117: {Interview} Healing Workplace Wounds: A New Perspective with Bree Johnson

In this conversation, Bree Johnson shares her journey from being an employment attorney to founding Executive UnSchool and the Work Wound Institute. She discusses the concept of workplace wounds, the importance of inner work, and how unschooling outdated beliefs about work can lead to personal transformation. Bree emphasizes the need for healing from work-related trauma and the significance of redefining one's relationship with work to achieve well-being and fulfillment.

takeaways

• Bree Johnson identifies as a 'professional pivoter' in her career.
• The legal system often fails to address the root causes of workplace harm.
• Workplace wounds can affect mental and physical health.
• Burnout is the most common work wound experienced by individuals.
• Feelings of betrayal and bullying are prevalent in workplace environments.
• Inner work is crucial for healing from work wounds.
• Unschooling involves questioning societal norms around productivity and success.
• Creating space for self-reflection can lead to personal transformation.
• It's important to separate one's worth from their work achievements.
• Healing from work wounds is a lifelong journey, not a quick fix.

Connect further with Bree HERE and on LinkedIn HERE

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:01.482)
Welcome free.

Bree Johnson (00:03.522)
Hello, so glad to be here.

Caroline Pennington (00:07.329)
So I want to hear your story. You and I met online, then we met in real life at Powerhouse Women. And I had the privilege of hearing you speak on stage at that event. But I love your story. I love the work that you're doing. You've gone through some major personal and professional pivots in your career. And so tell us about where you are now and how did you get there.

Bree Johnson (00:27.596)
Yeah, I love that when you put those words together. was like, hmm, maybe I should call myself the professional pivoter. So where I am now, I'm the founder of Executive End School as well as our research arm, which is the Work Wound Institute. And from my background of being an employment attorney, I no longer practice. But from that background, my heart, my calling, really every fiber of my being is about helping women in particular heal from work wounds.

And so while being an employment attorney allowed me to do a smidge of that, it really wasn't as expansive. And more importantly for me and my story is the legal system does not really get to the root of why women and people experience workplace harm. So it doesn't really do anything to prevent it from happening. And so I really wanted my story and my work to be much more meaningful for me.

in bigger way. so I do trainings, I do private mentorship and really help people not only heal work wounds, but in so doing enable it to create sort of an armor so that they don't keep going into cycles of work wounds because I've seen that happen often too. that's my kind of life and my work right now. And it's really been a joy stepping outside of law, which is pretty confined into a much more expansive way of working.

Caroline Pennington (01:53.089)
Okay, so I wanna dive into that more because I mean, you went to undergraduate, you went to graduate school, got a law degree, then you had a law degree for many years and you even started or a partner in your own firm. How did you unwind that and like, what did the pivot look like? Because I'm sure you're like me, had family telling you, no, stay with what's safe and you have the golden handcuffs and everything. But in reality, you're totally miserable and wanna do something different. So what did that look like for you?

Bree Johnson (02:22.166)
Yeah, the fits and starts along that journey of kind of, I think there were many months, years of sort of wrestling with exactly what you're talking about. So yeah, I went to, I was kind of the traditional achiever, if you will, in that I went to undergrad, immediately went into law school, graduated, I thought I was doing the right thing, a semester early ahead of my peers thinking I'd hit the job market, when in reality I came out right in 2009.

And so for anybody who like went to grad or undergrad in the 07, you went to school thinking there were going to be just unlimited opportunities. And then I came out in 2009 and jobs were just being hemorrhaged everywhere. No one was hiring. And so that was like my first kind of rupture of thinking that law school for me looked like, even though I had a fellowship, was a six figure debt. So that's what I came out with. And the reality really hit me with a force when

those bills started coming in and being 24 years old and having, I think it was like $1,300 law school debt bills in addition to just trying to live. I mean, it was a lot. And so I share that piece of the story to go to the depth level of like, not only were some of my pivots that I later made 10, 12, 15 years into my career.

you know, they were really big sort of ruptures. had to wrestle with the pain of, not having that identity, but I still was carrying the baggage of the six figure debt, too. So there's like the financial component to it. And I think that's the reality of a lot of people, particularly, you know, I speak to a lot of women and for me, you know, I sought to really make my parents proud. And so so many of my decisions really all through my 20s were that. And then I had the socialized experience like I was checking the boxes of getting married and having kids and

yet still climbing the ladder. And then had this experience where I got the corner office. I got the C-suite title. I'm leading a very large department in a law firm as a chief strategy officer. Thought everything was great. I used to pride myself on how I could ruthlessly compartmentalize and just get shit done. I was getting all the accolades. It was amazing on the outside, but it wasn't feeling right on the inside.

