Hi Reader,

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I shared a message on my personal Facebook page yesterday because it was my first official day back to work.

I made the last-minute to cancel the email that I had originally planned to share with you today.
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And instead, I’m going to share that Facebook post.

But first, some context:

As an organizational culture change and DEI consultant, I can tell you that organizations hire me to help them solve a variety of challenges.

Though each client's challenge may be slightly different, one consistent theme that I see in every organization and corporation, no matter the industry, annual budget, or location is this: people are tired. People are being burnt out and burned up.

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Because I examine organizational culture, engage employees for feedback on their workplace and workload, and I study this topic, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the modern workplace and work practices are incompatible with our basic human needs.

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And that includes the need for rest and a break from production.

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I meet people who are so overworked, so past burnout, that they don’t even recognize the signs anymore.

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It’s a chronic state.

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They are in a perpetual state of fatigue, with both mental and physical exhaustion.

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And because so many people burnt out, the signs are missed until a well-rested outsider points it out.

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And many of us have never known any else. Work work work work work. Squeeze in rest. You’ll take a vacation soon and that’s when you rest.

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Sound familiar?

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This is why I want to share my story with you about the rest break, I took in July.

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It’s a story and an experience that connects to my identity as a Black woman in America and my experience is coming from a working class family.

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This rest break is personal, but it actually makes me a better strategist, coach, consultant and partner to my clients.

The Post:

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Every July since 2015, I have made a commitment to take the month off to be “work free”.

I‘ve made a commitment to not provide my clients with any deliverables or meeting availability.
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When I first started this practice, I felt guilt around not working.
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Guilt because I don’t come from a family that has the ability to take extended breaks from work.

We have been a Working Class family: people work until they are old or die
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My sister was working nearly every day in 2021 while battling Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She worked until her body was emaciated, essentially until she went into Hospice.

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This is like most of the relatives I know.
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Rest and extended time off was something that was squeezed into evenings, weekends, and federal holidays.
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Not enough.

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Since trafficked to this country, Black American identity has been inextricably linked to their labor.

What they can produce.
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Just over 60 years ago, in the region where I was raised, it was ILLEGAL for many Southern Black women to not work.
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Many of them had husbands abroad fighting in war, and that salary afforded them a lifestyle where they didn’t financially need to work.

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But the anti-Black laws and white-led governments didn’t know what to do with Free Black woman.

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Who is “a Black” if they aren’t working?

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I’ll tell you: A human being.
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And this is a radical notion for a country who has built a dehuman view of the American Black.

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As a Black woman who was trained and encouraged to be a high performer, I had to unlearn that my identity and my self-worth were tied to what I could produce.

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This is why I started taking work-free rest sabbaticals in July.
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That first July, in 2015, I did a lot of unlearning and re-membering.

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A student of history, I had to remember that Black women —since they were trafficked to this continent nearly 400 years ago— had always had their value *doubly* tied to their labor.

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In the first way, for their physical labor used to toil in cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane plantations to build America’s wealth.
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And, in the second way, for their physical ability to labor: to give birth to healthy Black children that would, for the first time anywhere in history, become enslaved simply because their mother was Black.
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Black women were exploited from their hands, to their backs, to their wombs.

And it still happens today.

And I resist this.
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When I take July to intentionally rest and focus on myself as a human being instead of a human doing, it is a revolutionary act.
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It is revolutionary to resist the idea that we are only as valuable as what we can * produce*
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So I don’t produce work products in July.
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This revolutionary act resists the idea of financial scarcity.
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It resists the idea that our work is urgent and cannot wait. It can.

In a deep and embodied way, I emerge in August rooted in Tricia Hersey’s decades-long movement with The Nap Ministry and her Rest is Resistance manifesto.

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This July was filled with so much rest:

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💫Cuddles with my pup

💫Long walks in beautiful places

💫Quality time with friends

💫Self-care in all the ways I could think of

💫Delicious food

💫Hosting Dinner parties with special people

💫Returning to the natural beauty of places like Napa Valley

💫And taking dedicated time to treasure what it is to be in my body, in this world, at this time.

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My assignment is to take these lessons learned, the healing and repair I have gained, and weave it into my everyday as I transition back to my business that’s planted in the high-demand field of justice, inclusion, and equity.

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There were many lessons I learned and relearned over this past month.

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One big one I’ll share now:

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Everything that I did to rest and recuperate this past month could have been woven into my life the first six months of the year.

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But I didn’t create the space or make it as much of a priority as I could have.

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My lesson and reminder was: do 👏🏾 not 👏🏾 wait.
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Rest cannot wait.
Self-care cannot wait.

What can wait? Work.

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Video reel highlights :

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Warmly,

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