When I was a manager in a UX org, one of the most challenging parts of my job was trying to satisfy my team members’ ambitions. Sometimes it was because there was an absolute misalignment between someone’s expectations and their abilities — but more often, the main blocker was simply the reality of our org.

Someone might be eager — and ready! — to lead a project, but that position was already filled. Someone was seeking a new kind of project, but their skills were needed in an area where they’d already excelled. Or someone was hoping to move into management, but there weren’t enough people to justify their role.

Advocacy isn’t magic — and despite some wins, I inevitably lost good people who moved on to something more aligned with their ambitions. Sometimes it hurt, especially when I felt like I was thisclose to delivering on their desires. But frankly, sometimes it was a relief — because the frustration and cynicism of some folks’ thwarted ambitions grew toxic, and started infecting other people on the team.

The early-pandemic hiring boom made my job a lot easier — because when you double your team size in a couple of months, there’s suddenly plenty of need for new managers. Retention bonuses and promotions were doled out like Halloween candy. New projects popped up left and right.

And for those who still didn’t feel like they could accomplish what they wanted within our org? They left for greener pastures — easily. Recruiters were flooding their DMs with opportunities and dangling flashy incentives to jump ship.

But that was then. That’s definitely not now.

“There’s no clear path for growth.”

That’s one of the many things my partner Sara and I heard this summer when our company, Active Voice, ran a research project to find out how design managers are holding up in these deeply challenging times.

This manager isn’t the only one feeling this way. One of the main themes that surfaced in our research was how hard it is now for managers to support their team members’ growth and satisfaction. The folks we surveyed reported that their teams are stagnating — upward mobility has been capped and opportunities for learning and training have been diminished or cut.

The result? Well, I’ll let another survey respondent describe it:

“People are disengaged after layoffs. I can’t find any sparks for them. It feels like everyone wants to leave but they can’t because of the job market. So folks are hanging out, miserable.”

Oof. This sounds a lot like career purgatory. Managers are seeing their smart, talented, ambitious people languishing. It’s unhealthy for those individuals. It’s unhealthy for the teams they’re on. And it’s unhealthy for the managers, who desperately want their people to feel engaged and supported.

Managers, take note: None of this is your fault. There are forces at play far beyond your control or influence. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless — and neither are your people.

If your team members are “hanging out, miserable” — I promise there’s still hope. Because even if your org has cut off traditional paths to progress, there are still other ways to help your folks feel a sense of growth. And I’m talking real growth — the kind people set aside because it doesn’t look impressive on paper or add an extra zero to their salary.

In fact, that’s the kind of growth we should’ve spent more time on all along.

Break out of the performance cycle

Many managers never have a career progression conversation with their teams outside of a performance review cycle. These conversations tend to be very specifically tied to promotions — evaluating someone’s skills and accomplishments against the criteria for moving up to the next level. As a result, when upward mobility is out of reach, the conversation goes on pause until the next cycle.

In the months between, 1:1s tend to shift focus to facts — what projects are being worked on, what’s going well, what’s causing problems. But when there’s nothing significant to share, managers and reports can feel like they’re just filling space with idle chit-chat or venting sessions. Or they just cancel them outright.

Now, I think there’s value to both types of conversations. Small talk can build trust and rapport, and venting sessions can surface important issues that need to be addressed.

But there’s a third type of conversation that more managers should add to the mix: career conversations. These are conversations that are less about delivering feedback or prepping for promotions, and more about helping your people understand themselves: their skills and strengths, their values, their interests, their likes and dislikes.

You don’t need to have these answers — your job as a manager is simply to get curious and ask.

These kinds of conversations benefit both sides:

• For your team members, these conversations can help them think more holistically about what does and doesn’t matter to them, what their preferences are, and what needs they have that are unmet right now.
• As the manager, you can better understand what your people are thinking and feeling — what’s behind their words and behaviors.

You might be surprised at how rarely people are asked these kinds of questions — and at how much insight and clarity can come from letting someone talk them through while you really listen.

Prioritize intrinsic motivations

There’s a second reason that I recommend managers don’t limit career conversations to performance review cycles — even in times when opportunity abounds. That’s because it ignores an important truth: not everyone is trying to climb the career ladder.

There are many reasons some of your people may fall into this category. Maybe it’s because they have a lot of change going on in their personal lives and need work to feel more stable. Maybe it’s because they’re looking at the requirements of these next-level roles and realizing they’re not interested in the work required.

The reason isn’t the important part. The motivation is what matters.

And too often, that initial motivation isn’t coming from their own needs, values, or interests — it comes from outside. Who can they please? Influence? Impress? What does success look like to their family members, peer groups, broader communities, and a capitalist society?

It’s a vicious cycle: when someone performs and produces enough to get that validation, the process starts anew. The pressure builds with every loop, because it’s never enough to truly satisfy — it just raises the bar they’re trying to meet higher and higher.

I see this all the time as a coach. People exhaust themselves trying to reach the next goal, or climb the next rung, but they never actually get to rest and enjoy once they’re there. Because there’s a new goal or a next rung that requires them to give away more and more of themselves to their jobs.

It might not be fair that the most common external success markers — things like promotions and pay raises, accolades and awards — are harder to come by right now. But that also makes it a good time to realize that those markers alone don’t make people happy. Even in the best of times, all they do is give us short-term validation. The fulfillment doesn’t stick.

The only validation any of us can truly rely on comes from within. While that may feel like a foreign concept, it is something that can be taught — and that you, manager, can teach.

You can start by helping your team members set down their OKRs and KPIs and spend some time developing intrinsic goals — the kind where their ambition isn’t defined by external markers of success, but by the person’s own internal needs, desires, and values. (Those very same ones you helped them tease out in your 1:1s!)

Like, say you have a direct report with a deep value of equity. How would it look for their success to be measured by how much of that they could bring to their work lives? That could be achieved any number of ways that require no outside permission or approval to begin. Maybe they decide to begin researching and learning accessibility best practices. Or if they’ve already got that skill, maybe they make it their mission to speak up about accessibility concerns every time they spot one, even if they don’t have the power to ensure every fix makes it into the next release.

Here’s another example: say you’ve got a direct report who’s been really wanting to step into management, but there are no open roles. If the driving force behind that desire is to help other people navigate their tricky workplace, there’s no manager title required to reach that goal. They could schedule some 1:1s with more junior teammates. They could offer open office hours to designers just entering the field. Or they could set up a monthly lunch date with their peers to talk through their current challenges.

Whatever action they take, the marker of their success and progress becomes less about other people’s perceptions and more about how they feel about themselves: Satisfied. Connected. Impactful. Proud.

Teach your team members to think about success in this way, and you’ve given them a gift they’ll carry with them through the rest of their lives. No matter what external circumstances they may stumble into, they can find meaning and purpose in how they’re spending their time.

“Focus on the things I can influence. Not worry too much about the things I can’t.”

Not every design manager in our study was struggling. In fact, about 1 in 4 said they were doing pretty well at work right now. And one theme we found amongst those thriving managers was this: they have the same challenges as everyone else. They just weren’t spending all their energy feeling frustrated at the things out of their control.

We all have finite energy and time. And it’s heartbreaking — and frustrating — as a manager to watch your people waste those precious resources chasing ghosts and battling paper tigers.

But you can’t expect them to lay down their swords if you’re still swinging yours around wildly. To lead by example you need to take your own best advice. Because there are no management trophies awarded for “hanging out, miserable” — even if you’re doing so in service of the team members you care about.

So, manager: which of your ambitions are in your control? Do you know your own skills and strengths, your values, your interests, your likes and dislikes? Where are you pursuing external rewards at the expense of your own sense of pride, impact, connection, and satisfaction?

And once you’ve started to define those things: what intrinsic goals will get you back there?

Your ambitions matter too. Breaking yourself won’t make your people any happier. Being the shit umbrella sounds noble for a minute or so, until you realize you’re the one stuck dripping in shit.

You can make meaningful contributions to your team members’ growth and ambitions even in the worst of conditions — no flashy gestures are required. Give yourself the same grace. Hang onto the words of wisdom another survey respondent shared about how they get by:

“Progress is progress.”

Make your own wins.

Interested in our full study? Request a copy of Managing this Moment, our 2024 report on line managers in design/UX. Or visit Active Voice to learn more about our coaching and training options for aspiring and experienced managers.

The growth path no one can take away was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This essay is adapted from my opening talk at the 2024 Lead With Tempo conference. I wrote it for and about people working in content design and strategy, but I suspect people from many fields will find it relatable.

I remember what it felt like to discover content work for the first time. It was 2007, and I was working at an advertising agency in Arizona writing copy for real estate ads. I was 23, and I was so, so bored. Turns out there are only so many ways to describe a suburban home with three bathrooms, granite countertops, and a deeply unsustainable water supply.

So when I saw a posting for a web writer at a different agency, I thought, what the hell? I’d worked on a couple web projects. I liked them well enough. Most importantly, the office was really close to my house.

I got the job. But when I showed up to my first day, I learned that I wasn’t on the creative team with the other writers. And I wasn’t on the UX team, either — because there wasn’t one. To be honest, I don’t think I even knew what UX was.

I was on the SEO team.

Pretty soon, I found myself writing lots and lots of articles designed to garner search traffic. I didn’t love it, but I did my best to make what I wrote actually helpful and informative—not just more stuff.

But ultimately, that’s what I was writing: stuff. Pages and pages of stuff, duplicative and unnecessary, tacked up all over the edges of our clients’ websites.

After a while, I wasn’t just bored. I was disappointed. Frustrated. Resentful. I loved writing, but I wanted my work to be meaningful — to me, to a user, to someone other than a search engine.

So I started asking questions: Why are we designing and launching sites with whatever crappy content our clients give us, then showing up after the fact to add even more crap for SEO? Why aren’t we planning these projects to include user-centered content from the start?

Most of all, why am I not in the meetings where all this is being decided?

So I made it my mission to worm my way in. I asked if I could take over sitemapping and navigation design. I started collaborating on wireframes. Eventually, I became a central part of the process.

There was just one problem: no one quite knew what my job was anymore. I wasn’t considered a designer — not at that agency, at least. Back then, the design team all came from print. They worked in Photoshop all day. And I wasn’t really a copywriter, either. I wasn’t creating campaigns. I was writing, sure—but I was also asking clients hard questions, collaborating with designers and devs, and modeling existing content to be more useful within a new design system.

So no one really knew what to call my work, or how to scope it. They just knew that website projects were less likely to go off the rails when I was there.

Then one day, my boss sent me this post by Rachel Lovinger: “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data.” Something clicked. I saw myself in that article. Even more powerful, I think I found myself in that article. Because before that point, I didn’t really have a professional plan. I just knew that I wanted to write, and that I needed to pay the bills while my partner was in grad school. But when I found content strategy and UX, I found so much more than a job title. I found a community, and a career path I was passionate about.

