Building your career resilience is an intentional, deliberate process. Leaving it up to chance is a recipe for failure. But what's the process for making change happen?  In The Joy of Appreciative Living (a book I can't recommend highly enough), Jacqueline Kelm lays out 5 stages for deliberative change that I think are instructive for those of us looking to become more resilient.  1. Awareness To make a change, you must first become aware that change is necessary. When it comes to resilience, you become aware that something has to change in your approach to your career. Maybe you find that you're on your 3rd layoff in as many years. Or you realize that you're in a constant state of anxiety over work. Somehow, the need for change pushes its way into your consciousness. It's the awareness phase that sets the stage.  2. Commitment After you become aware of a situation, the next phase is commitment. You must decide to make things happen.  Often I find that people become aware that change is necessary, but instead of committing to making a change, they push the awareness out of their consciousness--they go into denial.   Another response I've seen with people is that they assume that they have little control over their lives--that there are no actions to take, so commitment to change is not going to accomplish anything. But awareness is not enough to make change happen. You must commit to change in order to move to the next phase.  3. Action Once you've committed to making a change, you must now take actions that support the change you want to see.  This is another area where I see people having some problems. They know there's an issue, they are committed to making changes, but then they don't take action to make those changes a reality.  Often this is because they aren't sure what actions to take. Fear or confusion holds them back. But lack of action can also be a sign of the resistance that accompanies every act of creation.  Steven Pressfield, in Do the Work, argues that Resistance (with a capital "R") is the enemy of everything we do to create something new in the world. It is an external force that inevitably rises up to meet us when we strive to do something great.  Without action, though, we cannot build resilience. It is through action that we start to see the shifts in ourselves that are nessary to meet the challenges of the workplace.  4. Acclimation Assuming that we've begun to act, things will start to change around us so we must acclimate to the new reality we are creating for ourselves. This means adjusting to the new and letting go of the old.  This acclimation phase can be challenging, particularly in terms of releasing what no longer serves us. Often the changes we are pursuing will point out all of the old ways of being and doing that were unconscious before.  During the acclimation phase, we become more aware of old patterns and beliefs that we must let go of and we begin to see what the new patterns are creating in our lives. These new patterns will require us to adapt again.  I also find that during acclimation, we can struggle with feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Are we making good choices? Are we looking "stupid"? Are people judging us for the changes that we're making and how does that impact what we do?  Acclimation is the uncertain phase when we're caught between the old and the new. If we keep up with the changes, then that leads us to the final phase--Realization.  5. Realization This is the final stage of intentional change, when we've succeeded in creating new patterns of behavior. It becomes easier for us to make the right choices and to live the new patterns without having to think all the time about what we're doing.  This is also when we can more consistently reap the rewards of the changes we've made. Enough momentum has built up that we are in the flow of a new way of being in the world.  To build the four patterns of resilience--Clarifying, Connecting, Creating and Coping--we must be intentional about the change proceess. These patterns don't happen by accident. We must coax them into being through a conscious process of development.  What phase of resilience are you in? Are you stuck in a phase and need to move to the next level? How will you do that today? 

Video Blog 1--Limiting Beliefs - Computer from Michele Martin on Vimeo. I'm taking my own medicine--doing some experimenting and taking a bit of a risk-- so today's blog post is a video where I go over 5 limiting beliefs that get in the way of your career in today's economy and the alternative beliefs we need to put in their place.  I also want to point you to this post on 3 ways to create your own opportunities.  Let me know in comments what you think of these beliefs and any other limiting beliefs you think we need to let go of in order to be more resilient in today's economy. 

