Day: November 28, 2025

• Severe burnout led Audrey Wang to experience chronic hives and health issues.
• The high-pressure demands of her luxury estate management career were a trigger.
• Wang recovered by prioritizing health, shifting to coaching, and embracing intentional living.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Audrey Wang, a 42-year-old business and executive coach in LA. Business Insider has verified Wang’s employment history with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I burned out so severely in my last job that I broke out in hives that lasted six years. The baseline was all over my body, from head to toe. On my face, it started as a small hive on both cheeks and gradually grew to the point where my entire face was swollen.

They would peak for one whole week. Then it would take three weeks to return to normal and start up again in the fourth week. The hives on the rest of my body moved around aggressively.

I worked in high-end estate management, overseeing multiple luxury properties, managing household staff, and handling a wide range of requests.

I had to quit, and now I’m a business and executive coach. Once I got my stress levels under control, my hives went away.

My first job in 2010 was incredible

I managed a 20,000-square-foot estate in Santa Monica and continued to take on additional clients. Everything grew through word of mouth. It’s a high-turnover space, and private professionals are always in demand, especially those who can step in quickly and handle high-pressure environments with discretion.

As I moved on to larger and wealthier clients, the demands got more extreme. One client was a die-hard U2 fan and wanted to charter a helicopter from Santa Monica to the Inglewood stadium. He insisted I find a way for his helicopter to fly directly over LAX, which is a no-fly zone. It was absurd and obviously impossible.

I worked for two families, including one from the UAE

I would spend two to three months a year living in the UAE to work for them. They were essentially government officials and highly discerning, and their escalating requests were so constant that there was barely time to sleep or eat.

The remainder of my year was spent working full-time with another family, based mainly in LA, from about 2013 to 2016. In 2015, the work environment became very difficult to manage. I was also getting married soon, and I was so stressed that the hives started.

That’s when I hit my breaking point

My face was so swollen and disfigured that I couldn’t be seen in public. I was in tears daily. Thankfully, I’d saved enough to take a year or two off to recover.

In 2016, I moved back to Playa Vista, but my hair started falling out. Doctors told me I probably had severe adrenal fatigue or even possibly cancer. It forced me to ask myself: Do I really want to keep doing this for the rest of my life?

The money was amazing, but was I willing to die for an early retirement?

During that break, I leaned into things I actually loved, like organizing

I discovered Marie Kondo’s KonMari method. I wondered if my health issues were caused by allergies, so I started giving away everything and stopped buying anything new. It felt meditative. I helped friends declutter, and sometimes they paid me for my help.

The hives continued at first. Doctors put me on steroids because they believed it was stress-induced, but nothing helped. I didn’t work for three years because my skin was so unpredictable. One month it’d clear up, and the next I’d have a lupus-like rash.

I was eventually diagnosed with chronic idiopathic urticaria and angioedema. Sometimes when I bit into something, my lips or eyes would swell, so I carried an EpiPen everywhere.

I concluded that the root cause must be internal

I’d tried everything in Western and Eastern medicine, so I enrolled with the Nutritional Therapy Association. Their clinical partners tested my deficiencies and confirmed I had adrenal fatigue and sky-high cortisol.

They gave me hormone-balancing supplements. I thought, Really? Vitamins? But I had no other choice, so I stuck with it.

A few weeks later, my hives improved. Three months in, they were completely gone. My blood pressure dropped. I felt like a different person.

I knew I could never go back to estate management

Instead, I grew my home-organizing work into a full-time business. Word spread, and I found myself back in some of the same mansions organizing people’s lives, again. That evolved into motivational coaching and eventually high-performance coaching.

I teach that less is more. My work at Invitation to Succeed bridges the KonMari method with high-performance habits. But high performance isn’t what people think it is. It’s not about hustling so hard you sacrifice your health and relationships. It’s about doing what truly matters and brings you a life worth living.

If you think being productive means working nonstop, you’ve got it twisted

Real high performance is intentional. It means analyzing what really matters — your health, relationships, and joy — and aligning your life around them.

If I could do things differently, I would’ve quit the minute a client disrespected me. I’d tell my former self: Your integrity is your compass. When you start betraying it to keep the peace, you’ve already lost yourself.

