Working With Our Nature, Not Against It

How can a woman find herself when she is always at odds with herself?

Women live in a conundrum, pulled in different directions by societal expectations, internal desires, and external pressures that often feel impossible to reconcile.

For men, society has long defined manhood through initiation, survival, and war—a man must fight, endure, and belong to his tribe. While many are challenging this rigid framework, its foundations remain deeply embedded. Women, however, face a different and more tangled narrative.

Like it or not, women have a biologically innate inclination to care, to nurture, to build and sustain life. This is not a prescription but an observation—a biological and psychological reality. Yet, in the modern age, this natural role has become fraught with conflict. To embrace it, women risk being labeled as falling into a “pre-liberation trap.” They are accused of conforming to outdated norms, and of submitting to the patriarchal paradigm. To reject nurture and prioritize a career, they risk being told they are “unnatural” or “less maternal.”

I’ve worked with clients who feel paralyzed by this divide. They can’t act. A woman who longs to stay home and raise her children wonders if she’s betraying her independence. Another who thrives in a high-powered career questions whether there’s something broken inside her because she doesn’t desire motherhood. This psychological tug-of-war is exhausting, and it runs deeper for women because the stakes are so high—personal identity, societal judgment, and systemic pressures all intertwine.

The Power We Abandoned

Historically, women’s work—child-rearing, caregiving, home-building—was essential to humanity’s survival. It still is. But it was never honored in the way it should have been. Equality could only be achieved by claiming a place in a male-defined world. We implicitly accepted the idea that what we were already doing wasn’t enough, wasn’t economically worthwhile, didn’t require skill or knowledge.

This is where the real heartbreak lies. It isn’t that women shouldn’t have fought for equal opportunities—they absolutely had to. It’s that the work they were already doing was never recognized as equal in value. We played by the rules rather than creatively defining success, contribution, and fulfillment on our own terms.

The Modern Dilemma: Caught Between Roles

Now, the stakes feel even higher. Traditional inclinations, like wanting a family or prioritizing care, often come with guilt or fear. In a world where women’s rights are dangerously under attack, anything less than full, visible resistance can feel like enabling a system that seeks to undermine hard-won progress. If you focus on family, are you abandoning the cause? If you prioritize work, are you abandoning yourself? And so the cycle continues.

No matter what women choose, they feel they sacrifice something fundamental—their autonomy, their nature, or their voice. Caught between roles, unable to focus on one thing without feeling the risk of losing another, women suffer.

The Path Inward: Telling Our Own Truth

What’s the way out of this loop? Mediations and productivity hacks won’t help. No external solution will reconcile what is, at its core, an internal conflict.

The real work is to go inward—to cultivate the self-awareness to ask hard questions and listen to the answers that emerge:

• What parts of me are truly mine, and what parts were given to me by society?

• What do I want, apart from what I’ve been told I should want?

• Who am I supposed to be… and who am I really?

These questions demand courage. They require us to face truths that may not align with the expectations of others, or even with the narratives we’ve internalized about ourselves.

When a woman honors her own truth—whether that truth is building a family, leading a company, or carving out a path that blends both—she reclaims her power. The courage to live the life you want comes from knowing yourself deeply enough to stop living in contradiction, and to hold a shield of serenity up to the judgements of others.

It takes courage to go inward and find yourself. But the alternative—a life spent at war with yourself—is far costlier. The world has long asked women to live in a more enlightened way than the society around them. This has never been more true than it is now. We must live ahead of our time.

The Psychological Toll of Reawakened Misogyny

As right wing movements surge with power in India, Brazil, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkyie, France, Germany, Russia and the United States, many women feel that the tide is turning against them. 

Last month on X white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes wrote “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Professional misogynist Andrew Tate informs us that “The men are back in charge.” 

It’s beside the point to wonder when men stopped being in charge. These influencers and the legions following them, along with multitudes of less radical people, proclaim that a new age of manhood has dawned. Get used to it.

Women feel that hard won gains, gains they had taken for granted, are under threat. This perception causes widespread distress, taking form as anxiety, depression, simmering anger, and profound incredulity. 