  I'm aware that for many people, a job change just isn't in the cards right now. They know that they are unhappy--or at least restless--but for a variety of reasons, changing jobs or changing careers just can't happen for awhile.  This is OK. In fact, it can be a good thing. Your current job can be the home base from which you experiment with some new possibilities. You just have to move yourself into experimental mode.  3 Steps For Change 1. Start by working with more intention--pay attention to where you feel positive energy in your work.  What activities do you most enjoy doing? Who are the people who energize and inspire you? Where do you feel like you are really leveraging your strengths and being the most authentic and effective?  I suggest logging these experiences for a week or two. Take a few minutes a few times throughout your day to note the energy of what's going on. Consider: What have I been doing? What activities have you been engaged in?  How do I feel about it? Note particularly the things you do that leave you feeling energized, interested and really "present" in your work. These may be things you want more of.  Who am I doing it with? See if there's something about the people you are working with or the conversations you are having that feels energizing to you. Or are you doing things alone? What does that tell you?  2. Write it down. You will be tempted to just think about these things, but I promise you that you will get more from the exercise if you keep a written log. You will be able to go back through your notes to find patterns and ideas in a way that just won't happen without the written information.  3. Follow the energy of More and find ways to change how you're working As you begin to see more clearly what gives you energy and inspiration at work, you can begin to look for opportunities to pursue those activities and experiences more intentionally.  Start with thinking about what you want MORE of at work. What relationships do you want more of? What conversations, experiences and activities do you want to have happen more often? How can you structure your day to encourage these?  For example, one of the participants in last year's Career Clarity Camp identified that having more meaningful, authentic conversations with colleagues and co-workers gave him a lot of satisfaction. So each morning, he looked at the day's schedule and spent some time thinking about what he could do to have more meaningful discussions with the people he would be talking to that day. What questions could he ask that would invite more engagement? How could he create safe space for people to be more authentic?  As he became more intentional about planning for what he most enjoyed, he found that he was more inspired and engaged than he'd been before. The tasks of his job hadn't changed. What had changed was the energy and intention he brought to the work. He changed HOW he worked and that began to create new enthusiasm for the work.  Other ways to re-energize yourself for a job that can't change right now include: Setting up personal learning experiments. What new skills could you develop within the confines of your current job? How could you try out new ideas or have different conversations? Take an experimental approach--maybe a 30-day Trial to start?  Connecting with like-minded peers. Create a mastermind group for yourself, working with others who want to explore and expand their opportunities. Maybe you can work on some group projects together or support each other in finding ways to expand at work. Remember, these don't have to be people who work with you. There can be great benefit to connecting with people online who or who work other places.  Experimenting with asking and reflecting on more positive questions. Often we begin to lose steam with our jobs because we are so mired in the day-to-day problems and negativity that can take over so much of our work lives. Reframing and approaching your work experiences from a more positive standpoint can help you begin to find new energy.  Checking out this list of 60 small ways to improve your life in the next 100 days. Pay particular attention to the section on learning/personal development.  Turning the job you have into the job you want. You may, in fact, have more flexibility to change your job than you think. This post on job crafting has some excellent advice on how to turn the job you have into the job you want. This could be a great discussion to have with your mastermind group.  The ultimate goal here is to reframe your relationship to your work--finding ways to create within your existing job more of what you want to experience, as well as using your current position as a home base from which to further learn and develop.  You can have a surprising amount of control over your current job if you choose to exercise it. The trick is in how you approach your situation, letting go of those things you can't control and putting your time, energy and focus into those things you can change.  _______________________________________________________________________ My Career Clarity Virtual Retreat on September 21 can be a great way for you to develop a plan for making your current job work better for you. Even if you aren't ready to make a job change, more clarity can help you bring more of what you want into your current situation. 

