Introduction
Dr Kat Page is an organisational psychologist and the author of Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out. She has spent two decades asking one question (what makes work good for us?) across mining sites, hospital wards, universities and boardrooms.
In this conversation, Pod and Kat talk about burnout as a systems problem rather than a personal failing, why burnout in midlife men so often looks like cynicism, what real recovery takes and what it means to give yourself permission to be human in a culture built around coping.
Why this conversation matters
Kat grew up in country Victoria with two parents who’d both served as police officers. Her dad left the force but never really left the identity. He told the same policing yarns five or six times over, kept his police radio on and spent most of her childhood up in the shed. He’d talk about the job all day. He wouldn’t talk about himself.
That picture sits underneath a lot of what she now studies. When your identity gets fused with your work, a redundancy or a restructure can take everything with it. Kat knows this from the inside too. Years into a secure corporate role she’d talked herself into, she was made redundant, and the shock showed her how far she’d drifted from her own purpose. She says she wouldn’t have left otherwise.
Most men who listen to DLTOMI have spent 20 or 30 years building careers that ask a great deal of them. This episode asks what that work has been giving back, and what to do when the answer is less than it used to be.
What we discuss
- Why burnout in men tends to present as cynicism and detachment rather than emotional exhaustion, and why that makes it so easy to miss
- Job, career or calling: Amy Wrzesniewski’s research, and how small choices add up to a life you don’t recognise
- The “third space” (a concept from Dr Adam Fraser) and how Kat used it while her infant son was in intensive care at the Royal Children’s Hospital
- The effort-recovery model, why the couch leaves you just as flat the next day and what her colour-coded kitchen cupboards have to do with it
- The difference between languishing and flourishing, and why chasing pleasure rarely delivers the fulfilment people are after
- Tracking your sparks: a practical way to build purpose, including the story of a mining superintendent who found his in a single conversation
Why midlife men should listen
Guest info
Kat Page
Dr Kat Page is an organisational psychologist, author and Leadership Partner at ByMany, where she advises leaders across healthcare, mining, finance, retail and government. She holds an Adjunct Professor appointment at Swinburne University and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Melbourne, including work with police officers, examining work and mental health through a public health lens. Research she worked on in 2014 went on to inform global guidance from the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization.
For nearly two decades she has worked with leaders from mining sites in the Andes to universities in Saudi Arabia, hospital wards in Melbourne and boardrooms in Sydney.
Her book, Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out (Wiley, 2026), argues that work, when it’s designed and led well, can be one of the most powerful forces for good in people’s lives. It has been endorsed by Harvard Business School’s Amy C Edmondson.
Kat is based in Melbourne with her husband Luke and their two children.
