Burnout Coach | Renewal & Alignment
My Approach
I am Jo Liu, a trauma-informed burnout coach. This work is for people approaching or experiencing a breaking point where self-worth, self-identity, and meaning of life are coming into question.
My approach is intuitive and attuned to your emotional depth. Instead of surface fixes, I work with the deeper patterns underneath that drive your burnout. Burnout isn’t just about overwork. At its core, it’s about losing touch with yourself and your values.
My work is about helping you return to yourself and rebuild a life that feels true and fulfilling.
Who this is for
The people I work with are often deeply capable, the ones holding everything together even when it costs them their own well-being.
Burnout takes on different forms. For some, it’s compassion fatigue, the steady drain of caring for others until little remains for themselves. For others, it’s perfectionism or a harsh inner critic that pushes them beyond their limits. It can also appear as self-doubt or impostor syndrome, fueling constant second-guessing and over-striving. The result is emotional exhaustion and chronic stress, after years of being “on” without pause.
If you’ve tried coaching that focused only on productivity or stress management and still find yourself stuck, my approach goes deeper. Together, we work with the patterns beneath burnout so you can step out of survival mode, rediscover what makes life meaningful, and rebuild the connections to feel excited by life again.
"We get there through presence, not striving."
The holistic path to burnout recovery
My approach meets you as a whole person and it brings together two components:
• Inner work: building self-trust and emotional safety. Welcoming back the parts of you that have been muted or buried. Learning to relate to yourself in a new way and make choices that honor your values.
• Everyday practices: gentle ways to steady yourself when emotions run heavy, protect your energy without guilt, soothe your nervous system, quiet mental noise, and shape daily rhythms that nourish.
This comprehensive approach creates lasting change. You don’t just find a moment of ease. You grow the capacity to live, work, and rest in ways that fulfill you.
What this work offers
A place to lay it all down and be met as you are.
In our work together, you’ll have space to slow down and see what’s really happening inside. We go beyond temporary relief. We meet the pressures you put on yourself, the critical voice, and the parts you’ve neglected, so you can approach them with new self-insights.
The focus isn’t on becoming a “better” version of yourself but on returning to what’s already here and beginning to trust it.
Clients often share that they feel more present in their day-to-day and less wound up, able to recover balance more quickly. When challenges arise, they find they can pause instead of reacting, choosing compassion over self-blame. With that shift, life no longer feels consumed by pressure, and work-life balance opens space for lighter, more easeful days.
"This isn’t a fix. It’s a return to the part of you that never needed fixing."
This work resonates with people who sense healing isn’t about erasing what doesn’t work, but about returning to what’s true and whole. Without the constant striving to prove or please, it becomes easier to meet life as you are.
At the heart of this work is presence and compassion, and the simple act of slowing down to reconnect with what’s here. That’s where healing starts.
How I hold space
Before I stepped into this work, I spent two decades in art direction and photography, crafting visual narratives. That work drew me to the language of imagery, symbols, and metaphor, the same language the subconscious, responsible for our deeply held patterns, often speaks. It showed me how meaning often emerges through nuance, not direct explanation.
That way of sensing still shapes how I hold space.
In coaching, this helps me listen beyond words. I notice pauses, undercurrents, and what has not found language yet. Sometimes what shows up first is a feeling before it has words. We stay with it until the meaning becomes clear.
I also weave in mindfulness, guided imagery, and hypnosis as needed to help you stay present and connect with your subconscious, opening space for what’s beneath the surface to come forward.
This is not a scripted process. Like creative work, healing has layers, and my role is to help you stay with what is underneath so real change can unfold.
That is what keeps this work alive for me.
My Story
The relentless pursuit of enough
For years, I was chasing something. Some version of wholeness or perfection I thought I had to earn. I thought healing meant doing more: figuring it out, pushing myself, getting it right. I believed if I just did enough, fixed enough, became someone better, I’d finally feel at peace.