I went all in: I followed everyone who was using the hashtag #contentstrategy. I read all the blog posts. I started a local meetup. I felt like I was part of a movement.

I may have even physically fist-pumped when I read Kristina Halvorson’s A List Apart article from 2008:

“Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.”

Hell yeah. I was hooked. I took up that torch. I was a content strategist. And you know, it felt somehow noble. I wasn’t “just” writing. I wasn’t “just” doing marketing. My work was meaningful. I was making people’s experiences online better — more inclusive, more usable, more accessible, more relevant.

How could anyone not care about this?

So for the next few years, I worked very, very hard to convince people to see content work the way I did: Important. Valuable. Necessary. I advocated and evangelized and went to pitches and closed projects. I grew a team. In 2011, I left that agency to go solo. I spoke at conferences and consulted and ran workshops all over the world. And while my career took off, so did content disciplines more broadly: content design, UX writing, content ops, content architecture — these specialties and more blossomed, and what used to be seen as one field transformed into a whole bunch of related specialties.

Now, 15 years later, when I look at all the content disciplines that exist today, when I look at the sheer number of people who hold these kinds of titles today, I am floored. We did it! We’re everywhere.

So…why do things feel so gloomy in contentland?

I’ve been asking myself this question for a while. Because, in 2020, I stopped doing product and project work, and I started focusing on people — running leadership coaching and professional development programs for people in and around design.

That has included a lot of content leaders — somewhere north of 100 at this point. Managers, directors, senior ICs. People at big-name companies and tiny startups, federal governments and boutique agencies. And while their stories are all a little different, so many of them tell me the same thing: they are struggling.

They feel overworked, yet undervalued. Underleveled. Under-resourced.

At best, they’re stretched thin and forcing a smile while being asked to “do more with less.” At worst, they’re cynical and burnt out — all that passion and optimism they used to hold slipping away.

If that’s you, I want you to know something: you don’t have to choose between advocating and convincing and fighting till you’re blue in the face, or giving up and collapsing in a pit of despair. You don’t have to carry the weight of this discipline on your back to be a leader.

But we’re going to have to change some things to make that possible.

This isn’t about changing your company.

Most of you have already tried that. You’ve done the decks and roadshows, the people-pleasing and convincing and advocating. And I won’t tell you that doesn’t work at all — again, this field has grown dramatically in the past 15 years, even considering the more recent layoffs and the threats of AI and all the rest.

But that approach hasn’t given content folks the power or agency they crave. It’s just given them more of the same: more decks, more roadshows, more people-pleasing. More expectations that you keep all the bases covered, no matter how few content people there are.

So I don’t want to talk about changing your organization anymore.

What I want to talk about is changing the only thing any of us can really change, anyway. Ourselves.

Now you might be thinking, ourselves? But what about the layoffs decimating practices? What about the reorgs, the return to office mandates sprung on people who were hired to be fully remote, the way execs are looking at AI as the solution to all their content needs?

And to that I say, yeah. You’re not wrong. Those things are real, and they are absolutely causing pain. Be mad.

But I also know that the pain we’re collectively feeling didn’t start with the layoffs, or the launch of Chat GPT. It’s much deeper in our DNA as a field.

It’s right there in my own story: I cared deeply about content work. I believed it was important and meaningful, and I saw it as my duty to convince more people to see what I saw. I identified so strongly with the work that it became a huge part of my life, my friendships, my personality.

And there were high points! I wrote books and got invited to speak all over the world. I met a koala after a conference in Sydney and pet a cheetah at a conference in Cape Town. On the same trip. I mean, WHAT!?

But then there were the lows: Projects that felt pointless. Draining, ill-considered slogs. Products I wasn’t sure anyone needed. And then there was one particular project that broke me. I think the lowest moment was when our project sponsor actually cut me off suddenly during a large meeting demanding to know why I was presenting a different deck than we’d discussed. Only, I was presenting that deck. There was only one deck!

How do you answer that question with 25 stakeholders watching? How do you move on from there? I’m still not sure—but I know that my attempts to pull the train back on the tracks failed. Because afterward, my colleague — someone I’d trusted as a mentor and considered a close friend, and who’d quietly watched as all this went down—told me it was all my fault. That I was failing at my job.

I was crushed. I was supposed to be a content leader. That was, like, my whole thing.

If I wasn’t good at that, who was I even?

I was stuck in vocational awe.

Fobazi Ettarh coined the term vocational awe in 2017, in an essay for and about librarians. And she opens with a news story from my city, Philadelphia — the home of a heartbreaking opioid and fentanyl crisis. Back in 2017, as overdoses started happening in and around a local library branch, some librarians decided they needed to intervene. So they got trained to administer narcan, and they developed new procedures and protocols: Who goes to get help? Who stays with the person overdosing? How do we safely move kids out of the building?

The public loved these librarians — these kind booklovers jumping up from their desks to save people’s lives! The story went viral, and it kicked off a wave of librarians across the country training to intervene during an overdose — and a wave of media depicting these librarians as selfless heroes. Saints.

But of course, they’re not saints. They’re workers — workers who aren’t paid particularly well. Workers who regularly skip their lunchbreaks and stay late.

And while it’s a powerful story of commitment to the community, what Ettarh argues is that we do librarians a disservice when we talk about the profession as a vocation. Not a job, but a sacred calling. Something librarians feel responsible for — regardless of how hard the work can be, regardless of the pay, regardless of how far their actual job duties have strayed from what they signed up for. She writes:

“Tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful. Awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint.”

This is the problem with vocational awe: it teaches workers that because their work matters — because it is meaningful in some way — that they have to do whatever it takes to deliver. Even if it’s harming them, even if it’s making them sick, even if it’s leaving them sleepless and numb and traumatized.

And if they don’t — if they want to take breaks and have hobbies and quit work in time to actually cook dinner — then that means they just do not care enough about the cause.

Content work is a job, not a duty.

Are you starting to see some parallels? Because I sure do. I’ve seen content people treat it as their duty to ensure nothing goes live without their eyes on it — even though it was their company’s decision to only have two content designers spread out across a 100-person design org.

I’ve seen heads of practices feel so responsible for “changing hearts and minds” that they’ve burnt out spectacularly, crashed into a wall, made themselves so sick they had to take a year off to recover.

I’ve also met content leaders who couldn’t take time off, or who told themselves they couldn’t. And so they kept on grinding, coping however they could: taking their stress out on their teams. Sneering at cross-functional partners. Burying themselves in wine and Netflix. But still telling themselves they’re all in.

In 2022, I noticed something else happening, though: We were emerging from the worst of the pandemic, and the layoffs were just getting going. And I started noticing content leaders rejecting vocational awe — rejecting the idea that the most important thing about them was their job title.

At first, it felt exhilarating. But…then I noticed how many of them were replacing it with cynicism. “I’m only here for the paycheck,” they’d say. Why should I unmute in a meeting? Try to collaborate? Set goals? Why bother with any of it? It’s all BS. It’s all just capitalism.

They’re not wrong, exactly. There’s nothing pure about this work. Especially in tech — an industry where so many business models are extractive, unsustainable, relying on underpaid and invisible labor, selling our data, stealing our creative work, surveilling our movements. Short-term, investor-centered capitalism has a lot to answer for.

Again: Be mad.

But as much as I want to see a different world, with different kinds of businesses and different kinds of incentives, I gotta say: those cynical, none-of-this-matters types? They’re miserable, too. They’re spending their days marinating in despair — lonely, angry, numb. And to be honest, they’re often terrible colleagues: judgmental, quick to blame, always on defense. Because that’s where cynicism leads. It’s corrosive.

I don’t want that life for any of us.

So I want to go back to libraries for a moment. And I want you to consider this: what would happen if librarians all traded out their vocational awe for this sort of cynicism? Do we want a world where librarians don’t give a shit about their work? Where they’re just there to punch a clock, and don’t derive meaning from things like serving their communities? Upholding access to information and literacy? Creating safe spaces for people to pause, to think, to read — to dream?

I don’t think we do. Because that work is meaningful. It’s necessary. It creates hope — and god, do we need hope right now. And librarians deserve to feel joy and pride in doing the work needed to make that possible.

But they also deserve to set limits on that work, and to be people — joyful, loving, curious, happy people — outside of that work.

That’s what I want for content folks, too.

We deserve to feel joy and pride in the parts of content work that are meaningful.

The opportunities to make everyday tasks a little less draining for users. The efforts to reduce cognitive load, to improve accessibility, to include more people with more identities.

And not just in the content work itself. But also in our relationships at work: When we connect with a colleague, or show kindness to a struggling peer, or help a junior teammate grow and build self-trust. When we simply enjoy the small pleasures of solving thorny problems together.

But the meaning I’m talking about here isn’t found in your job title, or level, or company. It’s not even in the set of tasks you do — whether you’re a librarian helping a teen tackle their first real research paper or a content designer writing an error message a human can actually understand.

Real meaning is deeper. It’s a product of living in ways that affirm our values and our humanity — and not just our individual humanity, but everyone’s: our colleagues’, our users’, the world’s.

This form of meaning often isn’t splashy. It’s not curing cancer, it’s not stopping climate change. You might not even be stopping your company from releasing a poorly considered new feature.

It’s the meaning found in being present, generous, and kind. It’s the meaning found in the thousands of small moments and tiny interactions that add up to treating ourselves and the people around us like people: people with inherent value, people who are worthy of respect.

People who are beautiful and fragile and struggling.

But meaning isn’t in the job itself.

Because when we attempt to attach meaning to the job, it’s incredibly easy to start attaching our identity to it, too.

We start to see the job as not just how we’re valuable, but also: who we are.

Honestly this might be the biggest risk facing content leaders right now. Not AI, not layoffs, not even lack of organizational investment in our work. But the fact that so many of our identities are so tightly wrapped up in being a content designer, or a UX writer, or a content strategist.

Because this over-identification with the job — this belief that content work is the primary expression of who we are in the world — it might feel like it gives us purpose. But it really trains us to take things personally. It makes us self-righteous, easily wounded: How dare they disrespect content design? How dare they disrespect ME?

A few months ago, Lyft’s head of content design, Alicia Ostarello, wrote about her own experience with this — and how it broke her both mentally and physically. Left her unable to get out of bed, sleeping for 22 hours straight, subsisting on a diet of fig newtons and shame. Finally, after a leave of absence and a lot of healing, she realized something:

Self-worth was handcuffed to my title so completely that not actively working felt like a death of self.

She describes realizing there was an insatiable monster in her who sought approval and validation through her work — a monster that wanted her job to love her back. Was willing to do anything it took to get this love.

Except, a company can’t love you. No matter how hard you work, how much you perform, how much impact you show.

The desire to be wanted runs deep.

Some of this is human — it’s normal to want to be loved, or to fear being abandoned. But capitalism loves to exploit that desire — that’s why it teaches us that our labor is what makes us valuable. That our professional success is our worthiness. And that if we aren’t traditionally successful, there’s just one answer: grind harder.