I was reading an article in the NYT this morning about How to Live Wisely. It describes a course at Harvard designed to get students to think deeply about their lives.  At the end of the course, students are asked to share one thing they've changed their minds about as a result of their participation in the course. The course is meant to be transformational and, of course, transformation doesn't occur when we cling to old habits, beliefs and emotions. This got me thinking about how open we as "adults" are to changing our minds. How many times do we approach a "learning" experience not with the intent of opening our minds to new ideas, but looking for ways to have our old ideas confirmed? I've been guilty of this on numerous occasions, I know.  Many of us hunger for transformation. We want to shed the skin of what doesn't work for us and don a new way of being or feeling. This happens in our personal lives, as well as our work lives.  Yet to do this, we must be willing to change our minds.  We cannot experience a transformation as long as we are clinging to the safe comfort of our old ways. Transformation MEANS change, so we have to let go.  If we are feeling stuck, yet hungering for something else, maybe the first question we need to ask ourselves is  What have I changed my mind about lately?  If the answer is "nothing," then we need to do something about that.  To learn and grow, seek not to change minds, but to have your own mind changed.  ______________________________________________________________________ Frustrated with your toxic workplace? I'm offering an online, self-guided course that can help you let go and move on! 

Last week I had lunch with my accountant and a friend of his who was laid off a year ago (at 62) and is now starting his own business because he can't find an employer who will hire him. We spent much of that lunch talking about how many people we knew who were in this situation.  For the past year, I've been facilitating the Speedy Startup--a 12-week program to help people who are unemployed start up their own businesses. With only a few exceptions, everyone I've been working with is over 45, laid off and unable to find new employment. I'm recruiting for a new Fall class and finding that the trend continues.  I also do a lot of  program work with "unemployment programs" in the US. Their biggest challenge is helping the 45 and over crowd find a new job. If these people do find new work, it's often part-time at a substantially lower salary with responsibilities far below their capabilities.  50 is the New 65 The reality is that when it comes to the workplace 50 is the new 65 and we're seeing a lot of people who in other eras would have been at the peak of their careers, getting booted from the job market with very little opportunity to find comparable work once this happens. It's a phenomenon that's particularly pronounced in certain industries (like tech), but it's pretty widespread.  We spend a lot of time advising new college grads on how they should manage their careers, recognizing that this s a period of transition. But I would argue that in our new normal, another period of transition we need to plan for is the 45+ transition.  I know you're thinking this won't happen to you--you work hard, you're flying high in your career. But I'm telling you, that's what all these other people were thinking too.  You may get lucky and have a healthy, satisfying career right up until you decide that you want to retire. But I wouldn't count on that.  Planning for 45 and Over Because lay-offs seem to heat up for people in their 50s, the time to start planning for it is in your 40s. This is also when a lot of people start looking around and thinking "Is this all there is?" If they've had dreams of working for themselves or making a career change, this is when those dreams become more insistent.  So what should you be doing? 1. Start Saving Up Make sure you have a cushion of cash that's readily accessible, not socked away in a 401k, where you may have to pay penalties to get at it. This may be easier said than done, so that why you need to. . .  2. Start Creating Multiple Income Streams Stop thinking of your job as your only way of bringing in revenue. Start thinking about creating multiple income streams. This is the time to start developing side gigs. The best time to work on developing new income streams is while you are still working at a full-time job that gives you some level of security. It can take a few years to begin generating enough revenue and you will be much less stressed if you work on your side hustle when you don't have the pressure of replacing your previous income.  3. Nurture and Grow Your Relationships Your relationships are going to help you grow and access new opportunities and provide you with support when you are laid off. Start paying attention to them now.  Shift from networking on behalf of your company and start thinking about how to build your own circles of connection that will support and sustain you in this next act.  