"Better for whom?" The question nobody teaches you to ask before taking the bigger job.
I'm speaking at Out in Tech Leadership Institute in September. And I've got a 20% discount code if you want to come.
You're not bad at resting. You just never got permission. Episode 104 of Rewritten is out.
A few weeks ago I got off a call and just sat there for a minute.
The person I'd been talking to had done everything right. Worked hard, built a reputation, got noticed. When a recruiter came calling with a bigger title and more money, they said yes. Of course they said yes. That's the move. That's what you do when the opportunity shows up.
Six months later, they were miserable. The job wasn't what was promised. The culture was nothing like what they'd been sold in the interview. And instead of being angry at the situation, they were angry at themselves. Calling it a stupid mistake. Embarrassed. Ashamed.
That's the part that stayed with me.
Because they hadn't done anything wrong. They had followed the rule, the one most of us absorbed so early we don't even remember learning it: up is better. More scope, bigger title, higher number on the paycheck. That's the win. That's success. Keep climbing.
And the thing is, early on? That rule kind of works. When you're figuring out what you're good at, saying yes to whatever comes builds the base. You need the reps. You need the exposure. You don't know enough about yourself yet to be selective.
But at some point it flips. And nobody tells you when that happens.
So you keep optimizing for the metric you were handed. You take the promotion that pulls you away from the work you actually love. You accept the role that looks incredible on LinkedIn and feels hollow by Wednesday. And when it doesn't feel like the win it was supposed to be, you assume something's wrong with you.
There isn't. You just never got handed a different question to ask.
The question I've started giving clients before any big move: better for whom?
Not better in some universal sense. Not better according to the recruiter or the org chart or the LinkedIn version of your career. Better for you. For how you're wired. For what you're actually trying to build. Because a role that strips out the parts of the work you love isn't a promotion. It's just a nicer-sounding way to be miserable.
And if you already made the move and it's not working? You're not stupid. You got handed some new information. That's not failure. That's data.
I'm building a whole talk around this, the mistake of letting prestige point you somewhere. More on that soon. But in the meantime: have you ever chased the "better" job and figured out too late it wasn't better for you? Hit reply. I genuinely want to know.
Join me at Out in Tech's Leadership Institute this Sept in NYC
I'm heading back to the stage in September and I'm genuinely excited about this one.
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βOut in Tech Leadership Institute is a three-day conference in New York City, September 16 through 18, built for LGBTQ+ professionals and allies who are serious about leading well. Hands-on workshops, honest panels, small-cohort sessions where the conversation actually gets real. You leave with a Leadership Experiment Plan and a community that doesn't disappear when the conference ends.
This year's theme is Future-Proof Leadership: Authenticity, Agency, and Action in an Age of Change. Which, honestly, couldn't be a better fit for what I'm bringing.
Here's my take, and I'll warn you it's a little contrarian: your "people problem" usually isn't a people problem.
That team that won't align. The colleague who's suddenly difficult. The direction that keeps getting muddy no matter how many times you talk it through. We're quick to label it a personality clash or a bad hire. But underneath most of it is something much less dramatic and much more fixable: a clarity problem. Fix the clarity, and a surprising amount of the "people stuff" quietly disappears.
That's the framework I'll be sharing. How to lead with clarity when everything around you is shifting.
I'll also be the facilitator for one of the cohort groups on Friday. Wouldn't it be cool if we got paired in the same group?!
ποΈ If you're thinking about going, I have a 20% discount code. Just reply to this email and I'll send it your way. The room is going to be full of people doing the actual work. Come be one of them.
You're Not Bad at Resting. You Just Never Got Permission.
I have a rule that sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud: on my days off, nothing productive after noon.
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Pencils down. The afternoon is for being, not doing.
It was surprisingly hard to stick to at first, because there's a voice that says as a working mom, an afternoon off is self-indulgent. That I haven't really earned the right to sit down. You probably know that voice.
Here's where it comes from. Most of us got trained to equate productivity with worth. The all-nighters were badges. The 4am emails were proof of commitment. And that message doesn't stay at work. It follows you home, into your weekends, into the rare afternoon when nothing is scheduled and you stand in your living room feeling vaguely guilty.
So you answer a few emails. Throw in a load of laundry. Look up and it's 4pm and you don't feel rested. You feel like you failed at resting.
That's not a time management problem. It's a permission problem.
Teresa and I got into all of it on Episode 104 of Rewritten, including the question I ask clients who can't let themselves stop, and the thing most people never actually figure out about their own rest. Go listen.