Often, though, I see content folks advising one another to lean into this mentality: Say yes to everything. Be helpful. Never miss an opportunity to “demonstrate value.” Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. That’s how we’ll change hearts and minds. That’s how we’ll make them want us.

People-pleasing like this might seem nice on its face — who doesn’t want to be helpful? — but ultimately, it keeps us stuck. It keeps us reactive, constantly seeking external validation of our value. This creates a cycle that teaches content folks to do whatever it takes to be liked and wanted — even if that work holds no meaning for them. Even if that work drains them dry.

So, what helps people let go of that desire? What loosens the grip of external validation? What I’ve found in my coaching work is that it’s something simple to describe, but hard to accomplish: self-trust.

• What do you like about yourself?
• Where do you see your strengths?
• What do you value?
• What do you think good work looks like?
• What behaviors will you be proud of later?

The more concrete our sense of self, the more developed our taste and opinions, the less we need to rely on external validation to know how to feel. And the easier it is to see other people’s opinions and screwed-up organizational priorities for what they are: information. Information about what’s possible with this person, in this environment, in this moment. Not an indictment of our skills or our practice — but just the reality of the situation today.

Accepting reality is a lot harder than it sounds.

People often think that “accepting reality” means that you stop trying, that you give up. It doesn’t. It also doesn’t mean liking how things are, or agreeing with how things are, or no longer feeling pissed off about how things are. And it definitely doesn’t mean abandoning hope that things can be different.

Radical acceptance simply means having the courage to look at a situation directly, and then acknowledge what is true right now — even if it’s disappointing, or unfair, or ugly.

But humans will go to some pretty extreme lengths to avoid reality. We do it when we pretend fights in our relationships never happened. When we ignore the signs that a loved one has a substance abuse problem. When we can’t bear to look at our credit card bills, or our email accounts, or our own behavior.

And we definitely do it at work. We run in circles trying to convince the same VPs over and over — maybe this deck will do it! Or this one! — while ignoring the signals that this just isn’t their priority.

We do it when we tell ourselves that if we just work late one more night, on one more weekend, over one more vacation…everything will be fine. We’ll be caught up. And then we’ll stop.

We do it when we believe the PR campaigns corporations put out — when we repeat their mission statements about changing the world, and try not to think about who actually wins and who loses in their business models.

Radical acceptance is hard because it requires us to be honest with ourselves, over and over again, about what’s actually going on around us, and why. It requires us to admit uncomfortable truths — whether it’s that despite your pleas, your spouse has shown no interest in treating you differently, or that despite sending half a dozen spicy emails to your design partners, they’ve still never invited you to the kickoff.

And again, acceptance doesn’t mean liking these things, or no longer working to change the situation. But it does mean accepting that what’s happening is happening — and that what you’ve been doing hasn’t worked.

Ultimately, I think of radical acceptance as being about no longer wasting your precious time and energy trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your control — like other people’s behaviors and corporate business models — and then beating yourself up for failing.

It’s challenging to accept that things are not in your control, but it’s also freeing. Because when you stop spending your time trying over and over again to make something happen that, ultimately, is impossible, new space opens up. You stop ramming into the same wall over and over again, hoping that this time it won’t be there. You find a new direction to point your energy toward instead.

Like whether you choose to continue working there or not.

Like the boundaries you set around your work.

Like how you treat your colleagues.

Like whether you choose to carry the weight of your company’s content decisions on your personal shoulders.

Radical acceptance starts with becoming an observer.

Try this: Imagine your company, and all its shenanigans, playing out on a stage. But you’re sitting in a box seat, high above, gazing down: Ah yes, there they are — playing out their various power struggles. Jockeying for position. Saying one thing and doing another.

And again, acceptance doesn’t mean liking what you see. It only means seeing it clearly, and having the courage to be honest with yourself about what you see.

The problem is, our brains are wired to protect us, to avoid pain. And not just physical pain, but any kind of pain. So when faced with the discomfort of the truth, our brains can easily jump into overdrive, and make up all kinds of cognitive distortions to explain away the situation.

One I see all the time with content leaders is all-or-nothing thinking: either we’re winning or we’re losing. Either we’re gaining headcount or we’re about to disappear forever. I’ve seen it a lot during this season of layoffs — an organization cuts its content team, and my LinkedIn feed is full of people certain that the discipline is dying.

You know how to start noticing this distortion? Look for extreme language in your thoughts: words like “always” or “never.” “Win” or “lose.” Anytime we reduce the situation to a good/bad or all/nothing, we’re liable to be in a cognitive distortion.

Another one I often see is mind-reading: assuming others’ thoughts or beliefs without clear evidence. Like, “My product manager didn’t invite me to the meeting. They don’t think I’m important.”

And then there’s personalization: taking on responsibility for things that aren’t in your control. Like believing you’re a failure if your leadership continues to underinvest in content — when the real reason is: the organization isn’t prioritizing a good user experience right now, because they’re prioritizing quick releases that appease shareholders.

Then there’s fortune-telling and catastrophizing — and I think we’ve all seen a lot of those lately: AI is going to be the death of our field. No one should enter the field right now. No one should be excited about the future of content design.

And you know, I don’t think we should stick our heads in the sand. Things are changing in this field, in some troubling ways. But I also know that catastrophizing won’t help us. Because all catastrophizing does is shut us down: Why bother with anything? It’s hopeless.

The truth is, things are always changing — not just in this field, but everywhere. And the only way to deal with that change is to face it head-on — to learn to notice it, to adapt to it, and to shape it where we can.

But we can’t shape anything when we’re stuck in a cognitive distortion. Because distorted thinking isn’t there to help us make long-term, intentional decisions. It’s there to deal with threats. And that means it’s designed to be reactive, to take mental shortcuts that ultimately harm us.

Here’s one of those shortcuts: Do you know why so many people are quick to blame themselves after they’ve been victimized or abused? It’s because self-blame is the quickest path to regaining a sense of control. After all, if it’s all my fault, I might feel bad and ashamed. But I can also tell myself that I can prevent it from happening again. If I just work even harder.

But working harder won’t fix the problems we face in content. If it could, those problems would be fixed by now.

We can’t work our way out of this.

So who are you when you’re not working?

That’s the question I’ve started asking my clients instead. And you know what the most common answer is?

I don’t know.

This still isn’t the easiest question for me to answer, either — even though I think about it all the time. Because I do care about my work. I care about doing a good job for my clients. And as much as I don’t like to admit it, I also care about how I’m perceived. I’m anxious about becoming irrelevant as I age in an industry where youth is valorized and women over 40 are so often rendered invisible.

But I do know a few things about who I am now. I’m a thinker and a writer — whether it’s monetizable or not. My friend Vanessa once told me that I was the most nuanced person she’d ever met. That in every situation I was trying to home in on something, see all its angles.

I’m hopeful. Even though people don’t always see that in me, because I talk a lot about the problems we face in this world. But I don’t see hope as positivity. I see it as the belief that people can change. That circumstances can change. I believe that healing is possible — for ourselves, our relationships, and I hope someday our planet.

I love nature. I love watching kids discover something new. I love the feeling of sore muscles.

I am so many things when I’m not working. We all are.

But we have to give ourselves permission to go find those things. And maybe even more than that, permission to believe that they are valuable. Not because they give us fresh energy for our work — but just because they give us joy.

That’s what Alicia Ostarello, Lyft’s head of content design, went in search of. And she found it off Vancouver Island, in a surfing lesson. She wrote:

Splashing around in the ocean and feeling vaguely terrified for my life, I felt boundless joy for the first time in a year and a half. And in doing so, I could finally see a different life for myself. Maybe it wasn’t going to be my old, pre-illness life. But my body remembered something it had long forgotten: how to be in love with existence.

So what makes you fall in love with existence?

And if you don’t know: what would it look like to give yourself permission to find out?

You can call all this impractical if you want. Falling in love with existence won’t help you land a new role, or increase your salary, or navigate the never-ending politics at work.

But in the face of profound joy, will you really care?

Knowing who you are when you’re not working won’t make all your workplace stressors disappear — being underestimated or excluded will still sting. But it will make those stressors feel less like existential crises. It will make it easier to keep things in perspective, and hold those distorted thoughts at bay.

It will help you remember that your life means something, even if your job doesn’t always.

So as you go about your day, I hope you hang onto this knowledge: that true meaning is so much bigger than a job, a title, an industry. And I hope you start to ask yourselves some questions:

• Who am I, and what gives me meaning? What makes me feel alive? What connects me to my values and affirms my humanity?
• Where can my work support the things that give me meaning — and what are the ways that it can’t? Where do I need to let go — to stop seeking validation of my worth through my work?
• What space opens up — space to dream, to hope, to just be — once I do?

I can’t wait to hear your answers.

Making meaning was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Can we talk?”

This question used to send waves of anxiety through my body. And when I was a manager, it appeared in my chat window all the time.

In the split second it took to reply “Of course!” I was already trying to predict what the person on the other end was going to say.

“I’m quitting.” Always my first assumption. Then my brain would run through all the other possible scenarios: A project spiraling out of control. A conflict with a teammate. A scary life event walloping the person out of nowhere.

I didn’t enter those conversations with curiosity — I entered them with dread.

Am I equipped to handle what this person is dealing with?

Am I about to be plunged into something super uncomfortable?

And, I’ll admit:

How much chaos is this about to bring into my day?

I loved being a manager. I loved supporting my people — frankly, all people. It’s why I became a coach. But in the midst of my own burnout, deadline pressure, and project drama, that support was so much harder to give.

It wasn’t the conversation itself I dreaded, but the work that would come after. My people were my responsibility, and I took that very seriously. That meant coming up with strategies and plans, backchanneling and advocating, and checking in again and again to make sure my people knew help was on its way.

It’s my job to fix this. It’s my job to make this right.

I’m cringing as I type those words. If that sounds like a savior complex coming in hot, that’s because it absolutely is.

I didn’t start my coaching training to be a better manager. I started it to help people outside of work. But a funny thing happened when my new coaching skills started seeping into my 1:1s. My physical and emotional reaction to “can we talk?” cooled down. And the exclamation point at the end of my “of course!” started to actually feel genuine.

A belief we have as coaches is that the person we’re talking to is the expert in their experience, not us. Our job is to help people unpack their dilemmas, challenge limiting beliefs and assumptions, and support them as they decide what to do next — based on their own needs and strengths.

The calls where I rushed into fix-it mode didn’t follow that process at all. I’d seen myself as a helper — and rescue missions as a key part of the job. I took a lot of pride in playing that role.

But it came at too high a cost.

When I showed up as a coach and not a fixer, the weight on my shoulders suddenly didn’t feel so heavy. I still needed to step in directly sometimes, but significantly less often than I needed to before. My 1:1s felt collaborative and generative — and my people started to show up with more confidence. Instead of asking me to fix things, my team started asking for help working through their own solutions.

In my rush to be a savior, I now realize I was robbing people of their agency. I wasn’t only exhausting myself. I was disempowering my teammates too.

