About Our Guest
Lorea Martinez
Shared as part of The Impactful Voice Project™ and Not Just A Story™ with Rose Davidson
One Voice. Infinite Impact.™
Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez is an award-winning author, speaker, and creator of the HEART in Mind® model, an evidence-based framework for developing emotional intelligence, resilience, well-being, and purpose. Drawing on 20 years in education and her own experience of burnout, she helps individuals, leaders, and organisations build greater emotional awareness, healthier boundaries, and more sustainable ways of living and working.
Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez shares how burnout changed her life and how emotional intelligence, boundaries and self-awareness helped her reconnect with purpose.
KEY POINTS
- Burnout is not simply tiredness. Lorea describes emotional exhaustion, lost motivation, negative self-talk, and feeling disconnected from work she once loved.
- Listen to what your emotions are telling you. Tools such as Lorea’s “emotion iceberg” can help uncover feelings beneath the surface and provide insight into what may need attention or change.
- Patterns that once helped us can eventually become harmful. Constantly pushing forward, striving and doing more may be rewarded for years, but healing can require learning to pause, set boundaries and recognise when enough is enough.
About this Episode
Burnout rarely announces itself all at once. Sometimes it appears slowly, through exhaustion, lost motivation, negative self-talk, brain fog, or the unsettling feeling that work you once loved no longer feels the same.
In this episode of Not Just A Story™ with Rose Davidson, Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez shares what happened when burnout entered a life built around purpose. After two decades in education and years spent helping others develop emotional intelligence, Lorea found herself emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed, and unable to keep moving forward in the way she always had.
She believed that doing meaningful work would protect her from burnout. Her experience taught her otherwise.
Lorea speaks openly about the moment she could no longer ignore what was happening, including an unexpected emotional collapse that made it clear her familiar pattern of simply pushing through was no longer sustainable. She and Rose explore the shame that can accompany burnout, the damaging idea that exhaustion is laziness, and the loneliness that can come when people around us do not understand the depth of what we are experiencing.
At the centre of the conversation is emotional intelligence: not as an abstract concept, but as a practical way of listening to what feelings are trying to tell us. Lorea shares her “emotion iceberg” exercise, which helps uncover emotions sitting beneath the surface, and reflects on learning to pause, set boundaries, and recognise when enough really is enough.
They also discuss why well-intentioned reassurance can sometimes invalidate difficult emotions, why tears can carry information, and why recovery may require us to rethink long-standing habits rather than simply take a day off.
This is a grounded conversation about burnout, self-awareness, emotional honesty, and the gradual process of reconnecting with joy, clarity, and purpose. It is also a reminder that asking for help can matter.
Listen to the Episode
What might your emotions be trying to tell you that you have been too busy, tired, or determined to hear?
Your story does not need to be neatly resolved to matter. Sometimes simply recognising what you have lived through is the beginning of understanding it — and, when you are ready, perhaps sharing it too.
More About Lorea
Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez is an award-winning author, speaker, educator, and creator of the HEART in Mind® model, an evidence-based framework for developing emotional intelligence, resilience, well-being, and purpose. Drawing on 20 years in education and her own experience of burnout, Lorea brings both professional insight and lived experience to conversations about emotional health, boundaries, self-awareness, and meaningful work.
She has trained thousands of adults around the world through keynotes, workshops, and learning communities. Her latest book, Living with the HEART in Mind: A Practical Guide to Healing from Burnout and Cultivating Purpose, grew from her own recovery journey and offers more than 30 practical tools to help readers recognise emotional patterns, rebuild emotional maturity, set healthier boundaries, and reconnect with joy and intention. Her work encourages people to listen more closely to what their emotions are communicating and to create lives that feel sustainable, purposeful, and truly their own.
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