Hi there,
She was still hitting every number. Still leading the team, still landing the quarter, still the person everyone leaned on. From the outside, it worked.
Inside, she wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t digesting. She had stopped trusting the people sitting right next to her.
She didn’t have a word for what was happening to her yet. I want to hand you the word before you ever need it.
This issue is a conversation with Abi Harmon. She grew a business to 80 million dollars, led 400 people, and took a company through an acquisition in the middle of a pandemic. Then she walked away, went back to school to study the human nervous system, and built House Harmon.
Her whole argument lands on one line: your edge under pressure isn’t your skill. It’s your state. And you can reset it in about 60 seconds.
One thing we didn't have room for in the newsletter: Abi will tell you that you have eight senses, not five. The three she adds are the ones running you right now.
That's in the audio…
Mental Infrastructure: Tips for better human performance. When your body runs well, your mind thinks sharper.
Start here, because it is the whole issue in 60 seconds.
Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four. Out through your nose for a count of four. Do that for one minute. That’s it. That is a coherence breath, and it is the single practice Abi leaves you with this issue.
I’m going to tell you why something that small changes everything, but I wanted you to feel it first, before the science talked you out of it.
Here is the science. Abi’s performance equation is simple:
Performance = Skill × State
Skill is what you’ve built. State is the temporary capacity of your body in this exact moment. And because it’s multiplication, not addition, a low state doesn’t subtract from your skill. It shrinks all of it. As Abi puts it: “AI runs on pattern. Humans run on sensation.” Your physiology writes your thoughts before you do.
Our nervous system is built to mobilize and then stabilize. But when we live activated all day, every day, we get stuck in the mobilized half. And when you’re stuck there, Abi says, “fundamental parts of our body do not work.” The frameworks, the experience, the strategy you spent years building are all still in there. You just lose the access.
The skill that gets the access back has a name. Interoception, your awareness of what’s happening inside your own body. Abi calls it “the greatest form of intelligence,” and the good news is it’s free and you train it through breath. That’s the whole reason the 60 second reset works.
Now the part that reframes everything.
If you were an athlete and a muscle group was sore, you’d recover it. You’d never train it to failure every single day and call that discipline. But, in Abi’s words, “in the workplace, we throw our minds against something over and over and over again,” and we call that resilience. It isn’t. It’s the same injury, in a place you can’t see.
Which brings us to the line I most want you to keep: "Burnout isn't a feeling."
If it’s physiological, then pushing harder cannot fix it. And it rarely announces itself the way we expect. Abi didn’t collapse on a couch. Hers showed up while she was still performing: “I’m not sleeping. I’m constipated. And I don’t trust anyone around me.” Those three, she says, are the clear marker of an overstimulated nervous system. Not a character flaw. A state.
I’ll be honest with you. I’m a go, go, go person. Single mom, too many companies at once. I read her list and felt caught. That’s the point. This isn’t a weakness you confess. It’s a dial you learn to turn down.
The 4 Loads your team carries that never show up on a project plan
Cognitive load. Tabs, threads, contexts. The brain pays a switching tax every time attention moves.
Emotional load. Holding tension for the team. Reading the room. Absorbing what others can’t yet name.
Decision load. Hundreds of micro-choices a day, most low-value but cortisol-priced.
Identity load. The pressure of being the person people rely on. The cost of never being off.
Prefer your eyes open? Try the attention reset.
Pick one object on your desk.
For 60 seconds, take in only that: the color, the texture, the shape. When your mind wanders, bring it back. Same effect, different door.
Minds on a Mission: Startups and bold ideas I follow closely, that make me optimistic about the future we are building.
Here’s why I trust Abi on this, and why you should too. Her story isn’t a resume. It’s evidence.
She started at the Target headquarters, then moved to Amazon when it was still mostly selling books, where she launched categories in pet and, in her words, was “shipping cat litter online, 40 pound bags to someone’s doorstep that was costing us 80 dollars to ship.” From there she founded the first technology that helped large enterprise manufacturers sell and advertise on top of Amazon. It was acquired. Then she became CEO of an AI advertising technology company.
By every external measure, she’d won. And the wall still caught her.
The turn came at the hardest edge of that last chapter, consolidating startups, running large layoffs, watching capable people leave with two weeks’ notice. Looking at who remained, she realized something that reorganized her whole life: “humans are our biggest bottleneck to the opportunity of what we can create with technology.” Not the tech. Us. So she went back to school to study the human operating system, and House Harmon was born.
House Harmon is a consultancy, and deliberately so. Instead of scaling the work away into an app, Abi keeps it human: live workshops, immersive retreats, executive coaching. The mission in one line: make state something leaders can command, “available on demand, not just on their good days.”
If the reset in Signal 1 did something for you, she built us a free toolkit to take it further:
(thank you, Abi!)
The Leadership Reset Kit · Free
Leadership Reset Workbook (PDF): how your nervous system impacts performance.
3 Audio Resets: Quick Reset, Body Scan + Coherent Breath (5:48). Balance Reset, Alternate Nostril (8:31). Deep Reset, Yoga Nidra (14:32).
An Invitation to Build: Tools and perspectives to stay relevant and resilient as the pace of change accelerates.
I’ve said this to every guest lately as it is the core of my keynote, and Abi agreed instantly: as AI reshapes the work, adaptability is worth more than fluency. Fluency is what you already know. Adaptability is what lets you keep moving when what you know stops being enough.
And here’s the part that surprised me. Adaptability isn’t the absence of fear. It’s a specific relationship with it. In Abi’s words:
“Adaptability happens when we have an awareness of fear. Like a football player, I tuck it into my crook and hold it with me, but it’s not going to be what’s driving me forward. And I can keep running.” — Abi Harmon
You don’t wait for the fear to leave. You carry it and keep running. And the way you notice you’ve stopped running, that you’ve gone rigid instead, is the breath. That same coherence breath from Signal 1 is the build tool here. Four in, four out, 60 seconds, and your system comes back online enough to choose your next move instead of react to it.
This is the invitation Abi leaves you with, and it’s bigger than a breathing exercise:
“People should be aggressively ambitious and do big things. And I want them to have the tools to do that from a regulated place.”
Remember the leader from the top of this issue, still hitting the numbers while quietly falling apart. That was Abi. This is also Abi: “The other side is full of things you can’t even imagine when you’re feeling afraid to let go.”
Burnout was never a feeling. It’s a state. And a state is something you can change.
The Invitation to Build · Work with Abi
Retreats. Use code RESET for 20% off upcoming retreats. Executive coaching (her deepest work) and corporate workshops. Schedule a discovery call.
That’s the issue. If one line stayed with you, it’s probably the one about burnout, so do me a favor and send it to the person you’re picturing right now. They already know they need it. They just don’t have the word yet.
Until the next signal,
Yrmis
Field notes from a cross-industry builder. My keynote, The World Rewarded Fluency. AI Rewards Adaptability., is built around CLICK, a practical framework for teams navigating technostress and leading through change. Book a fit call.
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