Latest / The Caribbean Workplace Wellness Channel / How Leaders Protect Their Mental Health While Leading With Empathy
Transcript
- 0:12Sarah: If you um if you walk onto a heavy commercial construction site, the defensive measures are just instantly recognizable.
- 0:20Adrian: Oh, absolutely.
- 0:21Adrian: It's the first thing you see.
- 0:22Sarah: Right.
- 0:22Sarah: You see the reinforced hard hats, the steel-toed boots, the high visibility vests.
- 0:27Adrian: Yeah, all the PPE.
- 0:28Sarah: Exactly.
- 0:29Sarah: The physical hazards, you know, falling debris, heavy machinery, exposed wiring.
- 0:34Sarah: They're obvious.
- 0:35Sarah: So the protection is obvious, and it is strictly mandated you do not step onto that site without your armor.
- 0:41Adrian: Aaron Powell No, the site supervisor would have you removed immediately.
- 0:44Adrian: Yeah.
- 0:45Adrian: I mean, it's just a baseline structural requirement for operating in an environment where things can go wrong.
- 0:51Adrian: We have completely normalized the concept of physical occupational hazards.
- 0:56Sarah: Aaron Powell But then you transition into a modern office environment, right?
- 1:00Sarah: Or you log on to a remote video call to manage your team, and suddenly the hazards are completely invisible.
- 1:06Adrian: They really are.
- 1:07Sarah: And I'm talking specifically about the emotional hazards.
- 1:10Sarah: If you step into a management or leadership role in your daily life, you are essentially expected to walk out onto an emotional construction site every single day, but uh completely unprotected.
- 1:20Adrian: Aaron Powell Which is wild when you think about it.
- 1:22Sarah: It is.
- 1:23Sarah: And when the structural integrity of your team's morale starts cracking, or maybe a direct report is navigating a severe personal crisis, the weight of all that falls directly on your shoulders.
- 1:34Adrian: Aaron Powell Yeah.
- 1:35Adrian: And it is the absolute definition of an occupational hazard, but one that corporate culture has just collectively decided to ignore.
- 1:42Sarah: Right.
- 1:42Adrian: We pretend the risk to the manager isn't real because it's not a falling brick.
- 1:46Sarah: Exactly.
- 1:46Sarah: You can't see it.
- 1:47Adrian: But it's a falling retention rate.
- 1:49Adrian: Or it's a slow creeping burnout caused by absorbing the anxiety of like 15 different people.
- 1:56Sarah: Which is the exact dynamic we are tackling today.
- 1:58Sarah: Welcome to the deep dive.
- 2:00Sarah: Our mission for this conversation is to explore a crucial and I'd say widely misunderstood tension.
- 2:07Adrian: Oh, very misunderstood.
- 2:09Sarah: How do you lead your team with genuine empathy without completely incinerating your own mental health in the process?
- 2:15Sarah: If you are managing people or stepping into a leadership role where you feel the weight of your team's well-being pressing down on you, this deep dive is for you.
- 2:23Sarah: It really is.
- 2:24Sarah: And today's insights are pulled from a really powerful brief.
- 2:28Sarah: It's published by the Caribbean Workplace Wellness Channel and the Institute for Mental Health and Well-Bing.
- 2:34Adrian: Fantastic organization.
- 2:35Sarah: Yeah, they do great work.
- 2:36Sarah: The brief is titled Culture and Boundaries: Empathetic Leadership Without Personal Depletion.
- 2:42Adrian: And it's a vital piece of research because it addresses a massive blind spot in contemporary management training.
- 2:49Sarah: A huge blind spot.
- 2:50Adrian: I mean, the push over the last decade has been to make leaders more emotionally intelligent, which is obviously a net positive, but it came without any safety guidelines.
- 2:59Adrian: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
- 3:00Sarah: Right.
- 3:00Sarah: Everyone reads the same business blogs.
- 3:02Sarah: The mantra is empathy, empathy, empathy.
- 3:04Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
- 3:05Sarah: We are told it's the ultimate leadership skill.
- 3:07Sarah: But nobody talks about the dark side of caring too much or how it physically and mentally drains the person in charge.
- 3:14Sarah: Today we are going to learn how to build what the authors call empathetic firewalls.
- 3:20Sarah: Okay, let's unpack this.
- 3:21Adrian: Let's do it.
- 3:22Sarah: Before we can engineer a solution to manager burnout, we really have to look at the foundation of how we process emotion at work.
