Burnt Out People Can't Save a Burning Planet: Navigating Climate Anxiety and Finding Hope

Sustainability work is meaningful, but it can also break you. In this episode, we sit down with Courtney Kovach and Georgia Monaghan, co-founders of EcoMind, to talk about what happens when the people trying to save the planet burn out trying to do it.

Georgia and Courtney bring very different journeys to this conversation, one from climate law and consulting, one from youth mental health. Together they've built something that sits right at the intersection: practical tools for navigating the emotional toll of living and working through a climate crisis.

We talk about the difference between overwork and burnout, how to find agency when the outcomes feel out of your control, and why hope isn't naive, it's necessary. 

If you've ever felt like what you're doing isn't enough, this one's for you.

EcoMind https://www.ecomind.au/

Corporate & team enquiries https://www.ecomind.au/work-with-us

Courtney and Georgia's Recommendations

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Where the Light Gets In (Ben Crowe)

Build a Ballot Tegan Lerm & Lizzie Hedding

Climate Writers Eezu Tan

Transcript

Loreto Gutierrez (00:01)
Welcome to The Green Fix. In this podcast, we explore how businesses are navigating a changing world through the lens of supply chains, sustainability and tech.

Dan Leverington (00:11)
Before we get started, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet today and pay our respects to elders past and present.

Dan Leverington (00:22)
Welcome to The Green Fix. I'm Dan Leverington.

Loreto Gutierrez (00:24)
And I'm Loreto Gutierrez.

Dan Leverington (00:25)
Today's guests, Courtney Kovach and Georgia Monaghan, are the co-founders of EcoMind. Courtney and Georgia's work is focused on how you can navigate the emotional toll climate change brings to many of us. So we want to use this episode to answer the question that many are asking themselves at the moment: how do we find hope in this space?

Courtney and Georgia, welcome to The Green Fix.

Courtney (00:46)
Thank you.

Georgia (00:47)
Thank you.

Dan Leverington (00:48)
We'd love to start with a question for both of you that we often ask our guests — what was your journey into the climate space initially?

Georgia (00:57)
I think what's quite cool is Courtney and I have really different journeys. I'm definitely the eco and Courtney's the mind of EcoMind. For me personally, I'm the daughter of a mining engineer. I grew up in Newcastle, not really realising I lived in the world's largest coal port, and I didn't really know about climate change. But I think like all of us, you realise in hindsight you were slowly living through it — hotter summers, more time spent in air conditioning, feeling like every summer you're having more bush smoke. And like a lot of Aussies, the Black Summer bushfires was my wake-up call.

I was working in corporate law but didn't feel it really aligned with my values — there was a kind of cognitive dissonance there. So that was this amazing wake-up call, and I moved from law into consulting in climate and sustainability at Pollination, where I was for five years. I absolutely loved that work, helping corporates and governments on climate and nature strategy — intense and complex. And then in 2024 I kind of burnt out. That's what brought me to Courtney and to EcoMind, and to really caring about how do we make sustainability not just sustainable in the end goal, but in how we get there.

Courtney (02:16)
And my journey's a little bit different. I grew up by the ocean, loved being in the water at every opportunity. I always felt a real affinity with nature. I'd heard about climate change and I was aware of it, but I didn't really understand how it applied to me or my world. And then I watched the David Attenborough documentary — A Life on Our Planet, his witness statement — and it completely rocked my world. I had never heard it laid out like that. I'd never seen how close the impacts were to my world and my existence. And rather than feeling like I have to do something, it completely overwhelmed me. I ran the other direction. The flight response was activated.

And then gradually I started to learn more about it and find my own agency and connection with it, and work out how I could actually participate in the movement. At the time I was working at Batyr, which is a youth mental health charity, designing programs around stigma reduction and helping young people learn that they're not alone. We were doing consultations with young people and time and time again, climate anxiety was coming up as something that was stressing them out. And I was like — wow, it's really stressing me out too. I have to do something at this intersection. And I couldn't see a whole heap of work being done in that space, so that's when I got connected with Georgia.

Loreto Gutierrez (03:46)
That's a perfect segue, because we would love to understand more about EcoMind and how it has become this shared vehicle that you use to enact positive change.

