Burning bridges for healthier career 👩🏼‍🚒

Are you also sick of pretending we all friends and no one is toxic?

Burning bridges is definitely my least favorite topic. Ever.

During the last year, in light of my private transitions, I wondered — when is it okay to burn bridges? What about professionally? I did it few times, but was it ACTUALLY beneficial for me and my career?

I usually read and hear, in the business networking context, that one should always be on good terms with everyone, and just, you know - smile and wave.

I find this highly disturbing

While I’m not saying we should all just spit in each other's faces, false kindness always makes me feel like something is off. That’s because it is.

I needed a few years into psychotherapy and coaching to understand this, let me explain.

Whenever I was feeling forced to smile and wave rather than to speak my mind, I was actually feeling unsafe in that environment.

There was no mutual respect, and as I will learn, I wasn’t respecting myself much either because I was choosing to stay in those kind of environments.

No matter how much energy, creativity, and time you put into work in those environments it’ll just not be benefiting you.

I remember specifically two work groups (I won’t use teams on purpose) where new ideas were mocked constantly. Even tho, as chance has it, they were constantly talking about innovation and creativity.

However, the founders/leaders/those supposedly in charge were vouching only for the ideas they brought to the table. But guess who was responsible if those ideas ended in failure? All served with a smile, of course.

So, I choose to burn bridges… For the sake of my own mental health. That’s it, that’s the reason.

My stomach developed a sensor to that type of leaders (if you can even call them that) and whenever it shouts, I listen.

I do not accept jobs, clients, partners, friends… anyone in my life if my gut tells me it’s a threat.

The ones that are a threat for my nervous system won’t really hep me in my career. But why is that?

The process of unpacking all of these toxic relations helped me understand that it’s totally fine to cut off people and burn bridges when we are not:

1. having the same values in life

2. aligned on how healthy environment should look like

3. bringing the best in each other.

There’s no amount of fake smiles that can cover disrespect and gaslighting.

Guess twice where that (un)happy flow leads you. Or read again the previous letter about burnout.

Love,

B.