Bree Johnson (04:36.834)
And so that was kind of my first pivot point was to recognize I was working on the operations side of law firms for the first 10 years of my career, made the decision to break off, started a solo practice representing employees harmed in the workplace because I was like, I want to use this law degree that I have. And I think the biggest theme through these moves that I've made, that one in particular, is about sort of reclaiming what was right for me.

Like what are the ways that I want to work? And in big law and often when we have like these big titles, so did the way we have to be so fully invested in our work that there wasn't any room for being a mom, being a wife, like being as present as I really wanted to be. And so once I started to zoom out, I saw that it wasn't necessarily an alignment that I wanted to make this move. So I gave it a go.

and became a solo employment attorney. And then that morphed into becoming an equity partner in a firm I co-founded. And it was like this, it was pretty consolidated timeline, which is important to the story to say that from the experience of making a big leap, kind of gaining that comfortability and going outside of my comfort zone, which is a lot of this, when we look to kind of readapt our, what we're doing or shake up our identity, our roles or go a completely different path.

It's really our comfort zone that is calling to us, both from a nervous system perspective, but also like, you know, the family pressure that you alluded to your family's like, what the heck, this was the safe thing to do. So our comfort zone calls to us. But then there is a separate piece that is a lot of grief. And I certainly felt that in both of these kind of big moves that I've made in my career of grief of like, things didn't work out the way that I thought they would, or I had hoped they would. And then that resulted in me not feeling aligned with that work anymore.

And that happened again in 2023 when I gave notice to the law firm I co-founded. It was everything that I wanted to be doing until all of a sudden it wasn't. And it was like, I really felt like I had one of those moments where I couldn't unsee sort of the way things were working. And it was nothing about anything at anyone else. It was about what do I want for my life? What do I want my work to look like? What do I want my relationship to my work to look like?

Bree Johnson (06:57.518)
client service, like all of these things, what do I want? And when that was no longer in alignment with what I wanted, I just sat with it for a few months. I didn't wait too long on it. Kind of got curious about what was happening within the organization. And then I ultimately decided that I needed to make my next big move. And really, as I alluded to at the beginning, it was for me about wanting to make a bigger impact in organizations and really impacting people who've experienced work wounds at scale.

because I just am not a believer that the legal system is the end-all be-all. Frankly, it does nothing to help people heal. It's often very re-traumatizing, and I just felt like my mission and my calling was bigger.

Caroline Pennington (07:40.661)
Okay, so I am also a 2009 graduate and completely really understand what the job market looked like then because I mean, most of my friends went back to school, to graduate school to get higher ed degrees that some are using now and some are not. And I don't know how I had a job in 2009, but it's because I had internships up before, but I'm not gonna go down with the tangent of all that. So I hear you. I feel like it was rough.

Bree Johnson (07:44.408)
Yeah.

Bree Johnson (08:07.836)
Yeah.

Caroline Pennington (08:09.589)
Let's talk about workplace wounds. What exactly is a workplace wound?

Bree Johnson (08:14.144)
Yeah. So I've used and really coined workplace work wounds as a way to describe, so there are legal claims that people can have. And I think that generally speaking, folks are familiar with what those are. Those are discrimination, that is sexual harassment, wrongful termination. There's these things that perhaps a lot of people are more familiar with. Work wounds, in contrast, zooms out. I'm going to talk about the four B's.

of work wounds, but there are these experiences that feel very rupturing. They often have profound mental health or physical health kind of impacts, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have a legal claim. And so I wanted to expand the aperture as we're talking about these experiences. People have a lot of really painful experiences in their work. And I really actually believe everyone has work wounds, whether they are willing to admit it or not is kind of a different question. But I think it's

It helps to normalize by calling it a work wound. We're now becoming more, as a society, comfortable talking about like childhood, inner child wounds and things like that. And I think we need to wrestle with this really long duration of our lives that we spend in our work. And sometimes work doesn't love us back and we feel really sad or we feel a lot of grief or we feel maybe sleepless nights. We have nightmares, we have lack of motivation, we feel burned out, we're getting headaches. All of these things can kind of come from work wounds.

