What If the Problem Isn't You, But the Way We Work?
Why can't I keep going when everyone else seems to manage? Why has work become so much harder than it used to be? Why do I feel so tired when, on paper at least, I have a good job, a supportive family and a life I should feel grateful for?
These are questions that often sit under the surface of the conversations I have with women.
These are thoughtful, capable women who have spent years building careers, caring for other people and showing up with extraordinary commitment. They are not lacking resilience or ambition. If anything, they have spent too much of their lives being resilient.
Which is why I don't think the most useful question is "What's wrong with me?"
The question I have become much more interested in is this:
What if we've inherited a way of working that asks us to leave too much of ourselves at the door?
This was the starting point for a recent workshop I hosted called Including Ourselves: Non-Extractive Approaches to Work. It wasn't about productivity hacks or squeezing more out of ourselves. It was an invitation to become curious about the invisible rules we have inherited about work, success and worthiness, and to imagine what might become possible if we began questioning them.
When We Become Our Own Worst Boss
For many women, the harshest manager they have ever had no longer works in the office. She lives inside them.
Long before we entered the workplace, many of us had already learned that being useful, capable and dependable was one of the safest ways to belong. We absorbed messages sometimes spoken, often unspoken that love was earned through contribution, that rest should be justified, and that our needs came after everyone else's.
Then we entered workplaces that rewarded exactly those qualities.
It's hardly surprising that, over time, we begin overriding ourselves almost automatically. We work through exhaustion because everyone else seems to be coping. We answer emails long after we've finished for the day because we don't want to let people down. We keep saying yes because somewhere deep inside us there is still a hope that, if we can just get enough done, we will finally feel safe enough to stop.
The tragedy, of course, is that the finish line keeps moving.
Our economic system thrives on the idea that we are never quite enough. There is always another promotion, another qualification, another target, another version of ourselves that promises to be more successful, more productive or somehow more deserving. Intellectually we may know this isn't true, but our nervous systems often haven't received that message.
Over time, we don't simply work within an extractive system, we begin carrying that system inside us. We become our own worst boss, asking more of ourselves than we would ever ask of someone we love.
The Nine-to-Five Was Never a Law of Nature
Much of what we accept as "normal" about work is surprisingly recent.
The traditional Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five schedule, remains the invisible template against which everything else is measured. We speak about "part-time" work, "reduced hours" or "flexible working" as though they are deviations from what is considered normal, rather than simply different ways of organising our time.
The problem is that human beings have never functioned like machines.
Our energy moves in rhythms. Some seasons invite action and visibility, while others naturally ask us to slow down, reflect and replenish. We see this in nature all around us, yet somehow we expect ourselves to produce consistently regardless of what is happening in our lives.
For some people, reconnecting with those rhythms might involve becoming aware of their menstrual cycle or noticing how different phases of the moon affect their energy. For others, it may simply be recognising that winter feels different from summer, or that some weeks require more solitude than others.
The point is not to replace one rigid system with another. In fact, I often caution against turning cycle awareness into yet another productivity tool. If we find ourselves saying, "I can't do that because I'm in my luteal phase," we may simply have created another set of rules to live by.
The real question is always this: How can these practices make us more free?
Sometimes that freedom begins with something remarkably small. A five per cent shift in how we organise our diary. Protecting a difficult day. Building in recovery after an emotionally demanding meeting or giving ourselves permission to acknowledge that not every day needs to look the same.
Life Was Never Meant to Be Worked Around
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in modern work is that it expects us to remain consistently productive through experiences that fundamentally change who we are.
Motherhood, menopause, illness, bereavement, divorce and caring responsibilities are treated almost as inconveniences, temporary interruptions that should be managed before returning to business as usual.
Yet these experiences are not interruptions to life.
They are life.
They are thresholds, and thresholds have always asked something different of us. They invite reflection, integration and often a profound reassessment of who we are becoming.
During the workshop, one participant spoke about living with Long Covid. She described how it had forced her to completely reimagine her relationship with time and capacity. Rather than measuring herself against who she had been before she became ill, she had slowly begun honouring the natural fluctuations in her energy. It wasn't a lesson she had wanted to learn, but it had become one of the most important.
Listening to her, I was reminded how often our bodies become the place where unsustainable ways of working finally meet their limit. So many of us don't choose to slow down; our bodies eventually choose for us.
