For Noor Rizvi, the question was never whether people were capable of more, but whether the systems they worked within allowed space to pause, reflect, and recalibrate before reaching breaking point.
After nearly two decades in high-performance enterprise technology roles across Asia and the Middle East, she’d seen how success and burnout often coexist. Targets were met. Careers advanced. Yet beneath the surface, many people were quietly depleted. “I was doing everything that was expected of me,” she says. “But internally, I was becoming increasingly disconnected from myself.”
Today, Noor is the Founder of Selfternity™, a future-of-work movement built around a largely unaddressed gap: the absence of structured, need-based space for people navigating burnout, disconnection, and major life transitions.
Born in Hong Kong and later living and working across Pakistan, Singapore, and the UAE, Noor’s early life was defined by constant movement and adjustment. Curious and creative by nature, she wasn’t always well served by conventional academic systems.
After dropping out of her A Levels, she returned to education through a long-distance degree with Curtin University, while working part-time during a formative year that demanded resilience. “It taught me how to keep moving forward,” she reflects, “but it also normalised pushing through discomfort without questioning whether it was sustainable.”
Her professional career began modestly, with a contract role at Shell, followed by positions at Citibank. In 2008, seeking independence and broader exposure, Noor moved to Singapore with USD 1,200 and no safety net.
Over the next fifteen years, she built a successful career in enterprise tech sales, holding senior roles at Oracle, Tableau (a Salesforce company), and Sprinklr in Singapore and later in Dubai. Working across markets from South Asia to Australia and New Zealand, she earned President’s Club recognition at all three companies. “Those years taught me about performance and pressure,” she says. “They also showed me how much people carry quietly while continuing to deliver.”
In 2019, Noor relocated to Dubai to be closer to her ageing parents while continuing her corporate career. Then came Covid, bringing prolonged isolation, increased workload, and personal loss.
Isolation, increased workload, and personal loss. “Within a short space of time, I lost several family members,” she recalls. “There was very little opportunity to process that grief.” Outwardly, she continued to function. Internally, the strain accumulated until even her professional performance began to falter.
Her turning point came in August 2022 during a late-night review of her finances. “I’d reached a point where I genuinely wasn’t sure I could keep going,” she says. “Either voluntarily or involuntarily.” After years of resisting therapy, she sought professional support.
What stayed with her most wasn’t a single statement, but a stark realisation: “How did I go from thriving under pressure to feeling anxious, depleted, and placed on a performance improvement plan?” she reflects. “I’d built my identity around always delivering – and suddenly I was questioning everything.”
What Noor needed wasn’t a short holiday or motivational advice, but protected time – intentional space – to understand what had led to burnout and how to avoid repeating it. Two weeks of unstructured leave offered temporary relief. Sabbaticals, she observed, often rewarded tenure rather than responding to genuine need.
Workplaces are designed to honour certain life transitions. Maternity leave creates space to become a mother; paternity leave, a father. There’s no equivalent recognition for moments when life itself destabilises someone internally.
“At my lowest point, that gap became impossible to ignore,” Noor says. “I needed space to recalibrate as a human being, not as a role.”
In May 2023, she stepped away without a predefined structure. What followed was deliberate experimentation – restoring energy, returning to baseline, and identifying what was no longer sustainable. Only then did clarity emerge: burnout wasn’t a personal failing, but an imbalance between demand and capacity. “Burnout isn’t a lack of grit,” she says. “It’s an energy imbalance.”
While burnout was Noor’s entry point, she’s clear it’s not the only cause of disorientation. Overwhelm, grief, loneliness, financial pressure, and major life transitions can all disrupt how people relate to themselves and their work.
What emerged from her experience is now a multi-pronged approach.
She’s launched a global petition to make Selfternity™ Leave a recognized leave type within workplaces – structured, need-based time off that responds to genuine crisis rather than tenure.
She’s also translated what she learned during her own leave into the 7.3 Self-Leadership Workshop, designed for prevention. “It’s about helping people recalibrate before they reach breaking point,” she explains.
Her approach is deliberately non-prescriptive. Rather than offering fixed solutions, she introduces her proprietary frameworks – PECSEC and The Life Pyramid – as blueprints people can interpret and apply within their own context. “No two journeys are the same,” she says. “Agency comes from understanding your own patterns, not from being told what to do.”
After years in quota-driven environments, she’s reshaped her relationship with ambition. “I don’t define success,” she says. “I define a failure threshold. Anything above that is success.”
The shift allows her to maintain discipline without constant pressure and to engage with life more intentionally. She’s equally deliberate about the environments she chooses. “The people you learn from, the systems you operate within, and the energy you’re exposed to all shape how you think and how you lead.”
“Honestly, AI doesn’t keep me up at night,” Noor says. “What keeps me awake is the legacy I’m building – frameworks designed to help people navigate not just AI but any obstacle. When fear dominates, discernment disappears. My work helps people lead themselves from clarity rather than survival mode.”
At its core, her work is driven by a simple conviction: “When you lead yourself with intention, you choose your future.” It’s a principle shaped by experience – and the foundation of the work Noor Rizvi continues to build.
