The Hidden Burden: Exploring Invisible Labor in the Workplace with Dr. Christine Nowik

In this thought-provoking episode, Mary is joined by her friend and leadership expert, Dr. Christine Nowik, to unpack the concept of Invisible Labor, particularly in the workplace. Together, they delve into how unpaid and often unrecognized tasks—such as emotional labor, office housekeeping, and conflict management—disproportionately fall on women due to societal expectations. Christine shares insights from her extensive leadership experience and academic expertise, shedding light on the profound impact Invisible Labor has on organizational culture and women’s roles. This conversation offers listeners a fresh perspective on gender dynamics in professional spaces and sets the stage for a follow-up episode exploring Invisible Labor in personal relationships.

You can find more information on Dr. Christine Nowik's work, as well as information on her management training course here: christinenowik.substack.com

Here is a link to Dr Jessica Calarco's work and information on her latest book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net

https://www.jessicacalarco.com/

You can find the video of the salt in jello experiment here: https://www.instagram.com/gzelle_kabir/reel/C_9BcqzugC1/

Here's the link to get info on the Mental Freedom Responsible vs Response-able resource.

Transcript

Mary

Hi and welcome to today's show.

Today I'm sharing the mic with my friend Doctor Christine Nowik. We're going to chat about the topic of Invisible Labor.

I think it just might be a bit mind blowing for some of you listening, if you've never heard the term. I can tell you that when I first learned about it, and of course from Christine, I was like that emoji with the top of its head exploding. But more about that in a second.

I met Christine when we worked together at a community college and from the first moment I saw her – she was actually the interviewee in an open forum interview – I was impressed by her knowledge and unflappable poise. She was, of course, hired, and we worked in related areas. As time went on, she became both a friend and a mentor, and we ended up in a PhD program together. It was actually in that program that I got to see up close how her brain really works and how quickly she can absorb knowledge and use it to develop and express quite eloquent opinions.

We share a passion for leadership and organizational theories, especially their impact on females in the workplace.

So to set the stage: female oriented leadership has different qualities than the traditional, but often more “acceptable” male oriented leadership, and females in the workplace have unique challenges, both in positions of leadership and often simply as a function of being female.

This is something that I've touched on briefly in a past episode, and this is what we're going to talk about today.

I remember when I first read a blog post Christine wrote about Invisible Labor.

I was a bit stunned for a second.

How could I have been an Invisible Laborer for most of my working life and never know it? It was the first time I had heard the term, but I realized that I knew its shape from my work with females in relationship theory. I just didn't have the more industrial-flavored term.

So today, Christine and I will be talking about Invisible Labor in the workplace: what it is and its impact on the workplace and its culture. We will also be doing a future episode together on what Invisible Labor looks like in intimate, friendship, and family relationships because I find it so compelling and such an often unrecognized aspect of keeping women in defined roles.

So before we dive in, let me introduce this amazing woman. Christine has 25 years of leadership experience in nonprofit organizations, as well as higher education. She is currently a professor of English and an organizational and leadership consultant. She has a PhD in leadership and administration with a focus on power structure and gender roles in organizations.

On the flip side, Christine is a wife, human mom and cat mom, and mother-in-law to a newly-minted daughter-in-law, an excellent cook, an excellent writer and an excellent and hilarious friend. I am so happy to have her big, powerful brain here today.

Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Christine.

Christine

Thank you so much.

That was a kind and generous introduction, and I'm delighted to be here with you today for this great conversation.

Mary

All right. So let's just dive.

So could you tell us: what does Invisible Labor mean, especially in the context of women in the workplace?

Christine

Absolutely. So Invisible Labor refers to unpaid and often unrecognized tasks that keep organizations functioning smoothly, but are rarely acknowledged or rewarded.

This sort of behavior includes emotional labor, office housekeeping, like organizing events or taking notes or even cleaning the shared office microwave, and the unspoken work of maintaining relationships or mentoring.

Women disproportionately take on this labor, often out of societal expectation.

And I know we're going to get to the personal domain another episode, but by way of example, I will point to things like insuring holidays are executed.

There's an ongoing social media joke about the fact that all too often, in two adult households, everyone's holiday stocking is filled except mom’s. Smoothing things out for everyone else is a form of Invisible Labor and a form of managing the emotions of others for the sake of the overall good.

Mary

OK.

So yes, this is right up my alley and you know, it's something that this podcast was predicated on. But again, more in the personal vei: as I said in my intro, when I first heard this applied to the workplace, I was like, what?