- 3:29Sarah: We need to dissect the critical difference between healthy empathy and toxic empathy.
- 3:35Adrian: What's fascinating here is that we should probably start by setting a baseline, right?
- 3:40Adrian: Modern organizational culture rightly emphasizes empathetic leadership.
- 3:45Sarah: Right.
- 3:45Sarah: We're not saying don't be empathetic.
- 3:47Adrian: No, not at all.
- 3:48Adrian: The brief does not argue for a return to the, you know, draconian unfeeling boss of the 1980s.
- 3:55Adrian: Leaders who listen actively, who demonstrate genuine compassion and support employee well-being, they systematically build higher trust teams.
- 4:03Sarah: Yeah, it's just good business.
- 4:04Adrian: It is.
- 4:05Adrian: They drive psychological safety, which allows for better innovation, and they significantly boost employee retention.
- 4:11Adrian: So empathy remains a core competency.
- 4:13Sarah: Yeah, we are definitely not advocating for becoming an unfeeling corporate robot.
- 4:17Sarah: The baseline of caring about your people is non-negotiable.
- 4:19Adrian: Exactly.
- 4:20Adrian: But the shadow side of this, however, is a psychological phenomenon the source identifies as compassion fatigue.
- 4:26Sarah: Compassion fatigue.
- 4:27Sarah: Okay.
- 4:27Adrian: Yeah.
- 4:28Adrian: This occurs when a manager absorbs their team's emotional distress and personal struggles to such an extreme degree that their own cognitive and emotional reserves basically hit zero.
- 4:39Adrian: Wow.
- 4:40Adrian: The brief draws a very hard, definitive line between compassionate empathy and emotional absorption.
- 4:47Adrian: Leading with empathy does not mean taking on your team's emotional burdens as your own.
- 4:52Sarah: I want to visualize that mechanism because the distinction there is everything.
- 4:56Sarah: A lot of people treat workplace empathy like a sponge.
- 4:59Adrian: Oh, that's a great analogy.
- 5:00Sarah: Right.
- 5:01Sarah: The manager acts as an emotional sponge, blindly soaking up every spill in the office, every frustration, every personal crisis, every bit of um macroeconomic anxiety the team is feeling.
- 5:11Adrian: Yeah, they just take it all in.
- 5:12Sarah: But the problem with a sponge is that once it's completely saturated, it's useless.
- 5:16Sarah: You can't clean up anything else.
- 5:17Sarah: And if someone squeezes you, you just leak dirty water all over the place.
- 5:21Adrian: Aaron Powell That is a very visceral image.
- 5:22Sarah: Yeah.
- 5:23Sarah: So I think a much better framework, especially sticking with our construction theme, is an electrical grid.
- 5:28Adrian: Oh, okay.
- 5:29Adrian: That is a much more accurate representation of the cognitive load involved.
- 5:33Sarah: Right.
- 5:33Sarah: Like if a massive power surge hits one of the houses on your grid, say, an employee going through a devastating personal issue, you don't route that massive surge of voltage directly into your own house's breaker box just to share the load.
- 5:46Adrian: Right, because if you do that, you blow your own transformer.
- 5:49Sarah: Exactly.
- 5:49Sarah: And now two houses are in the dark.
- 5:51Sarah: So compassionate empathy is recognizing the surge, acknowledging the damage, and routing that energy to a grounded surge protector.
- 5:59Sarah: Emotional absorption is wiring that raw, high voltage distress directly into your own nervous system.
- 6:06Adrian: Aaron Powell And that's exactly where managers get into trouble.
- 6:09Adrian: Because the psychology behind why so many intelligent, well-meaning managers wire that surge directly into their own breaker box is really complex.
- 6:17Adrian: They fundamentally blur the line between being a professional support system and trying to act as a personal savior.
- 6:23Sarah: Yeah, it's hard to separate those.
- 6:24Adrian: It is.
- 6:25Adrian: And neuroscience actually plays a massive role here.
- 6:28Adrian: When you see someone in deep distress, your brain's mirror neurons activate.
- 6:33Adrian: You literally simulate a fraction of their pain just to understand it.
- 6:37Sarah: Oh wow.
- 6:38Sarah: So it's biological.
- 6:39Adrian: Completely biological.
- 6:40Adrian: That triggers your own stress response.
- 6:42Adrian: Your cortisol levels spike.
- 6:44Adrian: So the manager is experiencing a very real physical stress reaction to an event that isn't actually happening to them.
