Re-newing for Authenticity, Courage and Resilience

This article features on both newsletters -apologies if your inbox sees it twice, please don't Unsubscribe :) and was first published on: https://www.duenablomstrom.com/post/re-newing-for-authenticity-courage-and-resilience

There must be at least 6 or 7 versions of this newsletter that I’ve started to write to you to share a bunch of things and I was so desperately trying to land on the best way to let you hear them and resonate but fate has spoken and I’m working on another machine while hurrying in traffic because once you hit the ground running after a half-work-half-play vacation, the ground hits back... so in its stead... here is what I wanted to say.

"Another one Duena?!? Isn’t that what made you leave the financial industry to fix Human Debt everywhere?!?" to which I say "Yes exactly like that one – who decided how many we can have considering no one is sure when the actual middle is?"

What’s this new one then? That I have been starting to be inauthentic and am burning out again. Over my career and lifetime, it happened quite a few times. My first time managing tens of reports. My first time building a scale-up. My first ask to execute someone else’s failed strategy and some of the times when I had to navigate places with extreme Human Debt and rampant politics. All of those times required a level of fakery out of me that asked me to wear one other additional “professional mask” in addition to my hide-neurodivergence-from-mean-neurotypicals one. And when the level of fakery is high I become so emotionally dysregulated I dissociate aka disengage so then there is no authenticity to speak of.

I expect this process my mind goes through to protect itself is neither isolated to me nor unique and a version of that happens to most of us Human Debt Fighters when we hit cape fatigue but this time I was more prepared for it and saw it coming.