Start making NEW connections. A lot of people in their 40's have settled into a pretty closed circle. But closed circles keep us from becoming aware of and accessing new opportunities. We are less likely to see new trends or possibilities. Broaden your connections and you will be better positioned for success.  4. Develop New Skills That Are Relevant to Today's Market If you haven't learned something new in the past year, you're already stale. You need to start working on a personal learning plan where you are developing new, relevant skills. Don't rely on your company to tell you what training to go to. Look around. See what skills are in demand and start working on them. You can do this as part of developing your side gig or by working on side projects that interest you.  5. Be Alert to Signals That You May be "Aging Out" of Your Job Monster has an excellent article on the signs to watch out for with your current company, things like promotions going to younger people and supervisors saying "You've been here so long!"  Also stay alert to shifting trends in your industry and occupation. If you start feeling like you're on the outside, start getting nervous. This is NOT a time to deny reality. You can't (and won't!) do anything if you aren't willing to see what may be coming down the pike! Again, it's tempting to hope that this won't happen to you, but believe me, you need to acknowledge and deal with reality.  6. Start Keeping a Career Journal Reflect on what is happening in your career--what you enjoy, where you're having success, etc. This will help you clarify what is going on at work and give you ideas for future direction and action.  7. Document Your Successes Create a portfolio and start keeping track of work products and projects. This can help you in job search. It can also be a great reminder of your competence and capabilities on bad days.  8. Work on Your Layoff Plan I posted about this awhile ago and it's worth a revisit. Note that these are strategies that will help you jumpstart your job search if/when you are laid off.  9. Acknowledge and Work With Your Emotions I've been focusing on more "practical" things, but there's a BIG emotional component here. If you are starting to deal with some of the signs of aging out of your job, then you will often encounter anger, anxiety and sadness. There is often a sense of shame, especially in a society where we put such a high value on youth.  If we don't acknowledge and deal with these feelings, we can find that we are taking things out on our families, our friends, our colleagues, etc. This, then, interferes with our ability to grow and maintain our connections, so it can be a pretty negative cycle. Use your emotions as a guide where you can. Try not to block them or deny that they are there.  Use Your 40's To Create Opportunities for 50 and Beyond All of us are working in a "new normal," where old rules are changing and the usual guideposts for our careers are shifting as well. Although it's tempting to see your 40's as a time to just sit back and enjoy what you may have created, in reality it's a time to start planning for that next major phase of your career in your 50's. It's all about resilience and to craft sustainable careers for ourselves, we need to be alert and responsive to the new types of transitions that are likely to come our way.  There ARE opportunities and we can create them. But to do that, we need to be alert, responsive and most of all proactive. Manage your career before it manages you.  _______________________________________________________________________ If you're struggling with the emotional fallout of being laid off, you may want to check out my new online course, Recovering from Unemployment: A 7-Day Course to Help You Let Go and Move On. Only $9.99, this course is self-guided and can give you the emotional boost you need to get back on track with your job search!  

One of the participants in my Toxic Workplace Course brought up the discomfort that comes with acknowledging to herself that she's in a toxic work situation. If she admits this then it opens up the question that she must DO something about it. And, of course, that feels REALLY uncomfortable.  But the discomfort of acknowledging reality and the various implications of our current situation is NOTHING compared to what happens when we deny what is going on.  Here's the thing.When we deny reality, the truth of our situation starts to pop up in other ways--usually physically. We feel exhausted or anxious all the time. We start succumbing to various illnesses. We can't sleep. We can't eat or we eat too much. We spend our off-hours in front of the TV or the computer, numbing ourselves out.  We can also start to see our relationships suffering. We anger more easily. Or we want to isolate ourselves from other people. We are there in body, but are not present emotionally or mentally.  We also see that our performance at work is suffering. We lose confidence in ourselves, our ideas and our ability to act. Our creativity suffers. We aren't doing our best thinking and we know it.  All of these things can be insidious, invisible. And that's what makes them so dangerous.  Here's what I've learned. Don't fear the discomfort of acknowledging when you are in a bad situation. Fear what happens when you don't. 

