So I am going to be fully transparent here and share that I am better at it now than I was for many of the years that I was an executive director. I think that a lot of those years were hard. I loved my organization. I was a founder, I loved my mission. I loved my team, I was very blessed to have a team and a board that I loved. And I absolutely did not send her my mental health, my sustainability. I think part of that was, you know, 10 years ago, just in our sector, conversations about sustainability were far less frequent. I think that part of it was that as I was coming up, you know, 25 years ago, the way people talked about leadership, and what it meant to be a leader meant, you never show what people called weakness, you never showed exhaustion, you, you know, were the first awake and the last to go to sleep, you know, all the things, right? And I was very much a student of that school of leadership. And, unfortunately, was good at it. And I say, unfortunately, because it's not, right. It's not good. It's not healthy. And what I learned, in all honesty, through my sisterhood and what they supported me and we all supported one another and doing over the tenure of my time running my organization was that nothing about our mission matters. Nothing about the strategies and the tactics matter if I burnout, right, if I can't read an email or focus on a thought, or if I snap every time I talk to my board members, if I'm resentful of the major donor that wants to have you know another There are coffee, right? All of that's the wrong narrative. I'm not bringing joy into those engagements into those conversations. So all of it's for naught. And I think once I started to understand that sustainability and mental health in particular, are not a nice to have, they're not like the thing you think about when you've nailed all the other things in your organization that everything strategic and tactical grows out of me putting my mask on first, once I started to understand that, I think I got better. There were three practices that became really central for me. One is a morning meditation, I am a, I shouldn't say lifelong, because I didn't do this as a child. But for the last two decades have been have tried to be a pretty consistent meditator. And I find that that centers me, and gives me sort of energy for the day, I would say a quiet week, for my office, and for my work. So the first week of every quarter is a quiet week. It's not a vacation week, although I do believe very firmly in vacations. But it is a week where we don't do external meetings, we don't do external work. People can work on whatever they need to catch up on. It's a time if they have passion projects to something they want to explore in our organization or in, in our sector. It's a week for them to spend living into the mission in the way that they want, and perhaps gets crowded out. So we do that every quarter to this day, even in running my business, I have a quiet week, it's coming up next week, first week in October. And related to that. Sometimes, we would do this at different times. But the last week of every August, for example. Sometimes some organizations do two weeks, there are blackout weeks, so not quite weeks, the next step, which is a vacation, everybody gets a week off, you know, or two weeks off, depending on how hard we'd work that year. Because one thing I realized is nobody actually takes vacation when they're supposed to. So those were things that I tried to create structures that would actually support quiet stillness, breathing, a chance to reflect. You know, our brilliance happens in the moments when our brain is not in panic mode. And I don't think we often think about how, how much time we spend in what our bodies feel as panic mode. So those are the things that I those are the habits I've tried to develop.
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