Tag Archive for: values

OP-Ed: International Women’s Day 2022: Burnout, Sustainability and What Matters?

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International Women's Day 2022Many companies focus myopically on International Women’s Day. This year #BreaktheBias and
 gender and climate are the annual themes, depending on your source. But, as founder and fifteen 
years in here at theglasshammer, it is hard to believe that these slogans and themes that come and
 go every year create any change at all. People wants Acts, Not Ads from companies, and
 professional hard-working women are tired of the lip service and want to see the talk, walked.

As 
we enter year three of the global pandemic, with so many of us doing extreme amounts of work, 
and some of us also still balancing childcare with covid related closures of daycares and schools, 
isn’t it time to ask ourselves how can professional women and men (and especially anyone who 
has second and third shifts with kids and aging parents) do balance and self-care, better? What 
matters? And what role do firms have in creating the workplace of the future that we are ready to 
be in, now? This International Women’s Day, the manifesto should be to take a day off.
 Tomorrow the work will still be there!

Overwork and Burnout


There is work and then there is overwork. Chances are if you are reading this article, you have 
spent at least some of your career in the overwork zone. You probably work in financial, legal or
 professional services, in technology firms, big pharma, manufacturing, media or Fortune 500.
 You are probably a go-getter, highly ambitious and very successful. You probably have engaged
 some of the usual methods and possess some of the characteristics often needed to get to the top, including old fashioned hard and long work, a
 competitive nature, cognitive smarts, higher than average EQ to read the room, and a belief that
 improvement is always possible. Possibly three generations of professional women are reading 
this article with similar, yet evolving, culturally programmed definitions of success regarding wealth, status
 and career ladder climb concepts.

Is the extreme achievement mindset in sync with your life
goals, your health and mental wellness? Is overachievement about meeting other people’s 
standards or earning your worth?


Dr. Devon Price, like many of us, came to his senses regarding extreme productivity after a health
 emergency. He insists that we should stop valuing ourselves in terms of our productivity at
 work. In the book, Laziness Does Not Exist, he affirms that ‘we don’t have to earn our
 right to exist’ with overwork and endless achievement.

Advice includes to listen to your body and to forget grinding away all the time to meet arbitrary
 standards. By reframing what being ‘lazy’ means, versus the allure of validation through
 achievement, a healthier, happier you can emerge.

“Laziness is usually a warning sign from our bodies and our mind that we need a break.”

In an interview with NPR, he discusses why we rationalize working so hard, and how asking for 
help, and helping others to helps us, prevents tiredness from overwork but also facilitates us to be better
, due to feeling less exhausted as “our brains take micro-naps either way.”


It isn’t just you.

In several recent studies, isolated overwork came up as the most demotivating factor and biggest
 reason people are quitting jobs. This isn’t new news. Back in 2017, Inc magazine reported on employees 
quitting when leaders overwork people, show zero empathy and don’t respect time when people
 are out of the office living their lives, but it is further accentuated by the pandemic. 
Microsoft conducted an employee indexing survey of 30,000 that resulted in a study called
 “The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work – Are we Ready?”

By looking at trends including 
desire for flexible work and hybrid structures, the study reiterated what their CEO Satya Nadella 
called the hybrid work paradox. This study reveals that while people want more flexibility and remote 
options, they also seek deep human social connection. The same study reveals that high
 productivity is masking employee exhaustion and overwork. It states measurable uptick over the
 course of the year –  February 2020 to February 2021 –  on volume of emails sent, 66% increase on 
people working on documents, and meeting usage on teams increased in volume and time on
 meeting applications.

Uncovering your own Competing Agendas

Isn’t it time you figured out what you want for you? Start with your values. Take a look at what
 matters to you on this worksheet – literally, pick ten words that mean the most and then rank them
 1-10, with one being what you value most. Are your actions matching your values? Are you
 living a humdrum existence while your top value is adventure? Are you spending fourteen hours 
a day at work when your top value is family? Now is a great to re-evaluate what matters to 
you. Be yourself, everyone else is taken as the adage goes.

If you had trouble thinking about how all of this meets reality, or deciding what your values are
, or felt conflicted, that is part of the journey too. Hyper achievement and superhuman
 productivity are sometimes part of deep developmental gremlins that have made their way into 
our heads over time, so we can’t see any other way to be, making them our base operating 
system with everything else being an app on top. Kegan and Lahey, Developmental 
psychologists at Harvard, really have a superb method in their book, Immunity to Change, to 
help you figure out what your unconscious mind is doing to you while you happily goal set in
 your conscious mind all day long regarding work, fitness and home life. We are all a product of 
whatever beliefs and paradigms that we have accumulated throughout our life and if your
 granny/dad/mother/friend told you words to live by, chances are you are doing just that, 
implicitly following some guidelines without even knowing.

