Natalie Badawy brings big energy to everything she does — from leading the software engineering team at Circuit Recruitment to co-founding What The Heck Is Tech(?)! and co-organising Melbourne Talent Meetup. Known for her warmth, drive, and unapologetic curiosity, she’s built a career that thrives on people, connection, and momentum.
In our chat, Natalie shares how she keeps her energy sustainable in a world that never slows down. She talks about why the right kind of busy can be a form of self-care, how she’s learned to curate her commitments, and the small rituals that help her recharge without losing her spark.
You describe yourself as a high-energy extrovert who actually prevents burnout by staying busy and social. What does balance look like for you, and how do you keep that energy sustainable?
Correct! When I don’t have any side projects or enough social stimulation, that’s when my mind & mental health starts to struggle. Covid was a real lesson in this for me. At first, I was enjoying the break, but after a few days of the same routine without seeing anyone and minimal social interactions outside of work, I was starting to really struggle with anxiety, overthinking and extreme boredom and languishing.
I find that when I’m not stimulated in that way, I begin to overthink and eventually, I find myself stuck in a boredom loop that feeds a dopamine chasing cycle. I do more doom scrolling, and I engage in more high dopamine and low impact activities for quick fixes.
There are times where my job has presented challenges, my family life is feeling rocky, or my worth hasn’t been at its best. When I feel that way about those aspects of my life, I’ve realised that it’s the extroverted activities that I’m engaging with that pull me out of that abyss and give me the energy and motivation to make it through with minimal mental impact. For example, when I’m having a really challenging week at work as a recruiter with multiple placements falling through and clients or candidates being difficult to manage, the community I’m building as a co-organiser of the Melbourne talent meetup makes me feel so happy and energised that it can help me make it through those weeks much easier.
I am however not immune to burnout, and when your solution to avoiding burnout mentally is to fill your life up with social and extracurricular activities/projects, you do run the risk of overcommitting and not leaving enough time for physical rest and mental reprieve from some of the projects you’re working on as they begin to feel less like fun solutions and more like obligatory chores.
Balance for me is less about having time alone to rest and relax….. It’s about getting the right type of busy and bustle in my daily life/week/month. It’s about feeling like I’m working towards something every day through ongoing projects that feel like play (like scrapbooking and hosting events/gatherings or finishing a book series), involvement in social circles and communities professionally and personally, and I get energy doses from surrounding myself with amazing human beings who either inspire me or fill my cup. This looks like a habit of coupling the stuff that I need to get done with the more enjoyable tasks, like walking and listening to podcasts or cleaning whilst listening to audiobooks.
But this also means that I ensure that most of (if not all of) my social and extracurricular activities are ones that bring me joy and or help me get to where I need to be. For example, when it comes to some of my volunteering work, I ensure that I am participating in events that can get me networking in the right circles so that I can organically create my own luck and opportunities around me.
Many people recharge by switching off, but that doesn’t always work for extroverts. How do you recognise when you’re genuinely energised versus when you’re running on empty?
Despite being fundamentally different to most given how extroverted I am, I think that the triggers that allow me to realise I’m running on empty tend to look much the same as anyone else’s. I feel physically and mentally exhausted, I’m irritable and grumpy, I feel the need to reach for high dopamine activities rather than the more challenging tasks with better long-term impacts, I get headaches and feel the fatigue in my brain.
The difference for me is that this feeling settles in so rarely that it can be quite challenging to pick up on it before it becomes too late. My social and energy battery is so large that when it does run out, it’s almost always a surprise to me, given how little it actually occurs. It’s almost like it happens so rarely that I’m out of practice and struggle to recognise the signs unless it hits me square in the face and it can really sneak up on me sometimes.
Before I began seeing a really good therapist, I found that my burnout would come out in the form of something catastrophic that the universe would put in my path. For example, last year whilst I was pushing myself really hard before a four week European holiday, I had two falls and sprained my ankle quite badly. And the year before that, in the leadup to my wedding which I was working night and day to organise, I had a nodule in my throat bleed through and formed a large clot. Both these events made me stop and take a break.
Some people might think those things were a coincidence, but with my belief system (mainly around the fact that nothing is a coincidence, and everything happens for a reason), I saw those as signs that I have to stop and take stock of where I am at and put on the brakes for my health. Now the work I do in therapy and journaling really helps me look inwards and check in with myself on a more regular basis. This allows me to make tweaks to my life & activities here and there and make different choices which help me avoid ever approaching burnout.
For me the journey is all about learning how to put the brakes on before the universe intervenes with its own plans to get me to slow down.
You’ve said that saying yes to everything helped you early on, but now curation matters more. How did you learn to start choosing where your time and energy go?
I’ve recently been looking at what the next step in my career may look like, and this revelation came from the advice of an amazing mentor of mine. During a session we were having together, she was hinting towards the fact that I am still engaging in hobbies, activities, and extracurricular activities that don’t necessarily align with my goals and desires anymore. In some cases I was holding onto those things because they felt familiar, some because I had made friends I didn’t want to let down, and some because they represented my comfort zone. But I have new goals in my sight and my energy needs to be getting put towards the endeavours that will help me get there.
I used to say yes to everything because I didn’t know what I wanted to achieve, so saying yes allowed me to expose myself to many different people, activities and scenarios, and that helped me get a feel for where I wanted to go through an array of different experiences, which is so incredibly valuable for where I was at. However, that has taught me what I do and don’t like, what I do and don’t want. Now that I have some clearer goals and interests that I’m pursuing, it’s important that I curate.
