This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Do You Need Job Therapy? with Dr. Tessa West | 239

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

I’d venture a guess that many of us would agree that we need job therapy today, or have needed it at some point in our adult lives… and yet most of us have never even heard of it. Our guest on the topic is a leading expert and author, Dr. Tessa West. Tessa is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and an expert in the science of interpersonal communication. She has published over 80 academic articles in psychology’s most prestigious journals, and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Tessa’s work has been covered by the likes of the New York Times, TIME, Forbes, The Guardian, and the US Supreme Court and many more, and she’s the author of the book “Jerks at Work: Toxic coworkers and what to do about them,” and “Job Therapy: Finding work that works for you.” You give too much of your time, talent, energy to your job to be miserable at it. And like relationships, there may be times or stages where you feel stressed and frustrated, disheartened or underappreciated – but not over the long haul.  Make sure you’re doing work that works for you. Otherwise, it might be time for some job therapy! Connect with Tessa: Tessa’s Website:  https://www.tessawestauthor.com/  Tessa’s Research: https://tessawestlab.com/publications.html  Tessa’s Books:  https://www.tessawestauthor.com/book/job-therapy  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: WiseFit Wealth are not just financial advisors; they’re your partners in achieving your dreams. Head over to wisefitwealth.com and click the “Schedule a Meeting with our Team” button. They’ll hook you up with a free budget sheet and some helpful planning tips! WiseFit Wealth has ONE goal, and that is to help you achieve yours.

I am Nicole Kalil, and I've said this before on the This Is Woman's Work podcast, but I believe we all need therapy. I have yet to meet a person that didn't have some sort of challenging life event or experience, trauma, or mental health concern. We all have difficult areas or times in our lives. We all benefit from learning coping skills, identifying root problems and core wounds. And frankly, it's just nice to have a safe, nonjudgmental place to vent and feel supported

and maybe even understood. You may not agree, but I'm willing to fight you on this one. And I don't care if it's talk therapy, hypnotherapy, equine therapy, psychotherapy, whatever therapy helps you and is facilitated by someone licensed and experienced, I am all for it. But today on the show, we're going to talk about a type of therapy I'd venture a guess that many of us would agree we need today

or have needed at some point in our adult lives. And that is job therapy. Yes, you heard me right. And if you're anything like me, you've never heard of job therapy before. But the second you did, you're thinking this is so obvious. Of course we need job therapy. I mean, we spend the bulk of our adult lives at our jobs with our colleagues. Many of us experience high amounts of stress, frustration, and possibly even abuse at our jobs. According to LinkedIn, 85% of people dislike their jobs, and a recent survey showed that 46% of professionals are considering quitting their job within the next year. I mean, friend, I can think of several times in my career, as recent as last year, where if somebody would have mentioned

job therapy to me, I would have run, not walked, not passed go, not collected $200. I mean, I would have hurdled myself toward the signup sheet. And I'm really not even being that dramatic. So without further delay, we are going to get some job therapy with the leading expert and author on the subject, Tessa West. Tessa is a professor of psychology at New York University and an expert in the science of interpersonal communication. Her work focuses on questions such as why is it so hard to give honest, critical feedback? And how do class, race, and cultural differences make communication in the workplace so difficult? And what can we do to improve it? She has published over 80 academic articles in psychology's most prestigious journals

and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Tessa's work has been covered by the likes of the New York Times, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and many more. She's been on Good Morning America, is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and is the author of the book, Jerks at Work, Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them, as well as the book, Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works for You. So Tessa, thank you for being our guest. And I have to say, you've obviously piqued my interest with the title of your book alone. So I don't know what it is, but I'm sure many of us would agree that we need it. What do you mean by job therapy?

I love this question. I came at this idea of job therapy as a relationship scientist, as someone who's been teaching romantic relationships at NYU. And what I mean by that is really understanding the root psychological cause of air and happiness, not the structural reasons why you're unhappy at work, not your compensation, not your work from home, you know, not your job title. But when you wake up in the middle of the night and you have that existential crisis and you're feeling angsty, when you love and you hate your job at the same time,

when that job is not giving as much to you as you give to it, then we need therapy to understand what is going on. And the same way that we do for a marriage, for a relationship that is not going well with a family member, with a mother, with a father, those same concepts apply to our relationships with our careers. So this jives with me so much, and I'm just shocked. Like, how can I be 48 years old and just learning about this today? So I know in researching and writing your book, you identified five of these common reasons why people feel frustrated in their jobs.