- 6:50Sarah: Which entirely explains why you go home at the end of the day feeling physically exhausted, even if all you did was sit in a chair and listen to people talk.
- 6:57Adrian: Exactly.
- 6:58Sarah: Your brain was running a marathon trying to process everyone else's emotional data.
- 7:02Sarah: It comes from a genuine desire to alleviate suffering.
- 7:05Sarah: You see someone hurting, and the immediate human instinct is to save them.
- 7:09Adrian: Right.
- 7:10Adrian: And in a personal relationship, that level of deep shared vulnerability can be appropriate.
- 7:16Adrian: But in a professional context, it is a trap.
- 7:19Sarah: A huge trap.
- 7:20Adrian: When you engage in emotional absorption, you are subconsciously signaling your pain is my pain.
- 7:25Adrian: And while that sounds incredibly noble, it destroys your objectivity.
- 7:29Sarah: Yeah, you lose your distance.
- 7:30Adrian: It means every time your employee has a bad day, your productivity and your mood plummet as well.
- 7:36Adrian: You lose the energy required to actually manage the department because you are drowning in their emotional wake.
- 7:42Sarah: So what's the alternative then?
- 7:44Adrian: Well, compassionate empathy requires the discipline to say, I see your pain, I acknowledge it, and I am here to support you in finding a structural solution.
- 7:54Adrian: But I am not going to internalize this feeling.
- 7:56Sarah: Man, that requires a massive paradigm shift for a lot of leaders.
- 7:59Sarah: We have this romanticized, almost cinematic idea of leadership that applies if you aren't agonizing and losing sleep alongside your team, you aren't really empathizing.
- 8:09Sarah: You're just a detached suit.
- 8:10Adrian: And that toxic romanticization is exactly what the brief is warning against.
- 8:15Adrian: To build a sustainable leadership practice, professionals have to learn to balance human compassion with protective emotional boundaries.
- 8:22Adrian: Right.
- 8:23Adrian: Without those boundaries, you aren't a hero.
- 8:25Adrian: You are just a liability on a fast track to profound burnout, which ultimately helps no one.
- 8:31Sarah: Okay, so moving from the theory of emotional absorption into the actual reality of, say, a Tuesday afternoon in the office, how do we change our behavior?
- 8:41Sarah: Because when an employee walks into your workspace, closes the door, and breaks down in tears over a severe life event, the theoretical frameworks kind of go out the window.
- 8:51Adrian: Oh, completely.
- 8:52Adrian: The instinct of any competent manager in that highly charged moment is to jump into the fray and fix the problem.
- 8:58Sarah: Yeah, managers are fixers.
- 8:59Adrian: Exactly.
- 9:00Adrian: Managers are promoted into their roles specifically because they are exceptional problem solvers.
- 9:04Adrian: You see a broken process, you fix it.
- 9:06Adrian: You see a client issue, you resolve it.
- 9:08Adrian: Naturally, when you see a broken employee, you try to fix their life.
- 9:11Sarah: You can't help yourself.
- 9:13Adrian: But the source material explicitly warns that attempting to resolve an employee's personal life creates a dangerous codependency and it severely oversteps professional boundaries.
- 9:22Sarah: So the required pivot here is moving your identity from being a fixer to being a facilitator.
- 9:28Sarah: And I really want to dig into the exact script the source provides for this scenario because having a phrase memorized prevents you from improvising something you'll regret when the pressure's on.
- 9:38Adrian: Yeah, having a script is crucial.
- 9:40Sarah: The briefs suggest that when confronted with an employee in deep distress, you look at them and say, and I'm quoting here, I hear how challenging this situation is.
- 9:50Sarah: How can the organization support you right now?
- 9:53Sarah: And what institutional resources would be most helpful?
- 9:56Adrian: It is a brilliantly constructed piece of dialogue.
- 9:59Sarah: It is.
- 9:59Adrian: Because it serves dual purposes, it validates the human emotion immediately, but then it pivots the locus of support away from the manager's personal bandwidth and onto the institution's structural resources.
- 10:11Adrian: Right.
- 10:11Adrian: The text points to things like employee assistance programs, EAPs, and flexible working hours as the primary examples of these institutional resources.
- 10:20Sarah: Okay, I am gonna play devil's advocate here for a second.
- 10:22Adrian: Go for it.
- 10:23Sarah: Because if I put myself in the shoes of that weeping employee, that script has the potential to land pretty poorly.
