She started as a barista making $6.50 an hour and ended up as COO of Walmart Canada, but that's not the most interesting part of the her story.

This weeks episode is with Nabeela Elasyed. Former COO of Walmart Canada and CHRO of IKEA US, a Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches member, and the author of the forthcoming Breaking Burnout. She's spent 20 years leading some of the world's largest organisations before stepping away to follow a different journey.

This conversation was such a pleasure. Nabeela and I are on very aligned missions in the world — and she brings a perspective I rarely get to sit across from. She went from a first-generation immigrant childhood, where work became both her escape and her identity, through twenty years at the top of the corporate world, to walking away from a seven-figure career and starting over. What she traces in this conversation is the interior cost of that climb — the postpartum depression and anxiety she carried in silence for years, what happens when the role that defined you is gone, and what it actually looks like to reimagine success once the title is gone. She's thought deeply about all of this. And she's lived every part of it.

In this episode:

• The internal operating system that drives overachievers - where it comes from, and what it does
• A decade of high-level executive performance sustained alongside hidden mental illness
• Why anchoring your identity in your career, your title, or any single thing puts you at serious risk when that thing is interrupted
• The difference between loving your work and being in love with it
• Why people with deep purpose are actually more vulnerable to burnout
• Her faith as the one constant through the lowest moments
• What the Gallup thriving scale tells us about the state of the global workforce, and why she's still optimistic

This is an incredible episode and if there's anything to take away from it, it's that that your value is inherent.
You don't have to produce to rest, to be worthy, or to be loved. For a lot of high achievers, that's not an easy thing to hear — and she'd know.

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Nabeela Elsayed:

🌐 Website: nabeelaelsayed.com
📖 Pre-order Breaking Burnout: https://www.nabeelaelsayed.com/breaking-burnout
📸 Instagram: @nabeelaelsayed
💼 LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabeelaixtabalan/?originalSubdomain=ca

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The Unknown Path is a podcast about the untold stories behind success — real conversations with extraordinary people.