And I would love to dive into a little bit of each of those five if we can. So let's start with the first one, or at least the first on the list in my research, which was, I'm just going to call it identity crisis. What are we talking about here? Identity crisis. So this is that feeling that you've been working really hard towards one career, one goal. So if you've been doing something for five or 10 years, maybe went to school, put a lot of money and time into it, and you just can't just get rid of that feeling that this might not be for you. If anyone's ever been committed to any kind of relationship, whether that be to another person or to their career,

they know what it feels like to just kind of panic, have that sense of shame even that they put so much into something that is no longer sparking joy. And I think this is the most common problem that very driven people are experiencing right now, this falling out of love with something that is no longer giving you the joy that it used to. I've had at least two of those in my life. And one of them was like right after I went and got my teaching credential. I thought I wanted to be a teacher.

And at this point, it was my parents' money. They'd invested in me going to college and getting my teaching credential and things like that. And the amount of shame and guilt I had about this, oh my God, I don't think this is what I actually want to be doing with my life, was very real. So I think a lot of us can relate to that. I guess before we move to the next one, if we're experiencing that identity crisis, any tips or things that we might want to do or consider thinking about? I'm guessing the answer isn't

always change jobs. Yeah. I think this is sort of like the question. What is the first thing that you should do? I think the first thing you want to understand is that identity is a complex concept. For most of us, there's really two pieces. The first piece is what we call centrality. That's how much this career defines you as a person. And you might not like it, but if you think about it, your self-esteem goes up and down depending on how well you're doing in that career. Something can be central to you. It can define you and at the same time, not bring you much satisfaction.

And so in the book, I actually talk about measuring both pieces, centrality, how much is this career a core piece of who I am? And then at the same time, how much joy does it actually bring? And I think the real danger zone is ending up in that quadrant of, you know, it defines me and I hate it at the same time. And that is a common experience for people. If you've experienced burnout at work, if you work in healthcare, we see this all the time. This career defines me. I don't know who I am outside of it, yet I hate it. I don't love what it's doing to me. I don't love how it makes me feel. I don't love how it disrupts my sleep and it affects my stress. So I think measuring those and understanding those unique pieces is really key. And then also developing kind of a sense of how stable you are. We have good identity days and bad

identity days at work. And before you make any huge leaps, before you kind of start dating other careers or understanding other identities, you want to know how stable you are in your feelings around that career. Don't take a huge leap just because you're having a bad week or even a bad month around your identity. You need to actually sort of consistently be able to say to yourself, if I don't do this job anymore, I'm okay with that. And that needs to be sort of like your anchor question. I'm so glad that you said that. It reminds me when I was younger in my career, somebody said something to the effect of like, nobody leaves their career because of a flat tire. They leave over a slow leak. And I think that that is probably accurate and also probably

an appropriate way to, you know, like you can't leave just because you had one bad day, unless it was like abusive, traumatic, bad day, right? But thinking about it on the whole, not just what you're experiencing with recency bias, right? Yeah, not just recency. And I would add to that, you don't want to stay because you had a good day either. I think one concept we don't talk a lot about in sort of your relationship with your career is this idea of intermittent reinforcement. The moment I start questioning my identity, something that's defined me, I become very sensitive to any information that I ought to stay, not just stuff that I should go. So if my boss is nice to me, maybe I get a

promotion. I'm so sensitive to those kind of patterns of intermittent reinforcement that I can talk myself in to re-identifying with something that I ought to actually be distancing myself from. It's kind of like being married. I've been divorced. So I kind of went through this right before we let go. We went on a whole bunch of date nights to kind of prove to ourselves that this relationship was going to work.

And I got very sensitive to cues that my ex-husband still loved me, that I ought to stay in this thing. And so just as much as you pay attention to those bad identity days, those days where you feel rejected by your career, you should also be very sensitive to not kind of over-reading into those pangs of love that this career is giving back to you. So that consistency, I think, goes both ways. Thank you for sharing that example. I think it's highly relatable. So, okay. The second common reason is, I'm just going to call it drifted apart. Tell us about that. So everyone who's ever been in a relationship where you slowly fall out of love and you're not quite sure what the one thing was, you know, the parallel might be look over at your partner

and when they chew food, it's annoying. And did their laugh always sound like that? When you walk back into that office after the pandemic, was it always this quiet? You know, were people always this disengaged from the job? Yeah, were my coworkers always this annoying? Always this annoying. Was there always that weird ticking sound

going on in the ceiling? You know, drifting apart is kind of slowly falling out of love with something. And the key is kind of knowing how much of this is really about the career or the job that's changed and how much have you changed? I think most of us kind of blame the other. We assume that, you know, this whole industry has shifted or this job isn't what it used to be. But we change a lot too.

