My wife has a dream. She calls it her “lotto dream” — the big, extravagant lifestyle choice she would make if she could have anything in the world. Many of us do. Maybe you do, as well. Yours might be a chalet in Tuscany or a trip around the world or a wardrobe of couture.

Hers is a 90’s-era Toyota Tacoma pickup.

The other day, on a dog walk, we passed one sitting in a driveway, covered in dirt and cobwebs, and she swooned.

I said, “Babe, we have two cars. Just trade yours in and get one. It’s not like you’re lusting after a cherry Corvette. It definitely will cost less than your paid off Nissan.”

She was shocked. She literally put her hand over her heart and stared at me. (Side note omg she’s the best.) It hadn’t occurred to her that she could just... do that thing. Stop pining and buy the $10k used car! LIVE YOUR DREAM!

On the way home she was stunned and ecstatic. She waxed rhapsodic about how she will turn heads when she drives that old truck down the street. (I don’t know how you could look away from that level of pure joy, to be honest.)

Here’s a harder version of the same thing.

I have a friend who described her job as “a prison cell with the door open.” This friend is a relentless achiever. You know that tech company? She’s worked for it. She’s done marketing work that has made those companies millions. She looks at her career with a structured pragmatism — collecting resume builders, working for different size companies to get a breadth of experience, from startups to FAANG giants. She recently told me that the juggernaut for which she currently works has a culture that feels stiff and uninspiring. Her boss is “likable” but requires a lot of managing up. She figures she’ll spend another year or two there before it becomes unbearable. In the meantime, she’s cooking up ideas. She’s dreaming of side hustles.

I said to her, “You know how to make money.” Because she does.

Recently she pitched an idea to me to help me grow my business, in exchange for a percentage, which I immediately said yes to.

She said, “I’m not sure I do.”

Lady, you literally just got me to write you a check from a single text message. I must disagree.

The idea that you can’t make money? That’s what keeps you sitting in your prison cell, despite the fact that the door is hanging open.

But I don’t think it’s really about the ability to make money.

Starting something new requires you to jump off a cliff.

Working for yourself requires you to jump on a regular basis. When I started Whipsmart, my PR firm, I learned quickly how to do it.

Each time I reached out to a contact, took an intake call, wrote a proposal — I had to work through the emotional run-up. The reason we don’t jump off cliffs is because we have a reasonable expectation that we would die. Most of us stay safely on the ground, a truly reasonable decision. But there are a few thousand people each year who gear up and try BASE jumping — flinging themselves off of high places for fun. They push past whatever fear grips them because they believe the rewards will be worth the risk1.

Building my business took a lot of conversations, a lot of networking, a lot of proposals. Each time I pitched our services, each time I reached out to someone new, I built up the skill of the emotional base jump. Turns out, the work that I and my team did was valuable to a lot of companies. We have done incredible work over the years, and billed millions of dollars. Those base jumps were absolutely worth it.

It’s not that you don’t know how to make money. It’s that some part of you believes that the risks are so high that you’re safer sitting in that cell.

My wife can buy the truck. She always could. The story she told herself — that a Tacoma was a lotto dream, not a real one — was the only thing in the way.

We tell ourselves that our dreams are impractical, impossible, unattainable, not doable. In that way, we make sure they are.

What’s the $10k used car version of the thing you’ve been pining after? Go look at the price tag today.

Early in your career, you’re rewarded for raw competence: the flawless spreadsheet, the perfect deck, the late nights crossing every t. It makes sense you’d develop a deeply-honed vigilance for being right.

But the further up the ladder, the softer the skills required. There’s a whole other currency that may not show up on your resume: warmth, relationship-building, and EQ. People crash and burn when they can’t regulate their emotions. Brilliant executives derail1 when they lack human connection, even if their deliverables are getting met. Relationship building is the way we build trust. When people trust you, they don’t mind if you make mistakes. When you’re seething, defensive, unregulated and overworked, people don’t see the work you’re doing. They only know how you’re making them feel.

High-achieving women, especially, are socialized to take on more than we can reasonably handle. We spend our lives making sure nothing falls through the cracks at home or at work. If a ball gets dropped, we pick it up. If a presentation is half-baked, we stay late to finish it. Years ago, a friend and I came up with a phrase to describe a way out of this trap: Smile more, do less.

What does it mean to smile more and do less?

You very likely built your career by demonstrating vast competence, technical knowledge, and a dedication to the work. You may have taken on the unofficial role of making sure the action items happen, that every presentation has all the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted.

We watch our less vigilant peers blithely make mistakes while charming their way through the organization. (Nowadays, the kids might say there’s a personality hire exercising weaponized incompetence. Potato PoTAHto.)