What are your saboteurs? There is another easy way to find out what is going on inside your own 
head by taking this short quiz on “How we self-sabotage” by Positive Intelligence. It is key to
 understand what is going on with yourself and what your self-talk is likely to be telling you.
 Let’s start with the gremlins. If you have something like hyperachievement as your top saboteur,
 then it is likely you will justify the overworking with sentences like ‘I must be effective and 
efficient, and ’emotions get in the way of performance.’ Or if you have a high control saboteur,
 you might be telling yourself things like, ‘well if I don’t do it, who will?’ Or, that people need
 people like you to get the job done. Show yourself some compassion and a great book to
 understand how to even begin to approach such a daunting task is Radical Compassion by Tara
 Brach. It is normal to feel your feelings and that includes joy.

In short, honor yourself on International Women’s Day by taking stock of what matters to you now, and how closely your own life feels aligned to that.

We are starting a Spring coaching cohort in May for sustainable success in 2022. Cost is $3,999 
per person and includes a yearlong program with 6 sessions of executive coaching, peer coaching
 and career development training. Limited spots, contact nicki@theglasshammer.com and write
 spring coaching cohort in the title of the email.

By Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com

Nicki founded theglasshammer in 2007 to inspire, inform and empower professional women in their careers. We have been the leading and longest running career advice online and in person media company in the USA for professional women in financial services.

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Personal Transformation in 2022: What are You Harmonizing With?

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transformationThe transformational story of caterpillar to winged butterfly has arguably become an overused and often abused analogy for rebirth. Yet, the crux of the journey is neither the caterpillar nor the butterfly, but the dissolution and uncertainty in the void of the chrysalis.

The messy process of transformation, the surrender of what has been for what will come, both terrifies and excites us. As humans, we face uncertainty in the transformation journey many times in our cycles of personal growth.

It is partially the willingness to go the liminal place of uncertainty that determines our capacity for personal evolution.

We also face a challenging matter the caterpillar does not: how resistant the human ego can be when it comes to letting go of who we have perceived ourselves to be, and the worth and value we have attached to it.

Separate Your Worth From Your Roles

Identity, according to Psychology Today, “encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self.”

In her book Warrior Goddess Training: Become the Woman You Are Meant to Be, Heather Ash Amara speaks to how we often attach value or self-worth to the roles we play within our lives. Any role that we identify with, no matter how valuable it may be to our sense of self, also becomes a too narrow script to ultimately live in.

A role can range anything from a “loving mother” to a “successful executive” to a “good friend” to a “resilient entrepreneur.”

We tend to have a script for every role we play, one that was often written before us. How you perceive yourself and how others perceive you can become a trap. Being stuck to being something you have been proud to identify with can be as much of a cage as being boxed into a role that you never asked for, if you have to keep acting out the script of that role to feel worthiness.

If you’ve attached to the image of being a world traveler, you might buy a ticket when you truly crave a home. You may not even be able to admit to yourself that you crave a home. If you’re attached to being a loving mother, perhaps your script does not include taking the personal break you really need. If you’ve attached your worth to being a good friend, you may have written yourself into a contract of being available more than what is now kind to you.

In order to be free to move authentically in our lives between roles, to both redefine who we are and to expand, we must be able to release ourselves from any script we’ve attached our worth and value to.

So take stock of the roles you are playing:

  • What roles have you currently attached some sense of worth or value to?
  • What is the script you have defined for each?
  • What worth do you derive from playing these roles?

When it comes to change, we have to be willing to question where we have displaced our sense of worth. We rather come to source it from our inherent selves and sometimes tear up or simply re-envision our scripts to fit who we are now.

As Brené Brown often speaks to, we have to stop hustling for our worthiness, which ultimately comes from shame and fear we are not enough. We must realize, as Meggan Watterson writes, “Worth is not given, it’s claimed.”

From a place of knowing our inherent worth, we give ourselves permission to shed who we have been without losing our sense of value in the world, and more importantly, our connection to ourselves.

Harmonize To Where You Want To Be

Inside of personal change, there is often a time of dissolution between a previous reality and the one that you are moving towards. And while you might not be able to see it, you can still harmonize towards where your inner awareness is taking you.

Imaginal cells are like the blank slate of the becoming inside the chrysalis. The caterpillar is gone. Possibility exists. At first, imaginal cells operate like disconnected islands and appear to be a threat to the organism. It is only once enough imaginal cells begin to vibrate at the intrinsic tune of butterfly and communicate with each other that they reach the tipping point of collectively becoming the butterfly.