And we don't necessarily get better or worse. We change in lateral ways. We just get different. And I think a lot of what I talked about in this chapter is understanding the ways in which you've shifted left and right, not just up and down, and how those changes can contribute to your drifting apart. You need a handle on those things. So when you go back out there, you kind of know what to look for. But I think a lot of us coming back to work have experienced this kind of falling out of love with your job in this kind of death by a thousand paper cuts kind of way. I loved how you said that we get different. I often thought, especially when people get married so young, one of the challenges that I would worry about is like, you're sort of banking on this idea that you're going to grow

and evolve at similar times in similar directions. And that's hard to do. I mean, and so that is often what I think of when I think of the challenge of any relationship that jives again with what you're saying with work. It's like, we get different. And I appreciate you pointing out because I think it's true. We have the tendency to blame the other. Yep. So thank you for saying that. Okay.

Torn between places. We are all this person. I think this is a chapter for everybody, even if you aren't feeling stressed or existential about your career. I really talk about this in two ways. So the first is we are in a busyness epidemic. We all think that more means more. And we think that means more roles, more tasks, more visibility at work, more name recognition,

more LinkedIn posts, more Instagram posts, more of all the things. And I think because of that, we're addicted to doing a whole bunch of things to sort of prove ourselves at work. That can often just lead us to getting absolutely nothing done. It can lead to resumes that are just all over the place because things aren't connecting in kind of a linear way or in a systematic way. So I think the kind of first piece of this is what are you doing at work? What are you taking on? The next is, how are you working? And I did a lot of deep dives into the neuroscience literature for this chapter to understand why task switching is a memory problem and how that can actually impact our ability to get things done, our ability to remember the work that we are doing.

So when we start up again, we're not going, why did I write that sentence? What did I mean by that? So I think there's those two key pieces, the kind of what you're doing and then the how you're doing it. And there's a lot of little life hacks I talk about in this book about how we can be more effective, not just in terms of what we take on, but how we structure our day, how we work around what we call working spheres, the things that we clump together as tasks and just being more efficient in ways that

basic neurological level will make us more productive. I know, obviously, the bulk of the people listening in identify as women and this torn between two places. Is there any aspect of the work-home feeling torn between the two? And that can create dissatisfaction at work. I often hear women say things like they feel guilty no matter where they're at, right? If I'm at work, I feel like I'm not being a good enough mom. If I'm with my mom, I feel guilty that I'm not working on this work project. Is there an element of that? Absolutely. And women are just much more disadvantaged with this than men. There's plenty of research to support the kind of that? Absolutely. And women are just much more disadvantaged with this than men. There's plenty of research to support the kind of gender gap here.

I think there's a misconception that work-life balance means structuring your day so that you have home time and work time. But what we know is that mental time doesn't work that way. You can be distracted by your job when you're home. You can be distracted by your job when you're home. You can be distracted by your home when you're at work. And so that distraction feeds into this issue of not being able to get anything done. We call these self-distractions, these kind of like internal interruptions of feeling like guilty, feeling like, oh, I forgot to schedule that doctor's appointment for my

kid. I'm sort of the poster child for this. My husband took photos of me writing this book at a trampoline park, at a baseball game, on an airplane, in a swimming pool at one point. You know, because I have like a million jobs. I'm a professor, I'm an author, and I'm a mother of a small child. And so I think tour between places is an emotional experience for a lot of women. It's not just I'm not getting anything done. It's I'm being made to feel bad that I'm not playing pickleball right now because I'm writing an email.

And now I have to go correct that relationship and engage in some reparation in ways that men often don't. Right. And so I think this is a very much a guilt, emotional experience and exhaustion experience, a burnout experience for women. Yes. And how do we set aside some of the distractions or do we, right? Like, so I've often said, and I don't even know if this is totally accurate. It's just my experience that our male counterparts seem to be better at compartmentalizing. They are where their feet are. And I have worked on, and in some ways succeeded on that. And it has helped me. Like, for example, I know that if I know that my child is well taken care of, she's safe, she's having fun, then I have no guilt when I'm at work. And so I try to make sure that I feel

really good, you know, when she was younger about her care provider or daycare. So are there things that we can do to minimize the distraction so we aren't all over the place? Yeah, absolutely. I think the way you talked about that is preparation for your smart time, right? So I think the most productive people don't work the most. They just protect maybe one or two hours a day of when they can be in a flow state, when they can actually be generative. We're not talking writing emails. We're not talking like rote tasks, the stuff that requires you to really be able to think.