We overwork ourselves and start to nurse violent fantasies of stabbing that coworker everyone loves between the eyes with a pencil. And because we are doing work that technically falls on someone else’s plate, we’re mostly not being acknowledged for the extra work at all. We think, “Doesn’t anyone SEE what’s happening here?”

At this point, we have become grumpy and passive aggressive. That personality hire is not only getting away with far less drudgery; everyone wants to hang out with them and no one wants to be around you.

In my work as a coach and a therapist, I tell clients that resentments are a signal that they have an unmet need. At this point, you have many of them to address.

“Smile more, do less” is not about slacking. It’s about taking responsibility for the part of the mire that you can control.2 It’s about setting and holding boundaries, and right-sizing the work so you can introduce more ease into your life and improve your work relationships at the same time. Perhaps the reason that spreadsheet wasn’t perfect is because realistically it did the job and no one is ever going to look at it again. Maybe it’s okay if Chad’s presentation kind of sucks, because that’s not even your work. Chad can be responsible for Chad. If the company doesn’t get the account because of it, Chad (and his boss) can deal with that.

Here’s the structural fact that smile more, do less is built on: people don’t succeed just because they’re really good at paperwork, the grind, even strategy. Even results. People ultimately succeed because other people want to work with them. And no one wants to work with the person who is seething with resentment.

If you’re feeling an angry prickle of resistance right now, I get it. (Write what you know!)

The things you do are technically correct. You are doing more work. But the voice telling you to fix everything is a habit from earlier in your career, the kind of overcompensation that got you here but won’t get you further.

Know this: you don’t need to prove yourself anymore. Everyone already knows you’re competent.

It’s time to step into the next part of your career. The part where you do less, so you can smile more.

Where can you do less?

When I say “smile more,” I’m not talking about performative friendliness. I’m talking about genuine ease — an actual better state of mind that shows up in how you work with people. Do less is a permission structure. Here are some ways to grant yourself that permission:

Make peace of mind a KPI. Right now, work ambition and the ambition to feel better may feel like they’re in conflict. They don’t have to be. Ask yourself what needs you have that aren’t currently being met, and what you can do to bridge that gap. The things that restore you — the run, the hour to yourself, the after work drinks with a friend — aren’t indulgences. They’re necessary tools. The inner voice that says “if you take time for this, you will fail” has it backwards. Try: “if I don’t take time for this, I will fail.”

Prioritize connection over perfection. This means releasing your death grip on the idea that you need to be right. It’s cutting you off from other people. If you find yourself arguing with Chad in your head before you drift off to sleep, it’s time to stop being right and start being curious. There’s a saying in marriage counseling: you can be right, or you can be married. At work, you can be right, or you can have allies. Choose allies. As soon as you’ve set up a situation when one person wins and one person loses, the relationship has already taken the hit. If you’re prioritizing a relationship, you welcome another person’s point of view (even if you think they’re wrong. Especially if you think they’re wrong). Sometimes, people just want to be heard. You don’t have to agree to hear someone out. The act of listening lowers the stakes and eases the path forward.

Ask for help. I’m not saying you’d ever say to your boss, “that’s not in my job description.” I’m not crazy. But you can ask for help prioritizing. “Hey, I’m fully focused on getting the Q3 strategy locked down by Friday. To make sure that stays on track, I need to leave Chad’s presentation entirely with him. If I step in to polish his slides, the strategy deadline is going to slip. Are we aligned on keeping my focus on the Q3 launch?”

Start small. Pick one ball this week that isn’t yours, and watch it hit the floor.

Chad will survive. So will you. But only one of you will be smiling about it.

If you have a friend who is currently staying up until midnight fixing someone else’s slides, send this to them. They probably need the permission to let it drop.

Ready to do this work with a thinking partner? Signal Strength

Here’s a tale of two conversations from this week.

The client.

I had a client write out all the qualities of her dream job.

It came with an excellent list of must-haves: killer team, juicy challenges, cool mission, good boss. The things she loves to do — parachute in and fix a project that stumbled, manage big stakes, solve complex problems. Collaborate with smart people. Each one carefully couched within what she considers her lane.

The very last item, right under “I’d like to work flexibly”:

“I want to create a retreat center with a therapist friend where we can offer workshops on career development, self-care and actualization with mid-career women. This will take place in a tranquil Northern California location. I will facilitate these workshops. We will create corporate-specific retreats for tech companies like Google and will use the revenue generated from these budgets to offer affordable opportunities for people from all walks of life.”

One of these things is not like the other.

Our collaboration dashboard is full of recruiter calls for exec positions at tech companies. Meanwhile, there’s a fully formed business plan casually lurking at the bottom of the list.

The friend.