Georgia (04:00)
It's just been a privilege, honestly, to work with Courtney — coming from such different backgrounds — and to find a way to act in a sustainable way and to survive and thrive in a changing climate. That is what we hope EcoMind will do for the next generation.

We really believe the climate crisis is a human crisis. Our culture of extraction has destabilised our minds, our communities, and the planet. The climate crisis represents what happens when you burn out a planet, and we're seeing this in ourselves and everyone all at once. So about 18 months ago, when we first came together and launched EcoMind, we were asking: how do we actually help the next generation so they're not anxious, not overwhelmed, not burning out on the front lines of this work?

We really believe that caring for the planet starts with caring for you. And so we provide a lot of different ways to support people. We do it through care — including our recently launched mental health first aid certificate for the climate crisis. We build community through climate cafes, which are safe spaces for people to share how they're feeling about climate. We do a lot of advocacy around ensuring we don't have misinformation around climate anxiety, and that we've got sustainable curriculum in schools that isn't creating despair — it's creating hope. There are so many parts of this that are really exciting: helping people on both ends, whether they're anxious or burnt out, find ways to be more sustainable in their action.

Dan Leverington (05:46)
That's so good. And Courtney, we know that many of our listeners have children themselves, and many actually entered the world of sustainability to provide their children with a safe and prosperous future. Why is it important for parents and kids to know how to process eco-anxiety together?

Courtney (06:05)
It's such a good question. This problem is huge and complex and it's not going away anytime soon. And one of the things that is going to help us get through this is connection — with ourselves and with each other.

It's funny because we live in this world where emotions are treated like this annoying thing that's just getting in the way. But emotions are the oldest language that we have. They're providing really important messages about how we feel about the world around us, what we need to protect, what we love, when we've experienced injustice. If we don't take the time to learn what these emotions are telling us and how to navigate things like eco-anxiety, we are not setting ourselves up to navigate this complex issue. And particularly between parent and child — we need to work out how to sit with our own climate emotions so that we can sit with the climate emotions of our children. It's absolutely crucial.

Loreto Gutierrez (07:16)
Absolutely. We also hear from a lot of young professionals who have entered the workforce trying to enact positive change. Do you have an approach or point of view on how you work with young sustainability professionals?

Georgia (07:34)
In a way, we are supporting the next generation who's inheriting the planet. 2050 is the goal — but how old are we in 2050? What does that actually look like? The reality is that for a lot of us, our lives are going to be deeply impacted by climate, and we might not reach net zero. We have to accept what that looks like, and also see that there can still be a lot of joy and good in that world, as long as we have the tools for adaptation and resilience.

We do work with a lot of high school and uni students, but we find that early career professionals have a unique vantage point. When they're just starting out, they're on the coalface looking at this daunting future. What we see more in that early career space is this fight response — a kind of martyrdom. I am doing this work for something greater than me. I'm going to give everything to it. I don't need to sleep, I don't need to support myself.

That's such a noble cause, but caring for the planet starts with you. It's really important that we all can do this work for the long haul — the next 25 years plus, whatever is beyond 2050. So it's really important that sustainability professionals starting their careers are not inheriting those old ways of working, and that we're challenging workplace cultures to be more caring and more sustainable.

We're embedding stress regulation and emotional processing and communities of care into the way we work. And there's an opportunity for leaders to model that. I see a lot of the next generation — they don't want to do things the old way anymore. They really want to see that it's not just what we do, it's how we do it. Because that is the thing we have control over, and it will ultimately impact the what.

Dan Leverington (09:48)
How should our listeners distinguish between a heavy workload and emotional burnout?

Georgia (09:57)
It's hard. This work is stressful. Life is stressful. The work can be hard, but there is a tipping point — climate tipping points, social tipping points, and even team tipping points.

I went through burnout, and I think the term already feels a bit stigmatised. For me, it really helped to reframe it by understanding the definition. It's not just overwork — it's overwork plus cynicism plus reduced effectiveness.