Fear of Losing Autonomy

When women look at global communities where female autonomy is starkly absent they see a potential future that feels chillingly plausible. These fears are not irrational; they are borne out by history.

Do you know the The 5th Dimension song Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In? It came out in 1969. That was the first year that women could file for divorce. 

In 1973 Marvin Gaye released Let's Get It On. Same year that abortion became legal – not by a proper act of legislation, but because of a cascade of reasonings from the Constitution.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama came out in 1974. Fifty years ago. That was the first year that women were allowed to open their own bank account. 

We all know this music. Historically speaking, fifty years is not that long. Young women are painfully aware of just how fresh their rights are. 

Seeing Roe vs. Wade fall, and having the state declare that it has authority over their body, and that it has the right to inspect their body to find out just how much authority it has, makes women terrified at how fragile their gains are. 

The incredulity some of my younger patients experience in the face of this and the many other hypothetical situations they dream up causes them deep distress. I have clients stockpiling birth control because they fear access to it will start to come along with government oversight.

No Quarter At Home or Work

There’s another side to this that’s rarely talked about. 

The feminist movement strongly advocated for women to gain access to “the man’s world.” At the same time, it failed to assert that women deserve equal rights for what they were already doing for humanity. 

Feminists belittled homemakers. Because of that, far right pundits can still say that being a homemaker means submission to a man. Women who are homemakers are believed to be “controlled” by their husband, “supported” by him, etc. In today’s culture wars, when the right tells women to be homemakers they mean it as an insult to their intelligence, agency and potential. They mean to “put them in their place.”

The feminist movement should have empowered women in the home, demanding honour and economic recognition for their work and their phenomenal social contribution. Instead, it perpetuated the beliefs of the patriarchy, and so left homemakers wide open to this cultural abuse. 

If there’s no retreat to the home, then perhaps there is agency moving into the “man’s world?” The current zeitgeist undermines that idea as well. 

The pundits say that working women didn’t earn their positions through hard work, talent, or grit. No, they were awarded them through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

Women’s hard won gains were not earned; they were granted by the authorities. Once again, women end up disempowered and defensive. 

The Breaking of the Social Fabric

To see rights come under attack is bad enough. Much worse are the harrowing stories my clients tell me about the unraveling of societal norms. 

Women have always had to be vigilant, but part of the cultural change feminism created was to demand and receive greater respect from all men. The way we are treated by strangers on the street matters perhaps more than anything else, and that treatment has deteriorated materially in recent years, and looks likely to get worse. 

The fear of losing autonomy and agency leads many women to feel deeply anxious. It’s as if they are watching progress unravel in slow-motion right before their eyes. Helpless to do anything about it, depression can set in.

The Personal Cost of Unprocessed Anger

This distress often pressurizes into rage that has no specific object. “Situational anger” can be the most difficult and debilitating type of rage. 

Worst of all, it's isolating. Women carry it silently, since there’s no place to put it and since releasing any of it might make their day-to-day situation worse. They worry about being perceived as “difficult” or “emotional” if they speak out too strongly, so they suppress their feelings.

Without any efficacious outlet available, the very anger that should fuel change becomes a source of self-harm. This is a quiet crisis among women—burning anger that offers no solutions, only pain.

What Can Be Done?

Women often feel the collective suffering of all women worldwide. Women are biologically wired to be more empathetic, a requirement for motherhood and for effective leadership. Women suffer more because they suffer not only for themselves but for others. 

Sometimes women feel that they cannot heal themselves unless they can heal all others. This fallacy arises from empathy, because the empath is the one who knows that if anyone is going to survive, the whole tribe has to survive. Women fall into this trap easily, where they hold themselves back out of some misshapen belief that doing so will make things better for others. 

To be a force of change in society, the first thing a woman must do is take care of herself. The very best way to do that right now might be to reach out to other people – not just other women, but sympathetic and enlightened men as well – and get together with them. If you can do it physically, that’s excellent, but video calls work too. Find a way, or create a way, to socialize in an unstructured situation where the only goal is friendship itself.

In a world that seems to be getting colder, friendly and open companionship of any kind, with anyone, about anything, is an act of rebellion that will have a real impact on our lives and on our world.

