How a £1M Recruitment CEO Stopped Looking for Answers in Books and Podcasts

When Success Becomes Unsustainable: A Recruitment CEO’s Journey from Burnout to Body-Guided Leadership

You’ve built the business. You’re billing the numbers you dreamed about. But you’re working 7am to 10pm every single day, and somewhere deep down, you know this can’t continue. If that sounds familiar, Andrea Rishmawi’s story might be exactly what you need to hear right now.

Andrea runs a recruitment firm and has been in the industry for 12 to 15 years. When she sat down with Katy after completing the Beyond Beliefs retreat in Somerset, she shared something many high-performing business owners will recognise: the moment you realise that hitting your revenue targets doesn’t automatically solve the sustainability problem you’ve been ignoring.

The Million-Dollar Question Nobody Asks

During the COVID period, Andrea was billing a million dollars a year personally. Business was booming. From the outside, everything looked extraordinary. But Andrea admits she liked to pretend there wasn’t an issue with sustainability because she thought of herself as superwoman who could do it all.

There was a part of her that recognised she was juggling a lot of balls. When the market slowed down, instead of panicking about bringing in more business, which would have been her normal response, she saw it differently. She thought it was a lovely opportunity to structure something better, to finally create some work-life balance.

Then the market took a massive downturn. Suddenly, she found herself thinking she’d take the busyness over what was happening. But when things started heating up again around Q2 2025, heading into Q3, Andrea had a realisation that changed everything. She was getting busy again, things were about to become crazy, and she hadn’t actually done anything differently.

She was starting to juggle all the things again. The buck stopped with her. She felt responsible for everybody and everything and the outcome of everything. She was working until 9 or 10pm every night and starting her day at 7am. It was simply too much.

The Pattern You Keep Repeating

Andrea felt stuck. The circumstances had changed a lot around her, but she couldn’t see a way to do things differently. She was doing the exact same things as she had done before. At least the outcome was good, she reasoned. At least she knew what to expect.

But when you’re in that time, when deals are happening and the momentum is building, it’s easy to forget what you’re sacrificing. Andrea knew that if there was a way to figure out that balance, she wanted it. That’s what drew her to say yes to the retreat.

You might recognise this pattern in your own business. You launch with the best intentions. You promise yourself this time will be different. You’ll build something sustainable, something that doesn’t require you to be everything to everyone. But when the pressure builds and the opportunities come flooding in, you default back to the same behaviours. You take on more. You stay later. You convince yourself it’s temporary.

Andrea launched her agency in 2023, partly because she wanted to create something different. But by 2025, she found herself right back in the familiar territory of managing all her own responsibilities and everybody else’s, making sure they were delivering for clients, and trying to keep three other things happening simultaneously. She jokingly mentioned she even had bread in the oven; a perfect metaphor for the constant juggling act.

Three Days That Changed Everything

The Beyond Beliefs retreat is an intimate, in-person experience created for high-performing business owners and leaders, many from recruitment but not limited to the industry. Over three days at a secluded Somerset estate, participants intentionally move from strategy to execution and into the deeper work of identity, belief systems, and the internal drivers that shape leadership and results.

Through guided inner work and embodied practices, the retreat helps leaders release what has been quietly holding them back, reconnect with who they are beneath the role, and return to their business with clarity, alignment, and more sustainable ways of leading.

When Andrea talks about her experience, she mentions that the part she tells people about most often is the death lodge; wandering in a pitch-black forest in a different country, frightened and unsure of anything. That’s what stands out in the storytelling.

But the part that was actually most meaningful to her was the last morning of the retreat. After all the breathwork, after the journaling, after the sweat lodge, after spending three days with people and getting to know them deeply, it was that final morning when she thought about what she wanted to take away. Hearing everybody else talk about how they wanted to move forward with this newfound sense of self. That was the most meaningful piece for her.

