doing with artificial intelligence.

Better Together AI is a communications tool built specifically for underrepresented startups and nonprofits that can’t afford traditional agency support. But what makes it distinct is not just who it serves — it’s how it was built.

Catharine designed the tool to detect bias from the ground up, rather than attempting to retrain for bias after the fact. She calls it “born inclusive technology.”

Her reasoning is rooted in research she has been conducting for three years on bias in AI systems: Once a tool is trained on biased data, retraining it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. The tool will perform differently in the short term, but it will revert. The only way to address bias in AI is to build with equity as a starting condition, not an afterthought.

“If we don’t build technology that from the beginning addresses bias, we’re never going to get there.”

For female founders and nonprofit leaders thinking about how to integrate AI into their work, this is a critical question to be asking: Not just what does this tool do, but who does it impact? And who was in the room when it was built?

The Long Game: Rest as a Leadership Strategy

At the end of our conversation, I asked Catharine what she would say to the Rest Rebels: the burned-out changemakers who listen to Just Rest.

Her answer was, “Think about yourself in 10 years and how you want to feel. You have to do it right now. You have to start today.”

Not because rest is a reward. Not because you’ll earn it once the business is stable or the mission is further along. But because the decisions you make right now — about how many hours you work, whether you take the half-day off, whether you let yourself be held by a community instead of suffering in silence — those decisions compound.

You cannot build something lasting on a depleted foundation.

For female founders, for faith-driven leaders, for women who are burning out inside systems that were never designed to include them, the invitation is the same: Believe rest is not the opposite of the work. It is what makes the work survivable. It is, and has always been, how we stay in the fight.

Go Deeper with the Rest Rebel Collective

Want to sit with this conversation a little longer?

Paid subscribers to the Rest Rebel Collective on Substack receive After the Mic — a reflection and resource post released the day after each episode drops. It’s where we slow down, integrate what we heard, and learn how liberating rest can actually show up in daily life.

✨ Join for $7/month or $70/year

Rest isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s how we build the capacity to change it.

Let’s Keep This Conversation Going

Here’s what I’m genuinely curious about after this conversation with Catharine:

• Has your sense of purpose ever been the thing that made it harder to stop? 
• Have you caught yourself thinking — or maybe even saying out loud — that burnout just isn’t something that happens to you because you care too much about what you’re doing to burn out from it?

I’ll be honest: I think this might be one of the more quietly dangerous ideas in purpose-driven spaces. The belief that meaning immunizes us. That if we just stay connected to the why, the body will follow.

I’m not so sure. And I’d love to know what you think — especially if you think I’m wrong.

Leave me a voicemail on Speakpipe. It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t have to be a fully formed thought. It can be thirty seconds of “here’s what I actually think about this.” That’s exactly what I want.

And if your question or comment is a good one — and I suspect it will be — it might just show up in a future episode.

Listen, Rate & Review

🎧 Listen to “Built on Purpose, Running on Empty: What Female Founders Need to Know About Burnout, Faith, and Starting Over” wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

About Catharine Montgomery

Catharine Montgomery is the founder of The Better Together Agency, a Washington DC-based communications firm built to amplify organizations doing good in the world. With a background in public relations, communications and technology, Catharine has spent her career at the intersection of storytelling, technology and social impact. She is also the creator of Together AI, a communications tool built from the ground up with bias detection and equity as founding principles — designed specifically to serve underrepresented startups and nonprofits that can’t afford traditional agency support. Catharine has conducted multi-year research on bias in AI systems and is a leading voice on what inclusive technology actually requires.

About Nicole Havelka

Nicole Havelka is a coach, facilitator and the host of Just Rest: Burnout Tips for Everyday Radicals — a podcast for burned-out changemakers who need permission to rest without guilt and inspiration for showing up without burning out.

She works with individuals and organizations who are tired of running on empty.

For individuals, Nicole offers coaching for people who need real support with time management, building sustainable rest practices, or just an honest sounding board. Nicole is a lot like that good friend who will always tell you when you have spinach in your teeth — with kindness, and because she actually wants you to succeed.

For organizations, Nicole works with mission-driven teams and leaders who are losing their best people to exhaustion and burnout, struggling with unproductive conflict, or watching miscommunication quietly erode their culture. She helps them build the kind of environments where people can do their best work — and actually want to stay.

Nicole is also the founder of the Rest Rebel Collective, a paid subscriber community on Substack where burned-out changemakers find community and practical tools, and the Calm Calendar Club, a planning and productivity offering for mothers in the Sandwich Generation who want to put down some of the balls they have in the air.

Her work is grounded in one belief: Rest is not a reward. It is resistance. And it is how we stay true to our core purpose and mission.