Self-respect is the quiet decision to choose yourself, even when it means sacrificing comfort or approval. The moment I got hives, my body was speaking the truth my mind was trying to rationalize. That was my wake-up call, a physical boundary screaming, “Enough.”

Today, I protect my peace like a non-negotiable. Integrity, self-worth, and self-respect are the foundations of every decision I make now.

• Michael Permana was placed on a performance improvement plan by Amazon.
• He worried his software engineering job was at risk, so he took paternity leave.
• He said he did it to protect his finances and buy himself time to find a new role.

When Michael Permana learned that his time as a software engineer at Amazon might be running out, he made an interesting decision: he took paternity leave.

In late February 2023, Permana was placed on a PIP.

“I was desperate because from what I’d heard, once you are in a performance improvement plan, you are on your way out at Amazon,” said the 47-year-old, who lives in Fremont, California.

He began applying for jobs right away, but knew it could take a while to land something new. He had a mortgage to pay, so he decided to buy himself roughly two months of breathing room by using the remainder of his paternity leave from when his daughter was born.

By temporarily stepping away from work — and the scrutiny that came with being on a PIP — he figured he could prolong his employment at Amazon while he searched for a new role.

“I took the opportunity while I could to delay time,” he said.

Permana is among the Americans who have taken steps to prepare for unemployment in a corporate landscape where, for some, job security feels less dependable than it once did.

Business Insider has spoken with dozens of workers laid off by large corporations that are implementing strategic changes — including eliminating management layers, shifting investments toward AI, letting go of underperforming employees, and cutting costs across the board. While some workers had a sense their roles might be eliminated, others said they were caught off guard — pointing to their tenure, clean performance records, and the financial strength of their employers.

Permana shared how he landed a new role after a challenging search — and offered advice for others facing performance pressure.

When reached for comment, Amazon said that it regularly reviews its performance evaluation process to ensure it best supports the growth and development of its employees.

Job searching during paternity leave and getting a ‘collection’ of rejection emails

Rather than simply working hard and hoping for the best, some workers have prepared for the worst — deploying strategies such as applying for jobs before trouble strikes, launching side businesses, or secretly juggling multiple jobs.

In Permana’s case, at least he had some warning, and paternity leave bought him some time to look for his next gig. That doesn’t mean his job search was easy.

His two main search strategies were applying to software engineering roles on LinkedIn and exploring opportunities through recruiters he connected with on the platform. Permana landed a few interviews at Meta, Instawork, and HubSpot, but was ultimately rejected from all of them. He said he tried applying to the software company SnapLogic, where he’d worked more than a decade previously, but was denied there as well.

“It was very hard,” he said, adding that he still has a “collection” of rejection emails he’s compiled for tracking purposes.

By the time Permana returned from paternity leave in May, he still hadn’t landed a new job, and he continued to feel that his performance was under scrutiny. However, he soon advanced in the interview process for a software engineering role at the mobile game developer MobilityWare. A friend who worked there referred him for the position, which he believes helped him get an interview.

In late May, Permana received an offer. In June, his tenure at Amazon came to an end, and he began the new role — a remote position that offered the flexibility he was looking for.

Permana said he enjoyed the job but recently left for a software engineering role at the mobile messaging platform Attentive, citing higher pay as a key reason for the switch.

How to navigate a PIP and land a software engineering role

When it comes to navigating a performance improvement plan, Permana said his best advice is to communicate openly with your manager and focus on doing exactly what they’re asking of you. However, he also believes it’s wise to assume things might not work out — and to start applying for jobs elsewhere.

As for advice on landing a software engineering role, Permana said his two biggest tips are to seek out referrals whenever possible and to dedicate significant time to interview preparation.

He recalled that Meta’s interview process, for example, included coding questions that required extensive prep. One question, he said, touched on a concept he hadn’t thought about in the last two decades of his career. Permana believes the questions were so demanding that it would be difficult for any working professional to find enough time to prepare properly.

“You’d have to study for a few months to be able to do those questions,” he said.

Reviewing questions on LeetCode, a coding interview prep website, helped him prepare for interviews at Meta and elsewhere — but he said it still required a significant time investment.

Permana’s advice: Find ways to carve out enough time for your job search — even if it doesn’t involve taking paternity leave.