- 10:30Sarah: Imagine you are going through a brutal, contentious divorce, or you are navigating the terminal illness of a parent.
- 10:36Sarah: You finally hit your breaking point and show vulnerability to your boss.
- 10:40Sarah: Yeah.
- 10:41Sarah: And your boss looks at you and essentially says, What institutional resources would be helpful?
- 10:47Sarah: Here's the one-800 number for the EAP.
- 10:50Sarah: That feels incredibly cold.
- 10:52Adrian: It can feel that way, yes.
- 10:53Sarah: It feels like you are deflecting a hurting human being to an HR brochure just to get them out of your office.
- 11:00Sarah: As a manager, I want to be the warm human in that moment, not a corporate routing system.
- 11:05Adrian: This raises an important question, and it captures the exact hesitation most empathetic leaders feel.
- 11:11Adrian: It feels deeply impersonal to hand someone a brochure when they're crying.
- 11:16Adrian: But we have to look at the reality of what happens when you try to be the warm caring fixer.
- 11:20Sarah: Okay, let's look at it.
- 11:21Adrian: Let's say you try to counsel them through the psychological fallout of their divorce.
- 11:24Adrian: You are stepping into an arena where you have zero clinical training.
- 11:28Adrian: Sure.
- 11:28Adrian: You are not a licensed therapist, you are not equipped to handle severe clinical depression, and you definitely do not know how to navigate complex grief.
- 11:37Sarah: Yeah, I am barely equipped to handle a pivot table, let alone complex psychological trauma.
- 11:42Adrian: Exactly.
- 11:43Adrian: By trying to be the intimate personal fixer, you are actually doing the employee a disservice.
- 11:49Adrian: You are providing them with amateur, wildly inadequate psychological support.
- 11:53Sarah: So that makes a lot of sense.
- 11:54Adrian: Simultaneously, you are carrying their trauma home with you and burning yourself out.
- 11:59Adrian: So facilitating is actually the most profoundly caring response you can offer because it connects the employee with competent, qualified professionals.
- 12:07Sarah: Right.
- 12:07Sarah: And EAP isn't just a corporate hotline, it's a gateway to actual licensed counselors, financial advisors, and legal assistants, people who can actually fix the problem.
- 12:17Adrian: That is the crucial distinction.
- 12:19Adrian: You are providing the employee with sustainable, robust help rather than acting as a temporary ad hoc emotional band-aid.
- 12:27Adrian: When you use the script, I hear how challenging this situation is.
- 12:31Adrian: You are providing the compassion.
- 12:33Adrian: You are holding space for their pain.
- 12:35Adrian: But by following it up with how can the organization support you, you're clearly establishing the firewall.
- 12:41Adrian: You are reminding both them and your own ego that this is a professional relationship.
- 12:46Sarah: That ego check is vital.
- 12:48Sarah: It really prevents that toxic codependency from taking root.
- 12:52Sarah: Because if you successfully soothe their personal anxiety once, you become their coping mechanism.
- 12:58Adrian: Yes, you do.
- 12:59Sarah: They will come to you for the next crisis and the next.
- 13:01Sarah: Suddenly, your weekly one-on-ones are no longer about project milestones or career development.
- 13:07Sarah: They have morphed into unlicensed therapy sessions that drain an hour of your week and leave you totally exhausted.
- 13:13Adrian: Which is the core thesis of empathetic leadership without personal depletion.
- 13:17Adrian: You are protecting your cognitive stamina so you can execute the strategic vision you were hired to drive while still ensuring the employee is safely handed off to the professional help they actually require.
- 13:27Sarah: Okay, so we've established the conversational boundaries, we have our script, and we understand the necessity of shifting from fixing to facilitating.
- 13:36Sarah: But conversational tactics aren't really enough if your actual daily schedule is structurally designed to invite constant emotional chaos.
- 13:44Sarah: No, they aren't.
- 13:45Sarah: Here's where it gets really interesting because the source takes direct aim at the absolute holy grail of modern management philosophy.
- 13:54Sarah: It attacks the open door policy.
- 13:56Adrian: Yeah, the open door policy has been championed as the gold standard of accessible leadership for decades.
- 14:02Adrian: It's sold as the ultimate proof that a manager is egalitarian and approachable.
- 14:06Sarah: But the reality, according to this brief, is that an unrestricted open door policy functions as an invitation for continuous, unpredictable interruptions and unscheduled emotional dumps throughout the workday.