The dominant story of success imagines life as a ladder that moves steadily upwards. Increasingly, though, I find myself drawn to a different image: a web.
A web expands, contracts and redistributes weight. At certain times we carry more. At other times we are the ones being held. That feels infinitely more human than expecting ourselves to climb relentlessly upwards regardless of what life asks of us.
Small Acts of Agency Matter More Than We Think
Whenever I speak about changing our relationship with work, someone inevitably says, "But I can't just leave my job."
It's an understandable response because conversations about work often become trapped in binaries. Stay or leave. Push through or quit. Work full-time or not at all.
The reality is that most of us live somewhere in the middle.
Many people don't have the financial freedom to reduce their hours or walk away from work. Others genuinely love parts of what they do and simply want to find a more sustainable way of doing it.
That's why I'm so interested in micro actions, small acts of agency that remind us we still have choices, even within systems we didn't create.
It might be walking more slowly back from the bathroom instead of rushing to your next meeting.
It might be blocking your calendar after a difficult conversation instead of expecting yourself to move seamlessly into another emotionally demanding task.
It might be deciding that cereal for dinner is an act of care rather than failure.
These moments can seem insignificant, but together they begin rebuilding something much bigger: self-trust.
During the workshop, we also explored another form of agency that we don't often talk about. I shared how, for some people, reducing the cost of living rather than increasing income can create more freedom. Choosing a smaller house, driving one car instead of two or deliberately resisting lifestyle inflation can sometimes offer greater flexibility than chasing the next promotion.
Someone gently challenged this idea by bringing in the reality of class and privilege. For many people, she reminded us, reducing costs isn't a choice because there is very little to reduce. Genuine financial hardship creates a completely different relationship with work and aspiration.
I was grateful she raised it because these conversations only become meaningful when we hold multiple truths at once. Non-extractive ways of working cannot ignore structural inequality. They have to make room for different starting points, different constraints and different kinds of freedom.
We Are More Than What We Produce
Later in the conversation, a participant shared something beautifully simple.
Whenever she notices herself becoming overwhelmed, she walks through a local park. Spending time with the trees helps regulate her nervous system and reminds her that value exists outside of productivity.
She said something that really moved me. That many trees never produce fruit.
And yet no one would question their contribution to the ecosystem.
They provide shelter. They improve the soil. They support countless forms of life simply by existing.
I couldn't help wondering what might change if we viewed ourselves in the same way.
What if our worth wasn't measured only by visible output? What if rest, wisdom, presence, creativity and care were recognised as contributions in their own right?
Perhaps the question isn't how we become more productive.
Perhaps it's whether we've been measuring contribution far too narrowly all along.
What Are We Midwifing?
Towards the end of the workshop, we found ourselves talking about menopause, and one participant offered a perspective that caught everyone by surprise.
She spoke about the fear many women have of becoming irrelevant as they age. But then she wondered whether we had misunderstood irrelevance altogether.
"What if our job is to become irrelevant to this system in order to midwife something new?"
I found that deeply moving.
So much energy goes into trying to remain visible, indispensable and endlessly productive within systems that many of us already know are harming us.
Perhaps there is another invitation available. Perhaps this stage of life is asking us to loosen our attachment to old definitions of success so that we can begin imagining different ones, not only for ourselves, but for the generations coming behind us.
That feels less like stepping back and more like stepping into a different kind of leadership.
I don't believe people hate work.
I think they hate work that asks them to disconnect from themselves. Work that values output over humanity, productivity over presence and individual achievement over community.
My hope is not that we abandon work altogether, but that we begin imagining forms of work that honour our rhythms, deepen our contribution and allow us to remain fully human.
That, to me, is what non-extractive work looks like.
It won't emerge overnight, and none of us has all the answers. We will need curiosity more than certainty, experimentation more than perfection and community more than individual striving.
The future of work won't be built by pushing ourselves harder within systems that are already failing us.
It will be built by people who are willing, in whatever ways they can, to include themselves in the picture.
Watch the Replay
If these ideas resonate with you and you'd like to explore them more deeply, I'd love to invite you to watch the replay of Including Ourselves: Non-Extractive Approaches to Work.
In the workshop we explore why so many caring, capable people become their own worst boss, how our relationship with work is shaped long before we enter the workplace, why our bodies and life stages deserve to be included in how we think about work, and how small, everyday acts of agency can begin shifting our relationship with work from extraction towards sustainability.
