Sometimes you want something different before you can explain exactly what that means.
You want your enthusiasm back.
You’ve built a good life. You still want something different.
You want work that excites you and stretches you.
And why do you always have to be the one replacing the toilet paper?
What would you like to be different?
You can honor the people and commitments you value while reconsidering expectations that leave little room for you.
Responsibility patterns + burnout score
You take on a lot. How is it affecting you?
Responsibility can be fulfilling. It can also become exhausting. Not all responsibility leads to burnout.
Understand what keeps landing on you, how you’re feeling, and what you might want to keep or change. Your results bring two pieces of your experience into view:
Your responsibility patterns
Explore seven patterns, possible stories that reinforce them, and actions to consider.
Your burnout score
Reflect on your current experience alongside the responsibilities you’re managing.
A place to begin
Understand the pattern. Consider the impact.
Are your responsibilities leaving room for what matters to you? Are you also experiencing burnout? Look at your results together and consider what deserves attention.
A starting point for reflection. Your results do not establish cause and effect. Expectations, resources, and support matter too.
Rewrite Your Story
Room to think. Room to laugh. A direction you choose.
When everything feels urgent, do you have room to think about what matters?
Rewrite Your Story brings together storytelling, guided reflection, and conversation to help people recognize familiar responsibility patterns, question the stories behind them, and explore a deliberate next step.
On October 15, 2026, Natalie H. Luke, Ph.D., and Merit Kahn brought storytelling, responsibility reflection, humor, and conversation to Troy, Michigan—followed by Merit’s theatrical comedy show, Optimistic Personality Disorder™.
Participants considered renewed optimism, stronger relationships, and what a new chapter might look like. One participant offered an image that stayed with us: a boat just a little off course can eventually reach a very different destination.
Is the direction I’m moving still the direction I want to go?
Rewrite Your Story · October 15, 2026 · Troy, Michigan.
A question from Natalie’s presentation
When did burnout actually begin?
After describing a moment of collapse, Natalie invites listeners to look back at the choices and responsibilities that came before it.
“That was my collapse. But my question for you is: when did I burn out? Did I burn out when I stayed up all night? Did I burn out when I said, hey, yeah, I got friends, I can collect urine? Did I burn out when the fire started? Did I burn out when we had to write the protocol for the study? Or did I burn out when I accepted the assignment of 15 papers? When was my burnout?”
Future gatherings
Bring room to think to your community.
Reset Your Responsibility is Natalie’s standalone workshop. Rewrite Your Story is the broader workshop and comedy collaboration with Merit Kahn, subject to availability and agreement.
Interested in attending?
Four live events are planned for 2027. Current planning includes the Detroit area in April and the Chicago area in June, with two additional locations and timing open for discussion. Dates, venues, formats, and presenters remain subject to confirmation. Tell Natalie where you’d like to attend.
Help your community make room for what matters next. Explore supporting one gathering or a broader relationship across the planned series. Tell Natalie about your audience and what you hope to make possible.
Your strongest people keep stepping in. What happens next?
Help leaders move beyond being needed everywhere—and develop people who can take ownership.
When the same dependable people keep stepping in, explore what keeps the cycle going: expectations, competing priorities, authority, resources, and support.
Build toward a legacy of capable people, supported decisions, and work that can move forward without constant intervention. As technology changes the work, these questions matter for the responsibilities that remain with people too.
Through storytelling, humor, and honest reflection, Natalie explores how being indispensable can shape both a leader’s identity and the team around them.
For conferences, associations, leadership meetings, and employee events.
Hear something that helps you see your experience differently.
Sometimes another person’s story gives you words for something you’ve been feeling.
Natalie talks with leaders, experts, and people exploring success, identity, expectations, and change. Through The Trust Tax Investigation, conversations examine how responsibility develops and what individuals and organizations might do differently.
Why does being good at something make it difficult to stop doing it?
When does helping become an expectation?
What happens when the role that helped you succeed no longer fits what you want next?
About Natalie
I’m Natalie. Figuring things out is something I love.
Creating programs. Solving problems. Bringing people and ideas together.
For a long time, being able to handle something was reason enough for me to take it on. Eventually, I began asking why—and what those choices were leaving room for.
I’m Natalie H. Luke, Ph.D., founder and host of UnCeiling You™, a senior executive, and creator of the Trust Tax™ research initiative. My work explores responsibility, the stories we tell ourselves, and the environments we live and work in.
My executive experience and research inform practical questions about ownership, support, and the choices available to us—at work and in life.