A friend I’ve known for 20 years, whose career is a thing of legends, called to talk about a position she’s interviewing for. “Interviewing” might be a misnomer, considering the dance they do when big public companies headhunt a key exec. Orchestrating, maybe? A litany of meetings and tests and conversations, an invisible network of calls and backchannel reputation checks, CEO to CEO. They probe and prod and look for weakness. A process requiring a candidate with a constitution of steel.

She knows she wants to leave her current position. She has options at a level of responsibility and compensation most of us will never see. Deservedly so. A generational talent.

During our conversation, she talked about the responsibilities and expectations of the position, and then she paused. “I have a vision for what I see as the future of my industry and practice. I see the impact that AI and other forces are having. I want to help usher in the next generation of folks as we shape what the future of this looks like, together. I’m hoping I can use their resources to do that.”

I said, “Why don’t you just do it on your own? It’s such a clear vision, you could absolutely build that.”

She gave me an immediate and decisive: “I can’t. I’m not ready.”

Why not?

Her kids are about to go to college. She wants the bandwidth for them and for her family in the coming year. She wants to deepen the relationship with her partner and support him as their parents age.

“Do you think the job you’re looking at — at the compensation they’ll pay you — is going to take less bandwidth from you than doing your own thing?” I don’t know for certain. But I cannot imagine a world where that would be true.

The case.

When you’re deferring your dream, you’re often working very hard. It’s not out of a lack of motivation or fear of hard work. Instead, we construct a case. We are masters at building the evidence, which is based both in realism (doing this plan would require capital I don’t currently have) and in arguments we make to obscure something deeper. From within the safety of that case, there’s no need to pursue the other thing. At least not right now.

Part of what makes the case so convincing is this: building your own thing requires a different kind of work than most high achievers have ever done. These are people who excel at operating within a structure. Give me the KPI, I’ll hit it. Give me the framework, I’ll master it. That is a real and hard-won skill.

Building something from scratch requires a different question: what is the framework? Do I have to build it myself? Not knowing what winning looks like before you’ve defined it is genuinely uncomfortable for people who’ve built their identity on knowing the answer. The case feels true in part because this part of it is.

Here’s the rub: the path they’re choosing instead may not be as secure as it looks. Spirit Airlines closed overnight. Whole divisions of companies have are being eliminated in a single budget conversation. The exec role that felt solid last year was gone by Q1. The certainty you’re trading the dream for was never guaranteed, and it is less guaranteed now than it has ever been.

In fact, at the end of the day, we are not guaranteed any tomorrow. Tim Denning uses this mindset to create what he describes as a “psychopathic sense of urgency:”

Whenever I try to delay priorities I tell myself “Timbo, you had a near-miss with cancer in 2015. What the hell makes you think you have the extreme privilege of being alive in three months to start this goal then?”

Without fail this thinking always makes me move faster. Believing you’ll be alive beyond today is sheer arrogance. It’s ego. And it’s bloody disgusting. How dare you. You could be dead tomorrow. So do it today or shut up and stop complaining

A psychopathic sense of urgency is a pattern interrupt. Use it.

He uses this as a way to keep himself focused. I think it’s also a useful way to tackle some of the objections in our case. My brain is excellent at spinning elaborate what-ifs (what if I fail, what if I do it and I hate it), and a surefire way to put those in perspective is to remind myself that the only thing I know for sure is I’m going to die, so if I want to do the thing, I better do it now.

As always, for every case, there’s a counter.

How to argue your case.

Like a good lawyer, you should be able to argue both sides. List every reason you can’t do the thing, then argue as opposing counsel.

I don’t have the skillset. I’ve only ever worked in one industry. Your honor, I object. Each of these skills can be put to good use building the thing you want to build. Any you don’t have, you can learn.

This isn’t the right time. For the jury’s consideration: what would the right time actually require that this time doesn’t have?

Building that would take way too many resources. Permission to cross-examine the witness: please list all the resources the current path requires. Then compare them to the other one.

You built the case. Give it a prosecutor.

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If it resonated with someone you know, send it their way.

Last year, I emerged from a camping trip with a gnarly tooth infection and some of the worst pain of my life. My dentist took one look, declared she couldn’t help, and sent me to an endodontist.

Enter the doctor I will call Eastern European Judge Judy.

Wiry, curt, and generally frustrated, this woman was not having any of my emotional bullshit. She did not care that I was in so much pain I was weeping; she reacted like I was a spoiled child and snapped, “I’m trying to help you! Stop crying!” She suggested that instead of her cleaning out the infection in the moment, a procedure that might involve more pain temporarily (and her having to deal with my reaction to that pain) that she send me home with antibiotics that might alleviate my pain in a few days.

An earlier incarnation of me might have spun out, apologizing and wallowing in the shame of this woman’s anger at my tears while I (inevitably unsuccessfully) attempted to stop crying.

