Alison Pugh

Those are crucial.

I want to say one other thing about the kind of what I'm hearing underneath that email's lament, and that is about burnout.

a lot of the treatment for burnout is take a day off, take a vacation, make sure you take your lunch, practice mindfulness.

It's very individual.

And it also kind of all subscribes to the theory that it's too much relationship is causing burnout.

There's too many people kind of sucking you dry.

And I actually think that that's a misread because so many people talk to me about how sustaining they find these relationships.

So I started to think like we're running around with a metaphor of workers as like kind of these buckets of compassion that spring holes from which their compassion drains away.

And actually, I don't think that's the right metaphor.

I think we should think about like kind of the workers as soil and the relationships as rain.

And sometimes the rain is torrential or toxic.

And sometimes the soil is too dry.

But it's not that we don't need rain.

It's that we need the working conditions that enable the rain to be restorative.

Yes, for sure.

I just don't want all the onus to be on the individual people who are doing so much work.

But I agree.

I think sounding boards are a crucial component to finding relationship work sustaining.

And so, yes, you should petition your manager to set that up.

Or you can, you know, maybe end.