Often, a time of transformation does involve re-imagining our lives. It’s not only new outcomes we might envision, but begins with our beliefs about ourselves, others and how the world works, as these are often shaping the reality we are operating within. If all the cells still vibrated at caterpillar, the change would never occur.

As Joe Dispenza writes in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, “a state of being means we have become familiar with a mental-emotional state, a way of thinking and a way of feeling, which has become an integral part of our self-identity.”

Just as with roles, the truth is that we can derive worth and value and reward from our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world, even if that value is the ability to stay comfortable inside of our limitations. We must not only be able to see the pattern, but desire to evolve, by actively challenging the more well-oiled perceptual pathways within so that we shift to and harmonize at a new level. As we begin to do this, we notice change begins to happen.

In her book How To Do The Work, Dr. Nicole LePera, also known as “The Holistic Psychologist”, shares her writing practice of leaning into growth through her Future Self Journaling prompts she used to ground new experiences in her body.

For the new experience she wishes to cultivate (eg restoring balance to her nervous system), LePera writes what she is practicing today, why she is grateful to be practicing it, what she is doing, how will she know when she is doing it and what the change will allow her to feel.

This journaling practice is a way to resonate more with the woman she is becoming and with the balanced nervous system she wishes to cultivate. Often we need to practice not only thinking in the direction we are moving, but feeling into it. This act of attention is infusing the conversations happening within the cells with a new way of being within the body.

Even when we don’t know our next big landing place, we can often feel the internal pull to evolve from within even as we must overcome ourselves, just as the being in the chrysalis must release the caterpillar to the open possibility of the imagination of cells.

Are you able to release yourself from the bounds of roles in which you have previously cast your worth? Are you able to harmonize more of your feelings and thoughts and actions with the being you can feel you are becoming?

In the uncertainty of the chrysalis and transition within a human life, this may look like nothing. But little by little, these small practices become the change.

By Aimee Hansen

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Anna de Jong: Head, Client Advisory Benelux and Nordics, PGIM Fixed Income

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Anna De Jong“A lot of people will tell you this or that can’t be done, and that goes for your personal and your professional life, but don’t take that as a given,” advises Anna de Jong. “Have the confidence and be strong until you get the answer that works for you.”

De Jong speaks about how the journey you take is what shapes you, the importance of knowing yourself and having the confidence to pursue the important questions.

What Defines You is the Journey You’re On

After growing up in a small village in the north of Holland, where she felt her limbs wanting to stretch even as a girl, de Jong adventured for a half year opportunity in London that became fifteen years between Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and other firms, thriving amidst a diversity of people, experiences, inspiration and opportunities.

Just when she reached the point of considering a move back to Holland for family motivations two years ago, PGIM Fixed Income approached about her current role in the Netherlands, which met the professional trajectory she also wanted. With London life having felt as much like home to her, de Jong reframes the question of where are you from to what it’s really about.

“It’s not where you’re from that matters. It’s just a box that people want to put you in. Ultimately, it’s about the journey that you’re on and the journey that you take that opens doors, or closes them,” she reflects.

It’s About The Personal Factor

The people factor has always magnetized her to her work. “In my field of work, I work for my clients and prospects, and I need to very quickly understand who I’m dealing with and how to progress things,” says de Jong. “You must be able to read people quickly in order to be successful, and that still holds today. I think that human element is what makes me most content in my work.”

De Jong advises that when working closely with others, it’s important to know yourself so you don’t lose your own intentions in any deal or interaction: “I’ve learned you need to hold your ground. You must understand yourself in order to do well professionally, but also personally. That’s a journey I also help other people with: stick with your convictions, yet be open to learning.”

Being approachable is important to de Jong: “I don’t think in different levels. I’ve learned from all walks of life and different parts of business and people,” says de Jong. “I’m always available and listening to everybody around. I am genuinely interested in people, and I think if you can understand what’s going on, then a lot of things make more sense, and it also matters when achieving the right results.”

De Jong notes that while remote working has been validated, being together with your team and clients is invaluable for creating connection and work culture.

“Covid is a lonely time, I think,” she reflects. “And ultimately you spend so much of your time at work. It’s good to see people, but being behind a screen also hides a lot. There’s no longer an excuse for saying that we can’t work from home because we all clearly can, but it’s also important to be with colleagues and have face-to-face time.”

Knowing and Balancing Your Values

“Someone once told me that when your career takes off, something else is going to suffer. For a long time, I was convinced that you have to work very hard while other things would have to take a backseat,” says de Jong. “ I have become of the opinion that’s entirely untrue. You are actually more successful when you understand what is really important to you and cultivate personal satisfaction, as well.”