Management can be a tough and lonely job. But I think a lot of us make it harder on ourselves than it needs to be. We weren’t taught how to lead people well — and we certainly weren’t taught how to lead in a way that takes our own wellbeing into account.

I want you to give something a try—and see how different it feels.

The next time you get the urge to fix someone’s problem, stop yourself. Ask one curious question. Then ask one more. Challenge yourself to believe that the other person knows what to do and what they need — and that your job is to help them uncover that for themselves.

Is it a relief to not need to have to save the day? Savor that feeling. You’ve earned it.

This essay was originally published in Nice Work—the Active Voice newsletter.

We’re managers, not firefighters was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Prove your value.” “Justify your presence.” “Demonstrate impact.” Too many organizations have convinced designers that they’re the problem — that if they just worked harder, they’d be taken seriously. But if just doing more were going to fix the problem… it’d be fixed by now.

The first thing I loved about coaching was the intimacy — the chance to strip away the veil of professionalism, and create spaces where people could get real about their challenges, their dreams, and their disappointments.

But pretty soon, I noticed another benefit: by talking with people in a range of different roles and organizations, I could start to see patterns. And lately, what people have been telling me has been alarming. Things like:

My organization just doesn’t understand research. I’ve been working overtime to educate them, but now I’m being told that it’s not enough and I still need to “prove my value.”

I’ve spent two years “evangelizing” content design, and people still never invite me until the last minute. My boss told me I should always jump in when asked, so people will learn the value of content.

I’m stretched across five teams, but I’m told design can’t get more headcount until we “demonstrate impact.” So I have to keep doing this and hope someday I’ve done enough.

These people all cared deeply about their work and were invested in their disciplines. They participated in professional communities, read books, learned new techniques and technologies. So when they were advised to do more, they did. They honed their business skills. Their quantitative skills. Their “executive presence.” They stretched across bunches of pods or squads, made more decks, “democratized” their research practices.

They tried so, so hard to prove that they were valuable. But all they got for their effort was bone-deep burnout.

So I started paying attention to where these messages were coming from. And pretty soon, I noticed them everywhere. Like when Judd Antin, a former research leader at Meta and Airbnb, wrote about what he called the “research reckoning”:

UX Research as it has existed over the last 15 years hasn’t done enough to justify itself.

Or when I wrote about the “prove your value” problem on LinkedIn, and one particularly salty UX leader told me that designers were being “pathetic.” He went on:

If UX designers can’t demonstrate their value to their leadership, they’re failing. End of story.

Over and over, the message was clear: Just do more. And if that doesn’t work, you didn’t do enough.

Friends, this is gaslighting.

It’s a manipulative technique that makes designers question their own sanity and assume that they’re the problem — but that maybe, if they just try one more time, things will change. But they never do. Because the truth is, you cannot overwork your way into being valued. You cannot explain or fight your way into being valued.

You can’t prove your value to someone who isn’t interested in seeing it.

So instead of burning ourselves out trying, what if we stopped?

I know that might sound terrifying: Just stop worrying about whether people think my work is valuable?! But I’ve met people who’ve done it — and found more peace on the other side. So this summer, I asked some of them how they did it, what they learned, and where they’re putting their energy instead.

What I found was that there are three big reframes we need to make right now to break free of this gaslighting and stop working in ways that bleed us dry and leave us cynical: our time, our value, and our relationships. And maybe counterintuitively, these reframes are also the shifts most likely to help designers actually gain some respect and power in their organizations.

Let’s look at each one.

Our time

Here are some statements I’ve heard one too many times in this cursèd year:

• We need you to do more with less.
• Always be helpful. Never miss an opportunity to demonstrate value.
• You need to stretch across the full product surface area until we get more headcount.

This advice might sound reasonable on its face, but it doesn’t work. Doing more with less doesn’t give us power — and it doesn’t produce good design work, either. Instead, we get overloaded and overcommitted. We feel personally responsible for keeping all the plates in the air.

We also get shallow work — because we’re prioritizing juggling it all over doing anything really well. And you know what that does? It teaches our partners that that’s our full value: quick fixes. Firefighting. Smoothing out the rough edges. It also makes it even easier for the organization to keep understaffing our teams. Why would we add headcount if everything’s covered?

So here’s the reframe I want you to try on:

Old frame
We’re understaffed, so my time is stretched.
I have to spread myself across the product to make sure nothing suffers.

Reframe
We’re understaffed, so my time is precious.
I need to protect it for high-value, high-impact work.

What does it look like to start treating your time as precious? I talked to Dylan Wilbanks about this. He’s a senior design manager who told me he was running himself and his team ragged trying to cover all the bases. So he stopped — and here’s what he learned:

You’re taught that saying yes is how you become valuable to organizations. What I found is that’s a trap, because that leads to that weird, demented heroism. You actually have more value if you do fewer things better.

When we chronically “save the day,” that extra effort becomes expected — and we can easily turn into martyrs, transmuting what should be the organizational pain of under-resourcing and poor planning into our own personal pain to bear.

It’s time to let our organizations shoulder that pain.

That’s something Melanie Seibert, a UX manager, learned to do—despite deep fears that saying “no” would hurt her career:

The biggest issue for me was…confronting the fear that someone might say that you’re not doing your job: “This is what I hired you for. I had the expectation that you were going to cover eight products, and you’re not doing that.” That never happened.

Read that again: that never happened. The risk was a lot bigger in her head than it turned out to be in reality.

Once you start setting boundaries, you also gain some space — space to tackle a juicy problem that’s actually fun to work on. So that’s Melanie’s advice:

Try an experiment. What if you drop some of those things and spend more of your time on solving one problem area where you could really sink your teeth in? That’s going to be rewarding to most people. And it’s a good object lesson to everyone around to say, “This person can deliver a lot of value if we give them the right working conditions.”

Dropping things doesn’t mean abandoning them without a word, though. It means showing people the gaps — and then not filling them. This is what Aladrian Goods, a senior content design manager, started doing for her overstretched team:

We’ve done zone coverage, where everything in a pillar goes through one person. So rather than spreading them across tasks, we started to get really clear on the subcategories of work, and call out gaps in red. It’s taking my personal responsibility out of the work getting done, and holding the organization accountable.

It’s also what Michaela Hackner, a global head of UX ops, started doing with her boss:

We’ve published our 2023 commitments, and we update those every quarter. And so if my boss ultimately says, “Hey, I need your team member to do this,” I’ll say: “Take a look at this list. Which of these things do you not want us to do?”

I don’t pretend this shift is easy — as Melanie noted, it can feel quite scary to start to say “no.” But there’s a high price to continuing to say “yes,” too. Burnout, disillusionment, cynicism — even giving up on design entirely.

So what might be different if you treated your time as precious?

Our value

More statements I’ve heard lately that make me want to scream:

• If you want a seat at the table, you need to prove the value of design.
• If you want to be invited earlier, make a case for why.
• People don’t understand what you do. Why don’t you make a deck to educate and evangelize?

I’ve seen way too many people listen to this advice—and it’s left them perpetually on defense, ready to justify their existence at the drop of a hat.

But endlessly justifying yourself rarely changes others’ opinions. It just positions design as something that’s up for debate.

It also does nothing to create that elusive “impact.” Because the more time we spend explaining why design matters, the less time we have to improve the actual product.

And according to Anna Söderbom — who built and led a UX writing team before becoming a localization and UX writing coach — this approach tends to erode our confidence, not build it:

It just creates more impostor syndrome for ourselves, trying to always prove our value. We get stressed thinking, “OK, have I proven myself enough?”

So here’s how I’ve been reframing the concept of value:

Old frame
Design isn’t well understood. I need to prove my value.
I need to create yet another deck to evangelize and educate.

Reframe
Design isn’t well understood. I need to own my value.
I need to assume I belong at the table, and bring a strong POV with me.

According to Dylan Wilbanks, the problem with looking to others to affirm our value is that it creates a never-ending cycle. “You get caught in this ‘I don’t feel valuable, I have to make myself valuable’ trap,” he told me. But we don’t actually need colleagues or bosses to approve of our existence. We need them to engage with our ideas.

So what would happen if we simply stopped explaining why design matters? If that sounds impossible, consider what Jonathan McFadden, a senior content designer, told me:

I had a conversation with my manager around that first round of layoffs last summer. He said something that was so profound, as hard as it was for me to hear it: “If there’s a discipline that has to spend such a disproportionate amount of time proving why it’s important, it’s probably not going to be considered important to the business.”

In other words: justifying your existence sends the message that your existence needs justification. So what Jonathan’s team decided to do instead was to focus on the work itself:

The roadshows aren’t working. The presentations and the decks just do not work. Our hypothesis is that showing up in the work consistently, as a discipline — and being very loud about our work — is probably the best way for us to show the value of our work.

The problem, he told me, is that for a lot of people, “educating” is comfortable. It lets us focus on the tools, the process, the concepts. It doesn’t require the more vulnerable part: sharing a recommendation. Advocating for a design direction. Offering a strong rationale.

“I think we feel shy about showing up in the work, improving impact that way,” he told me. “Because there’s more risk in it.”

He’s not wrong. When we’re bold about our work, we risk someone disagreeing with our ideas or critiquing our execution. But I think what this year has shown is how risky it is to default to education and evangelism. It might be more palatable, but it clearly doesn’t protect our jobs.

So if we want to own our value, we need to get comfortable moving forward simply because we know what needs to happen — even if others still don’t quite get us. That’s something Aladrian Goods told me she encourages her team to do:

If there’s a question that you have, or a meeting that you should be a part of that you haven’t seen, feel free to set those up. Feel free to say, “Hey, this is the intention for this meeting, we’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z.” It’s building that confidence to be able to say, “I don’t need to ask for permission to do this. I can take the lead on doing this.”

So what would happen if you stopped worrying about whether others understood your value, and simply brought that value to the work itself?

What would be different if you stopped waiting for permission?

Our relationships

Here’s a tougher reframe to swallow. Because it’s not about what designers hear from others — it’s what I hear us tell ourselves:

• Product managers don’t care about UX. They just want to ship features.
• Cross-functional partners only see us as pixel-pushers.
• We have to fight back against the people who don’t respect us.

I don’t know your product manager or business partners. But what I do know is this: when we see the people we work with as the problem, no one wins. It creates an us-versus-them that positions our peers as enemies, not fellow humans. We spend our days feeling persecuted, ready for a fight. This kind of chronic stress wreaks havoc on our central nervous systems — and leaves us even more disconnected and alienated.

If you find yourself in this space, here’s the reframe I want you to try on:

Old frame
I feel misunderstood. I need to fight those who don’t value us.
I’m in a constant battle with others who are trying to keep design down.

Reframe
I feel misunderstood. I need to build deeper connections. I’m working with imperfect partners who also want to feel valued.