For me, it looked like working every weekend, working 12-hour-plus days, and still feeling like I was behind and not enough. Then the second layer — cynicism. After five years doing the work, you're like: I keep drafting these strategies and net zero roadmaps, and I'm not sure I can quantify the emissions my work has actually resulted in. You start to become cynical and lose faith in what you're doing, which ultimately impacts the work. And then there's reduced effectiveness — part of the burnout definition by the World Health Organization. The result of those feelings is that you're probably not going to be as effective.

In 2024, I had just come back from working and studying in the US. I was working so hard, things were unravelling. I wasn't sleeping at night, then sleeping all day, taking double the time to write an email, feeling paralysis on tasks. I could not let anyone see that. I didn't share how I was feeling with anyone, and instead I just took on more to prove I was fine. But I wasn't.

Being able to recognise that it is not just overwork — it's those three things — is really helpful language. Burnt out people can't save a burning planet. A team full of overwork, cynicism and reduced effectiveness doesn't seem like a successful, happy, thriving or sustainable team. So understanding when you're reaching that tipping point really matters.

Loreto Gutierrez (12:25)
Thank you for sharing that, Georgia. Thank you for being so open. It's important for people to hear this and consider whether any of these concepts resonate with their own day-to-day — things they may not have identified as burnout. One thing that really resonated was what you said about spending all your time and energy building strategy decks and sustainability plans and not feeling like they're impacting the world the way you wish they did. Do you think that contributes to a loss of agency in the individual?

Georgia (13:03)
Yeah. A lot of my journey since 2024 has been about changing my metrics of success. If our metric of success is very fixed in an uncertain future, we don't have a lot of control over that. I can help draft a net zero action plan, but I have no control over whether that company and all its stakeholders actually implement it.

So what is your sphere of control? It really comes down to: I can control how I show up. I can control what I say, what I think, how I feel — to a degree. And I do have a lot of hope because you could see seeds being planted. Even if the whole strategy wasn't implemented, you knew you'd changed someone's mind. You'd spoken to a Chief Risk Officer or a CFO and seen something click — where they realised climate isn't a nice-to-have, it's a strategy, it's a risk to the bottom line. Maybe that didn't result in a net zero strategy that year, but maybe it will in a few years' time.

So for me, knowing my values and using them as my metric of success — that I produced an excellent strategy and took someone on the journey in their language — that's become my measure. Which means I do feel like I have agency in my personal theory of change about how we get to net zero by 2050.

That's a great exercise for all of us: what are our metrics of success? What are our values? What can we control, and what can't we?

I spoke to someone recently who does climate campaigning and one of their KPIs was to close a coal mine. I don't think that's in their control — and you're going to always feel like a failure if the KPI is wrong. We have to re-look and re-imagine our KPIs.

Courtney (15:18)
This sense of enough — it's a constant theme that comes up when we're talking to people. How do I know that what I have done is enough? By working out what our values are and what our own metrics of success are — metrics that are completely unique to us, not tied to some external outcome we have no control over — it gives us this sense of enough. And that contributes to our sense of agency.

Dan Leverington (15:43)
What are some effective strategies for balancing the fear-based language of climate risks with people's internal emotional need for hope and agency?

Courtney (15:59)
Fear is a really difficult emotion to sit with. I definitely experienced that when I first realised the reality of the climate crisis — I was overcome with fear. We all have different responses: we can fight it, we can run, some of us freeze.

But one of the most important things we can do when we feel those feelings of fear is to not shy away from them. To actually spend time with them and acknowledge that we are feeling fear — and that is okay. That is normal, that is valid, that is not an inflated response. It is completely normal considering the scale and complexity of this issue and the real, personal threats it poses to all of us.

The best place to start when we experience a difficult emotion is to sit with it and let it know it's okay for it to be there.

In terms of balancing that with hope and agency — hope is a very difficult thing to hold in this space, especially when the budget just came out and there's nothing in there about climate. We're constantly facing things that can contribute to feeling hopeless. What's important is that we accept the reality of the situation. The first part of finding hope is knowing that we have experienced loss, and we will experience more loss. Once we've accepted that, we can start to reconnect with what the future we hope for looks like, and find agency by working out what our path looks like to contributing to that future.

