Meet Cara Chace
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We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cara Chace. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cara below.

Cara, so great to have you with us today. There are so many topics we want to ask you about, but perhaps the one we can start with is burnout. How have you overcome or avoided burnout?

I didn’t avoid burnout. I walked straight into it, ignored every signal my body sent me, and kept going until I couldn’t anymore — and then I relaunched my business, and found myself in burnout again.

I spent nearly a decade as a Special Agent before transitioning into digital marketing. I managed social media for Megadeth for a couple of years, and got a front-row education in what it looks like when content and audience scale beyond anything sustainable, and then built a digital marketing agency from scratch that I ran for ten years. I was good at it, but I was also slowly running myself into the ground, and I was too busy being productive to notice.

Health issues eventually forced me to pause my business for 2 years — and when I came out the other side, I relaunched as a time management and burnout coach. I thought I’d done the work. I thought I understood the problem. And then one holiday season, my body showed me I was still carrying more than I realized.

I’d taken some time off and felt genuinely fine — quiet in a way I hadn’t been in years. Then the Friday before returning to work, my brain shifted into planning mode. I started mentally running through my content strategy, my social media schedule, the whole machine of it. And my body immediately started reacting to everything I ate. It hit me like a lightning bolt: the reactions weren’t random. They were my nervous system responding to the thought of going back online for hours a day.

I’d spent years teaching other people about burnout. And here was my own nervous system sending up flares I’d been too “busy” to see.

What I understand now is that burnout isn’t a problem you solve once. It’s information your body keeps sending until you actually listen. The question is whether you’re willing to hear it before it takes drastic measures to get your attention. I needed a few rounds before I got there. That whole journey — the agency years, the forced stop, the relaunch, and that holiday realization — is what became Chaos Detox, and it’s why I’m writing a book about it now.

Person holding a smartphone with an incoming call screen displaying 'CHAOS'.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

Everything I do comes back to one idea: that you are allowed to take your life and your business back from the noise, from the overwhelm, from the gurus, from the invisible rules that keep you performing instead of living.

My background is a little unusual for this space. I was a Special Agent, then spent years in the trenches of digital marketing — including managing social media for Megadeth — before building a digital marketing agency I ran for ten years. That path gave me a very specific lens on how social media actually works, what it costs the people trying to perform for an algorithm, and why the standard advice of “just show up consistently” is so much more complicated than it sounds when you’re a woman entrepreneur trying to run a business without burning your nervous system as fuel.

The centerpiece of what I offer right now is Chaos Detox, a course built around a skill I believe every woman entrepreneur needs for the rest of her career. It’s not a template or a content calendar. It’s a flexible weekly planning system you build around your actual life — clearing out the mental, digital, and external clutter, creating real white space in your calendar, and building enough breathing room in your brain that you can think clearly again. The goal is boundaries, autonomy, and a way of working that can evolve as your life does. I’m teaching people how to do this for themselves, permanently, not handing them a system that stops working the moment life gets complicated.

The thing I find most exciting about this work is that it’s genuinely countercultural. In an industry that profits from convincing you that you’re always one more strategy away from getting it right, giving women permission to do less — and showing them that less is often the smarter move — feels important. I get messages from women who say they can finally breathe. That never gets old.

The big thing on the horizon is my book, The Social Media Burnout Cure. It lives in the same world as Chaos Detox — creating space, reclaiming your power, refusing to let an algorithm run your life — but it goes deep on social media specifically. Part memoir, part practical framework, it’s the story of how a former Special Agent and social media manager for Megadeth finally stopped performing for an algorithm, and the tools I built for the women who are ready to do the same.

Young woman with glasses and long hair sitting indoors, surrounded by framed pictures and string lights.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Looking back, three things made the difference — and none of them were on any business strategy course or mastermind I ever bought.

1. Learning to trust my own gut over everyone else’s rules
I spent a long time doing what I was told — in my career, in my business, in how I marketed myself online. I was good at following the rules. The problem is that the rules are written by people who aren’t living your life, running your business, or carrying what you carry. The moment I started treating my own instincts as data worth listening to instead of noise to override, everything shifted. Not overnight, and not without resistance, but it shifted.

If you’re deep in the hustle and something keeps nagging at you — a quiet sense that this isn’t sustainable, that the way you’re doing it isn’t actually working for you even when the metrics say it is — that’s not weakness. That’s information. The advice I’d give is to start small: pick one thing everyone says you have to do, and ask yourself honestly whether it’s actually serving you or whether you’ve just never questioned it. That’s where the thread starts.

2. The willingness to question what everyone accepts as non-negotiable
My background as a Special Agent trained me to look at situations analytically, to separate what’s actually true from what people assume is true. That skill turned out to be one of the most valuable things I brought into entrepreneurship. So much of what we’re told about running a business — especially about marketing, especially about social media — is accepted wisdom that nobody’s actually tested against their own reality.

The advice here is permission-based: you are allowed to be skeptical. When someone tells you that you have to post every day, be on every platform, and make yourself constantly visible or your business will die — you’re allowed to ask who that actually works for, and whether that person’s life looks anything like yours. Questioning the rules isn’t the same as ignoring good advice. It’s how you figure out which advice is actually good.

3. Understanding your nervous system as a business asset, not an obstacle
This one took me the longest, and I think it’s the one most women in the hustle are missing entirely. We’re taught to push through, to be disciplined, to treat exhaustion as something to manage rather than something to listen to. What I know now is that your nervous system is the most honest feedback mechanism you have. When your body starts protesting — the anxiety, the dread, the physical reactions you can’t explain — it’s not failing you. It’s telling you something your brain is still working up the courage to admit.

If you’re at the point where you’re starting to feel it in your body, stop waiting for a more convenient time to take it seriously. The cost of overriding those signals compounds. Learning to read what your nervous system is telling you, and to build your work around what it can actually sustain, is not a luxury or a soft skill. It is the skill that determines whether you’re still standing in ten years.

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One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

Absolutely, and it’s actually one of my primary focuses right now as I move toward the launch of The Social Media Burnout Cure.

I’m looking to connect with podcast hosts, event organizers, and communities whose audiences include women entrepreneurs who are somewhere on the spectrum between quietly exhausted and actively questioning whether the way they’ve been told to run their business is actually working for them. If your listeners or attendees are high-capacity women who are performing for an algorithm, running on fumes, and starting to wonder if there’s another way — that’s exactly who I want to be talking to.

The topics I love speaking and guesting on include social media burnout, marketing without losing your mind, how your nervous system is trying to tell you something you keep overriding, and what it actually looks like to build a business that doesn’t require you to be constantly visible and always on. I bring a perspective that’s a little different — former Special Agent, ten years running a digital marketing agency, managed social media for Megadeth — and I’ve found that combination tends to make for conversations people remember.

If any of that resonates, I’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach me is emailing [email protected].

Contact Info:

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Image Credits

Dani Rexine
Morgan Phipps

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