When we feel insecure, we’re often quick to assume others’ behavior is about us. It feels personal, after all. But the reality is, they’re often just as caught up in their own pressures and preoccupations as we are in ours. As Anna Söderbom told me:

People are not leaving you out because they don’t want you to be there. They’re just not thinking about it, or they haven’t yet realized that they need you. It’s not because you’re not important. It just IS sometimes. And it’s good to have a little bit of distance.

So what do we do instead? Michaela Hackner told me that one of the biggest lessons she had to learn was to drop her adversarial stance. “I used to lean forward in meetings, in aggressive mode,” she told me. “And the more that I found myself sitting back, managing my nervous system and trusting myself, and just having a conversation with people as me, it changed so much, because I wasn’t on the offense anymore.”

This isn’t just important because living on defense is stressful and exhausting (though it is). It’s also important because when we’re in adversarial mode, we’re not curious. We’re guarded and dismissive. That prevents us from actually listening to our partners. It prevents us from finding common ground, and from seeing places where we can move forward together. As Michaela put it:

If we spent the same amount of time trying to understand our partners and what they care about as we spend trying to understand our users, we can paint this picture for everyone: This is what we can do together.

Ultimately, the best way to get someone to see things your way is to try to see things theirs. But we can only do that if we invest in those relationships.

So what would it look like to connect with your partners, instead of fight them?

Your value isn’t up for debate

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this article, it’s this: your value isn’t something to prove. It simply exists, whether people see it or not.

So whenever you get this advice — just do more, be more convincing, make the case again — know that this is gaslighting. It might come from well-meaning people — it might even come from leaders within your discipline who are truly trying to help! But if always proving ourselves, justifying ourselves, and working ourselves to death were going to work, they would have worked by now.

They haven’t. Instead, too many designers are exhausted, cynical, and still always feeling like they are coming up short.

And the kicker is: the more we buy into this gaslighting, the less we can actually make an impact with our work.

The more time we spend trying to “prove value,” the more focused we become on obtaining validation — on being liked and wanted.

This distracts us from the work itself, and erodes confidence in our ideas — because when we’re focused on people-pleasing, we stop having strong opinions. We stop championing new ideas. We’re helpful, sure. But in a way that feels small. Insignificant. Expendable.

But there’s another reason that “proving your value” doesn’t work, and it’s a structural one. See, the whole idea is centered on individual responsibility: the only thing in your way is you. If you just worked harder, or had an MBA, or used the right executive language, you’d have that seat at the table.

You know what’s really in the way? Business structures that are inhumane at the very core. An economic system that prioritizes shareholders and investors over everyone else. Short-term, profit-maximizing, unbridled and exploitative capitalism.

There’s no “managing up” you can do that will change those incentives. But that’s the trick of late-stage capitalism: it convinces individuals that structural problems are personal failings. But as Erika Hall wrote recently, in response to the so-called “UX research reckoning” this summer:

Researchers aren’t getting laid off because they didn’t do a good job proving their value to business. It’s that they were hired into organizations that either didn’t actually have reality-based business models, and/or have been doing short-term investor-centered design instead of anything resembling evidence-based strategy.

The reality is that many of us are working for companies where the business model is fundamentally misaligned to a good user experience, because shareholders and investors are the only audience that actually matters. And shareholders and investors are focused on making a return on their investment right now, at the expense of pretty much everything else: the health of the planet, the lives of workers, users’ wellbeing, you name it. All of that becomes a distant second in a world where shareholder primacy is the standard.

You can’t prove your value to someone whose business model relies on not seeing it.

I’m not gonna lie, this is a bit of a bum-out. Thinking about the ways that businesses are incentivized to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences, doesn’t make me feel great about spending my one wild and precious life helping them. Especially when this reality comes into direct conflict with the reasons so many people I know got into design in the first place: to make the world better. To make things more useful, more inclusive, more beautiful.

But what I’ve come to realize is that we need to learn to sit with this reality, as unpleasant as it may be. We need to get comfortable admitting that there’s no purity in design, and that the idealized version of our profession simply isn’t the reality. Because if we bury our heads in the sand about the incentives of the systems we live in, we stay vulnerable to the gaslighting. We blame ourselves.

It’s often more comfortable to believe that you’re the problem than to accept that the whole system’s rotten.

But once we’re honest with ourselves about the structures that we’re working in, new possibilities open up. We can stop beating ourselves up for failing to change something that’s not in our control, and instead reclaim that for the things we actually can change: our own wellbeing. The way we treat one another. The boundaries we set. The solidarity we build with colleagues.

I don’t know if this will change your company, or your partners’ perceptions of design. But I know we can’t change anything if we keep breaking ourselves trying.

So let’s find out what happens when we change how we see our work instead.

Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you. was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2020, my goals were clear. They were also dead wrong. Here’s how I found my ambition again — and how you might reconnect with yours this year, too.

In January 2020, I started working on a new book. It felt urgent: Technically Wrong had been out for a couple years, and without a fresh title in the pipeline, I worried people might forget I existed. How would I sustain my self-employment if no one knew who I was? Plus, I had just pivoted my work from consulting on tech and design to leadership coaching and training. I had new ideas I wanted to share, and a new focus I wanted people to know about.

But if I’m being honest, there was something else on my mind: my age. I was 36 years old. “I should have another book out before I’m 40,” I thought. That meant it was time to start drafting.

The outline came together quickly, and I felt pretty good about it. But every time I sat down to write, nothing came. I couldn’t summon any of the urgency I’d felt with my other books. The only thing I felt was dread.

When the world shut down two months later, it was almost a relief. Sure, I was riddled with anxiety, just like everyone else. But at least I had a good excuse to abandon my draft.

The rest of that year felt disconnected. I see-sawed between being all-in on my new business and dipping my toe back into the safety of UX work. I felt awkward trying to explain what I was doing to others. I said yes to things that felt wrong, and couldn’t seem to figure out what felt right.

“Maybe I’ve peaked,” I found myself thinking on one particularly low day. “Maybe I’ll never feel that motivation again.”

Now it’s 2023. I’ve got about five months left in my thirties, and I’m no closer to another book than I was three years ago. But I actually feel more ambitious about my work than ever. And what I now know in my bones is this: telling yourself you should want something isn’t the same as actually wanting it.

And the truth is, I really didn’t want to write that book.

Your shoulds might be very different from mine, but after three years of coaching hundreds of women in tech and design, I know I’m far from the only one who struggles with these feelings. My clients have told me countless stories about pushing through and achieving all the “right” things — the things that added up to success on paper — only to find themselves deeply unsatisfied on the other end.

Some dedicated themselves to making “safe” choices — choices their immigrant parents approved of, or that their spouse thought were practical — only to realize, years later, that the career they built felt like a prison.

Some, particularly women of color, felt responsible for the lack of diversity in their organizations — and believed that they owed it to others like them to change their workplaces, no matter how much it took from them to do so. Eventually, they’d hit burnout — and still feel like they had failed the next generation.

Some approached their careers with the vague sense that being a “good feminist” required climbing the ladder — that if they weren’t aiming for the C-suite, they were selling themselves short as women. Then they’d hit the senior role they’d been aiming for all those years, and realize that success in their organization required violating their values and becoming someone they didn’t even like.

Perhaps most common of all, though, were the women who felt compelled to make career choices that their peers and mentors would understand — and believed that if their choices weren’t legible to others in their field, it meant they were doing something wrong.

I’m loath to admit it, but that was me. I didn’t sit down to write another book because I truly had something important to say. What I wanted most was validation: to be told that my career was OK, that my choices were OK, that my existence was OK. And the only way I could think of to get it was to do something other people could see and understand.

Like a book.

But what I can see now is that there was no amount of external validation that would have made me feel OK in that moment. Because what I was struggling with wasn’t really about what other people thought about me. It was about what I thought about myself.

My 2019 had been rough: A project went sideways and I felt scapegoated. I realized I didn’t want to consult on UX and content issues anymore, but wasn’t yet sure what to do instead. My side projects had become the things I most looked forward to working on, but I wasn’t sure how to make them sustainable. Things weren’t working between me and a collaborator, but neither of us knew how to talk to the other about it. And that’s not even getting into the personal crises that hit me and my loved ones that year.

By January 2020, I had figured out the next steps for my career: launch Active Voice, shift my work from consulting to coaching and leadership training, and pivot my writing from looking at biased tech products to talking about the toxic work cultures they come from. But I was so busy moving forward that I hadn’t made any space to process and recover from 2019. And so instead of confidently entering this new phase of my career, I felt tentative. Fragile. Alone.

No wonder I was craving validation.

There’s a lot about the past three years I wish I could erase. But I am grateful that this time forced me to stop looking for approval — to stop judging my value as a human by how much I produced, how hard I worked, or how legible my career was to others.

I know a lot of you feel the same — there’s a reason terms like The Great Resignation and “quiet quitting” have become part of our vernacular. There’s a reason so many people are writing articles about losing their ambition or proclaiming the end of ambition. We’re all renegotiating our lives, and the role of our work within them.

I heard that loud and clear in the research we did with tech and design workers last spring. We asked people how their relationships to work had changed over the past two years—and over and over, respondents told us about massive shifts in their beliefs and values: They were less interested in striving. They didn’t want to “work nights and weekends for capitalism.” They wanted a four-day week, flexible schedules, and a lot more time with family.

Most of all, they wanted an identity that wasn’t their job.

I can’t argue with any of that — I’m trying to live that way myself. But I’ve also noticed something else happening in this big renegotiation. Despite setting firmer boundaries and distancing themselves from their work, a lot of people I talk to don’t actually feel better at work. They’re languishing. Stuck. Rudderless.

“I’m just trying to survive the week,” they say. “I’m just there for the paycheck,” they sigh.

They’re now feeling what I felt in 2020 — after I’d set down that book project, but before I’d figured out where I was actually orienting myself.

What I can see now is this: they’d let go of their old ambitions — the careers that looked good on paper, but felt awful in practice. But they haven’t yet defined any new ones. So now, everything about work feels pointless.

I understand the impulse. It’s self-protective: If nothing matters, nothing can disappoint me anymore. After three years of stress, instability, and a general sense of the world crumbling, I can see how it’s tempting to stay in that numb space.

But honestly, doesn’t that sound like a depressing way to live? Even with great boundaries and a healthy life outside of work, that’s still a lot of hours a week of settling for misery.

I want more than that. I know a lot of you do, too.

So how can we feel motivated at work without resubscribing to hustle culture or turning our jobs into our whole personalities?

I suspect this is a lifelong question — one I’ll keep exploring, and evolving my answers to, as time goes on. But one concept I’ve found useful so far comes from self-determination theory.

SDT is actually a macro set of theories based on a growing body of research dating back to the ’70s, but the basic idea is that humans crave psychological growth — our wellbeing is dependent upon it. But, the theory holds, humans don’t always seek out that growth, even if we know it’s good for us. We need motivation to do so.

We need goals.

That’s what researchers found last year when they conducted a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies from around the world: “Being motivated towards goals — in general — appears to be positively linked with well-being. Striving is better than amotivation,” they wrote.

