Is your career killing you?
"I had a heart attack because I worked too hard. I felt I owed my employer because only exceptional people get this position. I worked 7 days a week until I went into the hospital. Even then, I was emailing that I would miss meetings while dialing 911."
- Administrator at a Midwestern research university
Let the empathy and humanity of this comment settle in your own body and mind for a second. Notice what comes up for you. Maybe a little shock, maybe it feels a little spot on, maybe some of your own grief (which could be sadness but equally rage).
It could be easy to see her experience as a lesson in overworking (and that’s legit). I also see something deeper. It’s a story about the cost of institutional belonging that comes with indebtedness. How often do any of us conflate getting THE job with the mindset and behavior of continuously proving that we deserve our place - our self-worth so invested in institutional belonging.
This story is from three years ago, when many organizations were trying to build folks back up from the COVID-19 pandemic. I was facilitating a two-day training, Build a Culture of Regenerative Resilience in Graduate Education, for directors, graduate faculty, and graduate student leaders. We were still fresh in that time period when the pandemic showed us just how much work can change, how things could be done differently, and how office culture and policies could be designed more humanely. There was real potential for intentional, life-affirming changes.
Six years later, it’s safe to say we, collectively, failed. Failure can be an opportunity to reevaluate and do differently, though. That’s a choice.
We failed because we dug our heels in to reinforce institutions and old ways of working rather than reimagining our relationships to them. We didn’t demand that institutions stop extracting too much from people who want to belong. Nor have we fully asked ourselves why we continue to volunteer up our own belonging for the institutional variety of belonging.
What comes up when you ask yourself right now:
What have I come to believe I owe in exchange for belonging here?
What am I continuously trying to prove through my work?
Where has my internal sense of worth become entangled with institutional belonging?
Common answers I hear are overworking beyond paid hours, feeling guilty for rest, carrying so much unpaid/invisible labor, thinking you should feel grateful, feeling a constant hum of anxiousness, and burnout cycles of boom-bust. What are your patterns?
So perhaps it’s not about whether we are working too hard (because you are, trust me on that one). Perhaps it's about what we've come to believe we owe in exchange for belonging.
I encourage you to take your own pulse on this institutional illusion of belonging and join us in the Grove this month, where this will be our community focus.
I want to leave you with something more expansive that nudges towards where we’re going across this month.
Overall, how would you describe what it means to belong to your place of work?
Now compare that to a sense of belonging that is broader and deeper than the workplace.
Maybe it’s the land on which you live (no matter if it’s a room, house, apt, does or doesn’t have a yard or outdoor space), your local community, the geographical region you find yourself in, a favorite tree in the park you visit, the hummingbirds at your feeders in the morning, the little garden you planted this summer.
Feel in THAT rootedness - soak it in, breathe it in, let it radiate through your felt sensations and imagination. That’s closer to our true belonging than work ever can be. XO
