Take Your Damn Power Back (One Tiny Act at a Time)
The world is bananas right now. 🍌
Rights are being rolled back, wars are raging, people are losing jobs and homes and worse, and every morning your phone serves it all up before you've even had coffee. And this stuff is real. These stories are someone's family, someone's safety, someone's whole life. For some of you reading this, they're yours. That deserves more than a doomscroll and a sigh. It deserves real acknowledgment: this is hard, and you're carrying it.
Everything is changing, all at once, constantly, and none of it asked for your input. It can feel like life is something happening TO you rather than something you're actually living.
And then you go to work.
Where you're told to lower your voice. Where you're spoken over, or worse, spoken FOR. Where someone suggests, with a straight face, that you'd get further if you led "more like him." A thousand little signals, all delivering the same message: be less you.
You absorb all of that while also, you know, doing your actual job. Which you do damn well, by the way.
So if you're feeling buried, like it's all too much and you can barely move, that tracks. Overwhelmed to the point of immobilized.
I've talked with so many women recently who are right there on the cusp of burnout. Ambitious women. Women who genuinely like their work. Work is one meaningful part of their lives (they'd fight you for calling it their whole identity), and they'd like to actually enjoy that part. Instead, they're fantasizing about opting out entirely.
But, she'll also tell you that she doesn't actually want to opt out. She doesn't want to quiet quit. Some part of her still gets real pride from the work. She just wants it to stop costing her everything.
The research backs up why this moment feels so specifically awful. Burnout researchers identified six areas where a mismatch between you and your job breeds burnout, and one of the big ones is control.¹ Actually, in their model, control sits at the foundation. It shapes how you experience almost everything else about work. When you have no say over how your work and your days unfold, your brain and body start filing for divorce from your job.
And here's the part that made me go AHHH: in the data behind that model, spanning more than 6,000 workers across four countries, women reported less control at work than men, along with more exhaustion.¹ Add in a world that also refuses to give you a say, and congratulations, you've got mismatch on mismatch.
No wonder you're tired.
Last week I was in London talking about exactly this with friends, and two things kept coming up.
👯♀️ First: community. You need women you can lean on, work through the mess with, and laugh with. You've clearly got the crying alone in the fetal position part handled (we all do, it's a core competency at this point). What you need is the pack.² Painted wolves don't survive the chaos of the bush solo, and neither do we. Find the women who will let you vent without judgment and then make you laugh so hard you snort.
💃🏻 Second: micro acts. Small, deliberate actions that give you back a say in your own life.
Before you roll your eyes at "small," hear me out. A classic paper showed that when we frame problems as massive (the economy! the patriarchy! the entire flaming news cycle!), our brains get overwhelmed and flooded with the frustrated, helpless kind of stress that actually makes our thinking worse, right when we need it most.³ Sound familiar?
The fix: shrink the problem into small wins. A small win, in his words, is a "concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance." And here's the good part: small wins compound. Each one sets you up for the next, builds momentum, and even attracts allies.
A micro act might be a mindset shift: getting brutally honest about how many f*cks you actually have to give, and where you're currently spending them. (Audit incoming. Some of those f*cks are being wasted on people and problems that would not cross the street to help you.)
It might be playing out the forecast: okay, if I say the thing, what actually happens? Usually the imagined catastrophe is doing way more damage than any realistic outcome would.
Or it might be finally standing up for yourself. Saying the thing you've been rehearsing in the shower for three weeks. Sending the message. Correcting the person who keeps "summarizing" your ideas as his own.
None of these will fix the world. I know. The systems are still broken and I will keep yelling about that until they're fixed. But while we work on the big fight, these small acts remind you of something the chaos wants you to forget:
You have a say.
In your work, in your days, in your one wild and precious (and currently unhinged) life.
xoxo Kels
This Week's Thing
Find your micro act. Grab a pen (or your notes app, whatevs your vibe) and answer this:
👉🏼 Where in your work or life do you feel most like things are happening TO you? Name it specifically.
👉🏼Then pick ONE small action, doable this week, that gives you a say in that exact spot. Say the thing. Send the message. Reclaim the f*ck. Then tell a friend you did it, because your pack should get to celebrate you.
A Girl's Gotta Cite Her Sources
Leiter, M. P., & Maslach, C. (2004). Areas of worklife: A structured approach to organizational predictors of job burnout. In P. L. Perrewé & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), Emotional and Physiological Processes and Positive Intervention Strategies (Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being, Vol. 3, pp. 91-134). Oxford, UK: JAI Press/Elsevier. For an open-access overview: Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103-111. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20311
Medeiros, K. (2023). Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women.
Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40-49. Free full text: https://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Small-Wins_Redefining-the-Scale-of-Social-Problems.pdf