2.2 Let's stop wrecking our activists
In the name of helping people…
Sacrificial activism hurts the people who do the helping.
You can see this in the stories I told on the previous page about Lisa, Sara, Martin, Jeremy, Dana, and Gregg.
You can see this in the sacrificial mandate…
You should sacrifice yourself to save others.
You can see it in the deluge of subsidiary shoulds that reinforce this mandate…
You should be selfless.
You should put your work ahead of yourself.
You should always come last after you’ve taken care of everyone else.
You should give and give and give and never take.
You should produce results no matter what price you pay personally.
You should keep on working no matter how much you’re hurting.
By themselves, these shoulds are enough to condemn sacrifice. But I have to add a footnote, because there are limited occasions when sacrifice can be okay.
Say you find yourself caught in a convergence of deadlines in a particular week and you decide to work late every night. You miss out on a concert you wanted to go to, a movie with your friends, and three quiet evenings at home with your partner.
You’re sacrificing, but you know why you’re doing it, and you know…
This is the exception not the rule.
There’s no long-term damage. You accomplish your goals and at the end of the week you feel great about yourself. And next week maybe you’ll give yourself some extra treats or take time off to make up for the big push you did this week.
By contrast, when I talk about sacrificial-savior activism, I mean…
Core needs are not getting met.
Routinely. Over the long term. With no real hope of things changing.
Which then means…
You’re giving up parts of your life that really matter to you.
You’re diminishing your very self.
You’re suffering core injury.
When core needs do not get met, when you’re in despair about them ever getting met, they don’t just go away. They’re still in there, inside you, nagging, complaining, squirming, convulsing, contorting, and morphing into distress.
And what do we humans do with this distress? Two things…
We act in.
Which means we turn our distress into…
Attacks against ourselves.
Attacks which are filled with blame, shame, judgment, and contempt. And maybe they kill our spirit and drive us down into depression and self-sabotage and the loneliness of isolation.
Or…
We act out.
Which means we turn our distress into…
Attacks against others.
Attacks which are filled with blame, shame, judgment, and contempt. We demand that others make everything okay for us, and if they don’t then we feel justified in hating them and hurting them.
Both acting in and acting out are disastrous for relationships of any kind, but especially in our activist organizations where the challenges of the work puts extra stress on our relationships to begin with, making us especially vulnerable.
The symptoms of sacrifice often look like something else…
It might seem like someone is just having a bad day. But why are they having so many bad days, and why are there so many people in the organization having so many bad days?
It might seem like there’s a personality problem between two staff that sets them fighting with each other, but why do they feel permission to engage in nasty behavior at work?
It might seem that one of your Board members just has a negative personality. But why does the rest of the Board let him get away with saying unfair, hurtful things to you again and again?
When trouble happens, it could be an isolated incident, but if you trace troublesome incidents back to their source, you might discover they’re all being fueled by the same underlying sacrificial distress which has taken over the organizational culture.
For example…
Every time there’s a disagreement in a staff meeting, it’s like the match meets the gasoline. Seemingly insignificant issues trigger giant reactions.
Your staff has divided itself into factions and you spend way too much time trying to mediate and calm things down. The daily eruptions control you emotionally, dragging down your mood, so when you go out to meet with a funder, you can hardly smile let alone be genuinely enthusiastic about your organization.
A staff person develops a blind hatred toward you. Overnight you’ve become the enemy and you don’t understand why and you can’t get him to shake loose from his obsession. You try reasoning, you try being nice, you try being understanding, and not only do these attempts not work, they seem to make things worse.
A staff person looks at you and sees his parents. He may be in his 30s or 40s, but emotionally he’s reliving adolescent rebellion. When he looks at you, you feel a wave of disgust coming from him and washing over you.
One of your staff has basically stopped talking to you. You ask her how she’s doing and she says she’s fine, but she doesn’t look at you when she says it and you never see her smiling anymore. She used to be so animated, but now it’s like she’s faded to gray. Sometimes you see her in her cubicle with her head down on her desk. She doesn’t go to lunch with anyone anymore.
One of your staff, the one you’ve decided to fire because she spends more time gossiping than working, thinks she should be the ED because in her view you’re a total loss. You find out that everywhere she goes in the community she trashes you, subtly or blatantly depending on who she’s talking to. Now you really want to fire her, but your Board Chair tells you not to because she’s the daughter of an old friend of his.