So it's really fascinating to put this kind of layer over female roles that we have been taught to fill. It seems so obvious to me in our personal lives, but not so much in our professional lives until now, until you've pointed it out.

So if I spend a week in an organization where Invisible Labor was part of the operational system, so to speak, what would I see?

What are some common examples of Invisible Labor that women might take on at work?

Christine

You'd notice women stepping in to fill in gaps without being asked.

So things like planning celebrations, which is, yes, is in the personal realm, but we also do this in the professional realm too, right? Onboarding new hires, taking notes in meetings or smoothing over team conflicts. You might also see women being the go to for emotional support or the ones quietly managing details that no one else notices. It's not part of their job description, but they take it on to ensure harmony and functionality, both of which ensure success in departments and organizations.

I really like Dr. Jess Colarco’s work on the role women played to fill in the gaps, both in orgs, at home, and society as a whole. Her newest book is called Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. She takes on the larger social policies that ultimately determine what women need to do in our society. For me, then it's larger formative contexts that those dynamics in organizations end up replicating. They're replicated to the disadvantage of women.

It's sort of like this idea that it doesn't matter what the gaps are, it doesn't matter how our policies create these giant gaps both in society and in an organization.

Someone's going to fill it. Guess who it is? It's very often women, often by virtue of our socialization.

I saw this really interesting video clip that I would love to send you for inclusion in the show notes. These children have been interviewed after eating something that a woman adult in their lives made and it tastes terrible. It's way too salty, right?

And the little girls they're interviewing are trying not to make it look bad. They're trying not to make it look like they don't like it. They don't come out and say, This is terrible. And when the interviewer says to them, It's terrible. Why didn't you say that you weren't going to eat it? They say, Well, I didn't want to hurt her feelings, right?

The little boys in that same video take one bite and practically spit it out and say, This is trash.

These are 5- and 6-year-old children who are socialized from a very early age to either be attentive to those dynamics or not.

And that gets replicated in all kinds of ways on the social level, in our society and at the organizational level and in the home.

Mary

Wow. So yeah, we will include that link for that video in the show notes.

You know, it's interesting because I was talking to a friend a few days ago about this upcoming topic and giving her some of these examples and she said, You know, you were always the one that did those things at work.

And I was like, What? But yeah, it was true!

And it's interesting because to me, women are all about connection and there's actually research showing that our brains are different. But when did our brains start to become different?

Was it the shaping as we grew older or are there truly structures in the brain that are different right from birth? But to me that felt good.

You know, I would be the one that would say, Okay so-and-so has a birthday coming up or, you know, let's plan this retirement party and I’m not really by nature a social planner, but in the workplace, I took on that role. And it's funny because now I feel like, gosh, like I was….I don't know if “duped” is too strong of a word. But I took those roles on, and I don't even know what I expected to get from that, and I think that's what is so fascinating as part of this whole picture.

I'm thinking that women assume somewhere in their thought process, whether it's unconscious or not, that Invisible Labor would positively impact their career trajectory.

Is that accurate?

And how does it really impact career advancement? And this is sort of separate thing too: work-life balance. That's a complex question.

Christine

I love that you use the word “duped” a minute ago, because for many women, that is the experience they have. Once they get to maybe the middle part of their careers, where they look back and say, I did all of these things to make myself seem like a team player, to contribute to the team, to attend to what we have been socialized to believe as important.

And that is the social and emotional fabric of life. We have been socialized to believe that that's valuable. Unfortunately, it's a common misperception that in organizations that women will be promoted or rewarded for attending to the social and emotional fabric of the organization.Instead what happens is that these activities drain time and energy from high visibility tasks that are rewarded, like leading projects or strategic initiatives.

And these situations not only stall career advancement, but also do contribute to poor work-life balance as women feel overburdened and undervalued.

You are dedicating your time, energy, and emotional bandwidth to something that someone who's in a position to promote you may not value themselves, and I would love for women to realize this. One simple fact of organizations:

Working hard is not the key to advancement.

Working hard plus being visible, plus convincing your superiors that you are one of them, is the equation for advancement.

And we know this from research in organizations. I'm not advocating for the fact that this equation is right or good.

That's not what I want to share here.

I do want to share though that what we know from the leadership literature is that there's a reason people with power in organizations are often very similar to one another.

People with power promote those who exhibit and embody the things that mirror the things that they believe about themselves, right? If you want advancement and the people doing the advancing aren't doing this Invisible Labor, your doing it is not a winning strategy.