Interested in therapy? I’m accepting new clients. Please visit my website. 

Living With Existential Stress

People experience enormous stress due to things over which they have no control. 

Every professional I treat wonders how artificial intelligence will impact – or destroy – their career. They fear our inaction as the climate changes and nature suffers right before our eyes. Flaccid old men whip boys into a tribal froth, and they fear the outbreak of war. I can’t wait until this election is over, because everyone on both sides seems to fear that if their candidate loses, the sky will fall. 

The stress caused by these realities goes deep. People always want to know, “What can I do as an individual?” Then they answer their own question, “All I can do is control my own actions, which won’t change anything!”

How do we face these daunting issues in a mentally healthy way? How can we acknowledge trouble without being consumed by anxiety?

The Reality of Uncertainty

There’s a pervasive belief that happiness means being like Spongebob, skipping along while singing. But this is unrealistic—and unhealthy. Life isn't about being perpetually happy; it's about managing challenges and uncertainties with wisdom. 

It’s okay to admit that things are difficult, uncertain, fearful, or monstrous. The key isn't to banish intelligence and become Spongebob. The key is learning emotional resilience.

One highly effective way to develop this resilience is to contemplate empathy. Empathy is deeply connected to intelligence—an often overlooked truth. Anyone – anyone, including those who do not support your candidate – who cares about the fate of the world shows empathy. If we worry only about our own survival, we isolate ourselves, losing the connection that makes society thrive. 

People suffering from anxiety and existential stress are trapped in their own beliefs. Social media’s hall of mirrors makes this isolation much worse. We’re in a situation where people are isolated from one another while believing the whole time that their beliefs are the ones that will make the world a better place for everyone. 

Because of this, we always find common ground underlying opposing beliefs. Scientific American just published an article about this: when people of diametrically opposite political views actually talk to each other, they find out that they both want the same thing: justice, safety, peace, a secure future, all of it. 

By understanding and acknowledging another’s perspective, we strengthen our collective ability to face uncertainty. This is why self-awareness and empathy are crucial in times of chaos—they help us stay human when the world feels inhumane.

What Can We Do? Does It Even Matter?

In times like these, it's easy to wonder: does anything we do even matter? With so many voices offering conflicting opinions on how to live, many people constantly seek comfort rather than wisdom. But you can’t escape your mind. You can quiet it for a while, but self-soothing and escapism never satisfy our deepest desire for peace.

Learning to listen to who you truly are is one of the most powerful ways to manage uncertainty. Everyone has an internal compass, though it's often drowned out by the voices of others. By reconnecting with that inner knowledge, we can find clarity, even in a world full of chaos.

A person's identity is built upon what they hold to be true. We are all like one another, and our search for truth is similar, throughout all of humanity. We share common ground between us. When we go deep and find our true selves, we find that which is shared by all of humanity. 

By hating others for their truth, and parroting leaders who want to divide and conquer, we get lost. By going deep, to our true self, our true nature, our true beliefs and hopes, we find what all people hold in common. Developing an awareness of this can help us deal with existential stress in a constructive, efficacious manner. 

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Humanity has been through times like these before. In the year 999, Europe was gripped by the absolute certainty that the apocalypse would come with the year 1000. The Book of Revelations and strung-together passages from everywhere else in the Bible proved that the “four horsemen” had arrived, and that the world would certainly end. Kings knew it, priests knew it, the people knew it, everyone knew it.

Yet, here we are, over a thousand years later, convinced that the world is about to end again. Rather than play along with the hysteria, we are better served if we pause and wonder at how often humanity falls into this same existential state of fear and anxiety.

Our individual efforts to prevent large-scale issues like war might feel insignificant. But wisdom and empathy actually accomplish a great deal. Efforts to communicate and understand—rather than judge and condemn—change our lived reality, which helps us personally. When we learn to approach others with empathy, we contribute to a more humane world. 

Every problem we face has been solved, and solved elegantly. When we live and relate to others from the knowledge that we have more in common than we have dividing us, we create a path forward that is less about control and more about connection. This attitude transforms our existential stress into driven purpose, and reshapes our anxiety into aspiration.

Is It Work Or Is It Me?