And honestly, I think most of us have at max two hours a day, but usually more like one. The key is protecting that time ahead of time. And so what I found in my research is that most interruptions are self interruptions. It's not that someone else is calling us, it's that we feel guilty. So we minimize our tab, we check Slack, we check our phone, we get a text from camp, we make sure our kids got there. Okay, we're doing this to ourselves. And unless you engage in that mental preparation, like you did, where you tell yourself, okay, I prepared myself for this one hour block, I'm putting away my phone, I'm minimizing yourself, okay, I prepared myself for this one hour block,

I'm putting away my phone, I'm minimizing all other tabs. I just need to be smart during this one hour. And I'm allowed to be distracted the hour after that to put yourself on a bit of a distraction diet. I think that can really help. Don't put yourself in a situation where you need to do something that requires concentration when there's other people around you. I think the biggest mistake is we do that and then we get irritated that we're interrupted. So find that one hour, protect it, plan ahead so that you don't self-interrupt during it and that those emotional triggers aren't going to pull you back into all that other stuff. That's the single best thing I think most of us can do. Hey friend, did you know that according to the World Economic Forum, that 77% of women

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your financial goals today. Again, that's wisefitwealth.com. All right, now let's head back to the show. The next one is what you call the runner up. So most of us, if you've worked long enough, know what it feels like to not get that razor promotion. I was fascinated at how little feedback people are getting as to why. We rarely get failure feedback. 7% of the people I surveyed were told why they didn't get promoted in a concrete way. Even those who were promoted don't really know why. They were kind of guessing.

And so I think this communication gap is huge. We don't know why we weren't promoted. We don't know how many promotion attempts it takes. And critically, we don't know who our relevant social comparison others are. We might know who won out over us, and we're going to sort of like cling to whatever differences or similarities we have with that person. But we don't often know who the top 10 people are who keep showing up over and over again. What did their resumes look like? Did they hold a role four roles back that is relevant? You know, and I think there's so much missing information out there that we can dig deeper at and bosses and managers can be better at communicating to really help people understand why they keep landing in this runner-up category. Okay. This concept of failure feedback is so vitally important. And again, I'm guessing, but I would venture a guess we as women probably get

that even less than our male counterparts because I've heard people say like, we don't want to, and I put in air quotes, hurt their feelings. Right. So, and in the absence of concrete feedback, I think all humans just make shit up. Right. And so we come up with our own reasons or theories about why we didn't or why this person did. And it's probably unlikely to be totally accurate. So how do we, let me first ask, how do we ask for failure feedback? And then I'll ask about giving it. Yeah, I think there's so much magic that goes into the framing of this. The first thing you want to ask isn't why did I not get this job? It's can you tell me about the top 10 people who are competitive for this role? Not the person who got it, but the top 10 who were discussed. Ask this every time. What you don't want to do is

become so hyper focused on one thing that's different between you and one other person. You and 10 other people is I think is super useful. The next thing I would ask is, are there kind of roles that I'm missing on my resume, not just the one I hold right now, but maybe something three or four roles back. One of the things I found is a lot of leaders have lay theories of what you ought to have done to get here. You know, if you're being promoted to manager and retail, you should have worked the floor at some point. And they just have all these little theories that are kind of untested and not discussed with people. And those end up holding people back and they kind of don't know what's actually happening. And then I think the

next thing is you want to make sure that the work you're doing is visible in the right way. Most of us take on a lot of roles at work, like running an employee resource group. Women are constantly asked to do these kind of likable roles. But those the tasks you do aren't discussed during promotion meetings. So simply ask, if I take on this role, or that job that I did, was the work I did even discussed during a promotion meeting? Not, you know, did I perform well enough to get promoted based on it? But is the conversation even happening? And nine times out of 10, people are shocked to find that that work died in their boss's head. Their boss never even told anyone they did it. They were embarrassed they even had to ask them to do it, or it just simply wasn't relevant for the job. And I think we're making

