We are still in the midst of a global pandemic and now COVID cases are on the rise again. We are still witnessing senseless violence against people of color. We are living through a war, women’s rights are under attack and there is a recession looming. Yet, somehow we’re still expected to do our best work. Unreasonable expectations in combination with little-to-no support are a recipe for burnout. I want to share a few of my own hard-learned lessons as a burnout survivor with the hope that they may help anyone out there going through it NOW.

More now than ever, women are the driving force behind The Great Resignation: the death knell of hustle culture and the demand for less doing, more being in everything we do.

What if owning the stage actually means… showing up on it less?

What I mean is this: hustle culture teaches us that in order to BOSS UP (and change our lives, apologies to Lizzo) we have to SHOW UP. All the damn time.

I’ve written about hustle culture here before and its insidious way of glamorizing too-little-sleep, never-getting-away, over-working, and never, ever stepping away from the grind. It’s easy to write about it, but not so easy to recognize the ways this kind of culture has crept into my own life and approach to work/success.

Turns out the desire to get a bigger paycheck isn’t the most important factor when it comes to where you choose to work.

In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation. An MIT Study found a toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry. So… if you dread going to work, even if the pay is good, you’re more likely to look for employment elsewhere than if you simply want a bigger paycheck.

Whether you’ve seen the recent Jennifer Hudson biopic on Aretha Franklin or not, you are undoubtedly familiar with the refrain: R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Respect! This can be a make-or-break factor in career success – whether you feel you are receiving enough of it, unable to give it, or simply not being met in a reciprocal way.

Disrespectful behavior in the workplace takes many forms, from subtle comments…

Everyone has been working so hard on their messages of anti-productivity lately. (See what I did there?)

Anyone else notice the current popularity of less-productivity, more ease, a slower approach to moving back into the frenetic pace of real-work-life alongside the typical New Year detox messaging? Detox from dopamine! Detox from productivity! Detox from alcohol, and digital, and…