Reinventing Yourself After Burnout: What Susie St. Angelo Learned From Starting Over

About This Blog

Susie St. Angelo built her entire career as a private banker without ever planning to. She fell into banking after college, worked her way up, and spent years serving high net worth clients inside a bank known for treating both its employees and its clients well. She was good at it. She was also, by her own description, a great people pleaser, and that combination kept her running long after her body started sending warning signs.

In this episode of Fountain of Vitality, host LaMont Leavitt sits down with Susie St. Angelo, host of the SOS for Your Life podcast, to talk about what happens when burnout hits every part of a person's life at once, and what it takes to rebuild from there.

 A Career, A Health, A Marriage   

Susie says she realized she was burning out a full year before she actually left her banking career. She made a plan to leave without knowing what came next, and only later understood that the burnout was not limited to her job. Her career, her health, and her marriage were all breaking down at the same time. She calls it her trifecta.

The moment that stands out most is a conversation with her doctor. Susie told her doctor she had already left her career, expecting that to be the fix. Her doctor corrected her. The real problem, her doctor said, was her marriage.

 The Sentence That Changed Her Course   

Her doctor told her plainly that she could not get well in the environment that made her sick. That sentence became the turning point. Susie began taking a hard look at her marriage for the first time, and around the same period she switched to functional medicine for her physical health.

Functional medicine looks for root causes instead of treating symptoms, and Susie says that deeper approach played a major role in saving her health. That root cause philosophy eventually became central to how she works with her own clients.

 Becoming A Health Coach   

Once she understood how much her own healing had required looking beneath the surface, Susie became a health coach, mostly working with women navigating major life changes similar to her own. Two years ago she took that experience further and launched a podcast, SOS for Your Life, Emergency Wisdom for Everyday Life.

The show is built around what Susie calls the pie of life, roughly ten or more categories including career, finances, spirituality, joy, fitness, personal relationships, and hobbies. Her premise is simple. A person cannot be happy by focusing on only one slice.

 Three Bank Robberies, One Pivot   

Susie's banking career was not the plan she set out to make. She says she had the right skill set and the motivation, and the more she was paid, the harder she worked, eventually becoming what she calls a workaholic. She spent ten years in retail banking management, including surviving three bank robberies, before moving into private banking with high net worth clients.

That move changed the culture around her, and she says her body noticed the change before her mind caught up. Looking back, she describes her health as trying to tell her something long before she was ready to listen.

 Turning Sixty, Starting Her 61st   

One of Susie's own podcast guests inspired what came next. That guest had celebrated turning 70 by completing 70 new things in a single year. Susie asked to borrow the idea, and when she turned 60, she built her own version, a running list of new experiences she now calls her 61st.

She has been blogging the project publicly, and she says the process has taught her as much about herself as any single guest interview has.

 When Reinvention Does Not Work   

Not every item on Susie's list went as planned, and she says that is exactly the point. One of her 61st experiences was inviting the guest who inspired the whole project back onto her podcast to record live on Facebook. The livestream failed. Susie posted about the failure anyway, on purpose, because she wanted her audience to see that things not working out is part of the process, not a reason to stop.

She says failure has taught her more about herself than success ever did, and that chasing perfection, especially the kind performed on social media, keeps people from actually trying anything new.

 Relighting The Pilot Light   

This past summer, one of Susie's 61st experiences took her to Modern Elder Academy, a program for midlife adults questioning where they are in life. She drove to New Mexico alone, attended a workshop called Who Am I Now, and spent time with more than a dozen other participants working through the same questions.

The workshop centered on identifying personal values, what genuinely motivates a person, and what old interests are worth picking back up. Susie describes the experience in one phrase. It relit her pilot light.

 Advice For Anyone Starting Over   

Susie's favorite piece of advice came from a family therapist guest on her own show. Ask for what you want, not for what you do not want. Susie says most people are fluent in stating what they do not want and rarely practice stating what they actually need, in relationships that are romantic, professional, or built on friendship.

She also offers guidance for anyone carrying unresolved trauma or sitting inside a toxic relationship. Decompression after a difficult experience looks different for everyone. For some it means therapy, for others breath work or physical movement, but she is clear that ignoring trauma only buries it. Eventually the body reveals what a person has been avoiding.

 What Comes Next   

Susie does not have a ten year plan, and she says that is fine. What she does have is a growth mentality and a refusal to spend her later decades sitting still. She is considering a new version of her podcast built for a 60 plus audience, another business, or simply more chapters she has not written yet.

Her closing thought captures the whole conversation. Sixty is not old, people are living longer, and the only real mistake is deciding your story is finished before it actually is.

 Key Takeaways   

• Burnout rarely arrives in only one area of life. Susie's career, health, and marriage broke down together.

• A single honest sentence from a doctor can be the turning point that starts real change.

• Functional medicine looks for root causes, not just symptoms, and that mindset can apply well beyond physical health.

• Happiness rarely comes from one area of life alone. Susie describes it as a pie with many slices.

• Reinvention does not require a perfect outcome. A failed Facebook livestream became one of Susie's proudest lessons.

• Failure teaches more than constant success, especially when it is shared openly instead of hidden.

• Ask for what you want instead of only naming what you do not want.

• The body keeps score. Unresolved trauma and toxic relationships eventually surface as physical symptoms.

• Reinvention has no age limit. Susie's 61st list proves a milestone birthday can be a launchpad, not an ending.

Listen to the full conversation with Susie St. Angelo on Fountain of Vitality, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Guest Bio  

Susie St. Angelo is a health coach and the host of the SOS for Your Life podcast. After a long career in private banking that ended in what she calls a trifecta of burnout in her career, her health, and her marriage, Susie shifted into functional medicine and built a coaching practice helping women through life transitions. She lives by a simple philosophy: growth keeps going, and reinvention has no age limit, sixty included.

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