Weekly Badass Mail

A quick glance at the jobs report and one might think we’re taking a turn for the better. 172,000 jobs added in May. More than double what economists expected. Unemployment sitting flat at 4.3 percent. Every headline you scrolled past called it strong and solid. And if you’re sitting in a job that’s been sucking the life out of you, you probably felt two things at once. A little relief that things aren’t falling apart. And then a knot in your stomach you couldn’t quite name. That knot is...

I’m about to pick a fight with the most beloved piece of advice in my entire industry. Buckle up. “Find your purpose” is garbage advice for a burned-out person. I stopped giving it, and I’ll tell you exactly why. You’re already running on fumes, already behind, and already half-convinced something is wrong with you. And now you’ve been handed a homework assignment the size of the freaking universe, with no instructions, and it's due “immediately, or you’re wasting your one precious life.” So...

If someone had told me at 28 that the advice I was following would put me on a couch unable to move by 40, I would have thought they were being dramatic. I picked the safe career. Got the degrees. Stayed at jobs longer than I should have because leaving felt irresponsible. I was the first one in, last one out. I said yes to everything. I followed my passion straight into a career that made me miserable. And when I burned out so badly I had to rebuild from scratch, I kept hearing the same...

I’m mid-conversation with this week’s podcast guest and she starts talking about being lost in a forest. Not metaphorically lost like “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” Lost like search-and-rescue lost. Helicopter-overhead lost. And she says the reason nobody can find you isn’t because they’re not looking. It’s because you’re standing in the middle of the trees and there’s no clearing. Lisa Shubin, my guest on this week’s episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast®, is a national...

Oops, you did it again. You left a job you hated, took the first thing that looked different, and three months in you’re sitting there thinking… I think this is the same thing in a different building. You didn’t make a bad decision. You made a blind one. You committed to the 48-pack without ever tasting it. Think about it. The entire Costco sample model exists because people make better decisions when they try something small before committing to the big version. Nobody grabs a 48-count case...

Every Sunday night, the dread kicks in. By Monday morning, you’ve talked yourself out of it again. You tell yourself this quarter will be different. That the workload will ease up. That you just need to push through a little longer. You’ve been telling yourself that for two years. There’s a psychological model that explains exactly why you’re stuck in this loop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist who studied how change actually works. The real...

You got praised in your last review for something that isn’t in your job description. And you probably smiled and said thank you. That’s the moment the second job became permanent. Scope creep doesn’t announce itself. It moves in one favor at a time. One gap you filled because nobody else was going to. Someone left the team and you absorbed their work. A project needed someone strategic and you raised your hand. Leadership started pulling you into meetings that had nothing to do with your...

You’ve probably been told, at some point, that burnout is something you need to manage better. Sleep more. Set boundaries. Try meditation. Download an app. Maybe your company offered a wellness stipend or a resilience workshop and called it support. And you tried it. Some of it helped for a week. Then Monday hit and everything was exactly the same. That’s because a lot of the advice out there is aimed at the wrong target. Christina Maslach is the researcher who literally defined burnout. Her...

The New York Times published a piece last year asking whether women have "ruined the workplace." The original headline was even more direct before they quietly edited it after the internet responded accordingly. The argument went like this: flexibility, empathy, and the values women have pushed into professional spaces are what’s making work worse for everyone. I read it sitting at my desk, after a full day of work, and I just stared at it for a minute. Because if you’re someone who has been...