Chapter 8. A Guide to Rebel Self-Care
When Jeff was the marketing director at a large automotive parts company, people in the company bristled at his thinking and impatience. His ideas were ahead of most people and appeared risky. What he was proposing was not the way things were done in the industry. At a time when marketing was primarily creative, Jeff was crunching numbers. Was he trying to prove how smart he was? “Arrogant MBA smartass,” grumbled many in an effort to discredit him.
Fortunately Jeff reported to a CEO named Mike who, despite his tough-guy persona, was especially astute and insightful about human behavior, including Jeff’s. Rather than let Jeff burn out or alienate all his coworkers, Mike suggested that Jeff teach a college course at night so that he could divert his intense rebel energy somewhere else and give the rest of the organization time to catch up with his ideas.
Jeff was one lucky rebel to have a boss like Mike. Most rebels aren’t so lucky. We can become obsessive, angry, tired, and ineffective without even realizing it.
In Chapter 7, we mentioned that our fears of getting fired are probably unwarranted. A much more realistic concern is burning out. In this chapter, we look at:
- Heeding the warning signs of burnout
- The three Rs of rebel self-care: retreat, reset, and resiliency
- Knowing when to quit
- Finding the right boss
Don’t Let Work Consume You
Although passion for our work motivates us, we can’t let it consume our lives. Work is not family, religion, or identity. It’s a job. Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian and professor at the University of Iowa at Iowa City who specializes in the history of work, worries that work is fast replacing religion in providing meaning in people’s lives.
“Work has become how we define ourselves,” he says. “It is now answering the traditional religious questions: Who am I? How do I find meaning and purpose? Work is no longer just about economics; it’s about identity,” he says, warning that we are unlikely to find spiritual meaning in work alone.
In other words, love your work and live a full life that provides meaning and contributes to your identity. Should things not go well at work, as can happen, you will have better coping skills to bounce back.
We admit that it can be hard to step back or know when it’s time to do so. And it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your rebel cause that you start to become someone you are not. You forget to be a human.
Work Is Not More Important Than People
Both of us have lived through experiences at work where we neglected to take care of ourselves. They are not our fondest professional memories.
I got up that morning at 3:45 to feed my infant son and drive an hour and a half to my Cambridge office to be in early. The digital marketing agency I managed had a deadline for a big project with a well-known bank. If we could pull this off, I was sure that our reputation would be made and more business would follow.
At 7:30, the phone rang in my office. It was Ellen. Again.
A talented programmer whom I had hired from IBM, Ellen always had some sort of drama going on. She couldn’t get to work because her husband’s car was broken. (She didn’t drive.) Her son was sick. She had to check out a new apartment because her landlord was selling the building she was in. What would it be today?
While the rest of us were the picture of youth and energy, Ellen was not. She was overweight from medications, walked with a cane, and spoke slowly and deliberately while the rest of us acted like crackheads, though our only stimulant was the Internet, with dreams of dot-com glory and big lump sums of money.
“I’m not feeling well this morning,” she told me. “I’m at the hospital having a few tests.”
“You know we have the bank deadline today,” I said, trying to be pleasant.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll be in before lunch,” Ellen said.
“We’ll pay for a cab, Ellen,” I said. “We need you to get this project done.”
“I know. I’ll be there,” she reassured me with the genuine hopefulness she always exuded when there was something in her life that prevented her from working.
I tried to be pleasant but I was icy. “OK. Hope you feel better,” I said and hung up.
Four hours later, just before lunch, my phone rang.
It was Ellen’s husband. She was dead. Ellen had had a heart attack.
Aside from her husband, I had been the last person Ellen talked with and I had acted like kind of a jerk. I felt crushingly sad. I had worried about work and about Ellen being at work. But I had not really worried about Ellen. Who had I become? What was this ambition turning me into?
That humbling day forever shifted my perspective about work. I learned that when you begin to lose your best qualities, particularly those that are most important like compassion and thoughtfulness, you lose yourself.
I resigned four weeks later. I had become someone I didn’t want to be.
Heed the Warning Signs
To avoid becoming someone you don’t want to be, we suggest you heed signs that indicate you might be reaching an unhealthy breaking point and need a rest.
Here are some external clues that you need a break:
- You view every interaction and opportunity through the lens of your pet project.