Many of my clients come to me because of work-related stress. The stress is real and the troubles they face are certainly coming at them from the outside world. 

But so often, I find that the cause of work-induced stress is something my clients didn’t expect: old emotional wounds, unresolved trauma and childhood beliefs.

I’ll combine several clients into one fictional woman, who we’ll call Cathy, to show you how this plays out. 

Cathy came to me because she fell apart at work, and by all appearances, it was work stress that led to her breakdown. However, we soon discovered that the real cause went much, much deeper.

Is Your Work Struggle Really About Your Job — Or Something Deeper?

As is the case with most of my clients, Cathy holds a respected position at a high-powered company where she must meet tough professional demands. She is highly intelligent and she worked very hard to put herself in a position where she would experience stress like this. She enjoyed the financial rewards and the accolades she got from executives. 

So then, why did she find herself sobbing uncontrollably one day, unable to deal with even the simplest of her responsibilities?

What we discovered is that her goals, her achievements, were all done for her parents – in particular, she wanted to fulfill her mother’s unfulfilled dreams. Many of us do this, both consciously and unconsciously. We want to fulfill our parent’s dreams, and their dream becomes our own dream. If our dream is to please the parent, then the career choices are secondary, as they serve the primary goal. 

Many times when a person’s goal is to achieve for the sake of others, they end up in a place they don’t want to be. They achieve for someone else. Their outside world is based on what they saw growing up

Cathy already understood how childhood beliefs affect us all in adulthood. She strongly believed that her career was the result of her desire to please her mother. She was ready to figure out how that dynamic had contributed to her breakdown.

However, what emerged in therapy was a completely different dynamic. 

She had lost her father a few years before when he passed away suddenly. She thought she had resolved her grief. But grief can sneak up on us in ways we don’t expect. Cathy hadn’t come to therapy to talk about her father’s death. She had pushed it down, trying to move on as society often expects us to. 

What Cathy truly missed was her father’s voice—his support, his wisdom. It wasn’t until she sat down and spoke about her struggles with work that she connected the dots back to the deep loss she had not truly processed. The voice she longed to hear wasn’t guiding her, and that absence came to a crisis point during some routine decision-making process at work, when she completely lost her composure..

The Magic of Discovering Personal Truth

Making connections like this can be a pivotal moment in therapy. Nothing about our lives came about randomly. Our circumstances arise from our deepest desires. Most of the time, we remain unaware of our true desires until they erupt in some debilitating way that forces us to identify them. 

Cathy’s  breakdown wasn’t just from work stress. It resulted from using all her energy to keep her unresolved grief buried under a story about living her mothers’ dream. She chose to elevate a typical cliche about her mother to the level of a life-forming explanation so she could avoid confronting just how deeply the loss of her father had altered her world. 

Upon realizing that the mother story was only partially relevant, and that her grief truly precipitated her breakdown, her path forward opened brightly.

The beautiful thing about coming to a realization like that is the positive impact it has on our ability to perform at work while caring for ourselves at the same time. 

Of course, if something is driving us insane on the job, it might be because of what is happening on the job. There are highly stressful, unjust, random and hurtful situations in any work environment. But if the intensity of our reaction seems out of proportion – to us personally, or to those around us – there might be something deeper within that fuels this reaction. 

Cathy, our fictional amalgam, had a complete breakdown over something that those around her did not find nearly as distressing as she did. Her disconnect was enormous and demanded attention. 

For some of us, the disconnect can be a lot more mild. But the wisdom gained from pursuing this line of thought can be just as profound, just as rewarding, and just as freeing. 

Of course, Cathy is still working through her grief, and she will always feel it to some degree. But it no longer affects her work. Now that she has clarity on all of this, she can identify work problems as work problems, handling them appropriately, and she can identify grief as grief, so she can find or make the space she needs to experience it in a full, healthy manner.

In my experience, many people find that their troubles at work aren’t about the job. The job arose around them because they needed to replay dynamics they experienced as children. They find themselves in work situations that somehow trigger or mimic childhood situations that had a profound impact on their whole lives. 

It's fascinating how we will attract these sorts of situations to ourselves, repeatedly, until we figure out whatever lesson we need to learn from them. 