Because despite being an extremely high energy extrovert, I, like every other human on this planet, do still have limits (albeit those limits are much higher capacity than most others), and I need to learn how to recognise when things are no longer servicing me so that I can move on and save that energy for something new and interesting that can help propel me forward into one of the paths that I’m super keen to pursue.
I learnt a really great concept whilst completing The Community Collective course with Paz Pisarski, and she called it a “decision making framework”. This is basically a list of questions I have in my mind to figure out if a task, activity or commitment is going to be aligned with myself and my goals. Everyone’s decision making framework looks different according to their ethos, but my personal decision making framework asks me questions like “Will this activity spark joy?”, “Does it align with my values?”, ”Will it help me achieve my goals?”. I make my way through the framework systematically and if the answers to the questions are resounding “yes’s” then I know it’s a commitment that’s worth my time, but if the questions are throwing up some “no’s” then I know I need to really consider whether or not I take on that kind of commitment.
Between recruitment, meetups, podcasts, and events, you’re constantly around people. What small rituals or habits help you reset after long days of high interaction?
Pre-emptively, if I know I’m about to have a really high interaction day where I might be engaging in an activity or activities that will feel challenging or scary to me (which I try to do as regularly as possible to keep on growing), I will practise putting on my “armour” in the morning. It’s a practice/technique my mother shared with me once. I put on armour and fighting gear first thing before I leave the house to build a sense of confidence going into the day. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a fan of wearing fun eyeliner, so that is my “armour”. I used to say “the bigger my eyeliner, the more confident I want to feel today”. I’ll do more intricate and fun and impressive designs on the days where I’m meeting clients. It feels like a suit of armour or boxing gloves so to speak, so that I can go out and fight for the type of outcomes I want on the day. If I get a moment in the mirror that day, I will be reminded of the armour I have on.
When I’m feeling overwhelmed, writing in a small journal also really helps. It’s just a stream of consciousness writing but it can make all the difference when I’m trying to untangle my thoughts and I don’t have anyone to talk to. I try to keep the ramblings positive and all gratitude centric as this really helps me recalibrate and think through things in more of a positive lens.
As for my end of day ritual, I’m an evening showerer, and my showers are super sacred to me. Whenever I’m unwell or upset, a shower feels like a little reset for me. I come out clean and in a better mood. I feel like the woes of the day have been washed away a little bit. If I’m feeling especially drained from a day, I’ll just take an extra minute or two in the shower to let the water run over me and imagine the challenges of the day going down the drain. And if I’m particularly anxious, I’ll run the water cold to shock myself out of my head and back into my body!
As someone deeply embedded in Melbourne’s tech and talent community, how do you keep your social life, professional network, and personal wellbeing in sync?
I am a hyper organised type A personality, so this just comes super naturally to me. Over time I’ve organically just come up with ways to ensure that I’m on top of it all.
Some weeks I only have one evening at home doing nothing. The rest of my evenings after work are filled with a mixture of social and professional events and networking. And I really wouldn’t have it any other way. I love it like that. However, every few weeks I do like to ensure that I have a week of minimal or no after work activities so that my physical body has a chance to play catch up!
But at the same time, my extracurricular activities can’t be all work or all social. I like to balance both out. My calendar is like a warzone, but I always ensure I’m cross referencing whether I’m free on both my social and work calendar, and if one will affect the other, I always ensure the events are put into both calendars.
Socially, I can never be the kind of person who sees the same person once a week. I have to book everything a few weeks in advance most of the time. So, to keep up my relationships in between catchups, I just act on impulse, and when that person crosses my mind I send them a message letting them know, or a voice note depending on the relationship I have with the individual.
In order to prioritise things like sleep and exercise, I have a social media blocker on my phone for after 11pm to prevent doom scrolling until early hours of the morning, and I have also started to wake up a little earlier in the morning to get some of that done, whether it’s a treadmill walk, Pilates or some pre work life admin.
For people who thrive on being busy but still want to avoid burnout, what advice would you give about setting limits without losing momentum?
Know yourself. Know yourself better and better every day. This might happen organically as you go see a therapist, it might become more apparent as you begin to journal, it might come from your interactions with others and the types of discussions you have with them. But know yourself, or at the very least keep trying to get to know yourself as best you can every single day. If you’re extroverted, burnout will come up in ways you don’t expect. It won’t look the same as it does in other people because of our high threshold and tolerance and energy levels, so the only way to recognise it in yourself is to truly understand yourself.
It’s great that your limits sit higher than others might because that’s a superpower for sure, but no matter how invincible you might feel, and how much you might feel differently about this, your energy is not an unlimited resource. It will run out eventually. The good news is that given your resilience, you probably aren’t affected by external factors the same way other people are. The bad news is that your pain and burnout is likely self inflicted for that exact reason. So push the boundaries in line with your super ability to push, but be conscious when you do hit those limits. Take stock regularly and only push for the things that make you feel great and energised, and don’t be afraid to set boundaries around the stuff that doesn’t feel good. It might not even be stuff that makes you feel bad, but even the stuff you feel neutrally about might chip away at your energy faster than the stuff that truly makes you feel good! Look for net positive things, not neutral or net negative stuff to put your energy into.
You have a superpower being so resilient, but with great power comes great responsibility, and this responsibility is to yourself.
