As an adult, you’ve gotten used to certain things about your parents that your childhood never prepared you for—like your mom’s affinity for pickleball or your dad’s sudden fascination with ancient alien documentaries. But the frailty that comes with aging can be the most difficult change to see in your parents. You might be tempted to ignore the signs of aging in your parents, but it’s likely that they will need some kind of eldercare in the future.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, someone turning 65 today has a 70% chance of needing some kind of long-term care in the future. No matter how well prepared your parents are, some part of that care will probably fall to you.

Here’s how to afford the cost of caring for your elderly parents.

What is eldercare?

Seniors have varying needs that depend entirely on their health and situation. That means eldercare can mean something different for nearly every family. Your mom and dad’s eldercare might include any of these types of caregiving:

• Adult day care: This kind of daily program offers care and planned activities during the work week. Adult day care is typically for seniors who either need supervised care or are isolated or lonely; it provides any family members who are caring for an aging parent at home with a needed respite. Five days of adult day care per week costs an average of $24,000 per year.
• Home health aide: Whether your elderly parent still lives independently or lives with you, a home health aide can help them with daily activities, such as bathing, grooming, dressing, eating, and mobility, as well as monitor their physical and mental health and check vital signs. Forty-four hours per week of in-home care from a home health aide costs an average of $75,500 per year.
• Assisted-living facility: Moving your parents into assisted living will allow them to continue living independently in a private residence in a larger facility that offers meals and planned activities, but also provides easy access to nursing care and medical professionals on site. While assisted living can be an excellent option, it doesn’t come cheap, costing an average of $64,000 per year.
• Nursing home: If your parents need consistent medical care or 24-hour supervision, you may choose a nursing home to provide their care. These facilities generally offer three meals a day and assistance with daily activities, as well as rehabilitation services if needed. Medicare generally does not cover nursing home care, and a private room in a nursing home costs an average of $117,000 per year.

Paying for eldercare

Very few people have the kind of cash laying around to pay out-of-pocket for these kinds of services. And even if your parents planned ahead for their graying years, shelling out anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 per month can put a dent in even the best-laid retirement plans.

Unfortunately, most eldercare is not covered by Medicare, and your family will be stuck paying out-of-pocket for your parents’ care needs. Medicaid does pay for some of this kind of care, but your parents will have to have completely exhausted their assets to qualify for Medicaid.

That does not mean you’re stuck choosing between your mom’s care and your groceries, however.

Eldercare options

There are several options available that could help improve the affordability of your parents’ care, including:

• Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE): This government program provides eldercare services to seniors who would otherwise need to receive nursing home care. Seniors who join PACE have a dedicated team of medical professionals who help coordinate their care. PACE is a joint program between Medicare and Medicaid that is only available in 33 states and the District of Columbia. You can find out if it is available in your home state using the PACE Finder site.
• State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP): This nationally available government program offers one-on-one counseling and assistance with Medicare and Medicaid. It can help you and your parents navigate the options and programs available to you so you can find the least expensive eldercare options. You can find your local SHIP office via their website.
• Long-term-care (LTC) insurance: If your parents are already retired, long-term care insurance may be a nonstarter, since this kind of insurance policy grows more expensive as you age. The best time to purchase this insurance is typically prior to age 60, as the premiums can become prohibitively expensive with age. Additionally, a negative health diagnosis could mean the insurer denies your LTC coverage. But LTC insurance pays for care in a variety of settings, including home health care, adult day care, and nursing and assisted living facilities.
• Life insurance: Some life insurance policies offer what’s grimly known as an “accelerated death benefit.” This benefit allows the insured individual to access tax-free cash advances while still alive. The advanced money is subtracted from the proceeds the beneficiaries would receive after the insured individual dies. Even if your parents’ current life insurance policy does not offer this benefit, you may be able to add it as a rider.

Getting paid for eldercare

Taking care of an aging parent in your own home may be the most affordable option for your family—unless it interferes with your ability to work outside the home. For families in this position, you may be able to get paid for your time caring for your loved one at home.

Some state Medicaid programs will pay family caregivers for their in-home care work. This means your loved one must be eligible for Medicaid for you to receive payment for caregiving. In addition, the program is not available in every state, and the requirements, rules, and amount you are paid varies from one state to the next. To find out if payment for caregiving is available in your state, contact your state’s Medicaid office.

