Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I'm Ashley Milet.

This time, you've got to be your best self to perform in your daily job. You may not be an Olympic champion,

but you have a lot

that you have to give every minute of the day. And you want to have as much energy at the end of the

day as that you have during the day when you're working at your job. Sounds great, but taking care of

yourself takes practice. Working out was like a luxury. It's not anything that brown, black

women did in my neighborhood. No one talked about therapy. No one talked about getting massages.

Coming up, two women, two different stories of how they came to put themselves first, and they don't

feel guilty about it.

My first guest is Lee Stringer. She lives in Washington, D.C. She's in her 40s, married with two

children, and she works as a workplace strategist at an architecture firm. It's client-driven work,

so lots of deadlines. Would you describe yourself

as someone who got a lot of identity from your job? Oh, 100%. No, I would say that I'm a Taipei

northeasterner person, lots of degrees from lots of universities. I'm very into, or was,

into title and position. And I didn't always want to admit it,

but it's kind of true. During the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, business got tight and everyone

who could clung to their jobs. When the employment market improved, a lot of her colleagues

moved on at pretty much the same time.

You know, I had to pick up the ball for lots of folks doing four jobs for months on end and working 80, 90 hours a week, you know, the drill.

And after, you know, the third month or so, I just hit a wall and I was like, I cannot do this anymore.

I used to pride myself in my ability to kind of hunker down and, and just push through and deal with it.

But it clearly was not my best work.

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