But I'll briefly share the four B's that I talk about that are the most common work wounds, because even this language can kind of help people. Most common one is burnout, right? It's very much, you a lot of people are talking about this, but I think work will soon become what cigarettes were 40 years ago. We're going to see that the way that we're working is actually causing us a lot of physical harm from inflammation in the body. It's causing diseases. We're not

dealing with and sort of resetting stress and it results in the clinical burnout, which is kind of that lack of motivation really being at the end of the rope. So that's the most common work wound is burnout. Another work wound is betrayal. And I talk about this as it relates to like feelings of betrayal when you trust an organization and they lay you off. You've worked for 10 years and you've given all that kind blood, sweat and tears.

Bree Johnson (10:35.816)
and there is a reduction in force. It can also just look like, hey, this colleague of mine, we were super close. And then I had that kind of this like backstabbing feeling from a situation that arose. So feelings of betrayal are really common as well. The third that I talk about then is bullying, which is kind of related to feelings of betrayal. But bullying is like those microaggressions, the offensive conduct, the borderline, right? Like you're just feeling like you're being bullied, like nothing you can do is right in work.

And then the fourth B that I talk about is bad behavior. And that really encompasses what is traditionally understood to be some of the legal claims. But bad behavior, it can maybe rise to the level of a legal claim and often does not. And so those are the four Bs that I talk about that are the most common work wounds that people experience.

And again, I think language is such an important piece because when you have awareness of this and you can recognize, that's what I experienced, you see yourself more clearly, you're far less likely to feel so alone and isolated when it happens to you. And you see it as something that can be healed as opposed to just something that you don't need to talk about, especially if your family doesn't really understand. Or I hear a lot of women who experience work wounds, their husbands like, just get over it.

know, or I thought you'd be stronger, why are you so bothered by this? And I just think we need to do better in the way that we talk about how these experiences can really deeply affect them.

Caroline Pennington (12:05.121)
I love your four B's and I was writing them down because they are some really great categories. And as a former executive recruiter, I saw a lot of these happen. And you're right, they're not, maybe they don't warrant a lawsuit, but they still are happening and they still harm employees, know, mentally, physically, all the things. So you're touching on some things here that I like to talk about a lot. We all, you know, when I...

increase our skills or get a better job or continue moving up professionally. And a lot of that's exterior work, but why is the inner work just as important as the outside work?

Bree Johnson (12:43.758)
Hmm, it's so, so, so important. I think the biggest armor, right? think the, let me take a step back. The stat goes, 95 % of executives would change jobs if their wellbeing was better in the new job. And so I think the reason that I talk about work wounds so much is because I am so passionate about helping people really find wellbeing in their work. Like ideally it's not something...

that detracts and takes away from your joy or your physical health or your just like overall fulfillment in your life or your relationships. That's another area that people are really affected by when they have these bad experiences at work. It comes home with them. so work and wellbeing, right? If we can kind of normalize what maybe has happened, work through and heal it, then we can prevent it from happening in the future.

And that's the missing piece. And then find better wellbeing. So this acknowledgement allows people to redefine their relationship to work. And I use some of these glib phrases because they land so much. So I say, work won't love you back. And that sounds really cheeky and like, okay, ha ha, very funny. But the reality is if you've experienced a work wound, you feel that. You feel betrayed or like you've lost something and you don't understand why and other people don't understand it.

But if you take a step back and kind of evaluate what were my agreements about work? Well, I believed that that was how I was worthy of love or, you know, through my achievements was, you know, how I had any power or right. And we can begin to connect all these really deep seated subconscious beliefs about work and we can begin to rewrite new agreements. No, it actually does look.