But not just any goal improves our wellbeing. “If one is interested in reaching for goals that will result in an enduring sense of personal wellness, the what of the goals matters,” they concluded. “When setting goals for oneself, or indeed for others, a focus on money, beauty, and influence at the cost of growing and caring is psychologically detrimental.”

Money, beauty, influence — those are extrinsic goals. They’re based on others’ evaluation and perception of us. They’re the kinds of goals that so many of the women I’ve worked with based their careers around: climbing the ladder, seeking validation from peers. While extrinsic goals can motivate us to action, the research suggests they do little to help our wellbeing: “No matter who or where one is, focusing on extrinsic life goals is linked both to decreased flourishing and increased floundering.”

No wonder so many people I’ve worked with achieved great success on paper — and felt miserable in practice.

Intrinsic goals, on the other hand, are things we pursue because they are personally meaningful — things like personal growth and learning, building deeper connections with others, and living our values in our day-to-day life. And across the board, studies have shown that these are the goals that actually matter — that give us sustained wellbeing and happiness.

In other words, these are precisely the kinds of goals that can break us out of the career malaise so many people are feeling right now. These are the goals that can give us a sense of ambition — without driving us back to overworking and validation-seeking.

When I think about my goals this way, I don’t think about wealth or status. But I do feel ambitious as hell. Because the goals that feel most meaningful to me right now are also really, really hard to accomplish.

Here are a few of the ones I’m working on right now:

• Continue to heal the childhood wounds that make it hard for me to trust others or let people help me, and stretch myself to let go of more things, more often.
• Refine our revenue model so I don’t have to spend all my time running workshops and coaching programs, and can instead invest more deeply in being the present, supportive leader my team needs.
• Create more space in my workdays for creative exploration: reading, writing, play.

But most of us aren’t used to this kind of goal-setting — especially in tech and design, where the steady drumbeat of KPIs and OKRs tells us that the only things worth doing are the things we can measure and quantify.

You can’t reduce “be a more intentional leader” to a SMART goal. It’s not easily tracked on a line chart. No one will throw you a party when you achieve it. But none of that matters.

I’m not doing these things because I think I’ll be rewarded for them. I’m not doing them because I think my peers will even notice.

I’m doing them because I know they’re the right thing to do.

This year, that’s enough.

“Maybe I’ll never feel that motivation again.” was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What happens when setting work boundaries turns into shutting our colleagues out?

In the spring of 2006, I started working at an advertising agency. It seemed fancy at the time: nice offices, luxury cars in the parking lot, lots of women in heels buzzing around. My job certainly didn’t pay enough for one of those BMWs, but I did get business cards and dental insurance. I was 22 and had just moved to Arizona with no money and even fewer connections. I felt lucky to be there.

The work wasn’t glamorous. As a junior copywriter, I spent half my time proofreading others’ work, and the other half trying to drum up creative ways to write about 4,000-square-foot McMansions in planned communities on the fringes of the Phoenix suburbs.

Three months in, I had run out of ways to talk about open floor plans and stainless steel appliances. I’d also noticed a few things — like how one senior writer’s copy was always littered with creepy innuendo. Or how the agency owner would scream at junior account staff whenever a client was upset. Or the fact that we had to be there at 8:30am, no matter how late we’d worked on a pitch the night before.

Then Andrea showed up. Like me, she had just moved to Phoenix with her partner. Unlike me, she’d spent years working at large agencies in Chicago. She took one look around and realized the place was a mess.

Within weeks, I started spending half my days working from her office. We’d bounce ideas off each other and give critiques. We’d get burritos and crack jokes about the creepy guy. She made my work better, and she taught me a lot.

For one, she taught me that I wasn’t lucky to be there. I was actually underpaid and underleveled. I quit that job after 10 months.

But Andrea? She just visited last month. We texted last week. She’s one of the first people I’d call in a crisis. I wouldn’t trade that friendship for anything.

In August, Gallup released a report based on surveys from 15,000 U.S. adults claiming that not only has having a “best friend” at work long been correlated with higher levels of workplace satisfaction, but that this difference has become even more pronounced since the start of the pandemic:

In 2019, 33% of employees who had a work BFF were satisfied, while 23% of those without a work BFF were. That gap widened in 2022 to 32% and 15%, respectively.

Meanwhile, back in March, Capterra released the results of a very different study. They asked 1,000 U.S. employees to rank the relative importance of 14 job satisfaction factors (such as “job security” and “compensation”). Researchers then looked at which factors were most frequently listed within respondents’ top three. What they found was that “relationships with coworkers” was the least important of all 14 factors they tested — less important than recognition, learning opportunities, or relationships with managers. Just 11% of respondents listed it in their top three.

In that study, just over half of remote respondents also said that having friends or other social relationships at work was either minimally or not at all important to them. “Friends at work? Today’s employees aren’t interested,” the study concluded.

So one study tells us that people don’t care about work relationships anymore, and another tells us that people with work friends are happier than those without them. Huh.

This juxtaposition got me thinking: Are we trying to convince ourselves that work relationships don’t matter to us — and ending up more isolated and miserable as a result?

The more articles about work friendships I read, and the more talk with my clients and network about their experiences, the more I believe the answer is yes.

Five years ago, Dr. Marisa G. Franco started her first job at a university. As the only Black assistant professor on faculty, she decided that befriending her colleagues was too risky. “I felt the weight of being very different, and worried the more I exposed myself to them, the more I might experience racism and microaggressions,” she told the New York Times.

But that self-protection ended up coming at a steep cost:

One afternoon, she decided to measure herself on the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, which gauges feelings of isolation. She realized that although she had colleagues all around her, she felt very much alone, because they knew nothing about her beyond her work.

So when Dr. Franco got a new job in 2019, she took a different approach: she started telling her colleagues more about herself — everything from her summer vacation plans to her experience being mistaken for a different Black person at work. It changed her life so much she’s now publishing a book on platonic friendship.

Dr. Franco was certainly right about one thing at that first university job: opening up to colleagues carries risk. People could treat you differently, they could gossip, they could betray you. Management could use your connection to your colleagues as a means of manipulation — making it seem like you’re letting your friends down if you set boundaries.

That’s the thing about vulnerability: it’s risky, by definition. But what we don’t talk about often enough is the other side of the equation.

Hardening yourself — walling yourself off from some of the people you interact with most often — carries risk, too.

For Dr. Franco, that risk was profound loneliness — something researchers were already deeply concerned about before the pandemic, and are now seeing as a crisis of its own.

In my coaching work with people in tech and design, I hear about this kind of loneliness all the time — particularly from people who changed jobs during the pandemic, or whose teams had high turnover. And it’s not just me: UX designer-turned-connection coach Kat Vellos spent this spring talking with designers about their experiences with connection and disconnection, and she found that time and again, loneliness was a major issue. Making matters worse, she wrote, “design culture has an addiction to perfectionism,” so people don’t talk about what’s wrong. In this environment, “lonely designers can falsely believe that they’re the only ones who are having a hard time.”

“But I’m not lonely,” you might protest. “I just keep my social life outside work!” That’s great, and I do think trying to get all of your social needs met at work is a recipe for problematic power dynamics and eroded boundaries. By all means, center your social life elsewhere.

But friendship at work isn’t just about happy hours and “forced fun.” It’s about feeling seen and understood. It’s about feeling like people are in your corner when things get hard.

It’s about knowing that even on your worst day at work, you’re not alone.

That kind of connection only comes when you lower your guard, though — when you take yourself off defense, and find ways to be yourself with the people you work with.

In March of this year, I asked people in tech and design how their relationship to work had changed over the course of the pandemic. More than 200 people responded, and over and over — across job functions, age ranges, locations — I heard the same themes:

“I’ve become more against the idea of ‘career’ and work as a required main ‘identity.’”

“I’m way more transactional now. Labor in, money out.”

“Work is a paycheck that funds my life and hobbies. I owe it 40 hours a week and nothing more.”

“I’m not committing nights and weekends for capitalism.”

I cheered when I read these responses. It felt like a reckoning — a rejection of “lean in” and “rise and grind,” and a reclamation of humanity over hustle.

But I’m also worried at the level of cynicism and despair I see in people right now.

I’m afraid we’re not just distancing ourselves from corporate bullshit, but actually isolating ourselves from the very things we need to make it out of this moment: Community. Connection. Care.

As Yvonne Lam put it recently:

I wonder whether we’ve been enmeshed with work for so long that we don’t know what a healthy boundary could look like, so we’re picking estrangement because it looks like a clear choice.

If you’re not familiar with the term, enmeshment is a psychological concept usually used to describe family systems where boundaries between people are unclear or nonexistent — such as a parent who is so involved in their child’s life, the child struggles to form an independent identity, or is even punished for doing so. Applied to work, enmeshment might mean adopting a company’s goals as your own, prioritizing work above all else, and identifying so strongly with your career that you’re not even sure who you are without it.

In other words, it’s what a lot of professional work culture touted as totally normal before the pandemic.

But while ping-ponging from “work is everything” to “work is nothing” might feel like the solution, it’s not a treatment for burnout. In fact, it might make things worse.

In times when our intrinsic motivation is low — that is, when our work doesn’t feel personally meaningful — it’s actually our work relationships that can save us from burnout. In one study from 2010, which tracked several hundred university employees over a two-year period, researchers found that “for employees who do not experience pleasure or do not find personal meaning in their work, high-quality relationships with coworkers may help them cope with their work experiences and reduce the likelihood of burnout.” They also found that the converse is true: “poor interpersonal relationships with coworkers can make people more vulnerable to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization over time, as well as to depletion of feelings of personal accomplishment.”

Depersonalization. It’s a core facet of burnout, and one I wish we talked about more often. Because depersonalization isn’t just about our own feelings. It’s “the development of dehumanized and cynical attitudes” toward the people around us.

That’s what I’m worried is happening right now — that through the cloud of burnout, too many people are seeing their colleagues less like fellow humans, and more like time-wasting barriers standing between them and their “real lives.”

That’s not setting boundaries. That’s just being a jerk.

Andrea’s not the only lifelong friend I met at work. I met Christine at another agency in 2010. I’ll be at her wedding in October. I met Amanda in 2005 during a brief stint at a for-profit university. We talked last week. I met Katie during training for a call center job in 2003. I saw her when I visited my hometown last month.

I’ve also lost work friends. Some faded out once we stopped working together. A couple fell apart when one or both of us didn’t react to work stress well. I’d love to go back in time and handle those situations differently — set stronger boundaries, communicate my needs more effectively, be a better listener.

But I don’t regret any of those relationships, not even the failed ones. They made me who I am.

I definitely talked about work with all of these friends — sometimes too much, if I’m being honest. But we didn’t just bond over toxic bosses or rude customers. We bonded over live music, home cooking, progressive politics. We bonded through sharing our heartbreaks, our family dramas, our life changes.