Acceptance is a really core part of finding hope. The other thing about hope is that it creates opportunities and paths that we couldn't have imagined. Hope is imaginative. Without imagination, those possibilities don't exist. So whilst it's a hard thing to hold, it's an important tool for finding creative ways forward — and for finding what our unique contribution looks like to creating that future.

Loreto Gutierrez (18:16)
I love how you're framing this. It's a really beautiful approach — and probably quite a productive one too. I know that EcoMind has quite practical ways of working with people. Can you tell us a bit more about what those practical strategies look like?

Courtney (18:38)
Yes — we've just launched the EcoMind Certificate. You can think of it as mental health first aid for the climate crisis. We've designed this program with young climate leaders and mental health experts, and we've created it to specifically address the reality of living and taking action in a climate crisis.

It's essentially three 90-minute modules. Module one is all about learning to look after yourself — how you can manage stress, break the stress cycle, and come out of the survival mode we all find ourselves in. Module two is all around how we look after others. A lot of it focuses on sitting with difficult emotions and learning how to do that for yourself, so you can do it for others, and bring those tools to your workplace — creating communities centred on care, where we can show up for each other and do the work sustainably. Not just pretending everything's fine, but actually being there for each other for the long haul.

Module three is about looking after the planet — how you can take action in a way that's truly unique to you and sustains your activity over time. A core part of that module is creating your own personal theory of change. It starts by working out what the future you hope for looks like. Where are you going? What do you want to see? And then working out how you can contribute to that future in a way that feels really unique to you.

Sometimes what we see in the climate movement is a lot of personal individual burden — people feeling like they have to do it all. We use this beautiful analogy: if you look at a diverse ecosystem, each creature and each plant has its own unique role to play. A tree is not trying to be a bird, a bird is not trying to be a lizard. Everyone is just being who they are and contributing in their own unique way. This movement can operate the same way.

We do an activity where everyone writes down their unique strengths and puts them on a board. And you see this beautiful map that literally looks like an ecosystem — you can see how everybody's skills are contributing to creating change. It creates this sense of connectivity: you're not in this alone, we're all in this together. That can be a really powerful tool in preventing burnout and overwork.

Participants also get access to the EcoMind Hub, which has a whole range of activities they can use in their workplaces and personally — lots of reflective tools. It's designed to give people the skills to navigate everything that comes with this work, using core principles of connection, emotional regulation and sustainable action.

Dan Leverington (21:56)
It's fascinating — because doing that work means that as others begin to realise the scale of risk we're facing, it better positions us to help them have those conversations. Similar to a conversation about grief or loss that you'd have with a friend or family member. It sounds like these are the tools that will help those conversations.

Georgia (22:20)
Absolutely. And especially in this space — people love frameworks. We have frameworks and structures and systems for how we look after each other and how we talk about these things. We don't learn them at school, and they're actually exactly the kind of training we need for resilience in an uncertain future.

It's been really empowering to have a framework not only to check in with your own emotions, but to know how to safely hold space for someone else. We guide people on how to ask: what do you need from me? We all go straight into wanting to help, wanting to fix. But there's a framework — the three H's: do you need help, do you need a hug, or do you just need me to hear you? That is so empowering. One of our participants said, I used that on my grandma the other day — and it actually really worked.

These conversations aren't limited to this space. We need more people in this movement, and we need it to feel joyful, exciting and hopeful — or else people won't join, and people won't stay. We need as many people as possible seeing themselves as climate actors. Even on a plane the other day, I was talking to someone who was 27, working in defence, saying: I can't plan for the future. This world is crazy — and it's not just climate, it's AI, it's cost of living, it's wars overseas. And I felt like I could have that conversation. I could say: yeah, that's really valid, I hold those things too. And I could gently help them think about a future that looks different from now — but isn't bad. There'll be hard things, but there's also still a lot of joy and happiness.

So it's really important that we get better at having those hard conversations internally within our ecosystem, but also externally — having conversations that can get people in. I sound like a cult leader! But everyone is a climate worker. We are all impacted by climate. And emotions are the gateway to climate action in many ways.

