Sustainability
Person in hammock with quote “You can’t endure if you aren’t sustained.”
I ran two small, grassroots Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer (LGBQT) non-profits for a decade plus. Staff turn around in organizations like the ones I ran was often about 10 months. The pace was brutal. The pay was non-existent. (I started at $500 a month. Yes. A month- for 50+ hours a week.) The community was unforgiving and quick to tell you your flaws. Explicitly. The work was as heartbreaking as it was rewarding. I took the job initially in 2001 in Tacoma, WA because they needed someone and I needed a job, I didn’t expect it to become my career or define so much of my later life. And I stuck with it because I cared and I was good at the work. I was able to stick with it so long for a couple of reasons. One was my motivation. My source for my work was compassion, rather than rage. And while rage is a powerful fire, compassion lasts longer. I’ll get into that in a later post. This post is about the other reason I was able to stick with it for as long as I did.
Sustainability.
I understood that social justice work is about ‘enduring to the end’ as my religious upbringing taught me. And you can’t endure if you aren’t sustained. Meaning, if you work as hard as you can, as long as you can, with zero pauses to recharge, you will burn out and be done. I watched it happen. Powerful forces for change, fired up about the atrocities of our world, would charge in with everything they had. And fade away when the mountain of institutional apathy barely registered their efforts. I was a long distance runner at the time and used to tell my staff and volunteers: This is marathon- not a sprint. We have to pace ourselves. If we could work 100 hours a week for a year and end all suffering, I’d be for it. And that’s simply not how we are going to win this fight. We need to keep going for as long as it takes. Which means part of our strategy needs to be our self-care.
If something matters to me today, it will matter to me tomorrow. So part of my planning process is how to make sure I will be able to continue to invest myself in these things that matter to me. It’s not just about about the effort I can give today. It’s about ensuring I will have the energy and motivation to continue to give tomorrow and beyond. This is where work/life balance comes in.
Passionate people and driven founders will often ignore their personal lives, health, mental and emotional self care, sleep, and so forth, And workaholism is one of the few addictions Americans are comfortable bragging about publicly. While there has been a small shift towards valuing ourselves as people, the general trend is to admire the people who hold up their self-abuse proudly. You know— the folks that come into the office when they are sick; miss family events for work; never take vacation time — maybe that’s you? It’s been normalized to commit this kind of damage to ourselves and our lives in the name of being ‘successful’.
We all know it’s not healthy and really not desirable. And it can be difficult to counter that narrative when faced with the daily decisions of work and life. Which is why I have named Sustainability as a core value for myself and my work. Anything I am part of, including my work with you, will include sustainability as a foundational part of the process. More than something like ‘self-care’, which can feel like an indulgence or a deviation from your work, sustainability is about incorporating this truth into your work life. You wouldn’t expect your car to run if you didn’t put gas in it and get the oil changed. Why is your life worth less to you than your car?
As we work together, I will help you identify your recharge needs. They are different for everyone. Once identified, we will include those things in our planning process. For some folks, it’s exercise; others need quiet time. Everyone needs to get the right amount sleep and good nutrition, so learning to make those things an automatic priority will be part of how we work on building your strategies and goals.
What’s really amazing is that when you create a sustainable work plan that includes recharge time, you will get more done, more effectively, and feel more rested and energized. I know, it sounds too good to be true. And it’s still actually how it works.
