The creator of Beyond Burnout
Ben Carey Donaldson
IFS therapist and coach, meditation guide and group facilitator. Based in the Fontainebleau–Paris region of France, and working online with people around the world.
The story
Two sides, working together.
Ben has always stood with a foot in two worlds. One is analytical: systems, structures, and the question of what actually works and how you would know. The other belongs to the countercultural seeker: long silent retreats, festival fields at first light, the forest at dawn, and a lasting suspicion that the standard life script leaves out much of what matters. Beyond Burnout is where the two work together.
A life between countries
Born in Australia and raised in Melbourne, Ben has lived in four countries and travelled in more than thirty. He taught English in Turkey and France, and online to students in China, before settling in France in 2022. Today he lives on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, an hour from Paris, and most days start with a long walk among the trees. Life between countries isn't a niche he studied. It's the life he has lived: the visas, the second language, the friendships that move away, the home that keeps changing shape.
Systems and people
Before the practice, Ben spent years building things that help people grow. As Head of Coaching at an Australian online-education company, he led eight team leaders and about seventy coaches across three time zones, and rebuilt how they were hired, trained and developed. He has written for technology companies and built a sales and marketing function from scratch. He brings the same instinct to Beyond Burnout: a clear structure, honest measures, and nothing that doesn't earn its place.
The inner work
Alongside the career ran a long apprenticeship in the inner life: more than a thousand hours of silent meditation retreat, including serving as student manager on a ten-day Vipassana course and supporting participants through its hardest moments. He has worked welfare and crisis response at festivals, supported refugees in Paris, and helped lead the volunteer community behind a 3,000-person event in Spain, where he watched, again and again, how individuals and the systems around them shape each other.
Why IFS, and why Beyond Burnout
Internal Family Systems gave Ben a precise language for something he had long noticed: capable people held back not by a lack of discipline, but by parts of themselves doing jobs they took on long ago. Since 2025 he has run an independent IFS practice, working with several dozen clients in English and French.
Beyond Burnout grew out of that work, and out of a simple observation. Most people don't need another insight, or another routine, on its own. They need the two to meet: the inner work and the outer changes supporting each other, with a steady presence alongside them while it happens. The name Self & System comes from the same place: harmony within the self, of the self within the system, and between the self and the system.
How Ben works
Precise about the problem, generous about the possibility.
Non-pathologising
No diagnoses and no labels, and plain language instead of jargon. The patterns describe situations, never people.
Structured, and adaptive
The programme has a clear shape, and the order follows you. If you're ready for the next step early, you take it early.
Honest about limits
When clinical care is what's needed, Ben says so and helps you find it. This work runs alongside that care, never instead of it.
The thinking behind it. Beyond Burnout draws on Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz), research on burnout such as the Job Demands–Resources and Effort–Reward Imbalance models, habit and behaviour-change research, and long contemplative practice. It is a coaching programme, not clinical treatment.
In clients' words
From Ben's IFS practice.
“The first time I've felt truly and actively supported in therapy… Each session gives me concrete perspectives for feeling better, rather than simply a space to unload my difficulties.”
“His approach made it easy to explore what was happening beneath the surface and helped me see things from a new perspective. I now have practical tools and real insight I can use in everyday life.”
“The most effective therapy I've tried. Ben's clear, insightful guidance was outstanding.”
Next step
Talk it through first. Twenty minutes, free.
A conversation about what's going on, and whether Beyond Burnout, a single module or something else would suit you better.