Ah, time. If there's one thing we're good at, it's listing all the reasons we don't have the time to do the things we say we want to do.  So many people I know have a great idea for a side business, but they don't start because they say they don't have the time.  Other people tell me that they'd really love to explore changing careers, but they simply don't have the time to do it.  Whatever amazing thing it is we want to accomplish in the world, our most enduring reason for not doing it is that we don't have the time.  So today, several ways to find time . . .  Keep a Time Log Start by really looking at how you're using your time. For the next week, honestly log the hours you spend on your daily tasks. How many hours did you spend working? How many hours were spent sleeping? How many hours on exercise, chores, etc.? How many hours were spent mindlessly surfing the Internet or watching Netflix?  Checking Facebook 5 times a day for 6 minutes at a time adds up to 2.5 hours in a workweek. What if you had spent that time working on your side gig instead?  Manage Your Interruptions While we're talking about how you use your time, let's talk about interruptions. Too many of us lose hours in our day because we aren't very good at setting the boundaries that will give us good opportunities to focus. Part of the reason we feel so exhausted at the end of a day filled with interruptions is because our brains are simply not built to constantly switch from one task to the next.  Take a look at this article on managing interruptions and try using this Interruptions Log to track the flow of interruptions in a week.  Once you've seen what's going on, look at ways you can manage these interruptions to buy yourself greater opportunities to focus in larger chunks of time.  Use the Covey Quadrants to Assess Your Use of Time The Covey Quadrants (above) are a REALLY useful way to look at how you're using your time. Ideally, you want to spend as much time as possible in the "Important, Not Urgent" column. These are the activities that will bring you the most satisfaction and that will get you closer to where you want to be. Sadly, many of us spend too much time in all the other quadrants.  Pay particular attention to Quadrant 4--Not Important and Not Urgent. This is where  a lot of mindless TV watching and other distractions takes place. Instead of ending your day with 3 hours of Facebook and Netflix, try spending at least one of those hours on your own growth.  Schedule the Big Rocks Another Stephen Covey principle is the idea of the "big rocks"--the priorities in your life right now. If working on your career or starting a side business or creating that nonprofit you've been dreaming about is a real priority for you, you need to schedule that work FIRST, not last.  This means literally putting times in your calendar when you will work on your project or business or career growth. These become your first priority and everything else gets scheduled around that.  Use the Pomodoro Technique The Pomodoro Technique is a nice way to help you chunk your time.  Here's how it works: Choose a task you want to accomplish. Set a time for 25 minutes (this is called a Pomodoro) Work on the task until the 25 minutes is up, then put a check mark on your sheet of paper. Take a short, 5-minute break. Every 4 Pomodoros, take a longer break (15-30 minutes--whatever it takes for you to feel re-charged). Note that if you are interrupted during your Pomodoro, then you must either postpone the distraction or end the Pomodoro to attend to the interruption and start over later. The idea is that you are working in focused bursts of 25 minutes, so if that burst is interrupted by a co-worker, a phone call, etc., then you need to either end that Pomodoro and start over after you've dealt with the distraction OR you postpone the distraction until you finish the Pomodoro.  Start by committing to do 1 Pomodoro a day to move your project forward. Then build from there.  Get Up An Hour Earlier Doesn't get much simpler than this. Commit to getting up an hour earlier each day. You can knock out 2 Pomodoros and start your day knowing that you've made your project your FIRST priority. This has the added benefit of setting the tone for your day, a tone that puts your growth at the center.  Do a Month of Sundays (or Saturdays) For one month, commit to spending large blocks of weekend time on your project. Seth Godin's altMBA project has people working from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Sunday for a "5-week" sprint. How far could you move your career, side business, etc. if you committed to a sprint like that? Change How You Talk About Your Time Laura Vanderkam suggests that rather than saying that you're "too busy" to do something, you say instead, "This is not a priority." So instead of saying "I'm too busy to work on my career," say "Working on my career is not a priority." Or, instead of saying "I'm too busy to start my side business," say "Starting my side business is not a priority." It may be that those things are true. But you may also find that as soon as you say one of these things is not a priority, you realize that it needs to be.    Finding time to do what matters can be challenging. But it CAN be done. Stop saying that you don't have time to grow your career or start your side business or do anything else that's important to you. Instead, invest that energy in finding that time to invest in yourself.    ______________________________________________________________________ Frustrated with your toxic workplace? I'm offering an online, self-guided course that can help you let go and move on! 

