Episode Summary

What happens when the person who’s been protecting everyone else forgets to protect herself? For Isabelle Tremblay, the answer was burnout so complete she couldn’t draft a simple email. In this episode of Humor in the C Suite, Kate Davis sits down with Isabelle to trace the arc from 24 years of high-pressure global brand leadership to a full reinvention — and the role humor, empathy, and heart played in every part of that journey. This is a conversation about what it really costs to lead inside hustle culture, and what becomes possible when you decide to lead differently.

About Isabelle Tremblay

Isabelle Tremblay spent 24 years building global eyewear brands at EssilorLuxottica and Transitions Optical, managing teams across multiple countries and overseeing budgets across three continents. When burnout brought her career to a halt, she didn’t go back. Instead, at 47, she rebuilt entirely — writing the Amazon bestselling book Love Lead Succeed, launching her coaching practice, founding Eyenovating, starting her own podcast, and stepping into public speaking. She now works with leaders across North America on resilience, reinvention, and purpose-driven leadership.

Key Topics Covered

Isabelle and Kate explore how humor was a cornerstone of Isabelle’s leadership style long before burnout entered the picture — including the Two Truths and a Lie meeting exercise that consistently turned into genuine laughter and connection. They dig into how hustle culture systematically squeezes humor and humanity out of leadership, and what Isabelle wishes she’d done differently to protect not just her team but herself. Isabelle speaks candidly about how burnout eroded her ability to laugh — and how consciously rebuilding a humor-filled environment was part of her healing. They also cover why Isabelle believes humor is a genuine leadership superpower, how it moves leadership from transactional to human, and why authenticity and levity together create what she calls a love story in business. Kate brings in the broader cultural shift happening in leadership — more heart, less hustle — and why that’s exactly what the next generation of employees is asking for.

“A leader’s job is really to serve their team — so all of it, the authenticity, the humor, the transparency, will become a beautiful love story in business.” — Isabelle Tremblay

Isabelle’s Advice for Leaders

Keep humor authentic to who you are and always be respectful — never punch down, never make it about a person. The Two Truths and a Lie exercise is a simple, low-stakes way to bring playfulness into any team setting without pressure. Set boundaries not just for your team but for yourself — protecting only others while neglecting yourself is a fast track to burnout. And if the environment is truly toxic and damaging your health, give yourself permission to leave. Life is too short, and you have unlimited potential — at any age.

Connect with Isabelle Tremblay 🌐 Eyenovating  💼 LinkedIn

Connect with Kate Davis 📧 kate@katedavisca.com 🎙️ Humor in the C Suite — available wherever you get your podcasts

Heart-Led Leadership: Why Humor Builds Trust Faster Than Almost Anything Else

Isabelle Tremblay’s leadership philosophy — which she calls leadership with love — wasn’t built in a boardroom. It was built across two decades of managing people under real pressure, in real time, across multiple countries and cultures.

And at the center of it was humor.

“To be a leader that can connect with people and build trust, you do have to show your humanity,” Tremblay explains. “And I think humor is a very good way of doing it because it makes you human and it makes things not as serious.”

This is the core insight that separates heart-led leadership from traditional management: humor isn’t a distraction from the work. It’s the mechanism through which real connection — and therefore real performance — becomes possible.

When leaders use humor authentically, they send a signal to everyone in the room: it’s safe to be human here. That signal dissolves the kind of tension that makes people perform rather than contribute, comply rather than create, and stay quiet rather than speak up.

Practical tools don’t have to be complicated. Tremblay’s go-to meeting exercise — Two Truths and a Lie — consistently transformed team dynamics by inviting playfulness into professional settings. “It’s not necessarily supposed to be funny,” she notes, “but it always turns into something funny.” The result is a room full of people who feel seen, connected, and genuinely present — which is exactly the foundation that high-performing teams are built on.

For leaders looking to build psychological safety and employee engagement, humor is one of the most underutilized tools available. As Tremblay puts it, “humor in leadership is a superpower — it builds trust and respect, and turns the whole thing into a beautiful love story in business.”

Burnout and the Cost of Hustle Culture

Four out of five people in North America are currently operating under high stress. Most of them are just keeping going — because that’s what the culture rewards.

Isabelle Tremblay was one of them.