Instead, I thought, “Wow, she’s really uncomfortable with my feelings, but that’s not about me. I’m going to cry right now because that’s how I feel.” I said to her, “Give me a minute.” I cried for a bit then called her back in and insisted she go to work despite the pain. My tears were not an indication that I was incapable of handling whatever needed to be done. Her suggestion was more about her own comfort than my very real needs as a patient.

It’s not about you.

For many years now, “It’s not about you” has been a mantra. It gives you the distance to put into context everything from a snippy stranger in a parking lot to a boss who snaps at you about typos. The big secret to know is: if someone is acting in an outsized way, that’s when it’s the least about you. Someone is afraid, defensive, in a word: triggered. Give yourself the space from all that.

It’s not even about other people.

Many people I work with as a therapist or as a coach say, “I care too much about what other people think.”

The tricky part about caring what people think is that, the vast majority of the time, you have no actual idea what someone is thinking. Sometimes, what you care about is what they say they’re thinking. Even more often, people are describing an imagined version of what someone else is thinking.

“I’m worried everyone thinks I look dumb in this hat” isn’t actually about what everyone is thinking. It’s about a version of those people you made up in your head, then put words into their mouth. That voice is your own inner critic playing dress-up. So, so often, what we are worried about isn’t what someone else is thinking, it’s what we are thinking about ourselves.

Many times, when you say “I care too much what people think about me,” You’re telling yourself ghost stories and getting terrified. The terrifying part is the spectre of someone else giving voice to your worst fears about yourself. In other words, most of the time when you say “I care too much about what other people think,” it’s not about other people at all. It’s about you. It turns out, you’re excellent at telling ghost stories!

And here’s the real truth about what other people think: those are their thoughts. And you can’t control other people’s thoughts and feelings. Nor are you responsible for them.

The good news is the practice of “It’s not about you” works on both — the real reactions and the imagined ones.

Three steps to build your “It’s not about you” muscles.

For me, working as a therapist is what created a strong enough set of these muscles to show up even through pain and tears. But you don’t have to be a therapist to practice for yourself. Try these three steps when you feel your hackles rising:

1. Pause. Take a breath. Take three. Especially if you feel yourself wanting to act immediately. When it’s time to break out “It’s Not About You,” it’s usually when someone said something that got your hackles up, or scared you, or made you feel shame. Alternatively, when you get that sudden stomach drop that someone might be thinking something less than generous about you - it’s time for a time out.

2. Name it internally. What’s going on here? That client who works your last nerve because he changes everything at the last minute? That’s not because your work isn’t good enough. It’s because he doesn’t trust himself enough to delegate. That’s not about you - that’s about his anxiety and insecurity. Alternatively, if you find yourself wondering if the person who hasn’t texted you back might be mad at you - ask yourself three other reasons they could have not replied. (Maybe they’re feeling overwhelmed about something else today. Maybe they left their phone in another room.) That shift in perspective can help you diffuse big feelings faster.

3. Set a boundary. When Eastern European Judge Judy rolled her eyes at my tears, I asked her for a minute alone. That was a gift to me, acknowledging to myself that I deserve that space. Then I demanded she give me the care I deserve. That client demanding changes at 8PM? That’s an email you shouldn’t be reading, much less replying to. That voice in your head wondering if a friend might be mad at you because the tone of their last reply was off? Ask it to take a break. Because, say it with me, it’s not about you.

When Eastern European Judge Judy came back in the room after my cry break, I had taken off my jacket. She saw my many tattoos and she admonished me, “You have tattoos! You can take pain!” to which I said, “Yes I can, and that is information for you!” As I left, I asked if she might prescribe me some pain medication. She yelled, as she walked out the door, “YOU CAN TAKE ADVIL!”

The final boundary: finding a new endodontist.

Where does this show up for you? Hit reply — I read everything.

And if you think this might resonate with someone in your orbit, send it their way.

On my very first day of grad school, I met the 20-person cohort I’d spend the next two years with. As each person introduced themselves (name, background, fun fact), I was ruthlessly evaluating them in my head. That person sounds smart. I don’t know about that person. That person seems intimidating.

After class, I got in my car and felt deeply uncomfortable. I felt like maybe those people must have disliked me, afraid I’d made a bad impression. Then it hit me: I was assuming they judged me because I was judging them. What I was really doing, underneath all of it, was calculating: who here is useful? Who is going to help me climb, who is going to get in my way, and who am I going to have to step over?

We’re taught by the systems we’re in to be competitive with those around us, especially in work and school systems. Many of us internalized an identity that includes constant competition, maneuvering, stack ranking. We became people who know how to read a hierarchy and figure out how to climb it. The problem is, all this evaluation is in direct opposition to connection. Evaluation is isolating. It pits us against each other. And we are built for connection — it’s a deeply human quality, and unlike title or job level, a durable source of power.