What happens when you feel like you're stuck in a career rut? How do you get moving in a different direction? I think we make things more complicated than they need to be. Here are three steps you can take.  1. Admit that there's a problem. The first step is to recognize and accept the reality of your situation. As I've written before, one of the most important things you can do when you want to make a change is to take a scrupulous, unflinching look at what's going on. Be clear about what is and isn't working and where you want to see change. The more honest and complete you can be in this inventory, the more energy you will gather to make change. (This is what some of the people in the Recovering from the Toxic Workplace course are discovering)  One way to to do this is to simply write about your current experience. What is happening? How are you feeling about it? Who's involved? How long has this been going on?  Another way to explore the situation is through visuals. The Career Clarity Image Sessions are a great way to get clearer about what's happening and they can help you see issues and connections you might miss through writing alone.  2. Paint a vision of the future. Robert Fritz, in his excellent book, The Path of Least Resistance, says that the energy for creation comes from the tension between our vision for what we want and the reality of our situation.  In the first step, you looked at your current reality. Now it's time to paint a vision of what you want--what would your career look like if everything was in place? This is where visualization can again be helpful. Michael Hyatt writes that he regularly uses visual techniques to jumpstart his creative projects. He says that creating a visual: Makes it real. Sparks passion. Ignites creativity. Forces clarity. Defines a path. Encourages positivity. Your career is an act of creation and visualizing an outcome is a powerful way to create the necessary tension between your current reality and your imagined future.  3. Build a Bridge You have reality. You have your vision for the future. Now you just need to build a bridge from here to there.  I encourage people to focus on taking small, daily actions that move you in the direction of your vision. Often it feels overwhelming to plan some major career overhaul, but by dedicating some time every day to building that bridge, you can start to create some real momentum.  What kinds of things can you be doing? Here are some suggestions: Keep a One-Sentence Journal--At the end of each day, write one sentence about your experiences. What did you learn? What questions are coming up for you? What was a small win for the day? This can help you track what does/doesn't work for you.  Create a 6-month (or 3-month) plan of experiments--What are things you could try out? Maybe stretch projects? Learning new skills? Trying a side business or committing to reading some new books? Experiments are a way for us to learn more and to discover more about what we want to make happen. Plan these out in short increments with a focus on learning and you can start to evolve toward your new vision.  Do some de-cluttering--Sometimes our problem is that we need to do some mental de-cluttering to make space for a new vision. If you're feeling bogged down by a sense of "there's too much going on!" work on doing some mental (and possibly physical) de-cluttering. You may also want to focus on creating more time for yourself.  Schedule 50 Cups of Coffee--meet and talk with people who can help you clarify your thinking, learn more about a subject area, make new connections, etc. Relationships are the lifeblood of a career and the more we open up to diversifying our circles of connection and deepening those connections, the clearer things become for us.  Ask more questions--When answers are in short supply, we may need to start asking ourselves more questions. Instead of pushing yourself to "figure things out," try focusing on getting more curious.  Some Things to Keep in Mind You didn't get stuck overnight. Career stagnation is something that develops insidiously, over time. So don't expect that you are going to get miraculously unstuck within a day or two. Have patience and let things evolve. Also be aware that some of our sense of being stuck comes when our identities begin to shift and our jobs aren't keeping up. The things that used to engage us about our jobs may be changing. Or we are starting to care less about some things and more about others. Our sense of who we are and what we value changes over the course of our lives and often we get "stuck" when the personal changes and the professional realities are not in alignment.  Finally, you will not begin to get unstuck until you are willing to try some things out that may feel risky or "out of your comfort zone." The only way to get free of career quicksand is to start pulling yourself out of  the muck and onto firm ground. At first this may feel strange. You are used to being in the quicksand. But soon, you will begin to appreciate being on firmer ground. But you have to be willing to step over to it first.  _______________________________________________________________________ Are you stuck because you're mired in the quicksand of a toxic workplace? My new self-guided online course may be just what you need! 