If your parents are not on Medicaid, you may still be able to get paid for your caregiving. Some long-term-care insurance policies will allow family members to receive payment for caregiving as part of the LTC insurance coverage.

If you’d like to be the one helping Mom or Dad, these options may allow you to afford the time away from your day job.

Making the years golden with Mom and Dad

Taking care of your parents as they age can be challenging, rewarding—and expensive. Learning what types of eldercare are available can help you make the best choices for your parents’ needs, and investigating government programs and private financing can help you figure out how to afford it.

Because it’s much better to spend your time listening to Dad explain how aliens built Stonehenge than stressing about his care.

I am not a business coach. But as life in corporate America shifts, I’ve become a version of one to many of my C-suite clients who now find themselves in a career holding pattern. As the ground shifts beneath these executives, they are suddenly mighty curious about the lessons I’ve learned from four decades of navigating the kind of uncertainty freelancers deal with all the time.

Perhaps a new CEO is minimizing your role or changing your title in order to engineer your exit without a big payout. Maybe you’re waiting for stock to vest or struggling to find the right new position before moving on. In any case, you are uncomfortable in this unfamiliar role: You feel stuck, instead of just in neutral.

Because executives are high achievers whose careers have often been linear progressions, they view success in black-and-white terms. My job is to help them live in the grays, using counsel based on the self-reliance and resilience I’ve earned in my 40 years as a freelancer. 

Executive tip: Save yourself

I tell my C-suite clients that I had to learn the hard way that you can’t care more than they do. (“They” being whoever is in the hierarchy you’re dealing with.)  Whether your instincts and experience on projects are not being valued because of CEO ego, corporate groupthink, or data blindness, you job isn’t to save that project, but to save yourself. Have the self-respect to hold your ideas for the right audience. It is impossible to inspire the disinterested, and trying will only make you feel like a failure when you never had a chance. 

Executive tip: Extract value

To paraphrase Hunter Thompson, you bought the ticket, now take the ride. You’ve done the work to earn your spot in the room, so now you have to find ways to continue to extract value. This is not Quiet Quitting. It’s actively accepting where you are right now and putting effort into finding the benefits that are undoubtably there—because there’s always a worthwhile takeaway, even in difficult situations. When there’s a lack of positive engagement with your hierarchical C-suite colleagues, turn your energy toward the people who report to you—those who may hold your experience in greater esteem. Call for general brainstorming sessions just to hear their ideas, participate in their project development at earlier stages instead of waiting for fully baked ideas to hit your desk, make the time to be a better mentor. Not only will this enrich your current situation, when you go off to another executive position, you may find yourself in need of their skills, which you now better understand; and their loyalty, which you’ve now earned.

Executive tip: Incremental accomplishments

To equate your own success with the successful completion of an idea that’s accomplished by a group will break your heart. You have to find value in incremental accomplishment. When you are not able to control a project’s final execution, it’s useful to break your idea-to-implementation process down into stages and acknowledge your accomplishment at each interval (to yourself). That way, even when the idea doesn’t work the way you envisioned—and it rarely does—you will still feel some sense of satisfaction, instead of judging your own success by the secondary work of others.

Executive tip: Highlight reel

Be sure to create a highlight reel. In addition to the detailed multipage résumés they already have (which most people won’t ever read completely), I urge my old clients to develop a one-pager that focuses on what they do best. Their super power. This clarity helps them—as well as their headhunters—direct their job search. To make the information easier and more interesting to read, I always suggest they hire a designer. A good one. Because these days, you are your own retail footage. Invest in your storefront.

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play in solving complex problems such as curing a disease?

In my job as an applied mathematician, I use mathematical tools to study and solve complex problems in biology. I have worked on problems involving gene and neural networks such as interactions between cells and decision-making. To do this, I create descriptions of a real-world situation in mathematical language. The act of turning a situation into a mathematical representation is called modeling.

Translating real situations into mathematical terms

If you ever solved an arithmetic problem about the speed of trains or cost of groceries, that’s an example of mathematical modeling. But for more difficult questions, even just writing the real-world scenario as a math problem can be complicated. This process requires a lot of creativity and understanding of the problem at hand and is often the result of applied mathematicians working with scientists in other disciplines.