The calculus in that parking lot wasn’t really about them. It was the same calculus I’d been running on myself: who am I relative to everyone else? Useful enough. Impressive enough. Far enough along.

When you measure the people around you by cog qualities — title, output, how close they are to power — you’re using cog qualities as your own measuring stick. The same instinct, pointed in two directions. The competitive framework you absorbed — the one that runs the ranking in your head — is the same one that makes your career feel like your identity. And if you feel misaligned with your career, that identity can become confusing and painful. Untangle one and you start to untangle the other.

I’ve written before about the forces restructuring the workforce right now: AI, RTO, political instability. I don’t think we’re facing an apocalypse. But your job is going to change, and possibly your economic reality. For most people, that’s uncomfortable. For the people whose identities are built on cog qualities (title, compensation, job level), it’s something closer to existential. The job is threatened. So is the self.

This is the moment for what I’ve started calling the Great Disentanglement.

A friend and I were talking recently about what you’d tell a college student today, in a world of large language models, when grades and placements can be gamed with AI. She asked what major I’d recommend to a kid to get the best job out of school. I said: college was never career training. It’s how you learn to think. I’d tell a student to pursue what engages them, collect experiences for the joy of it, trust that the education will help them tie it all together into a life.

I’d give the same advice to every working adult right now.

The Great Disentanglement isn’t just about protecting your own identity from a disrupted market. It also frees you to actually connect with people. It frees you to connect with yourself, to remember the parts of work that fuel you and discard the rest. And connection — real, human, attentive connection — AI can’t replicate.

Your job is going to change. Ground yourself in something that doesn’t. That means doing the actual work of identifying your values — not listing them, but examining where they’re showing up in your life and where they’re not. Understanding your best qualities independent of your job description. Stopping the habit of measuring your life by your employer’s metrics. You have to do the work of figuring out who you are inside and outside that system, even (especially) if you’re going to continue to work within it.

Most people end up misaligned not because something went wrong, but because they let some other part of them drive. The Great Disentanglement is how we take the wheel.

Want to start disentangling? Start here: What feelings come up for you when you imagine a world without a title or a prestigious resume?

Since that day in the parking lot, I've spent a lot of energy trying to deconstruct my judgment. Evaluation is also a defense - it makes sense that it would kick in in a room full of new colleagues embarking on a whole new enterprise. But the big, life-changing thing for me is the realization that I don’t need to be defended. When I feel myself starting to judge, I ask myself how I can connect, instead. I can notice what someone is good at and just admire it, without it having anything to do with me. Their excellence isn't a threat or a resource. It's just theirs. No one has to be useful to have value. I don’t have to distance myself from someone who seems like they might in some way impede my endless climb. I don’t have anywhere to climb to, because I just get to be myself.

The work I do is about 1:1 connection for a reason. You can start with the free values sort.

If this landed for you, I’d love to hear about it!

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When I launched the Signal Strength website, a friend texted me: “your copy punched me in the face.” (As a writer, this thrilled me, obviously.) When I asked her more, she said: “I think just the idea that most people know what to do but don’t have the courage to do it.”

She wasn’t wrong. But it’s more specific than that.

The clients I work with are smart, self-aware, and well-informed. They know what they’re good at. They know what they care about. They know what’s keeping them up at night. Many of them have known for a long time what needs to change, or at least that something does. These are courageous people. They’re not missing courage. It’s how they’re using it. People need clarity — and, perhaps, more importantly, the permission to act. I’ve started to say: permission is the product. Here’s what I mean.

Have you ever thought about doing something — starting the Substack, applying for the role, having the conversation, leaving the job — when a part of you shows up and says you can’t do that? It has a whole repertoire of reasons. That will be too much for you. It’ll never work. No one will believe you could do that. It speaks in the language of risk and practicality, with a soupçon of shame. What if it doesn’t work? What if you’re wrong about what you want? What if you fail?

That part is not your enemy. Talking yourself out of things is not a character flaw. That part has one goal: to protect you. It genuinely believes it is keeping you safe — and in some technical sense, it is right. If you never try, nothing bad can happen as a direct result of trying.

And if you’re someone following a career path that no longer fits you, despite your desire to change, it’s that part that keeps you on the career highway - grinding through the miles, making great time, following the map laid out vs. taking exits to explore other roads. Driving at a different speed, taking the a different route is unknown. When that part is driving, you’re making great mileage, but you’ll never see the world’s biggest yarn ball.

Your protective part is considering a couple of outcomes: one where you change things and the outcome is unknown, and one where you don’t and the outcome is known. It has already done the math. Known outcomes, even bad ones, read as safer than unknowns. The discomfort of staying stuck is a known entity. One that comes with frustration and sadness, but feels safe to that part. The discomfort of what might happen if you actually go for it is open-ended, and open-ended is terrifying to that part.