A few weeks ago I launched two online courses on using expressive writing--one to recover from a toxic workplace and the other on recovering from unemployment. The more popular course by far has been the course on recovering from toxic work.  I have to say that this makes me a little sad, but also that I'm not surprised. Most of the people I know who are struggling with their careers feel this way because they are locked into work environments that are soul-killing. There are different flavors of toxic work--from jobs that feel useless, to working with colleagues and supervisors that bring you down, to dealing with the burnout of a competitive, 24/7 approach to work with Amazon as the latest example of this.  It's a growing and incredibly harmful trend that I feel we need to be discussing more.  I want to learn more about how you're feeling about toxic work. Is this something you are facing? How do you define a toxic workplace? How does it make you feel and how is it impacting your life? How are you dealing with it?  Drop me a line in comments or email me at michelemmartin@gmail.com. I want to know more about what you're experiencing. 

My husband and I have become obsessed with Naked and Afraid. In case you've missed it, it is the ultimate survival show. A man and a woman are dropped into a jungle somewhere with only one tool each--a knife, a fire starter, a length of rope--it's their choice. They have no food, no water and no clothes.  The goal of the show is that the pair must survive for 21 days in some really inhospitable locations. At the end of the 3 weeks, they must hike to the "extraction point," which is generally miles from where they've set up camp and usually involves a mountain to climb or a swamp to swim through. Remember, they have no clothes.  Each pair spends a lot of time building some kind of lean-to to sleep in and looking for fresh water and "protein." Everything is about "protein," which usually consists of bugs, lizards and if they're lucky maybe a bird or fish they've managed to catch.  They are living one day to the next, focused strictly on survival.  What fascinates me are their interactions.  A few of the pairs get along reasonably well throughout their 21 days of enforced naked togetherness. They support and coach each other and work together to locate those all-important protein and water sources. But more often than not one of them will start complaining that the other isn't "pulling his/her weight." This usually happens when one of the pair does things differently than the other person would have chosen to do.  Someone will storm off at some point. Someone will yell. Someone will cry. On more than a few occasions someone has "tapped out"--Naked-and-Afraid-Speak for dropping out before the 21 days are up. This leaves the other half of the pair on their own to finish out the 3 weeks.  Regardless of whether or not the pair gets along, the deeper into the survival experience they get, the crankier they become.  So what does all of this have to do with work?   Naked and Afraid is a portrait of people in survival mode--living in a hostile environment, lacking the tools they need to thrive. They are starving, sleep-deprived and I have to believe feeling vulnerable as hell. No shoes and no clothes in the jungle is no joke. For many people, their work is a version of this hostile jungle. OK, the food is better and they can find water. But sleep deprivation is pretty common. Lack of tools and a general sense of hostility in the environment are common too.  While occasionally the experience brings out the best in a Naked and Afraid pair, usually it brings out the worst. They become mean and petty, with lots of bickering in between treks for water. Many of them seem to battle depression and despair, sinking into lethargy as the days go on.  This can happen at work, too. It's the survival mode that brings out the dysfunctional team dynamic.  What saves Naked and Afraid pairs is knowing that they only have to do it for 21 days--there is an end in sight. Surviving to the end becomes a challenge.  But would happen if there was no end they could see? They were just in this survival mode for the foreseeable future?  I'm thinking that it wouldn't be pretty.  That's where surviving your job can be worse than Naked and Afraid. You may not be starving physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, you're in a desperate search for sustenance.  And you're trapped with other people who are in survival mode, too, which brings out the worst in everyone.  Of course Naked and Afraid is designed for entertainment. It purposely looks for the drama and shows us select pieces of what happens over the 21 days.  Still, I can't help feeling that many workplaces are a version of those hostile jungles. And that many of us are just trying to survive. . .  ________________________________________________________________________ Are you in survival mode at work? Check out my online course on Recovering from the Toxic Workplace.  It can give you the tools you need to move from surviving to thriving.