Dan Leverington (24:50)
And because that is the case, do you see the EcoMind Certificate as something that could be brought into business?

Georgia (24:59)
Absolutely. What we've started to see is that workplaces are communities, and they've created their own rituals and cultures that are impacting the work and how people show up. It's actually an opportunity to do this work on the coalface. And so we do bring it into corporate teams — in-house sustainability teams, university sustainability teams, climate scientists, and many others who deal with this work every day.

Regardless of the setting, we're all dealing with the same thing: this uphill battle of funding, competing interests and stakeholder management. And it's been really beautiful to bring the certificate into corporate workplaces, where we don't traditionally talk about emotions — even though they are all there, all the time. Giving people frameworks to identify what they're feeling and to create cultures of care.

What Courtney and I have realised is that a culture of care in a workplace is not created without effort. You do have to put infrastructure in, and we haven't been taught how. How are you creating check-ins at the beginning of meetings? How are you auditing the culture? How are you creating channels or roles where people know who to go to? How are you creating rest time? How are you bringing joy?

We have a really fun question at the start of our certificate: what's the weather for you right now in your life — as a feeling? That's a great way to get people talking about how they're actually turning up that day. Giving workplaces simple tools they can implement to work more cohesively — when we're all on the same page, cognitively and emotionally, the work gets better and it's more sustainable.

It's been really exciting to see some of the things we've talked to workplaces about being implemented — little check-ins, little ways they're celebrating wins and showing gratitude, embedding that in the culture, making it part of the work.

Loreto Gutierrez (27:18)
That must be really gratifying. And Courtney, I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier around competing stress factors — we've got climate anxiety, but also AI anxiety, the disruption of the workplace, navigating the current geopolitical landscape. How do you think we can maintain focus on climate when we're trying to navigate all of these global stresses?

Courtney (27:42)
Such a good question. One of the most important things we forget in the climate space is that we are whole humans existing in a full society. We don't just work — we have families, we have friends, we have other things in our world that we care about and that put pressure on us. It's really easy to feel like you want to put absolutely everything into this work, but we are whole humans experiencing pressures from so many different angles.

Acknowledging that is really important. A big part of managing focus comes back to what Georgia was talking about earlier: what is your unique role in contributing? What are your metrics for success? How do you know that what you've done is enough, and how can you find peace with that? Because you are existing in this complex world — it's not just climate. How do you stay connected with your sense of purpose and your activity so that you can know what you're doing is enough, and still show up for all of the other things in your life?

Dan Leverington (28:59)
What would both of you like our listeners to take away from today's conversation?

Georgia (29:07)
For me, I've always been so focused on the what. What am I doing? Is it enough? I'd love listeners to take away: not what, but how. How am I doing this work? Because how you do the work — how you make others feel as you do the work — is going to have so many more ripple effects, culturally, not just laterally but down through generations.

The next generation is looking up to sustainability leaders. They're modelling behaviour, they're modelling ways of working. And there is this opportunity to show that we can achieve the same what with a different how — and maybe a better what. A more inclusive, more empathetic what.

At the moment, we could say the what isn't quite there yet. So we have to reimagine the how. Are you doing this work in a way that's sustainable? Are you embodying sustainability in how you do it?

Courtney (30:14)
For me, it would be: you are not alone in these feelings, in these complex emotions around the climate crisis. We ran a program with Syro, and it was the first time any of them had realised that the people around them were feeling things like despair and grief and sadness too.

There are people around you who are feeling the same way. And the more that we can share this with each other, the better equipped we'll be to move through it, focus on the how, and take action in a way that's really meaningful — because we are not alone, and we are connected.

Loreto Gutierrez (30:52)
I love that. Is there a call to action for our listeners?

Georgia (30:57)
It's probably just to look out for yourself and your teams. How are you doing this work? And do you need a moment to reflect? We have a certificate that gives you the framework to do that. We can come into your organisation in person, virtually, over several weeks — some people have done it as a lunch and learn or a training day. There are so many ways to start interrogating this, but you do have to give it time. It is a productive use of time.

We all get very obsessed with optimisation and productivity, and I've had to really see that this work does make the work more productive in the end. But it's also just important in and of itself — without the goal of productivity.