Finding the Balance Between Past and Present

If you feel frustrated at your job, ask yourself: Is this really about work, or is it about something else? 

Be willing to go deeper than pop psychology. The thing that keeps triggering you may very well lead you to a liberating personal insight, if you think it through properly and persistently.

That insight, in turn, may free you in ways you didn’t expect. It may empower you in ways you didn’t expect. The freedom and power may help you a great deal, both personally and professionally. 

So, rather than seethe with anger or lash out in frustration, first ask yourself if the intensity of your reaction is really equal to the situation. If there’s a disconnect, there may be something of real use to be discovered by breaking it down and figuring out how this situation recalls something from your life that has impacted you deeply. For Cathy, it was the loss of her father’s voice.

An honest insight like that is what your true self is looking for. The manifestations in your work and in your life indicate what it is that you need to learn. Actually learning it is a whole different endeavor, but that is the “work” that will truly advance you.

Millennials Are Exhausted By Woke and Anti-Woke Nonsense

I treat many people in the so-called Millennial age group, and so I can say with some authority that they are completely exhausted with and bored by the continuous push and pull of the “woke” and “anti-woke” culture wars. 

To them it has all become the operatic chest-pounding of the righteous who have no sense of self when they stop shouting about the one or two beliefs upon which they have based their identity. My clients wonder why everyone seems to need to proclaim their identity with a bullhorn, and they find it deeply distressing that people of all shades on the political spectrum pounce on others to categorize them and dismiss them without ever listening to them or even acknowledging their humanity.

As they enter their late twenties and thirties, they’re suffering in completely new and unique ways.

Millennials: The Pendulum Swings Back

Millennials have grown weary of the social justice narratives that have been force-fed to them. They appreciate the values of inclusion or progress, but they reject the performative aspect of it all. They see it as another form of dominance—a societal expectation that one must loudly declare their sensitivities or identities just to fit in. But if you know who you are, why do you need to carry a banner? 

Especially when carrying a banner also means you won’t listen to anyone who is not in your tribe. One cannot finish enunciating words like “reproductive” or “immigration” without being instantly categorized and often rejected by the chest-pounders, who seem to believe they are continuously looking into their selfie camera. Rather than respond to others they monotonously broadcast to the masses. 

It’s boring. And it’s lonely. It was made far worse by the Covid lockdown, which profoundly injured this generation. The lockdown made social media that much more essential to social survival, but it weirdly deformed the experiences Millennials had during that time and left them disoriented and dissatisfied. 

The lack of authenticity affected them deeply, but since the years they lost are precisely those years that are most crucial to forming one’s own authentic self, they and their peers know only that something is missing from their authenticity. They don’t really know what’s wrong or what to do about it. The chest-pounders, and especially their sense of moral certainty, makes their situation worse.

Tech Fatigue and the Search for Authentic Connection

The most heartbreaking aspect of the Millennial’s predicament is their search for companionship. Remote work has made finding friends at work difficult or impossible. In New York, corporate management has decided that saturating the work environment with alcohol will help, but most Millennials recognize that for the fakery that it is. 

They don’t want fake lives lived through screens or curated online personas. Their situation reminds me of the classic experiment done with rats and cocaine-laced water. When the only stimulation available to them was cocaine – which for Millennials is scrolling and ketamine – the rats lapped up the cocaine. 

But as soon as they had a choice of fresh water, toys to play with, and other rats to chase around, they chose the water and the toys and the play.

Millennials search for that today. I encourage them to go be where they want to be, and to just figure that eventually they will find other people there with whom they would like to spend time. That’s the way it was done for thousands of years; without a doubt it will still work. 

It doesn’t work instantly, so I often need to encourage them to continue to go back to the park, back to gym, back to the bird watching pavilion, back to the dance studio, back again and again to increase the chances they will have a normal encounter with a potential friend.

Tragically, once again, the Covid lockdown handicaps them. Even if they follow that advice, there’s still the problem that they really don’t know how to interact with a stranger – especially when it’s so likely that their interaction will go off like a grenade if one of them says a triggering word in the wrong way. But still, with support and encouragement, many of my clients are starting to make these forays into the real world, and it is starting to work.

