A Work Recovery Lesson: Leading with Self-Compassion After Big Moments
Weekly Dose of Work Recovery Vol. 4.15.26
A Work Recovery™ Lesson: Your capacity to lead expands when your compassion for yourself keeps pace with your expectations.
Last week the long-awaited link to the TEDxDuluth talk I delivered dropped. And wouldn’t you know, my heart started racing and I immediately started sweating…
What if it’s terrible? Can I endure watching it? How cringe is it going to be? Those were the initial racing thoughts running through my head.
But I pushed through it, saw those first thoughts as silly resistance to be discarded, and then I pushed play to watch the entire thing. All glorious eight minutes and some odd seconds of it. And I found myself smiling at it too.
How I more fully responded to it after that first “oh sh*t” reaction may offer a way to evaluate your own performance on something that matters deeply to you, so I want to share it.
First and foremost, what I’ve held onto after being on stage is this truth, “Damn, I did that thing.”
As I shared before, the TEDxDuluth experience was one of the most uncomfortable, bold things I’ve done. The preparation was intense, with five rounds of comprehensive script edits, three live coaching sessions, and the requirement that it all be fully memorized for the stage.
It was unlike anything I’ve ever done, and it’s been essential to my entire evaluation of that big, bold experience that I center how proud I am of myself for even having done it. That comes first.
Life is about experiences, and this one was a bucket list checkmark, regardless of how it went.
Second, my saving grace has been the agreement that I now have, thanks to the powerful book The Four Agreements, that no matter what I'm doing, I give it my best. What my “best” is varies day to day, and even hour by hour, but that's my standard - my best.
It helps me remember that I’m not always at 100%, but I commit to giving each day, each project, each task whatever I’ve got available in that moment. That way, I don’t have regrets or shoulda, coulda, woulda moments, because I get to say, regardless of the outcome, I gave it my best shot.
And so I was able to take both of these important anchors into watching the recording. I’m proud of myself, and I gave it my best. It quieted the inner critic that loves to be unnecessarily unkind about the details, thankfully.
Because the truth of my TEDxDuluth talk performance is that it was great, AND I have beautiful room for improvement in many ways.
Isn’t that true of everything we do in this life?
Our efforts once completed can be enough, and hopefully the best we could do, all things considered, AND we can always improve.
Both things are true at the same time. It’s the beauty of loving ourselves even when we see room for improvement.
Where in your life can you offer this same grace to celebrate how you did a hard thing, knowing you gave it your best, and see gentle room for improvement?
Work Recovery looks like choosing kindness and compassion, especially toward ourselves, in our big, bold, brave moments of work.
- Bree
P.S. If you want to see my TEDxDuluth talk Recovering from Work: The Leadership Revolution We've Been Missing, check it out HERE
This week's did you know…
Did you know that adrienne maree brown writes that pleasure is not a distraction from mission-driven and social justice movement work—it’s a strategy for sustaining it? She teaches that when we center joy, passion, and aliveness, we build communities and even workplaces that aren’t just fighting to survive, but actually practicing the world we’re trying to create by centering THRIVING. What a novel concept sorely missing from so many spaces…
Source: Pleasure Activism, a book by adrienne maree brown
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