The founder of your organization, who is still on the Board, is unhappy with you and finds something to criticize you about in every meeting, not because you’re failing as ED, but because you’re five times more competent than he ever was.
The economy is really bad. Your staff get scared, then they get angry at you because you have to lay someone off, even though it’s the one sour goof-off who everyone knows was doing nothing of value anyway. The staff expects you to work magic with money and keep them from ever having to worry about their future. No amount of reasoning seems to touch their freak out. Nothing settles them down. You get mad and tell them, “Just wait till you’re a leader someday, and then you’ll see what it feels like.” They roll their eyes.
All of these situations are…
Symptoms of a system.
There’s no marquee over the door of a troubled nonprofit that says, “Beware! Sacrificial Operating System in effect here!” You have to know how to read the signs so that you can see the underlying problem.
But change that system and you get to watch the symptoms go away on their own. Here’s what Omar told me…
Over the past six months, I’ve upgraded our operating system from sacrificial to what you call deep-nurturance. It’s been really intense, but it’s worked. And now what I see is that so many things that stumped me in the past were features of sacrifice. They were part of that system.
And how do I know? Because they’re gone now. It’s like all these problems got on a bus and left town.
For example, there used to be this attitude in the air that it was okay to zitz people as long as you followed it with a smile. Quick, sharp put downs but then everyone would pretend it was nothing.
Here’s the thing, I didn’t address the zitzing at all during the transition. Yet the more we got into the deep-nurturance zone, the less of it there was. And now the put-downs are gone. We’re all doing so well now that we’re buzzing like happy bees. No need to think of stinging anyone anymore.
The nonprofit soap opera
When there’s trouble in an organization, you might hear things like…
There’s too much drama going on around here.
Or…
She’s such a drama queen!
These are instances when the term “drama” is being used to describe acting out. Personally I like to save “drama” for deep experiences and deep connections between people. For instance, when core needs actually do get met it can be moving and rich with nurturing drama.
When I’m talking about acting out, I like to use the word “melodrama” because it means that all the so-called drama is on the surface. It doesn’t have depth. It doesn’t go deep enough to touch core needs.
So what does the nonprofit soap opera look like?
Feelings are flying around all day every day. Fear is in the air. People get their feelings hurt constantly. Nothing happens without disruptive melodrama.
The work takes second place—if any place at all. And like in a TV soap opera, this state of affairs continues relentlessly with no end in sight because, as in a soap opera, the one thing no one ever does is to change the operating system.
Some individuals might wake up and see what’s going on, but the community as a whole does not wake up. That’s why we can count on another painful episode of the melodrama tomorrow.
Now it’s true that there are fans who watch the soap operas on TV who actually learn important things about human interactions from all those miscommunications, betrayals, and evil schemes. And they learn, too, from watching how love sometimes triumphs in the middle of that emotional mess.
But watching a soap opera is very different from living inside one.
Feelings are the stock-in-trade of soap operas, so let’s focus on them for a moment. Of course we want to acknowledge that feelings are good things when they’re connecting us with each other in loving ways. And mastering emotional intelligence is certainly a key part of leadership and team building.
But it’s also true that…
Feelings by themselves are not enough to make a relationship work.
The purpose of feelings is to point to needs. If needs are getting met, chances are we feel happy. If not, then distress sets in.
So it’s of the utmost importance that we always ground our working relationships in real needs instead of listening to the siren song of distressed feelings.
The sacrificial operating system is not able to take care of activists because…
It can’t meet their real needs.
It just simply can’t do that.
So a sacrificial organization might fall into the “endless processing of feelings.” People are trying to find a solution. They are trying to make things better. But they don’t have a prayer as long as they are operating within a system that has no solution. A system rooted in despair.
The perfect storm of relational aggression
What happens when all the worst elements of sacrificial culture come together at once? You get a swirling vortex of melodramatic dysfunction, which might turn tornado vicious, and overwhelm your organization with…
Force five relational aggression.
Which can happen when staff…
Spew poisonous gossip.
Hammer others with emotional bullying.
Posture like victims.
Stir up trouble to get attention.
Refuse responsibility for their own behavior.
Displace anger.
Nurse resentment.
Project blame.
Set person against person and group against group.
Once this perfect storm gets going, you have hell to pay. And people pay in deeply personal ways, because…
That’s the thing about relational aggression, it’s so personal.
Sometimes it’s one person who gets targeted. Sometimes the staff splits into warring factions which go after each other. In the days before I knew better, I was in some of those battles myself. I hated them but I was in them.
