"We're like family." This is a phrase that's become quite popular in our places of work to try to make work feel a little less like this and a little bit more like this. It's a phrase that started in the last decade or two to try to elicit feelings of warmth and belonging and really that "cool culture" vibe. The laid-back break rooms with beanbag chairs and the beer on tap and those tight-knit teams that got through everything together like a family. It's a phrase that started with positive intent and has had positive outcome. However, what's gone far less recognized and discussed is how calling work our family can actually be quite detrimental to our mental and emotional health without our knowing it. Which is why I'm here today to offer the reminder that work is not your family. And to explore how this "cool culture" catchphrase often ends up breeding burnout instead.
My name is Gloria Chan Packer. I am a mental wellness educator and an experienced corporate leader. In 2018, I founded a company called "Recalibrate" to try to deliver workplace mental wellness services that were more modern, accessible and science-backed. Since that time, I and my team have gotten to work with almost 20,000 employees all over the world. Now, the reason this topic, exploring how calling work our family can be problematic and breed burnout, the reason it's important to me is because I've personally lived it.
Before we get into that, though, let's first baseline by understanding why calling work our family at its core can be problematic. Doing so, psychologically infers a really big blur and betrayal in our boundaries. Work and family are different entities with different goals, expectations and responsibilities, and therefore should be separated and boundaried. For example, I'm not going to be in the shower one day and notice a really weird mole on my pregnant belly and roll into my boss's office like I would my mom and be like, "Hey, can you can you get in here and look at this? This looks kind of weird. I'm freaked out." A few of us are giggling or laughing, but I'm sure a few of us, too, in our heads are like, "Oh, have I done something weird like that at work? Have I crossed a boundary before?”
Boundaries are hard for a lot of us because many of us never learned boundaries. It's kind of a newer, buzzy phrase that not many of us really have learned or defined before. So let's start by defining what boundaries are and why they're so important to our mental health. I like to think of boundaries as our ability to identify, communicate and take action on our needs. Being able to say, "I need to eat," "I need to rest," "I need some space right now." Survival speaking, boundaries are critical for us as humans to be able to say, "I need something," to be able to find safety and resourcing. However, it can also be advantageous in certain situations to delay or deprioritize our needs too. For example, if I'm a human back in the day, running away from a tiger, if I happen to be hungry, it will, of course, be beneficial to delay that need for hunger until I'm safe again. However, if, after the tiger has left and I'm safe, I keep staying stuck and being scared of the tiger and delaying my hunger and not eating, that becomes unhealthy too. This shift of delaying our needs into the unhealthy without knowing it is where a lot of us find ourselves unknowingly stuck today. Somewhere in our lives we learned and adapted that repressing or sacrificing our needs for others was beneficial. But that became so auto-piloted in our subconscious that it goes past the point of diminishing returns and becomes unhealthy. To where maybe we land into a workplace and we hear "we're like family" and our brain just triggers into "give it everything no matter what." We sacrifice our boundaries, our time, our relationships, and we start living life in these big swings of overworking to burnout. And maybe we rationally know that it's not the healthiest pattern in our life, but we feel stuck. I get that. I've lived through that and sometimes still feel challenged with it.
You see, before I worked in mental wellness, you could argue that I worked in the opposite of mental wellness. I started my career in management and technology consulting, spending almost a decade giving it my all. I did the 80 to 100 hour billing weeks, the 100-plus fights a year, for years on end, the early promotion chase and didn't scale back on other parts of my life either. Still volunteered, went to my SoulCycle classes did brunch and late nights with my friends until my completely overscoped life turned into burnout cycle after burnout cycle. In 2017, my brain and body hit a wall. I started struggling with debilitating, chronic migraines that, for me, meant that after months of no change and no medication or treatment working, I knew I had to take at least a leave from work. And that was devastating for me because work had really become my everything.
There is a memory that haunts me from that time. And it was the night before I was about to go on leave, and I was just grabbing dinner with a friend and my husband. And I said to my friend, "Work is my entire worth and my identity. I don't know what I'm going to do without it." And my husband's body language and face dropped in a way that I had never seen it. And after my friend left, I remember him saying to me, "I can't believe that you think that work is your only worth when I see so much more. And I can't believe you can't see that either." It's a poignant memory for me because I remember it feeling so true. And now I know it's not. But it was a really rough period. It's such an important one in my life because it gave me the opportunity to do my own mental health work and understand where these burnout behaviors had come from for me, so that now I could grow into being able to discern when those behaviors are healthy or unhealthy. For me, where those behaviors started and were adopted is that I grew up learning that I needed to be perfect and to people please and be the best at everything so that I could get myself out of a situation that I felt like I otherwise wouldn't be able to make it through. For me, that perfectionism and people-pleasing was so critical to that point in my life. But then when I just put it on autopilot, it went way past the point of diminishing returns and often became unhealthy for me.