We bonded because we took the risk of opening up to one another, and found we had a lot more in common than our job titles.

That’s a risk I’ll keep taking.

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Not here to make friends was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most vivid memories from my youth is the day I got my SAT scores. I had taken them as a junior, so I’d have time to repeat them if I wasn’t happy with the result. But as I stood in front of the mailbox and ripped open the envelope, that worry evaporated. My scores were even higher than I’d hoped.

Most importantly, they were higher than my brother’s.

My older brother was an excellent student. He was in every advanced class, won all the scholarships, was easily his class valedictorian. And I knew all of this, in precise detail, because I had spent my entire childhood tallying his achievements—and then making sure I matched each and every one by the time I was his age.

I rushed through the door beaming, my scores fluttering in my hand, to tell my dad how I’d done.

“That’s pretty good!” he said to me. “Almost as good as your brother.”

That’s when I knew: I was done trying to compete with my brother. What was the point?

So instead of trying to hit all his marks, I started opting out. He was great at math, so I stopped taking math. He was majoring in chemistry, so I avoided the physical sciences entirely. He went straight to grad school, so I decided to just get a job. You can’t lose if you don’t play, I figured.

Twenty years later, I no longer believe the SATs should even exist, and I can see that my dad’s comparison wasn’t just factually incorrect, but a pretty harmful parenting choice. But more than anything, I feel sad for that teenage version of myself. She really loved math. She just couldn’t see any other way out — it was all or nothing. Compete or quit.

So she quit.

I think about this memory every time I read another article about women losing their ambition.

In the past two years, we’ve gone from breathless praise for the girlboss — always an impeccably dressed (and typically white, cis, straight, thin) woman at the helm of an impeccably branded company — to a slew of articles celebrating her demise and labeling this the age of anti-ambition.

I’m not mourning the end of the girlboss era—there was a lot of truth to the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” trend. But I do find myself wondering: what’s beyond that rejection?

Where do we put our ambition now?

That’s been a hard question to answer lately, while so many of us are stuck in a bone-deep burnout — spurred not just by demanding jobs or an unending pandemic, but also by unrelenting and unequal parenting responsibilities, the rollback of reproductive rights, and a pervasive sense of global doom. It’s no surprise that women who’ve spent years hustling and networking and striving—only to feel abandoned by society during a global crisis—have hit their limit.

But as much as I celebrate people using this moment to reset their work boundaries, find meaning outside of their careers, and disconnect their identities from their companies, I’m also worried by some of what I see — and more than a little sad. Because what I notice isn’t just people opting out of hustle culture and hyper-capitalist values.

I see a lot of my peers stuck in cynicism, feeling like they’re not supposed to strive for anything anymore.

I see teenage me, so desperate to break free of the status quo that she rejected the very things that brought her joy.

Who made the girlboss something bigger and worse than what she really was, and who made it feminism’s fault?

— Moira Donegan, “What Was the Girlboss?”

I was halfway through writing this when Moira Donegan published her take on the girlboss backlash this week. Like me, she found herself uncomfortable with all these pieces celebrating the fall of the girlboss:

At its worst, the rejection of the girlboss looked like a plain, rather uninventive form of misogyny, dressed in a flimsy costume of anticapitalism. Did the incessant critique of the girlboss represent a meaningful critique of power itself, or was it merely a thinly-veiled discomfort with the fact that some of that power was held by women?

In Donegan’s view, the real problem with the girlboss wasn’t her ambition. It was the framing of paid work “as a matter of personal fulfillment, rather than of material security.” She continues:

Much of paid work, for women and men alike, is tedious, devoid of ethical expression, and underpaid. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky or already very rich, your paid work probably won’t give your life full meaning.

Full meaning, no. But I disagree that finding meaning in your work is so rare. The reality is that for many, many people — particularly, though not exclusively, those of us in the professional class — the work we choose does contribute substantially to our personal fulfillment.

In my work, I talk to people daily who find great joy in watching their code bring something to life, or who feel deeply fulfilled by advocating for users in their design practice. People who became content designers because they both enjoy writing and feel good about turning jargon and business-speak into plain language. These people, who are predominantly women, do care about their material conditions — and are often deeply aware of the inequities they face. But that’s far from the only thing getting them out of bed in the morning.

I am sure this is also true for Donegan herself: no one becomes a feminist writer for the money. If she got nothing from her work but a paycheck, I suspect she’d choose an easier path than being screamed at by strangers on the internet.

I don’t have any interest in teaching more women that their highest selves can only be found at the top of the career ladder. More CEOs who wear perfect sheath dresses and no-makeup makeup while following the same toxic and exploitative playbooks as the men who came before them won’t fix anything. The girlboss can stay dead.

But what I am interested in is exploring a more nuanced look at ambition and meaning. Because I don’t believe that work has to be either an all-consuming passion or no more than a paycheck.

There’s nothing feminist about asking women to choose between two shitty options. There’s nothing feminist about convincing women that the work they put into the world doesn’t mean anything.

In fact, I’d argue that it’s actually harmful to our mental and emotional health. If everything at work is pointless, making decisions is impossible and exhausting. How do you choose? How can you decide where to focus or which opportunities to take when you have no goals, no sense of how you’d like to grow?

Feeling rudderless day after day is incredibly draining. Even worse, that exhaustion will leave you open to simply adopting other people’s priorities. Instead of people-pleasing like a girlboss—currying favor so you can get ahead—you end up people-pleasing because that makes it easier to avoid thinking about what you really want.

When the only ambition we recognize is that which increases our material security, we also end up making decisions without taking our values into account, as long as the price is right. Trust me, I’ve worked with a lot of women who tried that approach — and then woke up numb and full of self-hatred a few years later.

Work culture is rife with structural problems, and individual interventions to find meaning won’t change that. But this is also your life we’re talking about. You might as well figure out how to feel alive in the place you spend most of your days.

We don’t tend to find much meaning through what we reject, though. We find it through what we choose.

We find it when we allow ourselves to ask what we most want to move toward, not just what we’re getting away from.

And yes, that probably includes re-orienting our priorities toward things outside of work: families, communities, causes. But there are so many meaningful places to orient ourselves while we’re at work, too. Like toward becoming a better collaborator or manager. Or following our curiosity about a new topic or technique. Or building a sense of mastery in our craft.

Each of these things can bring us meaning, can make our days less draining and leave us with more energy for our non-work lives.

Even when they’re performed in a flawed system.

I stopped competing with my brother because I wanted freedom. But simply rejecting his path didn’t give me that. Actually, it gave me the opposite: I lived in chronic doubt that what I was doing instead was good enough. I craved affirmation that my choices were valid.

I had thrown away someone else’s yardstick for life. But it took me years to figure out my own. That’s why I’ve now oriented so much of my work toward helping other people figure out their own relationships to ambition. We all deserve to feel more agency over our lives.

The last math class I took was Calculus 3, in the fall of my senior year of high school. It was hard as hell. I’d love to take it again someday.

This time, for me.

Our newsletter includes essays like this, leadership tools, and information about our workshops and programs. (Expect 1–3 emails a month.) Subscribe here.

Where do we put our ambition now? was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was in Ireland last week, driving around the countryside with my partner and his mom. It was a long-delayed vacation, and a sorely needed escape from…well, you know. Everything was beautiful: lush hills, oceanside cliffs, crumbling medieval monasteries.

But the driving itself? Oh boy.

I’ve driven lots of places. I’ve been laughed at by a bus driver while struggling to start a stick shift up a steep hill in Catalonia. I’ve navigated my way through central Munich in the pre-smartphone era with nothing but my aunt’s scrawled-out instructions. I’ve even driven on the left a few times!

But none of that quite prepared me for the stress of driving a stick on the left in a country where most roads are the width of a toothpick and bounded by stone walls — and where an oncoming truck often forces you to stop entirely and wait for them to inch past.

At one point, we came upon an accident at the edge of a narrow bridge. Everyone was fine, but a car was wedged diagonally, blocking one lane fully and jutting out into the other. After a while, a few brave folks started nosing their way through the narrow opening — the bridge’s stone barrier on one side, the wrecked car on the other. No shoulder, no wiggle room. I could see they had just a couple inches on either side. The truck in front of me waved me ahead — they knew they were too wide to make it. So I held my breath and went for it, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver, visions of insurance claims and hefty deductibles dancing in my head.

Returning that rental car felt like setting down a boulder. I practically floated my way onto the Avis shuttle bus back to the airport.

That’s when it hit me: I had spent the whole week feeling vigilant — always on the lookout for a wandering sheep, or a stalled car, or an oncoming tour bus. Always thinking “little left, big right” at intersections. Always holding my breath, just a little.

And I didn’t realize how heavy it felt until I set it down.

A lot of people I work with are having similar realizations: “I didn’t realize how much anxiety my job gave me until I quit,” they tell me. “I didn’t realize how burnt out I was till my body physically shut down and I couldn’t work for three months,” they say.

That’s how chronic stress gets you: by becoming so normalized that it no longer registers as stress. It’s just the air you breathe.

The trouble is, there’s a lot to feel stressed about right now — threats to democracy, to bodily autonomy, to health and safety. You can’t just drop a nation-state off at the return counter and get your deposit back. Some worries we’re stuck carrying.

But when there are so many truly heavy things weighing us down, what we sure as hell don’t need to do is add more rocks to our pockets.

Yet that’s what we often do. We fret over little things. We micromanage. We feel certain the world will fall apart if we let something drop.

It makes sense. When your nervous system’s flooded with stress, everything starts feeling scary. Risks get overblown: If I say no to this project, I’ll lose my job. If I speak up, everyone will hate me.

In times like these, staying vigilant to everything and everyone is tempting. It feels like it will help you stay safe. If I can just monitor everything around me and never slip up, maybe things will be okay. But of course, you can’t monitor everything. No one can.

And in fact, trying to do so will probably just drain you further.

Take Amanda Ripley’s story. She’s a journalist who used to spend hours a day reading the news. It felt like her professional responsibility. But a few years ago, she started finding that the more she engaged with the news, the less able she was to do anything else — including her job. “I felt so drained that I couldn’t write,” she says.

I gave myself stern lectures: “This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”

The problem is, I wasn’t taking action. The dismay was paralyzing. It’s not like I was reading about yet another school shooting and then firing off an email to my member of Congress. No, I’d read too many stories about the dysfunction in Congress to think that would matter. All individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.

You hear that? Marinating in despair. I’ve definitely been there, and I bet you have too: overwhelmed, stretched thin, stuck in extreme thoughts. Everything is falling apart. Everything is hopeless.

That’s not gonna help a damn thing.

After coming to terms with her news avoidance, Ripley spent a year researching how we might remake journalism for this era. What she found was that there are three things humans need to live full, informed lives: hope, dignity, and agency.

Agency. Let’s talk about that one. Because I think that’s at the heart of so much work stress right now — a feeling that we don’t have agency. That we don’t have choice. That’s why I loved this post from Beth Fox, all about her burnout recovery. The whole thing is powerful (read it!), but there was one sentence that really stopped me in my tracks:

I’m learning to give up “custody” of problems until someone comes along to take them over.

