Burnout has become a near universal experience for Black women in workplaces that demand everything from us but offer little protection in return. According to a 2025 analysis from the National Women’s Law Center, more than 300,000 Black women were pushed out of the labor force this year, a staggering reminder of how fragile our place in the workforce can be. I didn’t plan for burnout. Most of us don’t. We keep pushing until the pushing pushes back.
For nearly a decade, I worked in compliance and local government, making sure policies and programs actually served the people they were written for. My job was to keep organizations accountable and ensure their decisions aligned with both regulation and humanity. On paper, I was thriving. In reality, the exhaustion ran deeper than any PTO request could fix.
I had built my identity around achievement. As a meticulous Virgo, I genuinely believed that if I stayed prepared and worked hard enough, I could outrun burnout. But that belief held me hostage. I thought constant high performance would finally make me feel secure. Instead, I felt trapped inside my own idea of success. My truth now is simple: thriving is not about perfection; it is about choosing purpose, boundaries, and wholeness over performance.
The Breaking Point
My breaking point didn’t come from a single dramatic moment. It came from a thousand slow, quiet ones. One Tuesday evening, I looked up from my desk and realized I was sitting in a “burnout nest” of empty mugs and stacked folders at 8 PM. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as I sank into work that never seemed to end. In that stillness, I finally admitted that I wasn’t leading. I was surviving.
Another moment came during a leadership meeting when I was one of only two Black women in the room. I had just presented our audit findings, numbers tied to a major lawsuit that needed to be reported up the chain. After the meeting, my manager pulled me aside and suggested we “adjust the numbers” to make them look better before sending them forward.
My coworker and I looked at each other like, absolutely not.
We weren’t about to water down the truth to make anyone more comfortable. That moment crystalized something for me: integrity wasn’t negotiable, but in too many workplaces, it was expected to be — especially from Black women.
Despite my military service, advanced degrees, and years of experience, I hit the same wall many Black women face. My personal $51,000 salary ceiling, despite a master’s in HR and industrial organizational psychology, made the systemic reality painfully clear. I could not keep shrinking myself for workplaces that would never expand for me.
In April 2025, I walked away. Not in defeat but in defiance. With the support of my therapist, psychiatrist, and a small circle of loved ones, I stepped out on faith to redefine how I wanted to serve.
Redefining Success: The TW Collective
That leap became The TW Collective, grounded in three pillars: Impact, Equity, and Strategy. My work focuses on helping Black women professionals and Black women owned businesses build the structure, policy, and clarity needed to operate equitably and sustainably.
In my consulting work, I support clients in compliance, documentation, performance fairness, and internal systems. Much of this work involves teaching Black women how to protect themselves through clarity and documentation, something our workplaces rarely train us to do.
One woman came to me after receiving a poor performance evaluation that didn’t reflect her workload or the gaps in her initial training. Together, we drafted a detailed rebuttal that clarified expectations, documented management’s role in the issue, and protected her from further harm. She didn’t just correct the record. She finally felt heard.
On the business side, I partner with Black women who were never given equitable support to build structure behind their vision. One leader was operating in constant crisis mode because she had no policies to guide her team. We streamlined her HR documents, developed procedures she could trust, and created an operational flow that let her shift from reacting to leading.
To date, The TW Collective has supported 12 Black women through consulting and strategic project work. Even at this early stage, the outcomes have been powerful. Clients now walk into difficult conversations with documentation and confidence. They resolve conflicts through policy alignment instead of emotional labor. And small businesses strengthen internal systems in ways that prevent inequity from taking root.
Instead of asking Black women to rely on endless resilience, I help them build structure. Equity must be built, not begged for.
My forthcoming book grows from this mission. Centered on Black women’s pay equity, it explores how financial disparities shape our mental health, our family systems, and our leadership trajectories. Through research and lived experience, I offer frameworks meant to help Black women not just survive the workplace but design careers that honor our agency.
What Burnout Revealed
Burnout taught me that collapse is not failure. It is information. It is your mind, body, and spirit whispering that the version of success you’ve been performing is no longer sustainable. Failing forward has become my philosophy. Every setback has shaped the leader I want to be, one who chooses wholeness over optics and purpose over performance.
When I work with Black women now, I remind them of what I had to learn myself: walking away is sometimes the most strategic form of leadership. Rest is not resignation. Redirection is not defeat. The system may have been built to overlook us, but Black women have always been the architects of what comes next.
Burnout taught me that thriving is not about doing more. It is about doing differently. If my story does anything, I hope it gives another Black woman permission to choose herself too. Because when we stop breaking for systems never built for us, that is when we finally begin building something better.
Tishayla Williams is an Army veteran, HR and compliance strategist, and doctoral candidate focused on leadership diversity, equity, and organizational retention. She is the founder of The TW Collective, a consulting firm helping Black women professionals and business owners create equitable and sustainable workplaces.