It's not good for you and your career, and it's not good for your work-life balance.

Mary

And I would admit that, as you were talking, my chest got tight because, you know, I've been a leader. And I think part of my approach was this idea of servant leadership, and we're certainly not going to get into leadership strategies today, but one of the things I had mentioned in a past episode was how women tend to wear this vest of, let’s say power. Of leadership.

And sometimes it's not nurturing, and I think it can be very confusing when you have been socialized to be this type of person. And then when you're actually given the playbook that you've just mentioned, it's like, But I don't know how to do that. 

People listening to this podcast hear me say this a lot. When women take up their space, they're often assigned adjectives that aren't flattering, and some of those adjectives – in fact many of them – are assigned by other females. And so something that I don't really think we'll get into much today is this idea of how women are set up to be competitors. Not just through social media, but in the workplace. So as you were saying that, I was thinking, gosh, I sort of knew that cognitively. But when I hear you say it, it's like, my gosh, that seems to be like a whole other ladder to climb.

So you know, this is sort of my editorial, but I come from a work environment that is typically nurturing. I'm a therapist and even in student affairs, in colleges where you and I shared different roles, it's interesting that we have sort of a shared mission all the time. When you work in education, really, your overarching goal should be student success.

You and I both know that, when you drill down into certain organizations, some of those action items aren't written so that that's going to be the outcome, however.

When you're in a career where you are prioritizing the success of other people, a lot of times that can be a more human focused, supportive environment and even typically when I work with male therapists, they tend to be more of a nurturer than – and again, totally stereotyping –  a typical male.

So in what you've experienced or in the research that you've done or read, are there certain jobs or work roles where Invisible Labor is especially prevalent?

Christine

There certainly are, and I do want to mention something that you shared here about this phenomenon where women in organizations are often disparaged for embodying some of the traditional leadership tropes.

And let's think about how roles that emphasize relationships, care, and teamwork, like administrative work, teaching, healthcare, nonprofit work, see a lot of Invisible Labor. But think about it from on the ground, in the departments that you and I worked in, and your description of the kind of work that we had done together previously. And let's think about the disparity between what's happening there on the ground in those environments and what's happening at the top.

Very often you will see those same care-focused organizations, relationship-focused organizations situated in larger leadership frameworks that are not the embodiment of care, relationships and teamwork, right?

And let's think about how our organizational dynamics replicate our larger cultural dynamics.

The one I'm thinking about most is individualism.

So when you were talking about the competition among women, for example: when I hear people say, Oh, I've had a woman leader, and she was just as bad as the male leaders on X,Y or Z. Or, She was the queen bee, or she tore me down more than any man ever had. 

And people often situate that as a gender issue. I situated it as a power issue.

When women use the same kind of power that men often use in organizations, they are penalized heavily for it.

Why? Because we have set up a social expectation that women aren't going to be like that, that they are going to be focused on relationships, that they are going to exhibit care in everything that they do. And when we don't, when we behave like traditional leaders, we are penalized heavily for that. So it's sort of an opportunity for us to lose either way. You can embody the things that are true to yourself, if those things are care and consideration and relationships, and not experience career advancement.

Or maybe you can not embody those things and get some career advancement, and then be judged harshly for it.

Because those agentic qualities that you're using as a traditional leader are not in line with your gender expectations.

It's a tough situation for people to navigate in organizations.

Mary

I think it's a tough situation to navigate all the time.

I mean, you know, I'm so fascinated by gender and the whole societal conditioning issue.

So I think that we sort of answered this, but when I think about both societal conditioning of women in the world – how we're taught to kind of “be” in the world – and workplace culture, obviously, I think both of those have a role in shaping women's behavior and their tendency to assume the tasks of Invisible Labor. So what thoughts do you have on that?

Christine

Yeah, I think social conditioning is a huge part of it because we are conditioned to be caregivers, peacemakers, fixers, and we often internalize the need to step up and step in… to pick up the slack. And workplace culture very often amplifies that expectation by failing to recognize or distribute the Invisible Labor fairly.

When I'm thinking about Invisible Labor, I'm often thinking, Invisible to whom?

It's not invisible to me. It's not invisible to you. Because we see the gaps, and we know what needs to be done to attend to this social and emotional fabric of an organization. But I'm also especially attentive to the decisions that create that need for the gap filling, right?

Let me give you a concrete example.

