Running on Empty

I hung up the phone and dropped to the floor. For me, the floor always feels like the best place to collapse in times of stress, the moments when we don’t feel worthy enough to sit on our own hand-me-down couches. I felt frightened and alone, except for Reesie.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I told her. She replied… with a meow.

I gave in to tears.

I’ve never before shared this story publicly, and it feels scary to do so now. But many of your employees are emerging from one of the most difficult periods of their lives, and their experiences may not be unlike mine. I am not an anthropologist, resiliency expert, or therapist, but I am someone who has struggled and come out on the other side. For me, and for countless others whose daily lives were uprooted over the course of these long months, on the other side of struggle is a demand for a better life.

Choose Your Own Adventure

I don’t know if there’s one definition, one experience, of what we call “rock bottom.” But when I arrived at mine, it looked something like this: First, it was dark. I wasn’t quite sure how I got there, and I couldn’t see far enough in front of my own face to find a way out. Second, it was scary. I realized that I had a very real chance of staying right where I was, in the same house, surrounded by cigarette butts and pizza boxes, in the same unhealthy relationship, and never making it out. Third, it was disorienting. I tried to focus my attention on making sense of the world around me, but everything was confusing, like one of those disturbing scenes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

No matter the specifics, most of us react the same way when we get lost in dark, scary and disorienting places: we panic. When we panic, our bodies go through a series of responses designed to help us get out of harm’s way fast: adrenaline floods the bloodstream, the heartbeat quickens, breathing becomes fast and shallow, and the senses get sharper. This is our more primal self taking over, and its job is to get us geared up for battle.

For me, and for countless others whose daily lives were uprooted over the course of these long months, on the other side of struggle is a demand for a better life.

Changing the Game

I set my tunnel vision on the ensuing fight and waited for my opponent to appear. Would it be the man from the bank who couldn’t help me? No, he’s not the bad guy here. Okay, it must be the thief from the gas station. Oh, it’s not him either. So it must my boyfriend and his issues. No? That’s weird. Okay, then it’s the broken ankles that ended my dance career. It’s my ordinary education. The people who raised me. The people who raised them. It’s the big, bad, terrible world and, dammit, I didn’t ask to be born into it. Wait, it’s none of those?!

So who was I fighting?

I took a deep breath and what followed was a mind-blowing realization: life is just a Choose Your Own Adventure game, and I’d been playing in Survival Mode. I could choose to continue down that path, fighting a wave of increasingly powerful false villains, but that would make today’s visit to Rock Bottom merely a pit stop during a multi-city tour of the state of Depression, and I’d been on the road long enough. So instead I looked around and saw that there was, in fact, another option: Exit Survival Mode. And when I did, the entire game changed.

Rising from the Ashes

From the dirty living room floor, I watched as my reality began to shift from an unrelenting war zone into a world where things were simply… out of place. They were very out of place, actually, but this was just a mess and I had the power to clean it up. So I got up, dusted myself off and began making small, incremental changes to the way I lived my life. Within six months I put an end to my relationship and found a stable job. I started practicing healthier eating, sleeping, and exercise habits, and rediscovered the beauty of sharing my art with the world. In short, my well-being became my top priority. By that summer I felt like me again, except this time, I was better.

That January day brought me to a dark place that many of us know well. And like that thief did to my bank account in 2012, the events of the last year drained our physical, financial, mental and emotional resources, thus sending millions of individuals, families and companies into survival mode. But now that we are beginning to re-emerge, we’re finding ourselves in a new reality and things are a bit out of place. It’s time we dust ourselves off, rethink our priorities and question everything about the way we operate.

The Great Reset

Prior to the pandemic, the typical relationship between people and their work was flat-out broken. This relationship was forged in an industrial era where the social contract between employees and companies was primarily based on a fee-for-service model. In short, work was steeped in this century-old expectation: I pay you to do something; you show up for work and perform or lose your job and the financial security it provides. When you trace the evolution of modern work, it started from this transactional base.

Many of us prescribe to a narrow, outdated definition of success rooted in decades-old norms, policies and expectations about the nature of work. But if discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life, in 2020 we paid our dues. People are now choosing to realign their personal missions around maximizing the quality of their time. By consequence, we are establishing a new set of norms in which we expect more of ourselves, our families, our communities and, importantly, our employers. Leaders will be wise to take heed of these emerging expectations and respond by implementing practices and policies that align with the goals of their people. If we are honest with ourselves, the way we worked before the pandemic was far from optimal. It’s time we reset the game.