Years ago, a friend introduced de Jong to a four pillar system. The four pillars represent what is personally important to you and emphasize keeping what matters to you in a balance. She uses the analogy of a chair, it can function with three but ideally needs four legs to be fully stable. For de Jong, she values home and family, friends, work and health: “If one gets out of whack, it makes the rest volatile and you do not perform as well, personally or professionally. It can be a juggling act, but you don’t have to forget about what’s important in your personal life in order to succeed in professional life and vice versa. In a way, they all become one.”

When the work aspect of life becomes too much, de Jong feels it’s important and okay to speak up about that, and not fall into the cultural notion of having to keep everything separate. Personally, she doesn’t resonate with a sense of being “successful” that connotes “achieving the best results regardless.”

De Jong does not perceive that getting the result, no matter what the impact on others or personal life, can ever be success. Rather, she speaks more to harmony and co-creation from a place that is aligned with your internal values.

When it comes to her personal success, “I do my work with lots of pleasure and have happy clients who are keeping and raising assets,” she notes, “but it’s also being home with my daughter and husband. It’s as elementary as that.”

De Jong feels well-matched by the atmosphere at her workspace: “PGIM Fixed Income has this fantastic work culture, that when I joined just felt like a warm blanket – where people work together, give each other challenges and opportunities. It’s been really fantastic.”

With a desire to keep growing, she is curious about pursuing courses in ESG investing and being able to mentor even more in that space.

Guidance For The Journey

“Some guidance that really stuck with me is to ask the same question until you get the right answer,” she notes, having tried this out in areas like promotion as well as anytime you’re immediately told something isn’t possible. “I will continue asking a question until I get the answer that I think works best.”

De Jong tells mentees: “Know, embrace, respect yourself and dare to be different. You have to be yourself, because if you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. It’s the journey you’re on that defines who you are. Embrace that.”

She emphasizes accepting and learning and being willing to let something go when it’s not the right thing. The more honest and non-judging you can be with yourself and others, feels de Jong, the more trust you build and the more you create results together. She has always advised women to be kind to each other, as it can be especially tricky to navigate in banking or finance when you first begin as a woman.

The hardest experience she’s had was in a previous role when she returned from maternity leave only two and a half months after having her daughter, and found part of her region moved from her remit and no expanded team as anticipated. Reflecting, she realizes the feeling that she could only take such a short leave was a red flag in feeling supported.

De Jong feels both men and women can contribute to normalizing parental leave by embracing it, and notes that her own husband has been a huge support.

Vocalize and Invest In Your Needs

De Jong now realizes that earlier in her career, she was often too scared to really ask for what would fulfill her, and so she often got something else. She feels it’s important to be very clear when you’re not satisfied.

“I would get frustrated but nobody seemed to notice, and then I would hand in my resignation and people were so surprised and often disappointed,” says de Jong. “They would ask, ‘why did you not tell me before?’ And I seriously thought I had, but clearly hadn’t been very vocal about my dissatisfaction.”

De Jong enjoys her four-year-old daughter, playing piano and is still looking for an experience in Holland akin to the community volunteer hub she loved in London. Her favorite volunteer work has been a charity she helped create called Launchpad Labs, which offered workspace and mentoring to those with challenging backgrounds.

“Helping others is a great way to stay on your feet to understand the bigger picture and that helps in your personal space and helps with your work,” says de Jong, “It helps to ground those four pillars and understanding what is important.”

She emphasizes investing in yourself and your personal happiness, as well as listening to your body. She loves exercise, baking, and continuing to learn and grow.

By: Aimee Hansen

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Your Negative Emotions Can Guide You to Value-Based Actions

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negative emotionsWhen we ignore, invalidate or suppress our negative emotions because we don’t want to feel them, or feel they are unacceptable, they do not go away.

“Effective leaders are mindful of their inner experiences but not caught in them. They know how to free up their internal resources and commit to actions that align with their values,” writes Dr. Susan David and Christina Congleton in Harvard Business Review. 

You Can’t Negate Negative Emotions

David, Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the award-winning book, Emotional Agility, shares in her TED Talk that a third of us either judge ourselves for having “bad emotions” like sadness or anger or grief, or try to push these feelings down.

“Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” says David. “Psychologists call this amplification.”

Indeed, research indicates that fighting against thoughts on addiction only magnifies them, restraining thoughts can create more stress and suppressing negative emotions spawns more emotional eating than admitting the emotions are there. 