- 14:17Adrian: The phrase emotional dumps is highly evocative and it perfectly captures the dynamic.
- 14:22Sarah: It really does.
- 14:23Adrian: When you have no barrier to entry, you have absolutely no control over the flow of emotional information entering your brain, and the cognitive penalty here is severe.
- 14:32Adrian: Imagine you are in the middle of deep strategic work.
- 14:36Adrian: Perhaps you are analyzing a complex budget or writing a critical strategic roadmap.
- 14:41Adrian: That requires immense prefrontal cortex engagement.
- 14:45Adrian: Suddenly, someone walks in with a crisis, you have to instantaneously abort that logical process and switch gears to deep emotional processing.
- 14:55Sarah: And the switching cost is astronomical.
- 14:57Sarah: Doing that five or six times a day completely shatters your focus.
- 15:00Sarah: I mean, it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption.
- 15:05Sarah: If you are constantly pivoting between a spreadsheet and a sobbing employee, your nervous system is going to fry.
- 15:11Adrian: It is.
- 15:12Adrian: So the text proposes a highly structured alternative: dedicated support windows.
- 15:17Adrian: Instead of an open door that invites chaos, the manager holds structured, scheduled one-on-one office hours.
- 15:23Sarah: Kind of similar to a university professor holding specific hours for student support.
- 15:27Sarah: It doesn't mean you can't reach them, it just means you reach them on a schedule that respects their bandwidth.
- 15:32Adrian: Exactly.
- 15:32Adrian: And this systemic change accomplishes two vital things simultaneously.
- 15:37Adrian: First, when an employee utilizes that dedicated window, they receive your undivided, fully present, empathetic attention.
- 15:45Sarah: Yeah, you aren't half-glancing at an urgent email while pretending to listen to their problem.
- 15:49Adrian: Right.
- 15:50Adrian: Secondly, it acts as a structural firewall for your calendar, protecting your deep work blocks from constant disruption.
- 15:56Sarah: So you are implicitly teaching your team that your empathy is always available, but it is not available on demand 24-7.
- 16:03Sarah: It is a scheduled resource.
- 16:04Sarah: Precisely.
- 16:05Sarah: But you know, this brings up a much heavier layer to the conversation.
- 16:08Sarah: We've been focusing on isolating and managing one-on-one interactions.
- 16:12Sarah: What happens when the emotional hazard isn't an isolated incident?
- 16:16Adrian: Right, the macro events.
- 16:17Sarah: Yeah.
- 16:17Sarah: Let's say there are massive company-wide layoffs, or a natural disaster impacts the region, or maybe the team is grieving the sudden loss of a colleague.
- 16:25Sarah: In those scenarios, the manager is suddenly expected to process and absorb the amplified emotional weight of 20 or 30 people simultaneously.
- 16:33Adrian: The grief addresses this macro-level trauma very directly, and it places the burden exactly where it belongs on the organization itself.
- 16:43Sarah: As it should.
- 16:44Adrian: In high stress, systemic team situations, the organization must intervene.
- 16:49Adrian: It cannot be localized onto the shoulders of middle management.
- 16:52Adrian: The source dictates that organizations must implement what they call emotional debriefing protocols.
- 16:58Sarah: Okay, I'm gonna make sure we don't just throw corporate jargon around.
- 17:01Sarah: What does an emotional debriefing protocol actually entail when the entire department is in shock?
- 17:07Adrian: The text details these protocols as highly specific structural supports for the leaders themselves.
- 17:12Adrian: This includes providing managers with immediate access to peer support groups, deploying HR advisory services to help navigate the messaging, and bringing in executive coaching or crisis counselors.
- 17:22Sarah: Wow, so real tangible support.
- 17:24Sarah: Yes.
- 17:25Adrian: The objective is to create a secure, confidential space where the manager can process the immense emotional weight they are carrying for the team.
- 17:31Sarah: Going back to the construction site, it is the equivalent of a decontamination shower before you leave the site.
- 17:38Sarah: If you have been working in hazardous materials all day, the company provides a facility for you to wash off the residue.
- 17:44Adrian: That's a perfect analogy.
- 17:46Sarah: You need a systemic mechanism to offload the psychological residue of a crisis so you aren't carrying that toxicity into your living room and dropping it onto your own family.
- 17:55Adrian: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the Institute for Mental Health and Well-Being is making a profound argument about corporate infrastructure.