That's my story. Let's spend some time getting to know yours. I'm going to invite you to do a little bit of reflection activity with me as you're comfortable, if you can all just close your eyes wherever you are. And with your eyes closed, I'm going to ask you to start to bring to mind a part of you that tends to overwork, to be a perfectionist or a people-pleaser, struggles to set boundaries. When I ask what it would be like if you tone that part of you back a little. Just let that go a little. For the piece of you that pops up with some tension or resistance, let's lean into that and ask, why not? What would happen? What would go wrong? Would things go wrong, the other shoe would finally drop, and it'd be all your fault? Would you lose success? Would you not have anything to talk about in conversation to feel worthy anymore? Then let's practice some curiosity around where you might have first adapted or learned this. When it might have helped or protected you in life. Did you learn early on you had to be perfect to avoid shame or discipline? Or when you were young, did you learn you had to be overly self-reliant, you had to take care of everything and everyone because your caretaker couldn't. Or maybe later in life, in college, did you learn it was worth sacrificing whatever you needed to get that win or accolade, maybe to make up for not feeling accepted earlier in life? See what it would be to speak to that part of yourself and say, "Thank you so much for making this adaptation. You helped me through such an important time, but right now, I don't need you to be on the clock all the time anymore. I have a beautiful life that I've built with safety and stability, and I have people in my life that love me for who I am and not what I do. You can take a breather so I can too.”
As you're ready, just gently opening your eyes back up and coming back into the room with me. Welcome back.
So part of that reflection activity is an example of what we would technically call identifying our cognitive schemas. Our cognitive schemas are essentially how our brain forms all of our subconscious behaviors, patterns, thoughts and emotions which our brain largely learns based on past experiences we've had. A majority of our subconscious schemas, our behaviors, are formed and adapted early on in life, especially in childhood, because our brains are kind of blank slates. We haven't experienced much of life yet, so out of safety and efficiency, our brain takes each big experience and wants to say, OK, this is what I did, these were the factors around, this is what happened and therefore is how I should predict, I should feel, think and act from here on out." And it puts that on autopilot into our subconscious. This can be very beneficial, and it does keep us safe and efficient. However, it can also become very outdated and unhealthy for us too, which is why it's so important to do this work. Now, doing such work is not about saying, because a lot of our subconscious behaviors were formed in the past, that they're all invalid or wrong. What it is about doing is making sure we each do our own due diligence to understand where the blueprint of our behaviors came from and ensure they're still relevant and productive to our current lives. We update everything else important in our lives, from our homes to our technology to our education. Why aren't we doing the same with our behaviors that affect our everyday?
Now I'm sure some of y'all might be asking, "OK, I thought we were talking about workplace burnout. Why aren't we talking more about our workplaces and our employers?" Which is where I'll offer a little bit of a plot twist. Yes, when it comes to burnout, our workplaces and employers do own a big part of the equation. However, what I find to be somewhat of an overlooked part of the equation today is what piece of the problem we individually own ourselves, too. If I inherently have a tendency or a pattern to overwork or not be able to set boundaries no matter what workplace or organization I change. If I never take accountability to drive my own internal change, then no matter what external change I make, I will likely keep suffering from the same patterns over and over again.
Now, all that being said and all that being something I strongly believe in, I am also a realist and I know that not all of us will be ready to do our own deep personal work yet. So where else can we start on this topic? What else can we do? I'll offer three smaller steps. First, when you find yourself wanting to say "we're like family" around work or organizations, try to get clearer in your communication and use language that has better boundaries. As Brené Brown says, "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." So if you find yourself wanting to say "We're like family," but you're really kind of asking for a favor, clarify that, say, "Hey, you know, we actually need this deliverable a week sooner. What can we do to achieve that?" Or if you're just trying to communicate a value about your organization, again, clarify the language and use boundaries. Say, "It's a priority for our teams to feel trust and connection." Or, as my friend Trey, the CEO of Kronologic, says to his team, he says, "We're not like a family; we're like a professional sports team." It still infers that same warmth and camaraderie, but within the boundaries of a workplace. Now, when it comes to this topic, it's not to say that you can't have deep, meaningful relationships from work, but it is to point out that we need to practice healthy boundaries so that we can sustain healthy workplaces and relationships.
The second tip I'll offer is to actually do the work to learn and model healthy boundaries for one another. If you are a people-pleaser who tends to overscope and overcommit, try buying some time before you respond and commit. Say, "Hey, I need to evaluate this against my other priorities. Can I get back to you by the end of the day?" Give yourself some time for that behavioral change instead of getting stuck in the same repetitive pattern. When you're communicating boundaries, clarify what you need and what the impact will be if you don't get that need met. Say, "If we need this product a month sooner, I'm going to need the help of two other people. Otherwise, the quality is really going to be at risk, and we might either lose team members or customers." Remember that when you're communicating boundaries, that's not a "me versus you" fight, but it's what we need to do to collectively come together to resource ourselves, to sustain our organizations, workplaces and relationships.
Last tip I will offer is to see if you can find one way to empower mental health for yourself or others this year. I will recognize that just when it comes to talking about mental, emotional health, our behaviors and our past, that can feel tender, personal. But it can especially feel a little scary or stigmatized when we are talking about working with experts like psychologist or psychotherapist. I'll close here by offering a reframe in that thinking, a reframe in that stigma. When it comes to any other important part of our lives, we seek out experts. When it comes to our physical health, we seek out doctors. Financial health, we seek out financial advisors. Why is it that when it comes to our mental health, we think we should take care of it on our own? We would never look at a friend who's having a heart attack and be like, "You should really take care of that yourself, otherwise you're kind of weak. You should not need to go to the hospital." Why is it that we think we can grow or develop our mental health when most of us don't have the tools or education to do so?
So today, whether it is your propensity to burn out, your struggle with setting boundaries or something different, I hope you can feel a little bit more free and empowered to start building more meaning and sustainability into your life.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)