So, that part whispers in your ear that you probably shouldn’t try, and your brain registers this as safety. Your brain knows not trying is a choice with a guaranteed outcome. You stay exactly where you are.

A client who struggled with a fear that making a change would leave her jobless told me her therapist asked her, “Have you ever been in a situation where you weren’t able to find a job?” This client worked for big, impactful companies and had a stretch of creating her own business before the job she is currently in. She thought about the answer and it was “No, no I’ve never *not* been able to find a new job.” That was revelatory to her even though it was a hard fact. The threat is a spectre - and the evidence doesn’t support it. And once she knew that, she could work from a place of confidence instead of a place of fear.

Your protective part is a good thing, in many respects. It prevents you from tumbling over cliff edges or playing with bears, things with real life or death consequences. Our protective part is very serious about doing its job. Don’t shove it aside — sit with it. Take its concerns seriously. Acknowledge what it is trying to do. And then, carefully, tuck it into the passenger seat and buckle up.

Permission is not the same as courage. Courage is dragging yourself forward despite the fear. Permission is when the protective part agrees to trust you (or at least stops actively working against you).

You will not manufacture that permission by pushing harder. In fact, pushing past that part’s concerns can actually make it that much louder. You build the conditions for yourself to listen to what the part has to say, acknowledge those concerns, and say, “Don’t worry. I got this.”

If your protective part is trying to talk you out of something this week, try this:

Let that part go wild. Sit down and write out all of its catastrophic fantasies. If I post about this on Linkedin I’ll never get a job again. My spouse will divorce me. My house will be set on fire by angry mobs. I’ll have to have an F for failure tatooed on my forehead. Put vivid color to the generalized dread.

Then do a little reality testing. Notice that you have survived uncertainty before. Offer up version of reality -- we’ve no evidence that my boss even looks at Linkedin.

Sit with the part that is trying to help until it believes you when you say you have considered the risk, and the risk is worth taking.

What have you talked yourself out of lately?

(Also, a friend asked what happens if you reply to the email form of this newsletter — the answer is that it goes directly to me. And I’d love to hear from you!)

Photo by Peace Creative on Unsplash

I have a slew of fantastic nieces and nephews, and a few years ago I took them to dinner. My teen nieces had invented a thought experiment: if you could paint a picture of how your brain works, what would it look like?

One niece said, “I’m like a spider and my brain is a spiderweb: I rush over to deal with something caught in the web, I focus on that thing, then I’m off to the next thing.” Another said, “Mine is like an open play video game: I explore and enjoy it and then for no obvious reason I level up and it’s a whole new world to explore.” My nephew described his brain as a conveyor belt: ideas building up one after another going into a big machine.

My brain is like a game of Bananagrams. I’m scanning the tiles, looking for connections, then configuring them in multiple ways as new ideas enter the fray. At my best, my ADHD pattern-recognizing, big-picture neurons are in full effect. I love looking at a galaxy of information and seeing many ways of pulling it all together.

In the years since this dinner I’ve trotted this thought experiment out with people many times. I love hearing what comes up. It’s one of my favorite ways to get to know people. For some, this question feels very intimate. For others, it’s a welcome invitation. Every single answer is different.

What makes this question different from most getting-to-know-you questions is that there’s no right answer; nobody is judging you against some invisible standard. You’re asking someone to imagine with you. You’re inviting a playful connection, offering a small vulnerability that invites someone else into your world.

When I have my therapist hat on I often use the lens of internal family systems. One of the goals in that work is to ground yourself in your capital-S self. The qualities of capital-S self are often referred to as the “C qualities”, i.e., Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, Connectedness. When we are acting on those qualities, we are acting from the most grounded, human, authentic place we can. When I am working with Signal Strength clients, I’m helping them differentiate what they value from cog qualities (the ones we are rewarded for in our work systems) so they can settle deeper into themselves. Either way, describing our brainscapes is a quick way to embody values like curiosity, connection and creativity.

When we are in self, we can see so much more clearly. In that way, it’s also dangerous.

Ursula K. Le Guin said: “The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”

The systems we work inside have a stake in keeping us focused outward — on performance, on legibility, on the question of how we’re being perceived. (In short, all the cog qualities embodied.) Inviting people and ourselves to play, on the other hand, allows us to explore from a place of self.

Knowing that I have a galaxy of bananagram tiles in my skull actually helped me to re-order the way I was approaching work. The work I do now takes direct advantage of this constant pattern-spotting. I am finding ways to help other people see the connections I see. Playing in this helped me reduce the shame I felt about the places where I saw myself falling short. This bananagram brain does not do everything well — hard structure, maintaining the details, staying focused on things it deems tedious. You know. Cog qualities.