So I kept striving, polishing, and performing. But the more I tried to shape myself into something acceptable, the further I drifted from who I was.
Even presence started to feel like another goal to achieve.
“Be more, do more… slow down and just breathe”
“Hustle harder… be still”
“Become your best self… what you are is enough”
The emptiness achievement couldn’t fill
An existential crisis led me to meditation and self-inquiry. At the time, I was working in art direction and photography in the advertising industry. Searching for beauty and meaning in a transient world and trying to fill an inner void with outer validation.
What once felt fulfilling no longer quieted the growing emptiness I felt. I had always been a drill sergeant to myself. Relentless drive and work ethic helped me succeed, but it slowly eroded me too.
The price of self-disconnection
Old trauma also surfaced around that time. It was raw, familiar, and no longer ignorable. My usual coping tactics of burying myself in work, numbing my feelings with distraction, and forcing a positive spin stopped working.
Years of burying parts of myself, blunting my sensitivity to manage my own emotional intensity and others around me, kept me moving ahead, but it also dimmed my capacity to feel joy. Eventually, the cost of that disconnection caught up with me. I wasn’t falling apart. But I wasn’t fully here either.
I began to see how the distance from myself was bleeding into everything: my relationships, my ability to feel, and my capacity to stay open to life. Without self-compassion, I kept circling the same patterns.
As my world was breaking down, something unexpected began to take shape.
"What I called strength was often just disconnection in disguise."
Breaking point became a beginning
Through meditation and inner work, I began to step back from my mind. I learned to notice my thoughts and emotions without judgment. I turned inward and started peeling back the layers: societal, cultural, ancestral. Layers that had silenced my deeper truth. It was messy, uncertain, and often painful. But in surrendering the need to hold it all together, something gentler began to emerge. What looked like a breaking point became a new beginning.
When I finally stopped outrunning what I’d spent years pushing down, I began trading self-loathing for self-acceptance. And grace started to pour in.
A new relationship with myself
Healing didn’t start with more effort. It unfolded when I surrendered control and put down the weight I thought I had to carry. It began when I softened, listened, and reconnected with the parts of myself I had ignored.
What I needed wasn’t more insight. It was a different way of being with myself. I needed to stop abandoning myself in the name of achievement and approval, and start caring for myself with the same energy I gave to everyone else. I needed room to pause, unravel, and to know I was worthy of my care.
That’s the shift I now help others explore. Not strategies, but space: a safe place to meet yourself honestly, lay down the weight, and rest in presence and compassion.
“What I needed wasn’t more insight. It was a different way of being with myself.”
My background
I’m a Gen Xer who grew up between continents. Childhood in Asia, teenage years in South America, and settled in the U.S. since 1995. Before settling in New York in 2010, I lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Each place added to my perspective and shaped the way I meet people and their stories.
For more than two decades, I worked in art direction and photography, crafting visual narratives for Fortune 500 companies. That chapter sharpened my creativity and discipline, taught me to notice nuance and adapt to complexity, and showed me that what works in one context won’t always fit another. Those skills still live in my coaching.
I find joy in animals, jazz, dancing, drumming, and being in nature.
My influences & training
My work is grounded in contemplative practices that emphasize presence, compassion, and inner awareness. I draw from Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, which invite balance, flow, and connection with the natural world.
Teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, and Adyashanti have shaped how I guide this work, helping clients slow down, meet themselves with compassion, and create space for clarity and balance.
I’m not aligned with any single tradition. What matters to me is offering inclusive, respectful care for people of all identities, orientations, and beliefs.
Credentials and Training
• Trauma-Informed Care Certification and Crisis Support Training
• Mental Health First Aid, National Council for Mental Wellbeing
• Ericksonian Hypnosis, Master Practitioner Certification
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Master Practitioner Certification
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
• Vipassana meditation
• Training in complementary frameworks, including the chakra system
• BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