How to Sustain a Real Conversation

Bored with the labels of identity politics, many of my clients long for the heartfelt conversations that they missed during the lockdown and that our polarized culture wars seem designed to prevent. 

Not, “With which group do you primarily identify and which groups do you vehemently hate?” 

But, “Who are you? What do you love? What are your dreams?”

Those conversations. 

One thing I assure my clients is that there are many, many other people out there who want to have the exact same deep interactions that they long for. They reject the idea that to be valid, you must constantly showcase your identity. Instead, they’re drawn to authenticity, to people who don’t feel the need to assert their status in every interaction.

I remind them that they need two things to create and sustain a deep conversation: critical thinking and a sense of humor.

Millennials were never really taught critical thinking skills. At some point our school systems seemed to decide that they had all the answers, and they began teaching “right thoughts” to their students – this happened at all shades on the political spectrum. 

“Right thought” is the opposite of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to argue several sides of an issue equally well. That’s the genius of debate clubs – when you go to a debate competition, you don’t know which side of an argument you will be defending until just before the debate begins. That’s critical thinking, because you can fully argue all sides of an issue. 

If you know only “right thought,” then you’re just a puppet. If you know only “right thought” then you are easily offended, easily confused, and quick to anger. People like that believe conspiracy theories, because they are not capable of sensing their absurdity. Since they know “right thought” they are ready to accept any narrative that supports it, no matter how ridiculous. 

If you have critical thinking, on the other hand, then your ability to see humor in life, and to sense a joke and laugh at it, expands exponentially. Critical thinking enables you to see the absurdities and fallacies that permeate the human experience, and this allows you to find humor and to accept humor. It imparts wisdom to your perspective, so conspiracy theories appear as silly as they are.

Millennials of the World, Unite!

I spend a lot of time these days counseling Millennials who are distraught with loneliness and who live in fear of being ridiculed, canceled, misunderstood, and mis-characterized. 

Millennials live in a more dangerous social situation than any generation before them. Their fears are real; social media can destroy their lives, and so to make sure that doesn’t happen they channel their own feed into acceptable lanes. 

That person on their feed becomes a curated version of themselves. Over time, the illusion calcifies and disgusts them. But they can’t change it, nor can they escape it. 

No generation has ever had to deal with something like this before. If you find yourself in a situation like that, an important part of your healing is to fully acknowledge that what you are going through is unique, unprecedented, and really weird.

The way out varies for each individual. But a crucial part of it is to stop scrolling and to get outside. Don’t film yourself turning off your phone and going outside. Actually do it, for yourself. 

Find where you want to be, and go there often. Meet people in the flesh. Don’t judge them – that’s essential. Don’t take what they say personally – this is also essential. Expect humor and laugh easily. If you want to see them again, make plans to meet again. Rather than capture them in your phone, memorize where and when you’ll meet them, and be there.

Go retro, go organic, and don’t broadcast it. These days, if the woke and anti-woke world bores you, that’s probably the most revolutionary and subversive thing you can do. If you rebel in this way, you’ll be one of the people creating what comes next.

The Remote Work Identity Crisis

Freedom from commutes! Liberation from office politics! Working in our pyjamas! Petting the cat while our employment appeared entirely on screen!

It was an entertaining dream, that’s for sure. But now that remote work has landed in the middle of our economy, we’ve awakened.

A sobering reality has emerged: remote work triggers an identity crisis.

As it turns out, the proverbial banter by the water cooler and the serendipitous hallway encounters were not unproductive wastes of time. Those encounters not only held together the social fabric of company culture, they also filled our minds and hearts with their spontaneity and connection.

The Importance of Banter

Without them, we lose more than we realize. The office was always more than just a workspace. It was a stage. We wore costumes, we delivered lines. It wasn’t just about the corporate ladder. It was about us personally.

Without the stage and the performance, our humanity suffers. Our sense of identity fails to form in healthy ways. We’re susceptible to anxiety. We get disoriented.

From a personal point of view, that’s all bad enough. But from a management point of view, even while efficiency might tick up, things like creativity, innovation, and commitment all drop.

