Most of us did not learn overing by accident; we learned it in cultures that praise self-abandonment and call it passion.

Overing is (mental, emotional, and/or physical) disconnection from yourself, often in service of perceived expectations (both internal and external).

Mental overing comes with a compulsive “more-ness” that folks experience as “I’m not enough,” so they commit to more than is doable or required. “Doing it all” as a badge of honor, and so your creative ambition gets hijacked into busyness instead of purpose.

When we moved in December, I unpacked a few old “academic self-help” books by Donald E. Hall that I once assigned in introductory doctoral seminars. The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual is now more than twenty years old. Antiquated in the sense that it was written when tenure-track jobs and graduate school were a coherent, linear pathway, and the old guard of the academy still set the tone.

I trained a generation of scholarly leaders to navigate institutional cultures, decode their norms, and succeed within them. I mentored academic and professional identity formation for decades.

For many of us, our bodies intervene in our hustling identities. In 2016, my hustle identity demanded I fight back against the bodily injuries that came two weeks after I started therapy. I threw every type of healing modality at my herniated discs and the shingles that followed. I was determined to work my way back from injury with the same energy that got me there in the first place.

I wrapped up my 30s face-to-face with the physical and emotional tolls of chronic stress burnout and going into early menopause. These were all ruptures to my identity and my body. I learned the hard way that you can’t force summer energy across all the seasons of life without burning and crashing out. And it takes longer to heal when you’re staying in toxic dynamics and environments.

Differentiation is the most disorienting phase of career identity untangling.

It’s when you begin to ask:

What parts of me were shaped by institutional reward systems?
What parts were adaptations to my own beliefs and behaviors that I internalized?
What parts are actually mine based on my core values and impact work?

This is where essentializing becomes a practice of deinstitutionalizing your identity as separate and more authentic than your career and J-O-B roles.

As institutional promises fray, and downright betray many folks, the limits of those systems, the complicitness of them, become harder to ignore.

Right now, I’m hearing a lot of disorientation from betrayal, grief, and career shocks. You cared. You believed there were shared values mutually held. You felt you were living your purpose, calling, or impact through your work.

What’s going on is more than the erosion of a dream or the closing of a program or the loss of a job. It’s the collapse of you.

We’ve been practicing active rest by staying in the discomfort for a few more breath cycles instead of rushing to fix or produce. In the Grove, we’ve called this fallow grounding. Because we’re up against one of the most enduring institutional myths in this country: the illusion of constant growth.

This myth keeps you thinking linearly and striving upwards. It lives in the story that there are steps you can take to control the outcome. Just follow the rules and keep propping up the systems (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.), then you too will succeed (in life, house, money, career).

Look around, and you’ll see where it’s gotten us. We are in our current polycrisis BECAUSE we’ve bought into the illusion of constant growth on every level

Last week I felt the faint glimmer of earlier sunlight. And, still we’re in the dark of winter, friends. February is the hardest, shortest little month for me. So the only way I know to meet it is with deep, raw honesty that comes when I pause long enough for it.

The dark isn’t something we get to muscle and hustle our way through. What do you actually do when it is dark out, like on a new moon night? You move more slowly, a little more intention and awareness as your eyes adjust and seek out for clarity. You might take a lot more pauses.

Since launching my leadership and team resilience consulting and trainings, I’ve shared this off-the-record motto in a half-joking way. But lately, it feels less like a joke and more like the whole point.

Helping humans (in organizations) be human together.

The longer I do this work, the more I see how many of our workplaces quietly train the opposite.

We’re trained to override our bodies to push through even when they’re chronically burned out, and morale efforts have the opposite effect.

And then we wonder why teams feel disconnected, why trust is thin, why leaders feel exhausted and alone, why “culture” initiatives don’t stick.

What happens when you loosen, just a little, the institutional training that has become encoded in your body?

You come face to face with fears and career grief. Often it’s surprising how deeply we’ve been trained in loyalty (the kind that lives outside of ourselves) for belonging and survival. So much so, none of us realize the extent it’s become automated, robot-like in our responses.

I’ve been asking some challenging questions lately. Of myself, of you all, of this world. I was never great at small talk, ha.

Loyalty trains in the body long before it registers in our minds.

A training that often comes at a cost to our own and others' lives. When we’re young or positioned ‘lower’ in hierarchical systems, loyalty becomes a coping strategy for safety and a belief of belonging. Maybe not even ‘negative’ per se. We are social animals with brains that have evolved for survival by maintaining the status quo even when it’s against our own embodied interests.

We depend on the systems.

Institutions shape our schedules and outputs. But well before that (and in order to control those), they train our nervous systems and bodies. I can’t tell you how many times I hear (usually) less traumatic stories from folks of how they’ve also learned to override their bodies’ needs in order to not interrupt a meeting or class. 

Time and time again, institutions and systems teach us: Safety comes from belonging. In order to belong, you’ll have to override your nervous system and body’s needs. 

You don’t have to leave your job to deinstitutionalize (unless you want to). 

Relief came across so many people’s faces as I shared that in our first Grove workshop on Naming the Spell of Institutions. 

When new clients show up asking me if they should stay or go, my go-to question is: What could open up if you change your relationship to your career first or simultaneously? 

If you deinstitutionalize while you’re in your current job, you can decide to stay, go or ___ from a place of clarity rather than panic.