David and Congleton have found that executives and leaders can get “hooked by” negative emotions— buying into them, avoiding situations that evoke those feelings and limiting themselves. Or, by denying the negative thoughts and rationalizing them away, even pushing themselves into situations that aren’t aligned with their values. 

Ultimately, suppressing or “fixing” negative emotions often ends up in cycling through the same reoccurring trigger areas of challenge for years. 

The Benefits of Feeling What You Don’t Want to Feel

“The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic,” says David. “We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.“

Positive emotions are simply those we tend to “find pleasurable to experience”—such as joy, satisfaction, love, serenity, interest or amusement. Whereas negative emotions are simply those we don’t find pleasurable to experience—such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, rage, loneliness and annoyance. Neither of these definitions imply the effect of having the emotion is entirely positive or negative within us, just that we judge experiencing it as so.

Apparently, a 3:1 positive/negative emotional experience ratio is necessary for a sense of flourishing, but the balance plays a part.

“One idea in the study of emotion and its impact on psychological health is overdue for retirement: that negative emotions (like sadness or fear) are inherently bad or maladaptive for our psychological well-being, and positive emotions (like happiness or joy) are inherently good or adaptive,” writes June Gruber.

So-called negative emotions have an inherent value. Negative emotions can foster detailed and analytical thinking and less stereotypical thoughts. Feelings like sadness can increase focus and help us to learn from mistakes and assess social situations better.

Negative emotions can facilitate us to go deeper into self-understanding and empathy. Being willing to experience them can build emotional resilience. They help us to evaluate our experience and detect when an area of life feels off and needs our attention.

Experiencing and accepting emotions like anger and sadness are important to our mental health. Mindfulness training has been helpful in overcoming anxiety disorders, not because it eradicated negative feelings but it trained participants to accept them. 

Research has shown the ability to hold mixed emotions together at once precedes improvements in well-being, even if it’s unpleasant or difficult. Across a study of ten years, frequent experiences of mixed emotions were strongly associated with relatively good physical health and that increases in them weakened age-related health declines.

“We find that psychological well-being is not entirely determined by the presence of one type or kind of an emotion,” writes Gerber, “but rather an ability to experience a rich diversity of both positive and negative emotions.”

From Emotional Data to Values-Aligned Action

David urges us to realize that emotions are data that “contain flashing lights to things that we care about”—when we get clear on precisely what we are feeling and can respond by taking steps that are value-aligned.

“Emotions are data, they are not directives,” she caveats. “We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them.” Rather, we pay attention to how they point to what we value. 

David and Congleton suggest four practices derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), originally created by Dr. Steven C. Hayes.

Recognize You Are Stuck.

Recognize your own patterns. Where are you caught in rigid, repeating mental loops—your thoughts like a broken record inside that is insistent on replaying? Does the loop feel familiar from the past, like situations you’ve felt before that triggered and created similar contraction? These loops only deplete your mental resources. Notice if you often feel undervalued, for example.

Identify Thoughts and Feelings. 

Label your thoughts and emotions distinctively to create emotional distance and clarity of the emotional data. If you feel you have to be available all the time for work, then you can get perspective by stating “I’m having the thought that I have to be available all the time for work.” Then you can look at what you feel and want to do.

Rather than saying “I’m sad” and being drowned by the emotion, you can say “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad,” and create enough space to look at the data. This is a mindfulness practice that can improve behavior, well-being and promote beneficial changes in the brain. 

Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectal behavior therapy, emphasizes that validating emotions requires accurate—observing and describing the event, thoughts and emotions, perhaps how it feels in your body—not interpretation or assumptions, which can invalidate and cause distrust in your internal experience.

“When he interrupted me for the second time, I felt anger and felt tightness and heat in my chest” is an observation. “I shouldn’t be so sensitive” is not.

Accept and Observe.

Rather than suppress or try to control your thoughts or emotions, even if you can’t rationally justify them or they don’t match how you think of yourself, allow them to be present. Breath ten deep breaths to check in. Rather than making them feel better, this is about making room for your raw emotions to reveal. What is going on internally and externally, and what is the energetic quality of your feelings? 

If you can get underneath the emotion, are they giving you a clear signal of something that matters, for which you could respond differently? 

Act in Alignment With Values. 

“You don’t get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort,” says David. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”

When you can treat your emotions as data, you can create choices of how you respond to them to act in a way that aligns with your values. 

Rather than be absorbed by or pulled into reaction by your emotions, you can be guided by your values, which is a primary focus of executive coaching. You can consider what actions will bring you closer to and further from them.

“When you take values-based actions, you will eventually arrive at a choice point,” tweets David. “Will you move toward your values and act like the person you wish to be, or will you move away from your values and act against them?”

By Aimee Hansen

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