these mistakes. So you can ask those really specific questions instead of why did I fail? Ask more, why did other people succeed? And are the things I'm doing the things that you ought to be doing to succeed? Again, incredible information. I think of a few times I've had conversations with people where they've been really upset that they didn't get what they thought they deserved. And they'll have a laundry list of all the things that they did that made them think that they deserve it. And I'm listening and I'm like, okay, but like eight of those 10 things have literally nothing to do with the job that you applied for, nor should people be sitting around

talking about the personal sacrifices you're making. You know, it's not related to the job. So interesting. And then what about giving failure feedback? Because let's be honest, it's hard to do. I know occasionally we have guests on and we don't always release every episode, typically because of some sort of audio issue. But occasionally we're just like, this isn't a strong enough episode to put out there. I have to reach out to the people and let them know and share a little bit as to why. And I fucking hate it. Like it's so heart wrenching. Yeah. Okay. So how do we do this? Kindly, I would imagine. Yeah. So I think, you know, failure feedback is always hard to give. And people tend to go on one end. They're either way too critical. And by that, I mean, the criticisms aren't specific, they're general. They'll say things like you're not trustworthy, or you don't have enough respect here. That is not useful feedback.

So general feedback that's positive or negative isn't useful, but normally tends to be sort of negative in general, or it is a brittle smile. You're doing great, you know, over the top smiling, but with nothing attached to it. And so what I would say to people is drop the positive negative piece and think about level of specificity. The more specific, the better. What exactly about the resume is good? What exactly about the resume is missing? What conversations have come up about their performance and teams? And the more behavioral focused you can be, the better. The problem is managers are often not writing things down, not note taking as they're doing it. And so they end up with an

impression and then they present an impression to the person. And they use a lot of superlatives or just like general attributes around their traits, behaviors, not traits, specific actions, not impressions. For women who are often on the receiving end of gender discrimination and our behaviors are not viewed the same way as men, hearing you're not trustworthy is not a useful piece of information. Hearing you interrupted a client five times is because then it actually sets the standard that your objective behavior is being compared to other people's in the same way. I think a lot of women, when we get failure feedback, it's so general and we often attribute it to racial or gender bias that we don't know what to make of it.

And so I think it has to be specific. The more immediate, the better. And don't wait too long. Don't sit on it. Don't wait for performance management. Just give it all the time and be as detail focused as you possibly can. It's a lot of work, but that's kind of the only way to give feedback, I think. Again, such valuable information. And having have also been on the receiving end of not very good failure feedback, this would have made a huge difference. I think back earlier in

my career, I was candidate for like an emerging leaders program. And I really, really, really wanted to get in. And I was telling everybody I could and trying to do all the right things and check all the boxes. And I didn't get in. And the feedback I got is because I needed to work on being too reactive. And then the suggestion was for me to reach out

to like one of the very few other women who were in contention that she'd worked on this skill. And it was really hard feedback for me, not because there wasn't truth to it. I actually could see that that is something that I needed to work on. But because there were lots of men getting in the program who were well known across the enterprise for being highly reactive. And also because it just felt like there was this gender component. Like what I heard is I'm too emotional. Yeah.

And that I, you know, needed to get with the other woman and work on our emotions, right? Like it just was so badly received, even though there probably was truth and accuracy to it. It was the giving of the feedback. So I think all the tips that you shared are incredible. And I hope every person who's in a position to give failure feedback listens to this, writes notes, practices. Yeah. Practice it. That's the best thing you can do. You know,le play a little bit at work. A hundred percent. Okay. And then the fifth thing that you identified, you called the underappreciated star. Yeah. So I think a lot of us feel like we are not being compensated for what we bring to the workplace. I push people a little bit in this chapter to actually evaluate their star status. Do you have a skill that is rare at work? Are

you actually better than other people at this skill? And critically, and this is where people are often misstepping, is that skill actually valued as much as you think it is? Most companies, good enough is just fine. The difference between someone at the 98th percentile and the 99th percentile isn't perceivable. They're kind of financial bottom line, but the compensation

packages go up exponentially at the top. And so it's just not worth it for them to get someone who is so amazing that they're paying $500,000 for a year versus someone who's pretty good that they can pay $100,000 for. And so knowing whether there's even a market for stars like you, I think is really important. I think most people are going, I'm a star. How come people don't want to hire me? Well, they recognize you're a star. They just don't want to pay for you. It's just, it's like the difference between a super fine wine and a pretty fine wine. You know, they just don't want to pay that compensation package. Well, and I'm again, grateful that you talked first about us evaluating our star status because again, in so many conversations, you know, I've yet to meet somebody who's like, you know what? I think I'm being overcompensated.

