Who would notice if you went quiet for a week?
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A friend of mine was in a job interview a while back, and the hiring manager said, "We're a family here." She thought of me right away. Her exact words to me were, "Alert! Alert!" 🚨🚨🚨 She had a point. Companies work hard at making us feel like we belong there. (I hate icebreakers so much, and yet I literally took a class on them.) And a lot of the time it works, which is exactly what makes it complicated when the job stops fitting. That's what this week's episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast® is about. Work as a proxy for belonging. For a lot of us, work has become the main place we feel like we're part of something. The 2025 American Time Use Survey found that only 30% of us socialize with anyone on an average day, down from 38% in 2015. Work is one of the few places connection still shows up on a schedule. And that makes a draining job a whole lot harder to leave. You're leaving the work, and you're also leaving your people. So here's one small thing for this week. I call it a belonging map. Write down the people who would notice you were gone if you went quiet for a week. Then put a star next to every name you only know because of work. Count the stars. If most of them have one, that's data. It explains a lot about why the stay-or-go question feels so hard. Then pick one starred person and ask them something that has nothing to do with work. See what happens. In the full episode, I get into why managers hand more unpaid work to the people they see as loyal, and why layoffs hit so hard when your people and your paycheck live in the same place. I also talk about building one place to belong that doesn't need a login. If you stay, stay because the work and the place still fit. Take care, Tara P.S. I'm hosting Off the Record with Alison Campbell on Thursday, Oct 29, from 12 to 1 PM ET. It's a free, candid hour on Zoom about what changed at work this year and what could shape 2027. It won't be recorded, so what's shared stays in the room. There are 40 seats. Save your seat |