Many of my clients, especially my younger clients, face debilitating challenges in the face of all this. They often feel that they don’t know how to succeed. People question their purpose, their values, and their place. The old adage "find your passion" has taken on new urgency.

Introverts and Extroverts in the Remote World

A hybrid model now calls to us with all the glamor of the original remote model. Yet, the challenges are immense. Coordinating schedules across teams, ensuring equitable opportunities for collaboration, maintaining cohesive project management all crash into the complexities of variable schedules and weird some-remote, some-in-person meetings.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal hit one aspect of this on the head: hard work is easily missed while outrageous theatrics are celebrated. In many ways, providing people with a sense of connection, even if it's really just entertainment, does more for your career than actually accomplishing something.

This creates a significant disadvantage for introverts in remote settings where face-to-face interactions are limited. It can cost a company the buy-in of its most creative and efficient contributors.

I’ve got clients on the verge of depression because of this situation. Of course, there’s always been an element of this in the workplace, but talented workers can come to feel that management thinks of them like a gumball machine: put an impossible task into the slot and finished work rolls out the bottom.

Without the personal interaction, they get frighteningly little spontaneous, positive input. At the same time, they’re trapped in meetings where the employee who gets the laugh is the one targeted for the promotion or raise.

Meeting Agendas Can Help

If there was one piece of advice I would give managers attempting to make remote and hybrid teams work, it would be to incorporate into their meetings updates on wins and accomplishments, which requires introverts and empaths alike to toot their own horn and set themselves up for praise. Yes, it's manufactured interaction, but it still serves an essential psychological purpose.

In a real world office, every now and then a gregarious salesperson would suddenly find out about something that a quiet creative had accomplished and, realizing that this new thing would enable them to close more sales, they would go find the creative.

Whether the creative liked it or not, whether they wanted it or not, the salesperson would express their amazement and appreciation, loudly, in front of everyone, and at length.

More significantly, whether the creative admits it or not, that sort of recognition – random, heartfelt, well-deserved – feeds the soul for months.

Things like that simply don’t happen in today’s work world, and it seems like the remote and hybrid models all but prevent it from happening. If the creative doesn’t experience the salesperson’s physical presence, the whole encounter becomes far less impactful. It can seem staged, forced, or like something they were asked to do.

This is not to say that we are doomed because we don’t work in offices anymore. However, companies that find ways around these limitations – such as sharing wins in meetings, no matter if it’s formulaic – will be the ones that have the biggest impact in their market.

Creative Remote Work Management

That intense encounter between the creative and the salesperson is a caricature for a whole range of interactions that enable people to form their personal sense of identity.

It’s not just about work – it's about who we are, how we perceive ourselves, how we present ourselves to others. Identity arises from encounters like that one.

When they don’t happen regularly, and when they rarely happen in person, we suffer as human beings. An essential aspect of what it means to be a social animal goes unsatisfied. We suffer for it.

Employers can’t solve everything with policies and meeting agendas. It will take time for this new hybrid environment to work itself out.

What managers can do is be hyper aware of the strong psychological impact that these new models have on their employee’s humanity. This is especially true of young employees, who had already been deprived of normal social development by the Covid lockdown. Now they are left trying to parse emails, emojis, and 2-dimensional images as if they somehow comprised a living, breathing human being.

Managers need to be especially wary of how they go about trying to overcome the impersonal nature of the hybrid workplace. Putting something together that lacks authenticity will probably do more harm than good.

We already know that an ever-expanding mudflat of Slack channels doesn’t work. Putting everyone in a room and firing a starting gun to initiate “real interactions” won’t work. Trying to enliven the room with copious amounts of alcohol won’t work, either.

There’s no simple solution, but managers can have a hugely positive impact by being aware of these deep psychological problems arising within hybrid work situations, and simply relying on their own humanity to enable the sorts of interactions that can ameliorate them.

Say you’re in a remote meeting with the gregarious salesperson who asks gleefully, “Where did we get that new thing!?”

Say, “Hold on…” and get the creative into the meeting if you can.

Facilitate interactions like that in whatever way possible, and your solutions will continue to improve as they arise from your own intuition.