I am worthy of rest regardless of how productive I was in the day. My best is my best. I'm not going to take things personally. And all of these things that really allow people to have a better relationship to their work and create a little bit of distance from their worth and their work, separate those two. And then that means that they're not going to feel as affected when something does happen. And they can see, I can rebound from this. And then I can start to ask myself, ooh, OK, this thing that happened, but how good can it get?

Bree Johnson (15:04.802)
Like what's the good stuff that might come on the other side of this?

Caroline Pennington (15:08.609)
You're making some really great points here. And so what if someone's listening to this podcast and they're like, yes, my boss is toxic or yes, my coworkers, you know, are manipulative and talk about me behind my back, but I still have to go to work and get a paycheck and pay my bills. How do you deal with both?

Bree Johnson (15:25.314)
Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. No, and that's the reality for so many people. And I don't want to trivialize that. I think that that's a very important reality. And I think that's where even someone in that position, you mentioned the inner work and how important the inner work is. That's all of the healing. It doesn't matter. Like nothing on the outside actually has to change. But the way that I work with clients who've experienced work wounds is we do that deep inner work to build more like an inner leadership.

of like, I might not be able to leave this job because very practical financial considerations. And I don't actually ever encourage somebody to just, I know there's a lot of like trendy, you know, just burn it down, just leave, you know, and even in my own story, there's been like an element of that. But I don't encourage others to do that because that can like the stress, the financial stress, you know, you're just going to offset one stress for another if that's your position. But there's so much space between where you are right now, probably

like feeling like you're falling, feeling like you can't ever get any peace in your work. I know a lot of people who wake up and take Xanax in the morning and are just like just to survive and get through the work day. And so there's a lot of space between where you might be today and just doing some nervous system regulation work, evaluating your agreements, redefining your current relationship to work. Like what are the changes that you can make taking control of those?

And we can do a lot to empower you to feel better in your work right where you are.

Caroline Pennington (16:58.037)
So you're the CEO and founder of Executive UnSchool. I wanna hear, what inspired you to start that?

Bree Johnson (17:04.546)
Yeah. Yeah. So unschool is really this, I call it, the business name is executive unschool, but the idea of unschooling is kind of a thread that I guess I've been weaving through this conversation without intentionally doing it, but of unschooling from all of those agreements about productivity and success and what my work means to me that maybe we've picked up, at least I picked up from a child.

I'm an Enneagram 3 also, so I have this just like deep achiever gene and picked all that up. And the unschooling work is to say, do I really want this? This year I'm gonna be 40, right? Whatever age you are, at whatever stage you're at in your career, you have enormous opportunity to reflect and really consider what it is that you may wanna do differently. Maybe that's a big pivot or maybe it's just a small change that you wanna make in terms of like what your workday looks like.

But there's a lot of small things that we can do. so executive unschool, really where this came from is my belief that there's a lot of opportunity for us through awareness, through connecting to new habits and building new habits, for us to expand our inner leadership, our conscious leadership in more mindful, less autopilot ways that we've been conditioned to do. And that's the unschooling.

Caroline Pennington (18:24.417)
What's really cool and you're touching on now, so we talked about the inner work earlier and then you've touched on the wellness practices, the nervous system regulation, the changing our values and beliefs of what we have, you know, circled around achievement or what is achievement? Like, I feel like when we go into work where you just, it's put on us, it's not the opposite way around. And so why is understanding that part like just so good for the soul?

Bree Johnson (18:54.548)
so good for the soul. Because I think it's this several of my clients refer to this feeling like they're on a hamster wheel, but they don't even know what the hamster wheel is for. Like, why did I get on it in the first place? And I think that that why is often because that's just that's simply what we saw modeled to us. And so we get on it because there's thousands of other hamsters running the same sort of endless race. And we think that

that's going to give us the joy, the success, right? It's this keeping up with the Joneses, but the soul food is taking a step back, getting off the hamster wheel for a moment, even if it's like a reflection exercise in your day, maybe you have a morning practice, an evening practice, and connecting on the inside and saying, okay, but what do I want? That's what everybody else might be doing, but what do I want?

And then there's some exercises that I often do, come up with a list of what are the things that give you energy in your work and what are the things that take away. Just like really simple things, but because of the pace of our sort of modern work, we don't take time to consider kind of the soul food exercises to say, but what really lights me up? What do I find meaningful? What do I wanna be doing with my time? What time do I wanna start my day? Everybody else is starting at 8 a.m.

