This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Audrey Wang, a 42-year-old business and executive coach in LA. Business Insider has verified Wang’s employment history with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I burned out so severely in my last job that I broke out in hives that lasted six years. The baseline was all over my body, from head to toe. On my face, it started as a small hive on both cheeks and gradually grew to the point where my entire face was swollen.
They would peak for one whole week. Then it would take three weeks to return to normal and start up again in the fourth week. The hives on the rest of my body moved around aggressively.
I worked in high-end estate management, overseeing multiple luxury properties, managing household staff, and handling a wide range of requests.
I had to quit, and now I’m a business and executive coach. Once I got my stress levels under control, my hives went away.
My first job in 2010 was incredible
I managed a 20,000-square-foot estate in Santa Monica and continued to take on additional clients. Everything grew through word of mouth. It’s a high-turnover space, and private professionals are always in demand, especially those who can step in quickly and handle high-pressure environments with discretion.
As I moved on to larger and wealthier clients, the demands got more extreme. One client was a die-hard U2 fan and wanted to charter a helicopter from Santa Monica to the Inglewood stadium. He insisted I find a way for his helicopter to fly directly over LAX, which is a no-fly zone. It was absurd and obviously impossible.
I worked for two families, including one from the UAE
I would spend two to three months a year living in the UAE to work for them. They were essentially government officials and highly discerning, and their escalating requests were so constant that there was barely time to sleep or eat.
The remainder of my year was spent working full-time with another family, based mainly in LA, from about 2013 to 2016. In 2015, the work environment became very difficult to manage. I was also getting married soon, and I was so stressed that the hives started.
That’s when I hit my breaking point
My face was so swollen and disfigured that I couldn’t be seen in public. I was in tears daily. Thankfully, I’d saved enough to take a year or two off to recover.
In 2016, I moved back to Playa Vista, but my hair started falling out. Doctors told me I probably had severe adrenal fatigue or even possibly cancer. It forced me to ask myself: Do I really want to keep doing this for the rest of my life?
The money was amazing, but was I willing to die for an early retirement?
During that break, I leaned into things I actually loved, like organizing
I discovered Marie Kondo’s KonMari method. I wondered if my health issues were caused by allergies, so I started giving away everything and stopped buying anything new. It felt meditative. I helped friends declutter, and sometimes they paid me for my help.
The hives continued at first. Doctors put me on steroids because they believed it was stress-induced, but nothing helped. I didn’t work for three years because my skin was so unpredictable. One month it’d clear up, and the next I’d have a lupus-like rash.
I was eventually diagnosed with chronic idiopathic urticaria and angioedema. Sometimes when I bit into something, my lips or eyes would swell, so I carried an EpiPen everywhere.
I concluded that the root cause must be internal
I’d tried everything in Western and Eastern medicine, so I enrolled with the Nutritional Therapy Association. Their clinical partners tested my deficiencies and confirmed I had adrenal fatigue and sky-high cortisol.
They gave me hormone-balancing supplements. I thought, Really? Vitamins? But I had no other choice, so I stuck with it.
A few weeks later, my hives improved. Three months in, they were completely gone. My blood pressure dropped. I felt like a different person.
I knew I could never go back to estate management
Instead, I grew my home-organizing work into a full-time business. Word spread, and I found myself back in some of the same mansions organizing people’s lives, again. That evolved into motivational coaching and eventually high-performance coaching.
I teach that less is more. My work at Invitation to Succeed bridges the KonMari method with high-performance habits. But high performance isn’t what people think it is. It’s not about hustling so hard you sacrifice your health and relationships. It’s about doing what truly matters and brings you a life worth living.
If you think being productive means working nonstop, you’ve got it twisted
Real high performance is intentional. It means analyzing what really matters — your health, relationships, and joy — and aligning your life around them.
If I could do things differently, I would’ve quit the minute a client disrespected me. I’d tell my former self: Your integrity is your compass. When you start betraying it to keep the peace, you’ve already lost yourself.
Self-respect is the quiet decision to choose yourself, even when it means sacrificing comfort or approval. The moment I got hives, my body was speaking the truth my mind was trying to rationalize. That was my wake-up call, a physical boundary screaming, “Enough.”
Today, I protect my peace like a non-negotiable. Integrity, self-worth, and self-respect are the foundations of every decision I make now.
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