At the peak of her corporate career, she was simultaneously holding two senior leadership positions, managing budgets across three countries, overseeing a team of more than twenty people, and navigating a challenging divorce. From the outside, she was succeeding. On the inside, she was disappearing.

“I realized at some point that I couldn’t even draft an email,” she recalls. Her doctor called it situational stress disorder. Tremblay called it complete failure. But what it really was — and what she came to understand through her recovery — was the inevitable outcome of a system that celebrates output over humanity.

“Corporate America really needs to stop celebrating that hustle culture,” she says. “Companies put mission statements on the wall saying how much they love their employees — and then the actual reality doesn’t match.”

This gap between stated values and lived culture is where burnout takes root. And it’s where so many well-intentioned leaders lose themselves — not because they stop caring, but because they care too much about everyone except themselves.

“I put boundaries in place to protect my team,” Tremblay reflects. “And I forgot about myself in the process.”

The warning signs of leadership burnout are often subtle: humor fades first, then creativity, then the ability to be present. “By the end, I had less humor because I was so burnt out that I couldn’t even find the strength to laugh,” she shares. Recognizing this connection — between levity and wellbeing, between laughter and resilience — is one of the most important insights any leader can carry.

From Burnout to Reinvention: Humor as a Healing Tool

Recovery from burnout isn’t linear, and it rarely looks the way people expect. For Tremblay, it began with a deliberate choice to rebuild her environment around joy.

“It all needed to be funny and bring humor and happiness into my life,” she explains of her time on sick leave. Every show she watched, every piece of content she consumed, every conversation she had — she filtered it through a single question: does this bring lightness?

That intentionality became the foundation of her reinvention. Through meditation, mindset work, and a complete redefinition of what success means, Tremblay rebuilt not just her career but her relationship with herself. The result was her Amazon bestselling book Love Lead Succeed — written during recovery as both a leadership guide and a personal healing journey.

“Life cannot be measured by the number of emails or your titles,” she writes. “But more on how aligned you are with your purpose.”

Her message to leaders currently in the grip of burnout is both practical and compassionate: talk about it, seek support, implement boundaries — for yourself, not just your team. And if the environment is genuinely toxic, give yourself permission to leave. “It’s never too late to reinvent yourself,” she says. “We all have unlimited potential.”

The Cultural Shift Leadership Needs Right Now

Something is changing in how the best organizations think about leadership development and workplace culture. The rigid, performance-at-all-costs model is giving way to something more human — and the data supports the shift.

Stanford University now teaches humor as part of its leadership curriculum. Research consistently shows that leaders with a sense of humor build more trusting teams, see higher levels of employee engagement, and create environments where people are more willing to take the creative risks that drive innovation.

The generation entering the workforce right now has made the ask explicit: they want leaders who sound like human beings.

That’s not a soft ask. That’s a strategic one.

Tremblay’s vision for the future of leadership is clear: “I’m hoping for a corporate world that will start really putting their employees first — and a leadership that leads with their heart.”

Heart-led leadership isn’t about making the workplace feel like a therapy session. It’s about recognizing that authenticity, empathy, and yes — humor — are the conditions under which people do their best work. A leader’s job, as Tremblay frames it, is ultimately to serve their team. And you cannot serve people well if you’ve burned yourself out trying to perform for them.

What Leaders Can Take Away Today

Integrating humor and heart-led leadership into your workplace culture doesn’t require a complete overhaul. It starts with small, intentional choices:

• Start meetings with connection, not agenda. An exercise like Two Truths and a Lie takes five minutes and consistently generates the kind of authentic laughter that builds team trust faster than almost any other tool.
• Know your audience. Humor that lands well is always contextual. It’s built on relationship, not performance. Start small, build rapport, and let the humor deepen naturally as trust does.
• Protect yourself, not just your team. Boundaries that only face outward eventually collapse inward. Sustainable leadership requires the same empathy you extend to others to be extended to yourself.
• Measure success differently. The number of emails processed, meetings attended, and hours logged are not indicators of leadership effectiveness. Alignment with purpose — yours and your team’s — is.
• Let yourself be human. Humor, vulnerability, and levity aren’t leadership weaknesses. They are, as Isabelle Tremblay puts it, the superpower that turns a transactional workplace into something that actually feels like a place worth showing up to.