What I remember most is the apocalyptic urgency, how one side was noble—my side—and the other side was evil, and nothing mattered more than taking them down.
We made enemies of people who weren’t really enemies. Their side had good hearts just like we did. In terms of our basic values, we had so much in common. But we hurt each other, eagerly, badly.
And for what?
I can’t think of a single thing that was gained by all that pain.
And sometimes a battle gets so bad that people never really get over it. Decades later a memory triggers and you feel like you’re right back in the middle of the pain. Or you run into someone from those days and the memories are so agonizing you can’t even look at her let alone try to find your way to forgiveness.
As a coach, I’ve helped leaders put a stop to perfect storms so I know how hard it is to bring an organization back to safe ground. That’s why I’m intense about prevention.
And really, the life of the organization is at stake here. I’ve seen nonprofits go down because a storm of relational aggression took hold and nobody could get control of it and bring people back together. In other cases, it can take years for a nonprofit to recover its productivity and health.
So I urge you, if you ever see any two elements of the perfect storm showing up together, in fact, if you ever see even one element, stop everything immediately and do whatever it takes to get your organization back on track. It’s really that serious.
The dirty little secret
Back when I was a sacrificial-savior activist, I was a contradiction…
The sacrifice part of me was self-abnegating.
But…
The savior part of me was self-aggrandizing.
I liked…
The praise I got for being selfless.
But wait a minute. Was I really selfless, then? Not so. I got lots of approval because of all the people I helped and for the happy gospel of hope that I preached.
I liked…
The praise I got for playing savior.
So I was selfless and selfish at the same time.
Breaking the spell
I believe the Sacrificial-Savior Operating System is…
The core tragedy of the nonprofit sector.
Because the one thing it does best is…
To hurt people.
Most especially the activists who work within that system.
And this system is so pervasive, it can seem invincible.
But it’s not. In fact, it’s got a remarkably simple vulnerability. To keep you trapped it has to keep you under its spell.
To break that spell, all you have to do is…
Go behind the scenes…
Where you can get a good look at it, so you can…
See this system for what it really is.
When you slip past the noble sentiments and sweep aside the false hopes which this OS uses to disguise itself, you finally get down to where you can…
Stand face to face with the truth.
And this is a powerful moment.
The SSOS only works if you’re living it unconsciously. The better you can see its true nature, the more conscious you get…
The more it becomes impossible to continue on with it.
On this page, I’m taking you on a tour of the SSOS…
To provoke rebellion. To help you get free.
If that’s something you want to do.
And maybe you’ve seen enough already. Maybe for yourself, you’re already done with sacrifice. But you might want to read on, because the better you understand the dangers of this OS, and the more precisely you can articulate them…
The better you’ll be able to help fellow activists break the spell.
So they can join you in freedom.
Thus far, what I’ve shown you is how sacrificial activism hurts the people who practice it.
Next, we’re going to dig into what it does to our work.
It’s not just the people who get hurt
If you hurt the people who do the work, the work gets hurt in consequence.
It might not look that way in the short term, because sacrificial activists can turn out great quantities of work due to their long hours and driven intensity. And they can experience compelling endorphin highs from being so productive and helping so many people. But for the long run sacrifice is a terrible strategy.
Truth is…
If you want to put the work first, you have to put it second.
You have to put the people first. That’s how to make your work the best it can be. It’s a win-win deal.
The nonprofit obsession with services
There’s an underlying assumption about nonprofits that our main business is to provide services for people in need. Activists are supposed to spend the great majority of their time correcting for the damage done by an exploitative economy and social neglect.
On the surface this work seems like such a sweet and caring thing to do. But look behind the scenes and the news is not good.
1. Bad news: We don’t have enough services
There’s no way the nonprofit sector could begin to meet the needs of all the people who are hurting, not even if we doubled or tripled our numbers. And that’s because…
Our society is mass-producing human suffering and the destruction of the planet.
Even if we could muster enough people to provide enough services to meet all the current needs, as long as exploitation and neglect continue, the need will never diminish.
Sacrificial service is seductive because you get to see individual lives change. But if the big picture never changes, activists will be like hamsters on the wheel, running, running, running, but never getting ahead of the game, never stopping the damage from being done. And what kind of life is that?
2. Worse news: Services will never be enough
If you’re an activist with a big heart, then maybe in your heart you have big ambitions, like…
You want to end exploitation and oppression everywhere.
You want the world to be so much better than it is.