- You ask your boss how important your project is on a scale of 1 to 10, and she tells you “maybe 5, no more” and you can’t understand it.
- You make your “big idea” part of your performance objectives. When it is rejected as not performance worthy, you fly off the handle.
- Fewer people show up for meetings about your idea, or your idea is put at the end of agendas—or doesn’t even make the agenda.
The internal signs, however, are the ones to especially watch:
- You start thinking you’re smarter than everyone else in the organization.
- You find yourself arguing with people who are close friends at work.
- You don’t recognize yourself when people at work describe you to others. They use words like cynical, negative, or unreasonable.
- You can’t hear helpful suggestions from others because you are solely focused on your own agenda.
The most alarming signals come when workmates distance themselves from you and you obsess about work so much at home that your personal relationships become frayed. A rebel with a cause but no love, support, or optimism is unlikely to find meaning at work or at home.
Know, too, that it’s difficult to handle the emotional load of being a rebel when there’s something else going on in your life. And, of course, there is always something else going on in your life.
When you’re in danger of becoming someone you’re not or feel crushed by disappointment, manage your anger and frustration, divert your energies into another assignment, take a few weeks off, take deep breaths, go on a vacation, and, for God’s sake, don’t do anything rash. It’s time to invest in some rebel self-care.
The Three Rs of Rebel Self-Care
We suggest three strategies to help you care for your rebel spirit:
- Retreating from your cause
- Hitting the pause button to give you and your ideas a rest.
- Resetting your perspectives
- Reevaluating your goals and situation to gain fresh perspectives on next steps.
- Restoring your resiliency
- Incorporating new habits into your life to increase your resiliency and ability to maintain a positive, balanced mind-set. This may be the most important way for rebels to care for their minds and their souls.
Retreating: Give Yourself a Break
We often need to hit the pause button to retreat and give our ideas and ourselves a break. It doesn’t mean we’re abandoning a good idea. In fact, it can be an investment in our idea. Sometimes, as with Jeff, the organization needs time to catch up with our ideas, or we need to let conflict over the issue cool down to the point that useful conversations on next steps can be held.
There’s a fine line between advocacy and obsession. When you begin to notice that you’ve become obsessed and all you talk about is your idea or the problems at work, consider stepping back before you lose credibility and possibly hurt your professional reputation. Notice when your internal tuner warns you that you’re becoming someone you’re not, snapping at friends, becoming impatient and irritable, not sleeping well. These are all indications that it’s time to take a break.
As highly public politicians or entertainers do amid controversy, go quiet for a while. Make time for a vacation. Do work that builds your credibility and doesn’t make waves. Hang out with positive people.
A retreat will give you the needed rest to replenish your energy and clarify your next moves. The Irish say that a good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book. We think they’re good cures for a tired or discouraged rebel, too. A tired rebel sees problems; a rested rebel sees possibilities again.
Resetting: Determine the Next Step
Retreating gives us the mental space to do some introspection and reset our perspective about what we should or shouldn’t do next.
Resetting our perspective is more difficult than continuing on our course of action. Yet the ability to reset and re-envision is important for a rebel’s long-term health and effectiveness. As fellow rebel Eric Pennington says, “The dream should never die, but versions of it may need to.”
Composer Philip Glass puts it this way: “When I talk to young composers, I tell them, I know that you’re all worried about finding your voice. Actually you’re going to find your voice. By the time you’re 30, you’ll find it. But that’s not the problem. The problem is getting rid of it. You have to find an engine for change.” In other words, how do we ease up on the cause that is starting to define us?
One way is to ask good questions, of ourselves and of people we respect in the organization:
- What’s beneath what’s going on here?
- What has foiled previous change efforts like this one? What can I learn from those?
- Should I continue to try to advance this idea? What might happen if I let it go?
- What approaches would make a difference in getting this idea back on track?
- Am I making assumptions that just aren’t true?
- Who else could help make this idea happen? Who could I talk with to get some fresh perspectives?
Another way to reset is to step back and try to see the bigger picture:
- Was my idea too provocative for a conservative organization? Did I fail to show this conservative organization how the idea would actually minimize risk?
- Was my idea too far ahead of the rest of the organization?
- Did I anticipate how forcefully a BBB would try to stop us?
- Did I show the relevance of the idea to the organization? Was the “what’s at stake” compelling enough? Did I get so far down in the weeds of how the idea would work that people couldn’t see why it’s such a good idea in the first place?
