Wellbeing Is Not a Perk
For anyone who has to decide what to cut this year.
The exit interview blind spot
A familiar scene plays out in leadership teams every year - a capable, committed colleague hands in their notice, and senior managers are blindsided.
At the exit interview, the feedback is uncomfortable. The departing team member speaks about chronic exhaustion, feeling unheard, and burning out under an unmanageable workload. The leadership team may be completely baffled. From where they sit, they worked hard to protect staff support and keep them in jobs despite difficult funding cycles. They point to the lunchtime mindfulness sessions, the employee assistance helpline, and the subsidised health and fitness memberships. They invested money and good intentions into those benefits, yet their best people are still walking out of the door.
This disconnect happens because nobody joined the dots between working conditions, structural pressures, and actual human wellbeing. Leaders often assume that providing these tools fulfills their duty of care. But when staff are routinely carrying the emotional weight of frontline work, absorbing vicarious trauma, or operating in under-resourced services, a class or an app doesn’t balance the ledger.
The fizzy bottle: how safe does it feel to lift the lid on ‘fizzy’ emotions and sticky subjects?
For leaders sitting on something their team hasn't said out loud yet.
Bottling up emotions and unsayable words can risk a build up of stress that leads to explosive conflicts, burnout, health problems and more. I’m interested in how we can take the same approach we would use with a shaken up fizzy bottle – unscrewing the lid slowly, carefully, and a little at a time.
If you can talk, you can sing!
For anyone who says they can't sing.
The gap between anatomy and belief
When I talk about the physical and emotional benefits of singing, the most common response I hear is a variation of ‘I can't sing"‘ ‘I'm completely tone-deaf’, or ‘I would love to, but I really can't.’
It is true that a small percentage of the population has a genuine neurological barrier to processing pitch. Up to 4 per cent of people have congenital amusia, a condition that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain injury, or other cognitive factors. Yet, in any given room, far more than 4 per cent of people will insist they are permanently and completely unable to carry a tune.
That gap between reality and the stories we tell about ourselves is significant. We accept that playing the piano, the guitar or the violin will require hundreds of hours of practice to master, even though some people seem to have more of a natural affinity for it than others. But because our voices are an inherent part of our anatomy, we tend to believe that singing tunefully is an innate, binary gift: you either have it or you don’t.
How we care for ourselves is political
For anyone who's tired of being told to fix their burnout with bubble baths and good vibes.
The concept of self-care tends to bring to mind a familiar set of images: inspirational quotes typed in a looping script, aimed at over-stretched, exhausted working mothers who're told to wash their troubles away in a fragrant bubble bath, followed by a green smoothie or a cheeky glass of wine.
I'll admit to a bit of cynicism here. I'm a fan of hot baths, smoothies, and any relief from the heavily gendered labour of caring for others. It isn't about shaming anyone's evening routine. But there's an urgent need to unpack the industry built around wellness, the products we're sold, and whose voices get centred or silenced in the process. As Skunk Anansie proclaimed in the nineties: 'Yes, it's f***ing political, everything's political!'
When we reduce self-care to a consumer habit, we strip away its history and its teeth. We treat chronic exhaustion as a private hygiene problem to be solved with scented candles, rather than asking why so many of us are running on empty in the first place.