Katy highlighted something important during their conversation: the ability to actually listen to people and properly listen. Not sitting there with your filters running, thinking about your next answer, but really hearing what’s coming from the heart of somebody.

Andrea caught herself doing exactly that during the retreat. She was preparing her next response instead of truly listening. What she took away was the ability to observe that pattern. She now observes far more and asks herself why she doesn’t just listen, why she has to be so prepared for the next thing that comes out of her mouth.

The Shift from Controlling to Trusting

One of the biggest shifts Andrea experienced was around trust and delegation. She realised she had been holding onto everything because she didn’t trust that it would get done properly otherwise. She thought she needed to be involved in every decision, every outcome, every detail.

Katy pointed out that as a business owner and leader, there’s often a question about whether stepping back is the right thing to do. Surely you should be taking that responsibility? But for others to grow in that space, you have to allow people to step up. And for them to step up, you’ve got to step back. That takes real courage.

Andrea described it perfectly with her circus metaphor. She could picture herself with balls in the air, her foot sticking out with a hula hoop, managing her own responsibilities and everybody else’s, making sure they were delivering for clients, keeping three other things happening at once. That’s what life looked like before.

What feels different now is a sense of calmness. She’s always had a mentality that everything will be fine. But the subtext to that was always “because I will make sure it’s fine.” Now it’s different. Now she recognises that things are happening for her team. She trusts that she’s surrounded herself with people who can execute.

That shift from “I’ll make it fine” to “it’s going to be fine” might seem small, but it represents a fundamental change in how you lead and how you live.

The Medicine Is Inside You

If Andrea could tell someone considering a retreat whether to attend, she’d say this: if you’re not sure, certainty does not come from an external factor. Certainty comes from within. If you’re not sure, listen.

When asked to sum up her experience in a word or phrase, Andrea said “worth it.” But she also mentioned she’d thought about it and had several words: growth, breathe. What struck Katy was how people notice the difference. Andrea confirmed that everybody she’s come home and talked to sees a difference in her.

She didn’t know what to expect going into the retreat. People in her life asked if she was going to come back and not like them anymore. What does identity shifting mean? Was she going to be a new person?

What it means for Andrea is that she’s now far more intentional. She’s more intentional about what she allows into her sphere of influence, more intentional about what she allows into her brain, more intentional about spending time with herself instead of constantly distracting herself. That wasn’t something she went in expecting.

She’s also far more connected to her body than she’s ever been. She’s in a place where she feels like she’s hearing messages through her body for the first time in her entire life, instead of her brain deciding what’s right for her and then telling her body what to do. That’s quite hard to explain if someone hasn’t experienced it, but Andrea hopes it resonates with people because it’s been a world of difference for her.

Anyone who’s experienced the monkey mind or the internal chatter, or felt a conflict between the mind and the body with the mind taking over, will understand what Andrea’s describing. Being able to drop into your body is where you want to go, but it’s an obstacle that many people face and find very hard to overcome.

From Prescribing to Listening

One sound bite that Andrea feels is really valuable is the shift she’s made from prescribing or looking for people to prescribe to her. That can mean medicine literally, but it can also mean advice. What should she do in her business? What diet should she eat? What workout regime should she follow? The constant searching for answers outside herself.

She’s moved from “I don’t have the answers, do you have the answers, can you tell me the answers I want?” to “Oh, I actually already know. It’s just about trusting myself and listening.”

Andrea uses that word…”listen” a lot now. During the integration period of the retreat, she came out with her favourite statement: “The medicine is inside you.” She now knows that when she needs answers, she can find them without asking anybody, without reading a book, without listening to a podcast, without anybody telling her. Because she already knows. It’s just about listening.

That’s quite a shift for someone who’s spent 12 to 15 years in an industry that values expertise, advice, and external validation. In recruitment, you’re constantly seeking the best strategies, the latest techniques, the proven methods that others have used successfully. But Andrea’s realised that the real answers for her business and her life aren’t in another person’s playbook. They’re already inside her.