Custody of problems. I read this and knew exactly what she meant. Those problems that you’re not solving, that you actually have zero capacity for right now…but that live in your brain and clog up your thoughts nevertheless.

These are the rocks we stick in our pockets, weighing us down further precisely when we need to lighten the load. We often feel like we have to hold onto these rocks — like we have no agency. But what Fox found was that, ultimately, she did have choices. She could “Marie Kondo” her life. It was deeply uncomfortable. It meant saying no to things that were exciting. But it was possible. And it was necessary.

So today, I encourage you to take a moment. Close your eyes, and breathe deeply. Where have you been holding your breath? Which rocks are in your pocket? What would it look like to release custody of some of them right now?

This post originally appeared in the July 12, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.

The rocks in your pocket was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Early in my career, I worked closely with a more senior colleague. They were smart, experienced, and took no shit. I looked up to them. I learned from them. More than anything, I wanted to impress them.

There was just one problem: I was never quite sure where I stood with them. “Is this what they had in mind?” I’d ask myself after sending a document their way. “How did they think that went?” I’d wonder after running a workshop.

I didn’t actually ask them those questions, though. I didn’t tell them when I needed more information, or when I wasn’t sure what they had meant. I was afraid that if I did, they’d think I was insecure, too needy. I was afraid they’d stop trusting my work. I was afraid they’d like me less.

So instead, I tried to play sleuth: What’s behind that facial expression? Why are they being distant? How can I make them happy? And I spent a lot of time quietly hoping I’d never disappoint them.

Then one day, I did.

Suddenly, all that communication I’d wished for came flooding in. They told me just how badly I’d screwed up. That I should have realized much sooner that things were going off the rails. That I’d been out of line and unprofessional. It was incredibly painful, and I walked away brimming with shame. Our relationship never recovered.

Years later, though, I can see that the problem started so much earlier than that awful moment. Our working relationship failed because we had never truly communicated: They’d said very little, and I’d pretended not to need more.

Honestly, it was the same way I’d handled dating as a young person: Fish around for clues about what the other party was thinking. Drop subtle hints. Over-analyze every sentence. But never, ever talk to them about the relationship outright.

It didn’t work when I was dating, and it certainly didn’t work with this colleague. But I can also see now why it felt so normal to me. It’s how I grew up — always on uncertain footing, scared of upsetting someone. I was so used to feeling unsafe that I didn’t even realize that’s what I was feeling. This was just what relationships were like.

I know I’m not alone in this. So many people I work with in my coaching practice tell me how nervous they feel asking for their needs to be met at work. They’re scared that they’ll lose credibility if they have too many questions, that they’ll be perceived as “difficult” if they set boundaries. That if they aren’t perfect all the time, they’ll be rejected.

And sometimes? They’re right. If they’re not working in a safe environment, they’re not wrong to try and protect themselves.

But what I wish someone had told me long ago is this: If you can’t safely express your needs in a relationship, that’s not a problem with your needs. That’s a problem with the relationship. Suppressing your feelings while guessing at theirs will never fix it — no matter how good you get at it.

If you’re in a leadership position in your organization, I hope you’re reading this carefully. While healthy communication relies on both parties being present and honest with one another, the stakes aren’t equal for everyone involved. The less power someone has, the riskier it is for them to be direct about their needs and boundaries.

The converse is also true: the more power you have, the greater your responsibility to start and steward these conversations.

So if you’re a leader looking to make it safer and easier to talk about hard things, where do you start? It’s actually quite simple: normalize talking about your working relationship. Not just checking in on projects and progress, but the relationship itself.

Here are a few topics I recommend:

• What would a thriving work relationship look like to each of you? What’s a definition of thriving that you can both agree on?
• What’s working well right now in your relationship, and what’s getting in the way of thriving?
• What’s been left unsaid recently? What do they need to feel more comfortable saying those things?
• What behaviors make them feel seen, understood, and respected? What behaviors do the opposite?
• What topics are difficult for each of you to discuss? How will you let one another know when something’s uncomfortable? How will you work through it?
• How do you want to treat one another when things are difficult? Which behaviors will help you work through rough patches, and which ones will make things worse?

If you’re anything like me, these kinds of conversations might feel weird at first. Actually, scratch that: they’ll feel downright bizarre. That’s not because they’re wrong or bad, though. It’s because a lot of us never learned to communicate about our needs and expectations. Instead, we’ve often learned to do what I did back in the day: guess, assume, and hope it works out.

Changing this habit isn’t easy. It triggers discomfort for a lot of people. But leaders, I say this with love: It’s time for us to work through that squirm. Because the alternative is exhausting for everyone.

If your team has to guess at what you’ve left unsaid, they’ll need constant vigilance — and they’ll still get it wrong sometimes. If they don’t feel safe sharing their needs with you directly, they’ll waste time hinting around — and you’ll still miss their signals sometimes.

This is a lot of extra work even in the best of times, but let’s be real: We are not in the best of times. Pretty much everyone I know already feels frayed — whether they’re grieving for Ukraine or Uvalde, worrying about inflation or abortion rights, trying to protect trans kids or avoid catching COVID. The last thing anyone needs right now is a workplace that leaves them feeling even more uncertain and anxious.

So if you want to lead in a way that respects your team’s humanity and eases their burden in hard times, I hope you’ll think about your own communication habits. What difficult conversations do you avoid? When do you stick to talking about the work when you really need to talk about the working relationship? What do you need to work through to change those habits? I promise I’ll keep doing the same — and sharing what I learn as I go.

This post originally appeared in the June 8, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.

No more guessing games was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Earlier this year, I shared our new research report on how tech and design folks’ relationships to their work have shifted over the past two years (if you missed it, grab it here — it’s a fascinating read, based on responses from 236 people). The longer I spend immersed in that research, the more I keep coming back to one simple idea:

We all need to listen more.

Especially those of us in leadership roles. Especially right now.

Here’s why: In our survey, we asked respondents how supportive their managers had been over the past two years on a scale of 1 to 5. And then we asked two open-ended follow-ups:

What’s the most valuable thing your direct manager has done to support your needs in the past year?

What do you wish your manager would do differently to better support you at work?

When we assessed the data, I noticed something: those who’d rated their managers’ support over the past year highly — a 4 or 5 — tended to say that the most helpful thing their manager had done was just listen to them. It was far and away the most common theme we saw. We heard things like:

• “Listen and cultivate a relationship where I feel safe and understood. Oh my god the value of this…cannot even express how much it means to me.”
• “Creating space to vent, ask for support (and then follow up on them). I can’t say enough about how much psychological safety my current director has built, she’s a gem.”
• “Genuinely listening to me, and not making assumptions, or making me feel like I’ve failed, when I’ve been struggling.”
• “Listened. She has never tried to sugarcoat any feedback or dismissed concerns. She’s always put the ‘human’ side of work first and seems to be very invested in my success as more than just an employee.”

We also looked at those who had rated their managers’ support poorly — a 1 or 2. When asked what they wished their managers would do differently, they said things like:

• “We never actually have a conversation about me, my professional development, my goals… Every conversation is about project health and profitability.”
• “I wish he would just listen to me. When I say I’m overworked and need more time to finish something, I want him to hear me and do something. I don’t need compliments… I don’t have imposter syndrome, I have unrealistic deadlines.”
• “Work with me instead of at me.”

The longer I compared these answers, the clearer it became: the managers who listen deeply — who go beyond checking in on tasks and instead create the space and safety for their direct reports to share their experiences — are the ones people want to stick with.

The ones who don’t are driving their people out.

So, like I said: We all need to listen more. It’s a simple idea — but that doesn’t make it easy to practice.

I used to think I was pretty good at listening. And in some ways, I was. When I was consulting on content strategy and product design, I could interview stakeholders or users for a day or two, and come out the other end with a perspective on the problem space and our approach to it. I could ask questions that would get underneath the surface-level issues. I knew how to pay attention to people’s word choice, body language, and energy.

That was great as a consultant working on business problems — after all, problem-solving was my job. Whether the problems we were solving were strategic, structural, or editorial, my job was to diagnose the situation, and come up with answers. And so all my listening was oriented in that direction: assessing and fixing.

I bet the same is true for a lot of you. In fields like design or engineering, much of the work is about assessing problems, and then solving them. We hone skills like critique and analysis. We brainstorm solutions. We align stakeholders. We fix things.

Those are all great skills to have. But what I’ve learned over the past few years — often the hard way — it’s that when we only listen through a lens of assessing or fixing, we miss so much.

Especially when what the other party needs to share is their experience.

Especially when what they most want is to feel understood — to feel seen and heard and important.

And those are exactly the kinds of conversations people need right now — which means it’s time for all of us who manage or lead people in any way to get better at listening. Not just listening to judge, or to respond, or to evaluate. But listening deeply, holistically, and non-judgmentally.

So what does deep listening look like? Look back at those quotes above, from the people describing highly supportive managers. Deep listening is about letting go of your own agenda, and allowing yourself to be fully present for the other party.

The challenge is, when you’re listening to someone on your team, you almost certainly do have your own agenda. You might be feeling pressure from your boss to move faster and get more done. You might be worried about hitting OKRs or concerned about your own performance review. You might have a vision for the team’s growth, and be excited about implementing it.

None of those things is wrong or bad. But each of those agendas will get in the way of listening deeply — because as soon as we’re focused on ourselves, we stop being truly open to someone else. Instead of listening with compassion, we start thinking about all the ways their experience conflicts with our own. We start making assumptions about why they feel the way they do. We start justifying our way of seeing things, trying to convince them that it’s right. We get defensive.

None of those will make our people feel heard.

What will? Simply pausing our own agenda — for the moment — and getting curious about their experience. What has work felt like for them lately? What’s hard for them right now? Rather than judging whether those things should be hard for them, deep listening is about simply accepting and acknowledging what you’re hearing. You might say something like, “I hear how hard this has been for you,” or “Thank you for trusting me with this.”

This is also a great time to have some open, compassionate questions in your back pocket — questions that encourage the other party to share more fully. These might be things like “What kinds of support would be most helpful to you?” or “What’s draining you most right now?”

If this kind of listening feels uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Most of us learned to listen for three reasons: to judge (Are they right or wrong?), to respond (What will I say back?), or to understand the facts (What really happened?). But what we’ve heard loud and clear in our research is that people need something deeper right now. They need support, compassion, and safety. And the better you get at deep listening, the more you can offer those things to them.

To help you out, I’m sharing a couple tools for deeper listening and better conversations: a handout on listening and acknowledging, and a set of open questions for more compassionate 1:1s. While I made them with managers in mind, I know that every single one of us, in any role, can benefit from these skills.

Happy listening.

This post originally appeared in the April 21, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.

“I wish he would just listen to me.” was originally published in Nice Work on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.