You want us humans to treat each other so much better than we do.
You want to stop our perverse march into extinction.
And if so, then minor adjustments can’t satisfy you. You want to go for serious, global transformation.
But services alone cannot bring about transformation…
Services cannot put an end to racism or poverty. Only political action can do that.
Services cannot stop the oppression of women and the abuse of children. Only political action can do that.
Services cannot stop climate change and save our species. Only political action can do that.
Our society seems to think of nonprofits as service-unit factories and activists as factory workers. Instead…
We need activists to be full-on leaders of coherent, passionate, strategic, mass political action.
Now, I’m not saying every activist should quit providing services. There are people who have a special talent for providing services. That’s what they’re good at, that’s what they love, and more power to them.
But I’d like to recommend that we…
Create a resolute partnership between our services and political action.
We can use services to…
Show what a caring society might look like.
Reveal the evils of exploitation.
Inspire people to join our movements.
And most especially…
Demonstrate that people who have been knocked down, discriminated against, and written off, if they are given a genuine chance, can pick themselves up and thrive.
And more than that, they can lead lives of contribution.
And even better, they can become leaders of political action at the forefront of creating a better society.
If we want to tie services to political action, nonprofit staff would have to stop playing “saviors” to their “clients.” We’d need to empower people instead of making them dependent on nonprofits.
“Empower,” of course, is a term that’s become clichéd. Or has it? Maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s been suppressed. Because empowering people who are being kept down by the dominant forces of society is a radical thing to do.
And we’d need to make radical changes in how we measure progress. We can define a unit of service.
But…
What is a unit of leadership?
And…
What is a unit of transformation?
Instead of talking in terms of discrete units of service, we need to switch over to talking about long-term stories of change and journeys of transformation. And what it takes to make successful stories and journeys.
3. The worst news: our work turns against us
Meanwhile, there are big forces at work which will do just about anything to keep the status quo locked in place. They are dedicated to the rule of the many by the few.
And let’s not mince words…
This means the exploitation of the many by the few.
So it’s no surprise…
These forces love the Sacrificial-Savior Operating System.
From an activist point of view, it seems to me we have to say the SSOS is not working. But for the powers that be, it’s working perfectly.
It’s slowing down social-change and social-justice work. It’s putting tremendous drag on social transformation. It’s putting the brakes on political action.
This is why the powers that be love to see our sector bury its leaders in administrative duties, and pin them down in the trenches providing services. Because then they have no time or energy left over to do what they were hoping to do when they became activists, which is…
To lead change and transformation in our communities and in the larger world.
And this makes me think of Dom Hélder Câmara, the former archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, who said…
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
In the midst of the Great Depression, back in the 1930’s, when the economy was imploding and many millions of people were unemployed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the New Deal and extensive public works programs.
This was a godsend to the people who needed help. And that was clearly one of his reasons for taking this action, even while his Republican opponents attacked him viciously.
But he had a second motive. He proudly told people that…
He had saved America for capitalism.
The Russian Revolution was fresh in the minds of our political leaders. And it scared them. And the Communist Party in the United States was burgeoning.
So FDR and his supporters took emergency action to prevent things from getting so bad that people would rise up to instigate a second American Revolution.
This prevention strategy is not a modern invention. In the declining days of the Roman Empire, the rulers provided the impoverished plebeian population with “the circus and the dole.”
The plan was to keep people distracted with entertainments and fed just well enough that they would keep on submitting to the patrician government that kept them down.
The Roman oligarchs were scared that…
Mass discontent, unless it was managed and suppressed, would erupt into mass action.
This same dynamic is at work today. Our modern powers that be are scared, too. So they want the nonprofit sector to help them keep their system going. They want us to help them…
Maximize exploitation while minimizing rebellion.
That’s the mission they’ve set for us.
And if we go along with it, we’re ironically putting our opponents in charge of our work.
I understand that these are not nice things that I’m saying…
But these are not nice things that I’m talking about.
The powers that be want us to grease the wheels of their hurtful system with our services, and in so doing, become a part of it.
The nonprofit sector is swampy with co-dependency. It’s bad enough when our individual services promote and enable dependency.
But the sector as a whole is…
Co-dependent with the powers that be.
And this co-dependency produces a terrible contradiction. While sacrificial activists are busy helping individuals, they are at the same time…
Enabling a system that hurts those people.
And I find it heartbreaking that…
Sacrificial activists work so very hard only to end up producing a result that’s the exact opposite of what they are longing for.
