The Advocate You Need

Dear friends,

For today’s letter, I have a powerful story to share with you that highlights the #1 advocate you need to thrive. Let’s get to it!

A brilliant, talented, generous, and extremely resilient friend of mine had been struggling for a long time.

She was being stretched incredibly thin at home as a new mom and at work where she was required to do the job of two full-time employees while holding a new leadership role.

For two years, she repeatedly told her manager that she was burning out. She wasn’t heard and instead, she was gaslighted into thinking that she was the problem and needed to toughen up to keep up with the demands of leadership.

Eventually her situation got so bad that she would dread going to work. She was so overwhelmed that she would start crying from the moment she got into her car in the morning until she arrived at work. She would then continue to cry all the way back home later in the day.

Her husband kept encouraging her to stay the course as he assumed she had just hit a rough patch and didn’t want her to miss out on the career growth opportunities she had worked so hard for. Her income was also essential to supporting their household, but she was too drained to start looking for other positions.

She was also physically struggling to function so she went to her doctor hoping they would advocate for her to take some time off of work. Her doctor told her that “stress is a normal part of life” and she can write her a note for one or two days off of work and prescribe some medication to help her cope, but that is it.

My friend knew that she had coped for long enough and her circumstances needed to change, but she was not yet ready to rock the boat herself.

Finally, one day as she cried all the way back home from work, she realized that she had reached the end of her rope.

After a lifetime of people-pleasing and making everyone else comfortable at her own expense, she decided to stand up for herself and demand change, even if this meant putting her career and household’s finances at risk for a period of time.

She told her workplace that she was being required to do the job of two full-time employees and this was not acceptable. She was also required to physically come into work every day and waste time commuting to just sit in an office and do all of her work via email and Zoom. This didn’t make any sense. She said to them that she was completely burnt out and could not go on and was willing to walk out if something didn’t change.

This finally got their attention.

They immediately not only cut her responsibilities in half to a normal full-time role (instead of two full-time roles packaged into one) while keeping her full salary, but also agreed to allow her to work from home.

When she called me this week with this update, she sounded lighter, happier, and more confident than ever!

Instead of waiting on her manager, husband, or doctor to see her struggles and intervene to save her somehow, she stepped up and saved herself.

She loved how powerful and confident she was feeling and she was incredibly proud of herself - as she should be.

Her story presents many lessons especially around improving the workplace culture, supporting working parents, and actually hearing employees and patients. It also highlights a key reminder that we all need and a lesson that took me (and my friend) a very long time to learn:

You are the only person who can save you.

You are the only person who can truly know what you are going through and what you need.

And you are the only person who you can count on to always be there for you and advocate for you.

This doesn’t mean that you need to go through life alone - in fact, you are not meant to.

But if you don’t see your needs, your worth, your limits, your capabilities, and your power, no one else will either.

You also won’t know which situations and people are healthy for you and your thriving and which ones are not.

YOU are the #1 advocate you need.

So commit to yourself.

Show up for yourself.

And advocate for yourself and demand change as best as you can in the unhealthy systems that we operate in - the systems that benefit from you believing that you are the problem (for more on this, please check out “The Womenifesto”).

Be your own safe space, your own protector, your own champion, your biggest cheerleader, and your number one fan.

You deserve to feel believed, heard, valued, and supported, and it all starts with believing, hearing, valuing, and supporting yourself.

May you continue to advocate for yourself and may you thrive.

With love and gratitude,

Maliheh

P.S. If you need some guidance on how to ask for more and advocate for yourself, tune into my podcast conversation with Alexandra Carter, world-renowned negotiator and the author of Ask For More.