It’s natural to want to rehash what happened. The problem is that at some point you begin to get mired in those feelings and think like a victim. It’s better to acknowledge the hurt, free yourself of anger and resentment, figure out what you can do to put the issue to rest, and move on. It’s not easy but it is essential.
Buddhist spiritual teacher Pema Chödron believes that when things don’t go the way we had hoped, it’s a test. In her book When Things Fall Apart, she says, “When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality.”
Tenderly accepting a sense of loss and being easy on yourself allows us to open our hearts and be ready for what might come next. Maybe it’s because we’ve lived a long time, but we’ve both found fascinating new professional (and personal) paths emerge from those times that we might have considered “failures.”
So be gentle and kind to yourself during a resetting period.
It was only after I took an involuntary three-year sabbatical from being a rebel that I found a new path and new energy for advancing my change ideas. I was still working at the CIA but because I had burned all the bridges at my previous offices, I joined a new work team and sat among strangers. (Truth be told, it was about the only job I could get.) I made new friends and developed new mentors—including one who had been a rebel earlier in her career and was now a tough manager with a cynical streak and a heart of gold. She too had suffered a difficult loss at work—one that made my own troubles seem insignificant in comparison. Just chatting with her gave me a better perspective on work and armed me with new techniques to navigate the organization.
Being with a new group also allowed me to share my ideas with people who had never heard them before and weren’t tired of them. They had a fresh perspective that both encouraged me and prompted some adjustments. At the end of that period, I took a job with responsibilities indirectly related to my reform agenda. I thought that if I proved myself in that position, I would get a chance to start planting the seeds for even bigger change.
And so I did. Sometimes the quickest way to your rebel goals ends up being indirect and circuitous.
Resiliency: Find the Strength You Need
Resiliency helps us bounce back from setbacks, disappointments, and failures. It’s an invaluable asset for everyone in general and rebels in particular. In our experience, three things can help a rebel become more resilient:
- Finding support from like-minded work friends
- Leaning on our biggest strength to remind us of our talents
- Tapping into the optimistic belief that we will be successful, though it may not turn out exactly the way we envisioned it
Finding friends at work
Professional friends can be the best source for optimism and seeing new ways to accomplish ideas. In the 1920s, a group of Oxford University professors felt frustrated and creatively stifled by the academic gravitas of that revered institution. Feeling alienated from the English Department, Professors C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other friends started meeting at a local pub every Friday night, calling themselves the Inklings. They were a rebel alliance of sorts.
Their intent, in Tolkien’s words, was to explore “vague or half-formed intimations on ideas.” These rebels wanted to experiment with new ideas that didn’t fit Oxford’s view of proper literature. Rather than allowing their frustration to drain them, they came together to share, experiment, and get support. This set them up to create the best work of their careers. For Lewis, it was The Chronicles of Narnia. For Tolkien, it was The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
They didn’t try to change Oxford. Rather, they found a way to create fascinating new work supported by their own rebel tribe while still teaching at Oxford. This approach can serve rebels in their work organizations. Finding people with similar interests, making time to talk about observations and ideas, forming a rebel alliance, and supporting one another in a safe and enjoyable way can replenish our energy and create lasting friendships.
Leaning on our strengths
Another way to move through stressful periods and build resiliency is to lean on the signature strengths mentioned in Chapter 7. Doing so will help you reclaim that strong, positive part of yourself.
Clinical psychologist and resilience specialist Dr. Maria Sirois offers a personal story about how this technique helped her through a stressful period:
One of my core strengths is compassion and, last winter, as our income suddenly became severely reduced, the bills began to pile, and tension in our home mounted. I took out my list, chose one of my gifts—compassion—and spent the next seven days practicing it.
One day, I called a former colleague who had lost her mother and just listened to her grieve. The next day, I wrote a note to my teenage daughter, who I knew was deeply worried. The third day, I visited a local shelter and offered my help. The fourth day, I let a mom with screaming children go ahead of me in line at the supermarket. The fifth day, I spent 10 minutes meditating on self-compassion. The sixth day, I wrote a note to a woman I had read about in our local paper who had just lost an infant son. The seventh day, I took time in the morning to review my acts of compassion and see what had happened. What did I notice? I had more energy, calmness, and clarity about what needed to be done next to help our family get through our crisis.