This was a real reconstruction of my work identity, and it didn’t happen overnight. It starts with getting into self.

Here are some questions I use when I want to get back into self:

• What can I be curious about in the stuck or difficult parts of my day? (Got a cranky boss? An unusually overwhelming negative feeling? Getting curious gets you out of a reactive place.)

• What is a ridiculous and entirely unreasonable way I could solve this problem? (Pick up and move to Antarctica instead of answering email, create a complex Rube Goldberg machine to wake the kids up, etc. — creativity and humor are straight shots into self.)

• And, of course, how would I describe my brainscape?

I’d love to know what your brainscape looks like. Hit reply and tell me.

If this resonated with someone you know, send it their way. And if you want to start identifying what’s signal and what’s noise for you specifically, the Values Sort available at this link takes about ten minutes. It’s free. The results are yours.

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Scrolling through the news and LinkedIn right now feels like that again.

I believe we are on the early edge of an epidemic of moral injury in workplaces.

What’s Moral Injury?

It’s a psychological term naming the thing that happens when we witness or participate in activities that conflict with our beliefs. It’s most studied with military or healthcare personnel: think doctors having to deny care (ie Dr. Mohan on The Pitt having to send a diabetic patient home because he can’t afford treatment). Think soldiers having to make a decision that they can’t save someone because it will put the whole platoon at risk. But you don’t need to be on a battlefield to experience it.

Research describes the signs as withdrawal, self-sabotage, cratering performance, and aggression. Physical symptoms include insomnia and chronic pain. It is not burnout. Burnout is exhaustion. Your brain hits the wall, your energy (and motivation and concentration) goes with it.

Burnout responds to rest because burnout is a signal that you need rest. Moral injury is something else: I can’t keep doing this and be who I think I am. That doesn’t respond to rest.

In uniquely bad news for companies, research shows that the people most likely to experience moral injury are the ones who most identify with the organization or team — who most believed in the work, the mission, the people. The most engaged. The ones who cared the most.

The conditions that create an epidemic

The conditions for an epidemic don’t emerge from a single cause. (It’s not just Gwenneth Paltrow sneezing ominously in Contagion.) Three forces are converging right now like competing storm fronts rolling in from all directions.

Political instability always impacts the workplace. In a recent workforce survey, 75% of respondents said political uncertainty is a driver of work burnout. And I don’t need to cite research that shows that we are in the midst of massive political uncertainty. Where this becomes moral injury: when leaders stay silent on policies that directly affect the people who work for them (immigration enforcement, healthcare access, civil rights, climate change) employees experience that silence as complicity.

The labor power shift has exposed what was always true. The Great Resignation was workers claiming power, demanding better conditions, insisting on their worth. The backlash has been swift. Amazon ordered employees back to Seattle offices, then laid off 30,000 people. Women are leaving the workforce at record rates because employers have refused to accommodate the reality of working parents. Those who believed the rhetoric about valuing their people now see it for what it was: temporary concessions during a labor shortage, revoked the moment the balance shifted.

AI has created a new category of professional dread. JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon has predicted civil unrest due to AI’s impact on employment. Struggling job seekers are being hired to train the systems designed to make their own roles obsolete. Meta employees must consent to keystroke and mouse monitoring to feed the AI beast in order to keep their jobs. While companies are claiming recent layoffs are due to AI, the reality is that many cuts are to feed the bottom line. The truth is, we have no idea how AI will affect our lives and our work. But it feels to most of us as an inevitable and unknowable dark cloud on the horizon.

Each of these situations creates the perfect conditions for moral injury at work. All of them at once is ground zero for an epidemic.

Just last week, Gallup found that manager engagement (not worker engagement, manager engagement ) has fallen from 31% to 22% in three years. A nine-point collapse. The same research found that leaders, compared to individual contributors, are substantially more likely to report experiencing stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness on any given day. They climbed toward a level that was supposed to feel more meaningful. It feels less.

What it looks like from the inside

Years ago, when I was a (considerably younger) fired-up comms leader, I was at a job where I was certain the leadership team was making decisions that were wrong — strategically and ethically. I was put in a position to do things that conflicted directly with my values.

I was talking (ranting?) about it to my boss when she stopped me.

“Want to know what I’m hearing?”

“Anger?” I said.

“Contempt. There’s research that shows once you’ve gotten to contempt in a relationship, there’s no going back.”

She was right. I was feeling contempt. And while it was aimed at leadership, something more complicated was going on inside: I was feeling contempt for myself. Corrosive, ugly, painful.

That was the signal I needed. I left.

Moral injury shows up as contempt. Shame. Anxiety.