As an example, we could represent a game of sudoku as a mathematical model. In sudoku, the player fills empty boxes in a puzzle with numbers between 1 and 9 subject to some rules, such as no repeated numbers in any row or column.

The puzzle begins with some prefilled boxes, and the goal is to figure out which numbers go in the rest of the boxes.

Imagine that a variable, say x, represents the number that goes in one of those empty boxes. We can guarantee that x is between 1 and 9 by saying that x solves the equation (x-1)(x-2) . . . (x-9)=0. This equation is true only when one of the factors on the left side is zero. Each of the factors on the left side is zero only when x is a number between 1 and 9; for example, (x-1)=0 when x=1. This equation encodes a fact about our game of sudoku, and we can encode the other features of the game similarly. The resulting model of sudoku will be a set of equations with 81 variables, one for each box in the puzzle.

Another situation we might model is the concentration of a drug, say aspirin, in a person’s bloodstream. In this case, we would be interested in how the concentration changes as we ingest aspirin and the body metabolizes it. Just like with sudoku, one can create a set of equations that describe how the concentration of aspirin evolves over time and how additional ingestion affects the dynamics of this medication. In contrast to sudoku, however, the variables that represent concentrations are not static but rather change over time.

But the act of modeling is not always so straightforward. How would we model diseases such as cancer? Is it enough to model the size and shape of a tumor, or do we need to model every single blood vessel inside the tumor? Every single cell? Every single chemical in each cell? There is much that is unknown about cancer, so how can we model such unknown features? Is it even possible?

Applied mathematicians have to find a balance between models that are realistic enough to be useful and simple enough to be implemented. Building these models may take several years, but in collaboration with experimental scientists, the act of trying to find a model often provides novel insight into the real-world problem.

Mathematical models help find real solutions

After writing a mathematical problem to represent a situation, the second step in the modeling process is to solve the problem.

For sudoku, we need to solve a collection of equations with 81 variables. For the aspirin example, we need to solve an equation that describes the rate of change of concentrations. This is where all the math that has been and is still being invented comes into play. Areas of pure math such as algebra, analysis, combinatorics, and many others can be used—in some cases combined—to solve the complex math problems arising from applications of math to the real world.

The third step of the modeling process consists of translating the mathematical solution into the solution to the applied problem. In the case of sudoku, the solution to the equations tells us which number should go in each box to solve the puzzle. In the case of aspirin, the solution would be a set of curves that tell us the aspirin concentration in the digestive system and bloodstream. This is how applied mathematics works.

When creating a model isn’t enough

Or is it? While this three-step process is the ideal process of applied math, reality is more complicated. Once I reach the second step where I want the solution of the math problem, very often, if not most of the time, it turns out that no one knows how to solve the math problem in the model. In some cases, the math to study the problem doesn’t even exist.

For example, it is difficult to analyze models of cancer because the interactions between genes, proteins, and chemicals are not as straightforward as the relationships between boxes in a game of sudoku. The main difficulty is that these interactions are “nonlinear,” meaning that the effect of two inputs is not simply the sum of the individual effects. To address this, I have been working on novel ways to study nonlinear systems, such as Boolean network theory and polynomial algebra. With this and traditional approaches, my colleagues and I have studied questions in areas such as decision-making, gene networks, cellular differentiation, and limb regeneration.

When approaching unsolved applied math problems, the distinction between applied and pure mathematics often vanishes. Areas that were considered at one time too abstract have been exactly what is needed for modern problems. This highlights the importance of math for all of us; current areas of pure mathematics can become the applied mathematics of tomorrow and be the tools needed for complex, real-world problems.

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Alan Veliz-Cuba is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Dayton.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many leaders are perplexed when their people don’t do what they want. They usually blame it on the employee. But that is not always the case. When employees don’t do what you want, it comes down to one or more of these three things that you as the leader are doing wrong. 

You are not being clear on what you actually want 

Leaders often think employees should intuitively know what they want. That is very seldom the case. Of course, that may be true in the day-to-day activities of a well-defined job description. But in a constantly changing world, your team needs to be flexible. They will often need to implement unusual or unique never-been-tried ideas.

So you need to lead your team in many different directions. You should not expect people to somehow know what those directions are. When your people don’t know what you want, it is always because you failed to communicate.