Unconscious collusion
The powers that be want us to work like crazy in the sacrificial system to which they’ve given their stamp of approval—but that’s not enough for them.
They don’t want to be troubled with running this system. They want us to manage it for them.
Essentially…
They want sacrificial activists to take charge of their own exploitation.
They want us to keep improving sacrificial activism so it can do its damage more and more efficiently. Which is like adding insult to injury.
What they are asking for is…
Sustainable sacrifice.
That shouldn’t be a thing, but it is. And I know it is because I did it for years.
I laughed at burnout. I bragged about bouncing back…
“Hell, I’ve burnt out so many times it’s not a big deal anymore. I just give myself a kick in the butt and get going again.”
That wasn’t the real story, though. I did force myself to keep going many, many times. But the real secret to my sacrificial success, was something else. I learned how to work myself right up to the limit, and then at the last minute…
Just before imploding, I’d pull myself back from the brink.
I’d pull back just enough that I could keep on trucking.
After I got free of sacrifice and started coaching, I needed a name for this strategy so I could talk with my clients about it. At first I called it “Sacrifice Lite” thinking it wasn’t as bad as full-on sacrifice, because you could keep it going.
But then I realized it was worse…
Because you could keep it going.
So instead, I called it “Chronic Sacrifice.” Because it seemed to me it was like having a constant low-grade sinus infection, but of your spirit.
I was able to make sacrifice look good, but I had to drag myself through my days. So while I got some big results, I didn’t get to feel what it was like to be at my best. I didn’t get to find out the kind of difference I could be making if I had been playing at the top of my game.
Finally I settled on the term…
Managed sacrifice.
And that felt exactly right.
I held the reins tightly. I did my work in a zone that was very, very close to hitting the wall, but I made sure not to actually hit it.
I turned myself into…
A virtuoso of calibration.
But I wish I had I had failed. I wish I had hit the wall and hit it hard. Because maybe that would have been the wake-up call I needed. Maybe it would have knocked some sense into me. Maybe it would have broken the sacrificial spell I was under.
It still shocks me when I look back and see how brilliant I was at managing sacrifice, given that the whole time I remained…
Doggedly unconscious about what I was doing.
An unconscious sector
It’s interesting how obsessed the nonprofit world is with strategic plans. Funders want every individual organization to have one.
But there is no coherent, sustaining plan with widespread agreement about the development and direction of the sector as a whole.
And if it were up to me to recommend such a strategy, I’d present a proposal with just one point…
Root out and replace the Sacrificial-Savior OS.
Do that first, then engage in intense strategic thinking about where to go from there.
Of course, the replacement I’d recommend is the Deep-Nurturance OS. There are other options, but I like this one because it’s so completely the opposite of the SSOS.
But the process of replacement would not be easy.
Here’s something that used to puzzle me. Sacrificial activism is dominant in the nonprofit sector, but it’s not the only game in town. There are organizations that are not sacrificial. And the people working in them are visibly happier.
So…
Why doesn’t everybody flock to them?
Or…
Why doesn’t every organization simply transform itself?
I see two main problems that keep the SSOS in power.
First, there are the big forces I already talked about that hold it in place, forces which provide a big share of the funding for nonprofits, namely corporate foundations and government bureaucracies.
And second, there’s human nature. The Deep-Nurturance Operating System is based on vigorous self-development. Which means it’s challenging. And we humans are torn when it comes to challenge.
We want to grow, but we really don’t like the pain that comes with growing. We don’t like to have to see ourselves as we really are. We don’t like to have to wake up to our blind spots. We don’t like to have to push through shame, even though pushing through it will get us to a better place.
As hard as it is to live the life of a sacrificial-savior activist, deep-nurturance is harder.
But that’s only when you’re crossing over into it. Once you begin to master it, it’s a thousand times better than sacrifice. But in the beginning it’s more challenging, and that’s what blocks many activists from escaping the SSOS.
Capacity building
Along with services and strategy, another obsession of the nonprofit sector is capacity building. But what does that term mean?
Are we talking about pushing already exhausted staff in financially malnourished organizations to do more with the same resources?
Are we talking about working smarter instead of harder? Nothing wrong with that if there really is a way to work smarter. Not so good, though, if this is slogan is a sneaky way to put more pressure on staff.
And most importantly…
Are we talking about producing more service units per year? Are we talking about making sacrifice work better? Are we staying within the bounds of the SSOS?