What had changed externally? Nothing. We were still in difficult straits. What had changed internally? Everything. I had come home to myself in a positive way. I had reminded myself of who I was and what I had to bring to the world—no matter what the world was bringing to me. Who can we become when life pulls the rug out from under us? Our fullest selves, gifted with qualities that enable us to rise. We simply must remember what they are and choose to go toward them.
Generating optimism, a rebel’s greatest asset
Appreciating what is going well despite everything that isn’t is another way to restore our energy and positive outlook. At the end of every day, ask yourself, “What was the one great moment of the day?” Maybe you got a parking spot close to the building on a frigid morning. Perhaps a meeting was canceled, giving you a free hour, or a friend at work said he’d cover a meeting for you so you could get home early to your children. The colors of the early evening sky were brilliant.
It doesn’t matter what that great moment is; only that we find time every night to find one. The positive psychology experts say that doing this builds a contagious practice of finding benefits in our lives and of learning to be grateful for what is working.
This practice increases our optimism, and optimism is one of a rebel’s greatest assets. It helps us keep going. Persistence and determination are easier to sustain with an optimistic attitude. Being a rebel at work can be stressful, but a positive perspective makes it less exhausting.
Optimists ride the possibility wave to stay motivated. Pessimists show persistence and determination by pushing a rock uphill. People want to surf with you. Pushing heavy objects up steep hills? Not so much.
Optimism can also have a powerful influence on teams at work.
I remember my first week on a new job, talking with one of my new teams. Everyone was discouraged and frustrated because the client had told them that he was unhappy with their work.
“Let’s try to show the client how much we’re accomplishing. What if we change the monthly report formats and list everything that we’ve accomplished each month in bullet points, right at the top?” I suggested.
“Yeah, right,” said Cindy. “What happens if we don’t achieve those kinds of results?”
Though I had only been at the agency a couple of weeks, I really believed that the team could achieve more, especially if they tweaked how they did some of the work.
My optimism accomplished two things. The team didn’t resist my new rebel ideas, although they were contrary to the way most teams did things at the company, and the team did in fact achieve results that surprised them and the client. Someone genuinely believing that they could succeed lifted the team, and they achieved more than they thought possible.
Science backs up these views on optimism.
Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a scholar in social and positive psychology and author of Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life, has found that positivity opens our minds and hearts, making us more creative and receptive to new ideas. Positive emotions also help us to discover new skills, gain new knowledge, and find new ways of doing things—and recover more quickly when things don’t go well.
You can’t force optimism and positivity. That’s why retreating, resetting, and restoring resilience are so important; rebalancing helps us tap into our optimism, which helps us see our next move.
In fact, the subtle difference between positivity and optimism is action, according to Elaine Fox, a psychologist at the University of Essex in England and author of a book on the science of optimism called Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain.
“Optimism is not so much about feeling happy, nor necessarily a belief that everything will be fine, but about how we respond when times get tough,” she writes. “Optimists tend to keep going, even when it seems as if the whole world is against them.”
Note
Optimism lifts. Skepticism requires climbing.
Knowing When to Quit
Sometimes, despite the Three Rs, we may still have to quit. You may need to give up on the idea or possibly leave the organization. We rebels often think we can change people and help organizations to see the light and appreciate our ideas if we just keep at it, try a new strategy, ramp up our networking, rename the program, find new executive sponsors, adjust the budget, or punch up the benefits. Often, that is magical thinking.
Note
Three Rs. Strategies for rebel self-care: retreating, resetting, and restoring resiliency. Retreating from your cause to give you and your idea a rest, resetting to gain fresh perspectives on next steps, and restoring resiliency to regain a positive, balanced mind-set.
Giving Up on Your Idea
Sometimes we’re blind because we love our idea so much. We’re like people in a bad relationship; our friends can see that our lover has dumped us and moved on. They tell us that it’s over, yet we cling to some odd hope that it might still work out.
Similarly, we have seen too many rebels, including us, hang on at work when there’s no chance our idea will succeed.
People at work might just hate your idea or they may be completely indifferent to it. You don’t want to ruin your career by hanging onto an idea that no one cares about. If you hang on too long to a dead idea, people will begin to see you as a problem person instead of a creative person who knows how to come up with great ideas. They will begin to dislike a good idea because they dislike you. As the saying goes, “When your horse dies, get off.”
