The Honest Place
When Achievement Stops Holding You Together: Olga Nikitina on Burnout, Identity and Rebuilding
The Honest Place is a space for honest conversations about self-worth, identity, leadership, ambition, parenting and the inner questions so many of us carry. Hosted by Svetlana Kaz, each episode offers reflective conversations on what growth and life really feel like from the inside.
Show Notes
What happens when achievement has become the thing that holds you together — and then one day, that strategy no longer works?
In this episode of The Honest Place, I speak with Olga Nikitina — startup co-founder, entrepreneur, immigrant, mother, and host of her own podcast about depression, insomnia, burnout, and rebuilding.
Olga and I first met as founders in Silicon Valley, where so many conversations revolve around growth, fundraising, productivity, and the next milestone. But this conversation goes beneath that visible layer.
We talk about achievement not only as ambition, but as identity, coping, safety, and a way of earning our place in the world. Olga shares what it was like to realize that ambition had become a coping strategy, what happened when her body could no longer continue in the old way, how support reached her, and what rebuilding a life looks like now.
We also talk about motherhood, the pressure of visible success, the silence around mental health, and the question of what it really means to build a life that is not only impressive from the outside, but livable from the inside.
This is not a clinical conversation or advice. It is a lived-experience conversation about ambition, identity, burnout, support, motherhood, and rebuilding from a more honest place.
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