Organizations decide that they're going to cut costs. And they often reduce staff or fail to hire at adequate levels and that leaves pretty large gaps.

Women on the ground in these departments who suffer this kind of situation are the ones who step in to fill those gaps and to keep things running in the workplace because of their commitment to other people. They don't want to leave their colleagues in lurch.

And again, this comes back to socialization, the socialization for the well-being of others.

But I would ask, where is that modeled as you go up the ladder in leadership?

Mary

Yeah, a lot of things to really ponder because again, as you were talking, I was thinking about what was some of my motivation for the times when I would be focusing on connecting and joining among my colleagues... whether that was in the form of a birthday party or hey, let's bring food to a staff meeting.

But I value very much having a workplace that feels connected, and I think there're more and more articles, research on women recognizing that this is happening and taking that step back. And I think about what would’ve happened if I took that step back.

I think I would probably feel guilty.

But I would also not feel as connected, which would then have this whole domino effect.

We spend a lot of time at work, if we are working in person, and it was always important to me – and maybe because of being a therapist –  to feel connected to people where we have this shared mission of supporting students. But there is certainly a cost.

So can you talk about the impact of Invisible Labor on mental health and burnout among women?

That's part of my jam, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Christine

Absolutely. And I love that you mentioned your own having to deal with the fallout of doing what you feel is right in the organization, and again I feel like this is a place where people are caught. You sort of can't win either way.

Do the work, and it's a major contributor to stress and burnout because care takes time.

One thing I share with leaders and organizations is that if you are going to say that you want an environment that is characterized by care, I'm going to need to know your strategy because that is not an organic situation in our organizations.

So what is the strategy for building in time to build a caring organization? So if we do it, we're devoting time and energy to doing it, often invisibly. If we don't do it – if we don't, as individualism, organically create exactly what you said, the kind of space that you want to function in, then we're left feeling like we should have, right?

You mentioned guilt. I think guilt is part of it.

Mary

Yeah.

Christine

I think shame is probably part of it.

I'm not an expert in these dynamics, but I can imagine how they would come to the fore if you're not doing what you think you should be doing and then there’s the fallout of having to operate in an environment that's not conducive with who we are and what we want.

There are a lot of dynamics here, a lot of penalties for doing it, and that's burnout and stress.

So those are things we bear in mind individually. And then there's the penalty of not doing it: guilt, shame, and also burnout and stress, because we're not operating in the environment that's optimal for us as individuals when there's a lack of recognition of the investment we make.

In creating these environments that are, we think, well suited for human functioning, we might feel resentful. We might feel isolated, we might feel exhausted.

And so that impacts our mental health and our job satisfaction.

So it's like running a marathon that no one acknowledges you're even in.

And I'll go back to Dr Calarco on this time and time again:

Women are doing the unspoken and unpaid work of holding things together. But there's a penalty. There's a penalty for doing it, and there's a penalty for not doing it.

Tell me what to do in that situation, if there's a penalty going both ways; it's like no win.

Mary

Yeah.

And you know, you mentioned the word resentment, and that had flitted through my mind earlier in our conversation because the times that I have set boundaries and recognized, OK, I have these work tasks that need to get done, so planning X, Y or Z or doing certain things…. I actually won't have time for that.

I've gotten way better as I've gotten older doing that.

But then when nobody steps into that, and they are content to just let that go to the side and not happen anymore? I remember feeling like, well, what the heck, was it not important? Did you not care that this happened?

So yeah, it's totally a 2-edged sword. And one of the things that I think is really an important skill to have is boundary setting, which of course we're going to talk about in future episodes. But when you set a boundary, I think you have to be prepared that that means some of the things that you used to do are no longer going to happen and that actually has nothing to do with you. It has to do with everybody else's value system.

People that have heard past episodes know, this entire podcast really was created to encourage women to take up their space, to listen to their inner nature which, I think, is really sometimes very challenging. But listening to their inner nature, their inner voice as a means to assess whether their environment and life choices are actually supporting what they truly need and what they really want is important.

So here's the $1,000,000 question.

What are some steps that women can take to advocate for themselves when it comes to Invisible Labor?

Christine

Yeah, it's a really great question, and I want to be clear that this is a systemic problem. I don't want to imply with my answer that women are solely responsible for fixing it because we're not. But at the same time, I recognize that your listeners are probably people of action who want to foster agency in their own lives.

So for all of you listening then, I suggest that we first name it. We make Invisible Labor visible by identifying what you're doing and how it affects your time.

I think boundary setting is an excellent place to start.