Everybody thinks they should be compensated at a higher level. Everybody, because you're the one doing it, can list out all the great things that they do or all the ways that they perceive that they're valuable to the organization. But having some sort of objective evaluation and then comparing it to what the decision makers, the culture wants and needs, I think is really an incredibly important point. A lot of people are missing that. So then that leads to my next question. Outside of observation, which can be a little wonky, how do we identify what is valued at the highest level at our work? Yeah, I think, you know, the proof is in the pudding. I wouldn't ask people what's evaluated. I would actually find out how much people are being compensated, how many of those people exist in the company

across different organizations. I talk a lot in this book about networking, but kind of in a different way, which is more about information seeking, pulling information out of people that you don't know yet about sort of what those options actually are. And I think you're right. I think most of us assume that everyone's being better compensated than we are, you know, because we hear these stories, but we don't actually have real data on that. So the more information you can get, and actually hiring managers are much more open about this information than you might think. If you could do one thing, find the hiring manager for your dream role for a role with a similar title and experience as you find out what that compensation is and do this with internal recruiters with as many people as you possibly can. And just build

up that little database of information. The best predictor of winning a negotiation is actually coming in with more information than your partner. So this will serve you a lot of purposes, but you do need that reality check. And don't assume you know what those numbers are kind of based on LinkedIn posts or Glassdoor reviews and so on and so forth. You really do have to collect the data. Great point.

It jumped into my head, and I'm curious your opinion on this. I think often I see people want to make more in the role that they're in. And so they think, you know, like if I just get really, really, really, really good at this role, then I will make more money. But there are income ranges for specific roles. And there are certain roles that cap at a certain level. And I don't give a crap how good you are at it. It just is. That's what that role is compensated at. So is there some value in going, okay, like, you know, arbitrary numbers, I want to make $150,000 a year. Okay. Who in this company or as making $150,000 a year, what do they do? How do they do it? And what star power is being valued at that level? And then kind of making a

game plan to put that into action? Or what are your thoughts? I think there is. So you can kind of anchor your search on compensation, but here's the one thing that you're going to need to get to the bottom of. Often when you jump from one comp level to the next, the skills that you need to succeed at your old role are different in kind than the skills that you need to succeed at the new one. And I don't just mean like you need to learn a new program. Sometimes those skills are actually really complex. So kind of one thing I found is that in sales, if you're doing really well at the regional level, you need a network that is small and deep. You need return customers and you need 30 of them. But if you want to be president of the company at the level of North America, you need a totally different kind of social network.

It needs to be broad and it needs to involve a lot of tenuous connections. So you know a lot of people, they don't necessarily need to be return customers, but you're spread very wide and thin. And just that difference in your networking strategy at work is a huge difference in sort of whether you're able to actually get compensated. So not just can I climb up here to the next income level, but are the skills different in kind? And are most of the people who are getting that job externally hired? Are they actually internally promoted? If they're externally hired, if they're scooped from competitors and they had sort of a parallel role in another job, then you probably need a completely different skill set. You need that

different network, for example. And I find a lot of people are really disappointed that they can't jump up to that next level because they are missing some kind of skill or what they've been trained on is so different in kind than something that ostensibly feels similar, but it's really actually quite different. And so that's where you should be doing your homework when you're doing that kind of money jump kind of approach is what else do I need that's super different from what I have now. Tessa, I could talk to you about this all day. Thank you. This has been an incredible conversation. I know people are going to want to learn more about you. So tessawestauthor.com is the website

and there are quizzes on the website that you can take and all sorts of resources. So definitely head there. And then, you know, for the love of all things, holy, go get your hands on the job therapy book. You can order it from Amazon or go to your local bookstore, have them order it. Let's support those bookstores. Tessa, thank you. Thank you so much. This has been awesome. My pleasure. All right. Like our relationships with loved ones, there is no such thing as perfect. No happy all the time, always feeling heard and appreciated, Pinterest worthy, flawless blend of mind reading, telepathic

agreement, and love of clean homes, where the only challenge is who is going to make the other person coffee in the morning. That shit does not exist at home or at work. In both cases, communication is vital. Safety and respect are baseline needs, and being more happy than not should be a standard that we all agree on. You give too much of your time, talent, and energy to your job to be miserable at it. And like relationships, there may be times or stages where you feel stressed and frustrated, disheartened, and underappreciated, but not over the long haul. Make sure you're doing work that works for you. Because having a job that you don't regularly need to go to therapy

about, well, that is woman's work.