Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. And today we're going to have some real talk about hustle culture.

If your workplace believes that everything is a top priority, that vacation days are the stuff of fantasy novels, and busyness is your best performance metric, then let's talk about what you can do to help dial back

that hustle before you burn out. Last week, I got on a coaching call with a client. Two minutes in,

she began crying. 47 minutes later, she was still crying. She was burned out to a crisp. At minute 52, we got a deep breath into her,

and she began listing her priorities for me. And there were many. I know we're supposed to be

setting boundaries and doing the self-care thing, she told me, but I can't afford to spend my days

meditating and taking walks. I have a big job to do.

And that was the moment when I almost started crying. She had articulated something I realize

so many are struggling with right now. This toxic belief that we're either succeeding or were

chanting in a warm bath. This unwillingness to believe that we can succeed while

caring for ourselves and our teams is the epitome of hustle culture. It's the mentality that a

minute not spent grinding out work is a minute wasted, that more is always better,

and that rest and relaxation are for the week. Unlike toxic productivity,

which is driven by an internal need to always be busy, hustle culture is a bundle of awfulness

perpetuated by a whole organization or team. What are some of the signals that you might see

in an organization suffering from the hustle? You'll see things like

items are only added to do-lisks, never subtracted. Lunch breaks are comedy. Everyone laughs at them.

There's always discussion of the next thing with no pause to recognize or celebrate what's

already been achieved. No one has asked about your boundaries,

and vacation days are to be collected, but rarely spent. Do any of these feel familiar?

If so, what can you do to begin to make change at your workplace? The antidote to hustle culture

isn't doing less work. It's doing work more mindfully with more purpose,

...