Loreto Gutierrez (31:39)
We'll make sure to link all of your contact details in the episode description so people can find you. Before we close out, we'd love to do a quick rapid fire.

Do you have one recommendation for our listeners? It could be a book, podcast, song, article, documentary — anything you'd like to share.

Georgia (32:02)
Mine would be Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh. He is the father of mindfulness — he brought mindfulness to the West, and he was also a freedom fighter in Vietnam. He beautifully marries Buddhist concepts of mindfulness with the fight to save the planet and bring justice to the world. I really recommend it.

Courtney (32:31)
I had about ten things pop into my mind, but I'm going to go with Where the Light Gets In by Ben Crowe. He released it at the beginning of this year. He's a mindset coach to Ash Barty and a whole bunch of athletes. It's this guidebook on how to be a feeling human in this challenging world.

Dan Leverington (32:50)
And who is someone that has inspired each of you that you think we should have on the podcast?

Georgia (32:56)
There are so many incredible people in this space. Someone I'm so inspired by is Eezu Tan — she's one of the founders of Climate Writers. She comes from a consulting background but has used her unique skills to create a monthly community where people meet up and send letters to MPs on climate. They've sent thousands of letters, and every time someone sends one, they ring a gong and everyone celebrates. It's so joyful. It's in Sydney and Melbourne, and I think they're starting one in Queensland. A real burst of joy.

Courtney (33:48)
Mine is definitely in a similar vein — I'd say Lerm from Project Planet. They've done Build a Ballot, which is amazing. As someone who found voting really difficult to understand — as a lot of Aussies do — they've just made it so simple and accessible. You're actually able to engage in this really meaningful tool to shape our Australian government. I just think she's awesome.

Loreto Gutierrez (34:14)
Do you have any positive climate news to share with us today?

Georgia (34:18)
The campaign and movement around a tax on gas exports has been so inspiring. We haven't necessarily got to the outcome yet, but the way they've brought everyone on the journey — finding language that isn't just climate language, it's justice, it's equity, it's feeling like something's wrong and we're not getting a fair go — it's deeply Australian. You can feel that it's changing something in how our culture is thinking about our economy and about what it means to create a lucky Australia for generations to come. That's my positive climate news that's unfolding right now.

Courtney (35:07)
Mine — as an ocean lover — is the high seas treaty. They've announced the world's first Ocean COP in January next year, which is just amazing. And there's now a global commitment to protecting 30% of the world's oceans before 2030. That makes me feel really hopeful.

Dan Leverington (35:26)
Absolutely. We want to give each of you your own Green Fix magic wand — how would you use it to change the world?

Courtney (35:35)
I would wave my Green Fix wand and reshape our entire culture to be one based on renewal — renewal of energy, resources, people, nature. Just this entire refocus where renewal is at the centre.

Georgia (35:56)
My magic wand aligns with renewal, but I would really love to see us investing in resilience — in all senses of the word. We have been so obsessed with mitigation, and we have to continue that, but it might not be enough. We need adaptation. But we also need resilience, because the world will look different, and how do we be resilient in that world? Resilience in ourselves, in communities, in our economy. How are we teaching our young people to be resilient and agile?

You've got IQ and EQ, but actually the thing that's going to help us weather the next few decades — where the only certainty we have is uncertainty and change — is AQ: agility quotient. Your ability to be resilient and adapt. By investing in resilience, we can all learn to adapt together, whatever the future holds.

Dan Leverington (36:53)
I'm a big fan of AQ, and it will only become more important over the next few years. Courtney and Georgia, thank you so much for joining us today. Listening to you both has been such a joy — it just shows how important it is to put people at the centre of the conversation. The work that you're doing with EcoMind is so inspiring and is going to have such huge ripple effects. Thank you for joining us.

Courtney (37:25)
Thank you so much. Beautiful questions — just lovely chatting with you both.

Loreto Gutierrez (37:27)
Thank you. What a great chat.

Loreto Gutierrez (37:33)
This was The Green Fix with your hosts Loreto Gutierrez and Dan Leverington. You can get your Green Fix every two weeks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Pocket Casts.