What If You Don’t Need a New Job? You Need a New Way to Recover From This One
What If Recovering from Work Is How We Become Capable of More?
I realized something recently had me shocked:
Executive Unschool, on September 1st its three year anniversary, is now one of the longest jobs I’ve ever had.
The only real comparison is my time at FindLaw, after graduating law school during the great recession, I was a writer and team lead because it was the only job that I could get because every law firm was laying off lawyers. Despite the weight of feeling that I wasn’t a “real lawyer”, I loved that job with my whole heart. Instead of practicing law, I got paid to write, think, create, and work with good humans who showed me what it meant to lead with both business and heart at the same time.
And yet all of the legal and law firm roles that followed brought with it a very different pattern.
I would fall in love with the work. Give it everything I had. Eventually, disappointment would arrive. Sometimes conflict and painful wounds.
Then I would leave.
There were new jobs, bigger titles, law firms, executive roles, and eventually businesses. From the outside, you could call a lot of it ambition.
Looking back, I can also see the accumulation of work wounds.
I spent nearly two decades inside workplaces as an employment lawyer, executive, strategist, managing partner, and founder. I saw what happens when smart, capable people spend years absorbing the emotional remnants left behind by the “normal” experience of work:
The difficult or nasty boss
The conflict that felt like a backstabbing betrayal you didn't see coming
The layoff that rearranges how safe and secure you feel
The job you worked incredibly hard to earn that somehow stopped feeling like success after all
The version of you who became very good at succeeding and eventually looked back to wonder what all that success cost you
This is part of why I built Executive Unschool.
Work Will Still Give Challenges Daily
For a while, I think I unconsciously imagined that the work I would create would bring about work wound healing that then would make work easier.
It hasn't.
Building Executive Unschool has included plenty of uncertainty, disappointment, conflict, failed ideas, financial decisions, uncomfortable conversations, and moments when I've questioned what I'm building. In that respect, it has the similar challenges as any other role I’ve held.
And yet the difference is what I do with the accumulated stress, worry, fear, and overwhelm caused by work…
I recover.
This looks like being able to experience something difficult without allowing it to become the entire story about my work. I more quickly bring awareness to when an old work wound has been activated and give myself enough space to understand what is actually happening rather than react immediately. I give myself space to make decisions only after the emotional charge has settled. And maybe most importantly, I stay rooted in work I deeply care about while continuing to change the parts that aren't working on regular basis.
That is a capacity I didn't always have.
This Is Work Recovery™
Most of what we say about recovery gets said too late, after someone is already running on empty.
Take the vacation. Book the massage. Get some sleep. Those things can feel wonderful, and they matter. They still aren't the whole practice.
Work Recovery is learning to process what work asks you to carry, so it stops piling up inside the rest of your life.
Because a weekend away has a hard time reaching the meeting you're still replaying on Monday morning. A bubble bath has never once repaired a betrayal. And an hour of scrolling on the couch can rest your body while your motor mind keeps running overtime.
Real recovery brings us back to ourselves.
Then something quieter happens underneath. We build capacity.
We get steadier with uncertainty, so an unknown stops registering as an emergency. Disappointment can move through us without putting our whole future on trial. And when something genuinely needs to change, we tend to see it sooner and decide with more clarity.
Recovery makes room for the next thing.
That's the Future We're Interested in Building
Executive Unschool exists for people who are curious about how good work and life can actually get. Especially the ones who already know how to succeed.
We're curious about what opens up when you stop reading your tolerance for more as proof of your ambition. When you recover from the work wounds you've been carrying. And when you get to revisit what work taught you about achievement, worth, time, money, leadership, and enough.
That’s the way to start building capacity for whatever wants to come next.
I’ve recently made peace (after a life-altering trip to Costa Rica with my husband Josh) that I want a reallly big life, hard things included. Meaningful work, real adventure, close relationships, creative risk, and plenty of unhurried joy alongside all of it.
Every bit of that runs on a hella lot of demand for expansive capacity.
Maybe that's one of the truest gifts work recovery hands us. Your next level may be asking for more capacity, not more effort.
That's the work we explore at Executive Unschool.
