Being full-on in the brainstormy stage of a creative endeavor means I’m joyfully surrounded by piles and piles of library books. The middle pile is my active reading pile, aka the books I’m rotating through depending on the moment and my mood.

My summer reading and listening have me thinking deeply about overwork, career grief, embodiment, and the future of work.

I keep thinking about how many workplaces, or even ourselves, are asking people to navigate precarity and uncertainty, maybe even calling for business-as-usual. Even if meant with good intentions, it doesn’t work. We’re calling it burnout or time to bounce back, but it's so much more than that at this point. And that rhetoric likely causes unintentional hurt because we live and work in a grief-averse society and have lost this critical skillset.

Working in the intersection of career and climate grief, there’s a lot of commonality and overlap with how folks are experiencing losses that are tangible and intangible, individual and collective.

In the last couple of months, I’ve worked with two different universities in different parts of the country, one on the West Coast and one in the Midwest, but all saying versions of the same thing.

Higher education, along with the country, is rapidly changing in directions we didn’t anticipate, and it is negatively impacting our sense of belonging and wellbeing. We need to figure out how we will cope so that we can then equip others through this.

We made it to midyear, it’s time to start planning for the second half, and I’m here to be your coconspirator in that. We’re all familiar with the traditional way that programs and organizations plan for what is ahead -- think the typical strategic or quarterly planning or start-of-the-academic-year retreat. Often including some teambuilding and then a long focus on goals, strategy, programming, and what needs to get done for the year ahead. These days, the messages come with mandates to innovate faster with fewer resources or get more students in seats and keep them there.

While there are parts in those messages and planning that still matter, they are by no means the top priorities for these upcoming months and years in these times of uncertainty and growing instability. I need you to know that grief is on the rise and it’s lurking under most conversations I have these days.

Midyear can be a chance to pause, reconnect with your heart, body, and boundaries, and notice how you want to tend your time and energy with more intention. Reflection, grief, and growth are often intertwined, asking us to stay open without overextending as we move into the second half of the year.

When you are deep in career uncertainty, it is very easy to make the next step carry the weight of the whole future.

Updating your CV can feel like admitting you are leaving. Looking at job postings can feel like betrayal or panic, not to mention fear of what’s there (and a whole lot of what’s not there). Naming a boundary can feel like the beginning of an ending. Staying can feel like giving up, while leaving can feel like abandoning everything you worked so hard to build.

No wonder most new client conversations start with some version of feeling stuck and unclear.

One of the tender parts of supporting folks through career pivots is when they realize how much of their identity has been shaped by or wrapped up in a title, institution, field, or role.

It makes sense that this happens. This sort of identity entanglement is typically considered a success, as weird as that may sound. Take it from someone whose role was to orient new graduate students into the field of higher education.

The goal of any professional field is to socialize individuals into a professional identity where you reflect in-depth knowledge, norms, values, and standards throughout your career. In essence, taking on a professional identity is a requirement of professionalism. This is why it’s so entangled.

No job title can fully hold what you know how to do, how you care, or what you bring to change, leadership, and repair. In uncertain seasons, it helps to come back to the strengths and capacities that belong to you, no matter what role you hold.

You are so powerful and amazing, probably more than you allow yourself to realize and feel! And the systems of work are scared of your innate creativity and embodiment.

Trust me on this. I have the honor of hearing and holding your beautifully inspiring and deeply heartbreaking stories. Every single one of these folks - YOU - is beyond badass AF and amazingly multitalented. And every single one shares stories of institutional betrayal, exploitation, and manipulation for others’ gain. It’s the bad behavior inherent in the systems of patriarchy, late-stage capitalism, and colonialism.

Career uncertainty often brings grief, disorientation, and pressure to have the next answer before you have had time to process what changed. A more grounded next step is to slow down, notice what has shifted, and move forward with small, honest clarity.

What are you pissed off about right now?

I mean it. Because there are a lot of reasons to feel pissed off these days. And your work life is likely piling it on, too. 

Some of what I hear a lot of: last-minute requests, carrying way more than your share ‘because you’re so good at it.’ All the shifting expectations, sometimes blatantly. Other times, it’s the invisible rules no one told you about. The shock when people you work with show you exactly who they are.

Boundaries often start with a pause, not a dramatic no, and even one simple sentence can interrupt the urgency that keeps you abandoning your own capacity. Giving yourself a little more time creates space to respond more honestly instead of reacting from pressure, people-pleasing, or habit.