Do I have any flexibility in that? Other people might be eating their lunch at their desk, but maybe I want to go out and get some sunshine, just little changes that we can make. But we have to connect on the inside and get off that hamster wheel that we've seen conditioned and socialized to us through our work experiences.

Caroline Pennington (20:36.997)
getting off that hamster wheel is hard. And so if you're listening to this podcast now and you think it's easy, because it may look like that for somebody on the internet, let's just say it's not, it's not at all. And so don't ever compare yourself to anyone else's journey.

Bree Johnson (20:47.53)
Hey.

Bree Johnson (20:53.376)
Yeah, so true. think the, I don't know if it's social media, right? The shiny pictures. I think what's not stated in this work that I can just loosely talk about sort of unschooling outdated beliefs about work is that there is a lot of second guessing or wrestling with yourself or even the people in your own life as you look to make new habits for yourself. There is a lot of sort of pushback that you

probably feel within yourself, but then each layer as you go beyond yourself, maybe your significant other, and then your family, and it's just layers and layers and layers. And I think this is just like any healing, it's a life's effort. It's not a one and done, there is no quick fix, there is no bandaid, this is the deep work, and it's worth it, because how cool is it if you can...

redefine and reclaim for yourself whatever your work is in a more meaningful way. What a wonderful opportunity that is because I truly, I've seen it for myself. I feel better in all areas of my life just by examining my relationship to work. So it's possible, but it is not without the hard stuff for sure.

Caroline Pennington (22:08.705)
I'm so glad you said that because I cannot tell you how many meetings and conversations I have with people that they just won't like the Amazon effect, like the quick fix. And the reality is we're human beings and it's not going to be a quick fix. And some wounds are deeper than others and they're going to take more time to heal. And so that's just the reality of it. And it's like you said, it's so worth it.

Bree Johnson (22:27.896)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's the process of it for sure.

Caroline Pennington (22:31.849)
So what is lighting you up with some of the clients that you're working with right now?

Bree Johnson (22:36.81)
my gosh. I'm so grateful for the women that I'm working with right now and watching their transformation. In a couple cases, I've been working with three women in particular for a few years now. There's one who I talked to the other day. I was checking in with her because she's going through some big transitions at work. She said, just don't feel stressed. I said, okay, well, we need to unpack that because

There's a prior version of you, a younger version of you that would have, you two years ago, you would have been so stressed. And so let's, you know, what can we say to her? You know, what's different? Because it's really remarkable when you can create that space that I was talking about, and the things that used to bother you, the assumptions you used to make, the things you used to take so personally, you're no longer doing that as it relates to work.

and how much more space and capacity and energy that person has now to be able to just do life and be present for her kids and be present for her spouse and just feel better in her work to not feel so dragged down by it all the time. So that's the transformation that really lights me up is when somebody can create just more spaciousness in their life so they have time for more of good stuff.

Caroline Pennington (23:57.695)
And what a gift. mean, not to be stressed, that is priceless right there.

Bree Johnson (24:02.112)
Yeah, it really is, especially against the backdrop of, again, just like the modern work and like it tries to draw you in, it gives you all these dopamine hits, it like tells you to be stressed. And so to hear, no, I'm just not feeling stressed right now, I'm like, my gosh, that's a win.

Caroline Pennington (24:19.233)
Yeah, what a freeing feeling. Okay, so how can our listeners find you? Tell us about your podcast. How good can it get? I want to hear all the things.

Bree Johnson (24:26.222)
Yeah. So best place to find me definitely would be my podcast, How Good Can It Get? If anyone is interested in digging deeper into healing their own work wounds or just going through a really big pivot, like work pivot, work rupture, whatever kind of phrase lands to describe what you may be going through this year. I know a lot more people are right now. I do have two private mentorship spots available beginning March 1st. So that would be another way to work with me.

But podcasts is a great place and you can also check out our work at executiveonschool.com.

Caroline Pennington (24:59.829)
Thanks, Bree.

Bree Johnson (25:01.027)
Thank you.