Or…
Are we talking about increasing the capacity of activists to transform society?
Again, if it were up to me to recommend the most effective way to increase capacity, I’d start by proposing just one thing…
Root out and replace the Sacrificial-Savior OS.
Because this is the best thing we could do for nonprofit activists. And the better the sector takes care of its people, the better their work becomes.
And then there’s the drive to increase the skill level of nonprofit leaders and activists. On the face of it that’s a very good thing. But the context matters.
Is this really a drive to…
Professionalize sacrifice.
For example in the last twenty to thirty years, the nonprofit sector has come a long way in terms of professionalizing financial management. In and of itself this is a good thing. It’s so helpful for leaders to have all the accounting information they need, and to be able to trust it, when they make their financial decisions.
But this is not such a good thing if staff development and leadership development is being used to do a better job of perpetuating sacrifice. It’s not such a good thing if the bottom line is that we’re creating…
Sacrifice 2.0.
A spiffier, longer lasting kind of sacrificial activism.
Miracle workers
Nonprofit leaders are called on to play the key role in making sacrificial activism work.
Look at the ads for executive directors. Look at the job descriptions. They’re supposed to be able to do everything…
Building teams, doing supervision, developing programs, evaluating programs, managing the Board, managing human resources, doing financial management, writing grants, raising funds, keeping donors happy, communicating with the public, strategizing social media, handling IT, running special events, inspiring the troops, resolving conflict with ease, overseeing operations.
They’re supposed to be…
Professional but down to earth, high-energy but a calming force, multitaskers but super focused, great at visioning but equally great at implementation.
Meanwhile, they’re not supposed to have personal limitations, certainly not leftover issues from childhood.
What we’re talking about here is…
Magical thinking.
What we’re really talking about is…
Hiring saviors.
Who can keep their sacrificial organizations going. Who can keep the Sacrificial-Savior system itself going.
And this is unreal. Because when we’re talking about saviors we’re not talking about real human beings.
And the only way to keep perpetuating this perspective is to for the sector to remain out of touch with reality—to remain unconscious.
Of course, it’s a kick to play savior. It’s quite a high. Until it catches up with you…
I’m a miracle worker (whose life is filled with drudgery not miracles.)
I’m saving others (while wrecking myself.)
I’m giving my best, (which is less and less good as I exhaust myself.)
I’m super important (yet expendable.)
I’m a person of integrity (living a lie.)
And there’s one more thing the SSOS tells its leaders…
You should be selfless.
But this is another example of the sector going unconscious. Because when you stop for a just a quick minute and get a grip and think about this admonition consciously, what does “selfless” mean?
It literally means…
You have no self.
Which means…
You’re a nobody.
Which means…
You have no needs.
And then…
Why would you have any reason to take care of yourself?
And why would anybody have any reason to feel any concern for you?
Self-care
But if you decide to continue to be a self, a real human being, someone with genuine human needs, then how do you choose to take care of yourself?
I believe that conventional self-care advice is not enough. The typical blog posts with five or seven or ten tips, all of which might be good things, just don’t match the depth of what we need.
Here’s some advice I remember hearing back in my days of exhaustion…
Friday night, at the end of a hard week, get a massage and take a hot tub.
If that’s your thing, please do it. But if that massage and that hot tub only refresh you enough that you go into the office on Saturday morning and work through the weekend, then they’re counterproductive.
Self-care should not be used to make sacrifice last longer.
And then there’s the advice about taking care of your health. Like: eat a nutritious diet, exercise every day, get plenty of sleep, keep your stress under control. I’ve had coaching clients who get pissed when they read a list of bullet-points like this.
They tell me…
I know all this stuff. I want to do it. I actually like going to the gym. I love to cook. But I don’t have time for those things.
As for stress, tell me how I’m supposed to control it when my job is super stressful as a baseline, and then surprises hit me, like a staff person having a meltdown, or a funder demands an extra 30-page report by the end of the week.
If you really want to help me, write me a check big enough so I can hire a deputy director, because that’s what might actually free up some of my time.
Random self-care activities like hot tubs and massages can coexist with the sacrificial system.
But if you want to get serious about being healthy, that means you have to change your operating system. Sacrificial activism is just simply not healthy. Not physically or emotionally.
What’s ahead?
As if what you’ve read so far is not bad enough, the next two pages continue our tour, taking it deeper, with the goal of breaking the spell of the SSOS, and breaking it so completely that it will stay broken.
