The Habits That Built Your Career May Be the Ones Wearing You Down
Every high achiever knows the pattern. The long hours, the exacting standards, and the refusal to drop a single ball are exactly what earned the promotion, and for a while they work beautifully. Then, somewhere along the way, they stop working.
Erin Stafford calls this “the Type A Trap,” and The Type A Trap: Five Mindset Shifts to Beat Burnout and Transform Your Life is her guide to getting out of it.
Who Is Erin Stafford?
Stafford is a social psychologist with a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a self-described burnout survivor. Before she turned her attention to burnout full time, she spent more than two decades in marketing and brand work, including time at MTV and a stint as head of marketing for a large healthcare staffing company (and, in an earlier chapter, as a celebrity stylist). The book carries endorsements from Mel Robbins and Olympian Amy Purdy.
Her 2026 Pennsylvania Conference for Women session, Escaping the Type A Trap: Fostering Teams That Burn Bright, Not Out, turns these ideas toward managers, exploring the high-achieving habits that can inadvertently drain the people they lead and offering an energy management framework to counter it.
What the Book Argues
Stafford’s premise is that the hustle, the grind, and the long hours that fuel early career success can become the very thing that leads to burnout later. Because those behaviors are so deeply ingrained, we don’t know another way, so when we feel depleted we do what we do best: work harder.
Her profile of the Type A mindset centers on measuring success by what you can achieve and finding your self-worth there. Many high achievers, she argues, don’t recognize the full weight of the stress they’re under until a painful, life-altering experience forces the issue.
The book builds its five mindset shifts from interviews and surveys with entrepreneurs, athletes, and other high performers who have burned out themselves. It also includes “Trap Talk” sidebars, where those high achievers share what they learned, and a Burnout Assessment that looks at work, relationships, health, finances, and faith or spirituality.
One fair note: if you’ve already read widely on burnout, parts of this will feel like a refresher, as one independent review observed. The self-assessment and the first-person stories from other high performers are the features most likely to feel new.
What You’ll Take Away
- Early-career strengths can become later-career liabilities. The habits that drive early success are often the ones that cause trouble down the road, which is a useful lens for anyone who has been rewarded for overdoing it.
- The warning signs are easy to miss. Stafford argues that many driven people only notice their stress level after something forces them to look. The assessment is designed to surface it sooner.
- Burnout is rarely confined to work. The assessment spans relationships, health, and finances alongside your job, a reminder that depletion tends to spread.
- Self-worth tied to achievement is the heart of the trap. Naming that link is the first step in her approach to loosening it.
- The pace you hold yourself to may become your team’s pace. This is the angle she develops in her CFW session, and it’s worth keeping in mind as you read, especially if you manage people.
Why We’re Recommending It
Plenty of burnout advice assumes the answer is more rest. Stafford asks a more interesting question: what is it about the way you measure success that makes rest feel like falling behind? For leaders, that is a good question to answer for yourself before you ask it of a team.
Related from the CFW Bookshelf: You may notice two Erins on the Bookshelf this fall, both asking leaders to think about energy. Pair this with The Energy Edge by Erin King, or try Thoughtload by Liane Davey for the team side of the conversation.
Get the Book
The Type A Trap: Five Mindset Shifts to Beat Burnout and Transform Your Life is available wherever books are sold, including BookPeople, Amazon, and Bookshop.org.
Learn more about Erin Stafford at erinstafford.com.