- 18:04Adrian: An organization cannot rely on its managers to be the sole emotional shock absorbers for the entire company.
- 18:11Adrian: If a vehicle is driving over incredibly rough terrain, the shock absorbers will eventually snap if there isn't a broader suspension system supporting them.
- 18:20Adrian: The organization must provide the suspension system for the leaders.
- 18:24Adrian: If an institution expects its managers to support the team, the institution must tangibly support the managers.
- 18:31Sarah: Because when companies fail to provide that infrastructure, the shock absorbers break.
- 18:36Sarah: The managers burn out, they quietly quit, or they have a stress-induced health crisis, and then the entire team suffers anyway.
- 18:43Sarah: It is a systemic failure of the organization's design.
- 18:46Adrian: Aaron Powell Yet organizations frequently gaslight their leaders by framing that systemic failure as an individual shortcoming.
- 18:53Adrian: They will claim the manager lacked resilience or just wasn't cut out for leadership.
- 18:58Sarah: Oh, that is so frustrating.
- 19:00Adrian: It is a wildly toxic reframing of the actual problem.
- 19:03Adrian: They send someone into a hazard zone without armor and then blame them for getting injured.
- 19:08Sarah: So what does this all mean?
- 19:09Sarah: If we zoom out and look at the blueprint we've extracted today from this brief on culture and boundaries, we can fundamentally change how we lead.
- 19:17Sarah: First, we have to recognize that empathetic leadership is absolutely not synonymous with self-sacrifice.
- 19:22Sarah: You do not have to set yourself on fire just to keep your team warm.
- 19:25Adrian: No, you don't.
- 19:26Adrian: The goal is sustainable compassion, not martyrdom.
- 19:29Sarah: Exactly.
- 19:30Sarah: And we achieve that by engineering emotional firewalls.
- 19:33Sarah: We shift our mindset away from the ego-driven fixer who tries to solve complex personal problems, and we embrace the role of the facilitator.
- 19:41Adrian: Right.
- 19:42Sarah: We use our scripts to validate the emotion, and then we actively connect the employee with institutional resources like the EAP.
- 19:49Sarah: That ensures they get competent help while protecting our own cognitive load.
- 19:53Adrian: Furthermore, we enforce those boundaries structurally by eliminating the chaotic attention-destroying open door policy.
- 20:01Sarah: Yeah, close the door.
- 20:02Adrian: By implementing dedicated support windows, we control the flow of emotional input, allowing us to offer deep, undivided presence without sacrificing our ability to execute our actual jobs.
- 20:13Sarah: And finally, we acknowledge that during periods of profound team crisis, we cannot carry the weight alone.
- 20:18Sarah: We have to utilize emotional debriefing protocols and demand that the organization provides the necessary suspension system.
- 20:25Sarah: By deploying these strategies, you create an environment where both you and your team can actually thrive over the long haul rather than just surviving from one emotional crisis to the next.
- 20:44Sarah: Okay, let's hear it.
- 20:46Adrian: If you are a manager and the idea of establishing these emotional firewalls, you know, the thought of closing your door, pointing an employee to a professional accounselor instead of advising them yourself, if that makes you feel a deep sense of guilt, you have to ask yourself a very hard question.
- 21:02Sarah: And what's that?
- 21:03Adrian: Is that guilt genuinely stemming from a healthy desire to help another human being?
- 21:08Adrian: Or is it stemming from a deeply ingrained, toxic workplace conditioning that mistakenly equates your professional value with your personal suffering?
- 21:17Adrian: When did we collectively decide that drowning alongside our team is the only valid way to prove that we care?
- 21:24Sarah: Wow, that is a phenomenal question to end on.
- 21:26Sarah: Are you actually having them navigate the storm, or are you just jumping into the water to drown with them so nobody calls you selfish?
- 21:32Sarah: It brings us right back to the beginning.
- 21:34Sarah: You would never walk onto a heavy construction site, throw away your hard hat, and pretend that exposing your skull to falling debris makes you a braver, more dedicated worker.
- 21:43Sarah: It just makes you unprotected and foolish.
- 21:46Adrian: It really does.
- 21:47Sarah: It is time we start treating our emotional defenses with the exact same respect we give physical defenses.
- 21:54Sarah: Put on your high V's vest, build your empathetic firewalls, and aggressively protect your energy.
- 21:59Sarah: Because at the end of the day, you can't build anything if you're broken.