We can politely decline tasks that are outside of our role, and we can share responsibility with other people.

So this one can be daunting though, because as a result of my own research, I do believe that power is the most influential variable in the social world and that it's often invisible.

It's not easy to decline tasks outside of your role if someone with power is asking you or is even in the room when the need arises. We might be internalizing this idea that if I don't step up, somehow that looks bad for me. But I think one way of setting boundaries is to do what you said, Mary.

Not volunteer.

And I'll share my personal approach on this matter because I have come to recognize how often I have served as a gap filler in my career.

I now see how larger organizational decisions by people with way more power and salary than I will ever have created the gaps. So why should I be the one to fill them?

You did and now you deal with the consequences.

So my view of the organization now is one of a superhighway and I used to see all of the lanes at once on that Super Highway. I'd see a pothole in lane 2 that needed fixing.

Guess what? I know how to fix it because I'm an expert, so I jump in with my little shovel and bucket and try to fix it up.

After years in organizations where not only is that work not valued, but also where it only further perpetuates poor decisions by leaders, because those of us on the ground are so good at filling in the gaps they create, I have decided that I'm going to maintain some tunnel vision.

If something isn't square in my lane, I don't bother with it.

I let things fall when they're outside my lane with the assumption that the people in that lane can pick it up and deal with it.

I am not the only one in this organization.

So, Mary, you already mentioned it is hard to do that because you are looking at other people who don't pick up the slack and you're saying why wouldn't you? Don't you care?

Guess what. They're not looking at you that way.

They're looking at you like, why would you? Why?

Why would you care?

Because it doesn't help your career advancement and it is only going to burn you out.

So the last suggestion I have then for individuals is documentation.

So document what you do and how you do it and bring it up during performance reviews or discussions about workload.

Invisible Labor stays invisible if we let it, and I personally would be linking that information to larger research and organizations about the value of this work.

What is it that makes this work?

And I am personally happy to assist anyone who needs support in that area because we want to bring these invisible strands of influence to light and often, situating it in research outside of the organizations –  giving people language for understanding these dynamics –  is one way to do that.

Not everyone even knows the value of this work, so I think we can do a better job of educating them. And even you, Mary, mentioned at the start of this episode that you hadn't contemplated how you had been serving as an invisible laborer. You just did it!

I think we need to make that work visible.

Mary

Yeah, that's a great point.

And when you said, you know, it's systemic, it's so systemic. And one of my other jams is systems, systems theory, of course, in my work as a therapist. But it's quite easy, then, to take that frame and start to assign it to everything: your family and your workplace.

So when you talk about the pothole – which is a great visual, by the way – I think also (and again, I'm going to stereotype), women tend to anticipate that kind of thing a bit more.

If you see that – your organization or your team or something is rolling towards this pothole – of course, you're going to try to smooth that path, because why let somebody be uncomfortable? 

But there's a concept of “responsible versus response-able.” I think we're not responsible to fix everything, but we are able to have a response, and sometimes it makes sense to fix the pothole and sometimes it makes sense to just focus on the road in front of you and stay on a path to get to your destination.

And as I think about different work environments – and of course we've talked about our being in education and a student services role, which doesn't have as clear of a trajectory for advancement as a corporation does – that has been a conversation that's come up as I've compared my leadership or the initiatives that I would take, and I've had people say, my gosh, if you worked in the corporate world, you would have had much more advancement. But often there's nowhere to go in certain educational rules, even some non profits. There's not necessarily a clear path.

Nor did I always want to advance.

So a conversation perhaps for another day, but when the motivation is more connecting, creating a more vibrant and resilient and cooperative workplace versus, oh, I want to take that next step up (just my musings because you know I get philosophical about this gender and societal stuff), how much of that is really what I 

Christine

Excellent question and something I think for all of us to ponder.

It's one of the things I want developing writers to understand. What do I think? What do I think? And what am I doing versus what have I been led to think and what have I been led to believe that I should do?

Mary

And it comes up for me now that I have moved away from working for someone else, and I'm establishing my own businesses. And as I worked into this role, I get questions pretty consistently of establishing my financial goals.

And I'm like, financial goals? Like you're not going to make a lot of money working in Human Services as a rule, unless you are the leader.

So that's been quite a mind shift for me, and I think where some of this started to fall away like my gosh, all of this effort that I have put into things! What if I had been in a more corporate focused environment? How would these skills of connecting and building and anticipating been?