It shows up as cynicism. You used to believe in the work, or at least in the people doing it, and now you don’t. You can’t fully explain when that changed.

It shows up as reluctance to talk about your job. Not out of confidentiality. Something about saying it out loud feels like admitting something.

It shows up as a gap between how you describe your work to other people and what you actually think about it when you’re alone. The version you tell at a dinner party and the version that lives in your chest at 2 a.m.

It shows up as self-sabotage — forgetting meetings, showing up late, unable to engage. Some part of you does not want to be there.

Moral injury can be understood as what happens to people whose internal alarm systems are working correctly — people who are being required to violate their values and are reacting accordingly.

If the epidemic argument lands for you, it is because you are inside it or watching it happen to people you know.

Your signal is working.

The problem is not you.

One question worth turning over this week: What are you telling yourself you're fine with?

If this named something you’re experiencing, I work with people navigating exactly this. The first step is the Initial Signal Assessment — 60 minutes, $350, available as a standalone. It starts with a conversation.

The highest compliment my old boss could give was to call you useful. Being called useful by her made me glow. To be real, I’d already been striving for usefulness for years before I met her. She just gave me the word. It’s so precise. Such a specific compliment to pay to someone’s work. “Oh! That’s useful.”

As a trainee during grad school, my clinical supervisor would raise an eyebrow when that word came up. She pushed back on how I used it, about myself and about clients. “What does that even mean?” In her frame, everything is information. You’re not there to sort for useful and discard the rest. You’re there to sit with it. You’re there to be curious.

I had been doing that filtering so automatically I didn’t know I was doing it. I’d been trained to do it. It’s what my system rewarded. It wasn’t until I got curious that I recognized it as something to question.

The system values my usefulness. But being useful doesn’t dictate my value as a person.

That’s what I call a cog quality.

Cog qualities are whatever your particular system rewards. Work-first. Money maker. Get the title. Be palatable. The qualities that make you an excellent cog in the machine. AKA: being useful.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, especially in the context of work, to be useful. My old boss was a badass (still is). Cog qualities are not inherently good or bad. You need them to operate. Pursuing them is a rational response to the conditions you’re in.

The problem is not the qualities. It’s what happens when you lose track of the difference between what the system values and what you value. When cog qualities stop being tools and start feeling like proof of something. Like the answer to the question of who you are.

Like your value as a person lies in being useful. It doesn’t.

Work systems train you to want what they need you to want. Over time, you start to value yourself based on cog qualities not because they serve you, but because you’ve internalized them as evidence of your worth. As proof.

When that happens, something quieter gets crowded out. The things you care about that have no metric. The work that lights you up that no one is measuring. You tune it out. Not because it stopped mattering. Because the system has no use for it.

And then it starts to feel gone.

This is a feedback loop. The less you hear the signal from inside, the more you chase the metrics from outside. The more you chase the metrics, the harder it gets to hear the signal.

Naming the difference is how you interrupt the feedback loop.

The opposite of your cog qualities: your real values. The things that matter to you, the things that give you energy and purpose.

Three questions I use to tell your cog qualities from your real values.

• If there were no salary, no title, no recognition attached to it, would you still want it? Cog qualities tend to evaporate without an audience. Real values don’t.

• Where does the energy come from? Real values generate energy, even when the work is hard. Cog qualities consume it, even when you’re succeeding.

• What happens when you finally get it? With cog qualities, the goalpost moves. With real values, the satisfaction feels complete.

When you can answer these honestly, the feedback loop has less grip. You are not abandoning the cog qualities. They still do real work. You are just no longer mistaking them for the whole picture.

The world of work has always had a cog problem. Right now it’s louder than usual.

The work that cannot be automated comes from the most human place.

The Values Sort is a tool that can help you tune into your real values. It takes about ten minutes. It’s free. The results are yours. Link here.

Maybe your career is working by every external measure and something still feels off. Maybe you know what you want but every time you move toward it, something pulls you back. Maybe you’ve started to wonder whether the ladder you’ve been climbing was ever actually yours.

This feels more existential than burnout. The ambition is still there. The capability is still there. The alignment isn’t.

This newsletter is for people in that particular kind of stuck. Each issue goes into one idea: the research, the questions, the specific tools that help you hear the signal again.

I’m Rebecca Silliman. I’m a therapist working in community mental health and a strategic communications consultant with over 20 years of experience. Signal Strength draws on both disciplines, and on my own experience of ignoring a signal for too long.

Start here: Why (and How) to Embrace Your Inner Bananagrams — the first issue. It introduces the concept of cog qualities: what your particular system rewards, and why confusing them with character is how people end up stuck.

If you want to start working on your own before the next issue, the Values Sort takes about ten minutes. Free: signalstrength.coach/values

Reply to any issue and tell me what brought you here. I read everything.

Rebecca