Even if this is the greatest idea you’ve ever developed, know that there will be more great ideas. Creativity doesn’t stop. It’s a renewable resource for rebels if we take care of ourselves and build the Three Rs into our lives.
Note
Creativity is a renewable resource if we take care of ourselves.
Leaving Your Organization
Here are some signals that may indicate it’s time to leave your organization:
- Your values are irreconcilable with those of the organization.
- Your organization is resisting important industry or professional trends. By staying with the organization, you won’t keep pace with trends. Becoming irrelevant or outdated is a serious career risk. Leave and go somewhere where learning and being on the forefront of what’s emerging is highly valued.
- You have been negatively labeled and are being assigned to projects out of the mainstream mission of the organization, limiting opportunities for growth and learning.
- Frustration and anger have led you to say or do some deeply hurtful things to people, which will be hard to recover from. The tension will make you unhappy and work uncomfortable for quite some time.
- All your mentors and bosses you could work with have left the organization or been assigned far away from your chain of command. You are isolated and unprotected.
- After years of turbulence and attempts at reform, your leadership announces a “back to basics” campaign. The organization has sounded retreat. It will probably be years before the organization is ready to move forward again.
Finding the Right Boss
If you decide to leave, be deliberate in choosing your next position. Here’s a list of questions to ask your next potential boss and people in the organization to help you gauge whether it will be a good fit.
- What is the organization trying to achieve? How do you measure success?
- This question reveals whether a clear organizational purpose exists. When there is a clear purpose, rebels have a much easier time because they can link their ideas to the big organizational goal or purpose. When goals and purposes are fuzzy, rebels can get caught in an unproductive eddy of trying to find solid links with the organization’s goals.
- What’s possible that hasn’t yet been done in this [field | company | organization]? What are the greatest opportunities for the organization?
- This question helps you gauge whether the interviewer is a forward-thinking idea person.
- What do you especially like about this organization’s culture and work environment?
- The answer to this question may reveal whether the person is positive and appreciative of the strengths of the organization, or a Debby Downer or Negative Nick consumed by problems and negativity. From our observations, positive, optimistic bosses are more open to—and appreciative of—rebels. (Be sure to sanity-check the answer you receive with other signals from this interview and read between the lines. How long she pauses and what the person doesn’t say is as important as what she does say.)
- What’s the best assignment/project you’ve ever worked on? What made it so fulfilling?
- Does the interviewer enjoy implementation or creating new things? Rebels tend to do better working for a boss who likes creating new things.
- How do you deal with failure?
- If the organization values experimentation and new ideas, a conversation about failure will be engaging, positive, and specific. This is a good sign for a rebel. If, however, the person hesitates and gives bland, trite answers like “We learn from our failures,” dig a little deeper to gauge how comfortable the person really is talking about failure.
- How do you support people who question approaches that may no longer be effective and who see alternative ways of doing things?
- How a person answers this question is more telling than the words themselves. Is the person comfortable with the question? Does the answer flow easily and naturally—or does it take a bit to find the words? Does it sound like the person truly values truth-telling idea people? Or do you detect some annoyance? Does the response indicate that people regularly bring up ideas and the boss has a genuine and comfortable way to support those people and ideas?
Take some time to walk around and look around the work environment. Do you sense a lot of energy and positive buzz? Or is there a hushed, disengaged feeling? The environment speaks volumes about whether it’s a place rebels can thrive. Are people energetic, laughing, sitting in small groups, and working together? Or is there an eerie, quiet hush with people heads down in their cubicles?
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?
When our values don’t line up with our organization’s or the culture isn’t a good fit, we must assess whether to stay or go. Only you can tell what gives you energy, what depletes your energy, what can be negotiated to make work tolerable, and what is simply intolerable.
Take care of yourself, rebel friends. Learn how to step back, look at your ideas through new lenses, and develop a positive spirit of resilience and optimism.
While innovation and creativity are glamorous concepts, the act of creating change is messy, hard work. It often takes much longer than we think is reasonable.
To succeed, we have to care for ourselves, mentally and spiritually.
Questions to Ponder
- What warning signs tell you that you’re in danger of burning out? What is especially important for you to pay attention to?
- What practices might help you become more resilient?
- What questions—and people—could help you assess where you are and the best next steps?
- How will you know it’s time to quit?
- What questions will you use to find the right boss? The right organization?