I think they would have also been valued differently as long as it wasn't sort of this “gap filling” that you're talking about.

So if you assumed leadership of an organization where you recognize that Invisible Labor was part of the culture, what 3 changes would you implement first to start to change that culture and foster recognition of these often covert issues?

Christine

It's my favorite kind of magic wand question. Hand it over and then let's make it happen.

Here are my 3 things.

Number one, you heard me talk already about visibility.

I would make it visible, so I'm going to want to conduct an audit to find tasks that are often overlooked and a list of who's doing them.

I would make sure that these conversations occurred with trusted members of the organization or, honestly, an outside person.

Definitely not people with power in the organization. If I'm the one with the power then I am not in the conversation. So I noted earlier that I think power is the most influential invisible variable in the social world, and I think we need to have some outside support to conduct this kind of research, but that's the first thing I'd want to do.

I need a survey and some follow up interviews because I need to know the lay of the land. So I want to make this conversation visible, and I want to frame it so that we can redistribute the load. So here's the thing.

This kind of thing doesn't happen organically, right? If a leader recognizes the role of Invisible Labor in the organization, they need to actually have a strategy to redistribute the load. So I'm setting clear guidelines on who does this Invisible Labor, whether it's taking meeting notes, (which may not be so much of an issue here in the era of AI), but activities that are similar to taking meeting notes, organizing events, or mentoring new people. And I would put them on a rotation.

If I'm a department lead, I'm structuring our work to avoid the need for Invisible Labor. Everyone takes a turn taking notes.

I don't care if you're not good at it.

We are not gonna pull any weaponized incompetence on this team. If you don't know how to take notes, plan an event, or mentor new employees, or clean the kitchen, guess what?

We're gonna get training because we believe that these activities are crucial parts of the fabric of this team. 

And then the third thing is just recognize and reward it.

I would incorporate Invisible Labor into performance evaluations. If that's your primary driver of goal setting and all of those things…the performance evaluation (and we could talk a whole other episode. Mary, on whether or not those annual performance evaluations actually do anything or not)...I would want to formally acknowledge those contributions to reinforce the value.

This brings us into, not just the technical aspects of our roles, like how are we contributing to the bottom line, but how are we moving the organization forward?

But it gives weight to the emotional and social fabric of the org.

Listen, I will argue all the livelong day that these things are equally important. The sort of tactical and technical parts of the organization, but also the emotional and social fabric of the organization. 

As leaders, then, we have to do a better job of equalizing these matters because the social and emotional health of an org is difficult, but not impossible, to measure.

You know when it's there and you know when it's not. If you show me a department or organization with high social and emotional health, I will show you a department or organization that is running on all cylinders, hitting its marks on all productivity measures.

So I have this self-paced course coming up on leadership for middle managers because you all are the ones!

And in part it will address this very issue and provide some clear and tactical guidance for making it happen.

Mary

So yes, thank you Christine for mentioning that. We will have a link to that in show notes, also.

So as usual, I just learned another amazing term from you.

You said weaponized incompetence. And I'm like, oh, my God, I totally have to use that in my therapy work because is that not illustrative of what happens?

It kind of goes back to the, I'll say, the gentler term of learned helplessness.

This is where I can segue a little bit to our next episode that we're going to record together, which is about Invisible Labor in women's personal relationships.

And this has been something that has been part of my life in relationships, where it's like, I'm just going to do it myself. It's easier to do it myself.

And how much of that is because the partner in the relationship, (which I'm going to just put a little asterisk, is not my current husband because he's amazing) but how often do people not do things well because they know that somebody else is going to pick up the slack.

So in the workplace, the idea of weaponized incompetence is beautifully stated.

Christine

And yeah, I think there are lots of dynamics there for us to unpack.

Mary

Totally. So I am so looking forward to our next episode.

And I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. It has been, of course, eye opening and just really wonderful to talk through these things that, believe it or not, Christine and I talk about over dinner.

So it was great to bring this to the public's ear. It's always fun and gives me so many more ideas for my own work.

So thank you so much for being here. It's been great.

If you have enjoyed today's episode, please follow, review or comment. I love to hear from you. And remember in the show notes, we're going to have a resource and a link to Christine's course that she'll be offering.

And also I will have a link to just a little bit of information on something that I mentioned – responsible versus response-able. That's actually part of my Mental Freedom training that I'm certified in. And it will give you just a little blurb that gives you an idea of how to reframe some of these ideas in your life.

So thank you for being here today and go out and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant Violet that you are.