Remember the three Cs of critical communications: clear, concise, and compelling. Be very clear in communicating your expectations. Be concise. Now is the time to be very precise. Tell your people exactly what you want. Don’t speak in generalities. Then ask them to repeat it back to be sure they are clear. Finally, your message should be compelling enough to motivate them to action. 

You aren’t permitting them to say, “I don’t know” 

Leaders also mistakenly assume people know how to do what they want, especially in a new situation. When they don’t know how to do what you want, they may be hesitant to admit it. Permit them to not know.

Always ask them if they know how to do it. Then listen very carefully to what they say. They probably won’t say “I don’t know” because they feel that admission would expose them to criticism. They will more likely say they do know even if they don’t. Ask probing, but not threatening, questions to discover areas they may be deficient in. Don’t leave the conversation until you are satisfied they’re clear and know how to do the assignment. 

And speaking of not knowing, now is a good time to reskill your workforce. Whatever they know today, it won’t be good enough for tomorrow. The rapidly evolving world of generative AI will highly likely obsolete your workforce if you aren’t constantly reskilling them.  

You don’t allow them to disagree

Sometimes, people simply don’t want to do what you want. They usually won’t tell you that because that could be insubordination. They just nod their heads but then passively ignore what you asked of them. Or they execute the assignment in a half-hearted way guaranteed to fail.  

Often, they disagree with your request, but won’t tell you that. In this case, if you know they disagree with it, you should ask them why—and then listen closely. They may have legitimate concerns about your request that deserve consideration. They may be right in their objections. In that case, you should reconsider and change direction.  

They may not do what you want because they don’t like you. This is more common than you think. Should a leader be likable? No. Should a leader be respected? Absolutely. If your people don’t like or respect you, that is a big problem. And that problem is yours. Don’t blame them because you are a leader not deserving of respect. You need to work on that before you can expect people to follow you. 

They may not do what you want because they want you to fail. This is more common than you might think. People sometimes want you to fail so they can get your job. People sometimes want you to fail just to make you look bad. People sometimes want you to fail so they don’t look bad. If that is the case, you need to replace them. There is nothing else you can do about an employee who wants you to fail.  

Sometimes, they fear they will look bad because you didn’t use their idea. Especially if your idea works and theirs doesn’t. Always be mindful of peer pressure. People always want to look good in front of their coworkers. If you aren’t going to use one of their ideas, don’t make a big deal out of it. Perhaps you could tell your team that the employee had a promising idea, but you just didn’t use it.  

Never assume that your employees are all-knowing. Many times, they are not. And most times, it is not their fault. It’s yours. Don’t just ignore the warning signs. Employees that “don’t do,” or “don’t know how to do” what you need can lead to all kinds of business problems, potentially even disasters. 

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether it should be more difficult for workers from “majority backgrounds,” such as white or heterosexual people, to prove workplace discrimination claims.

The justices took up an appeal by Marlean Ames, a heterosexual woman, seeking to revive her lawsuit against the Ohio Department of Youth Services in which she said she lost her job to a gay man and was passed over for a promotion in favor of a gay woman in violation of federal civil rights law.

The Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided last year that she had not shown the “background circumstances” that courts require to prove that she faced discrimination because she is straight, as she alleged.

She brought her lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal law banning workplace discrimination based on traits including race, sex, religion and national origin.

Since the 1980s, at least four other U.S. appeals courts have adopted similar hurdles to proving discrimination claims against members of majority groups, largely in cases involving white men. Those courts have said the higher bar is justified because discrimination against those workers is relatively uncommon.

But other courts have said that Title VII does not distinguish between bias against minority and majority groups.

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of Ames could provide a boost to the growing number of lawsuits by white and straight workers claiming they were discriminated against under company diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The court will hear arguments in the case in its new term, which begins on Monday, and a decision is expected by the end of June.

Lawyers for Ames and the Ohio agency, which oversees the confinement and rehabilitation of juvenile felony offenders, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ames was in charge of ensuring the agency’s compliance with a federal law designed to deter sexual assaults in prisons. She has said that despite receiving positive feedback for her job performance, she was demoted to her old job in 2019 and had her pay cut by nearly $20 an hour.

Ames has said she was replaced by a younger gay man, and that later in 2019 she was denied a promotion she had sought that went to a gay woman.

She sued the department in 2020. An Ohio federal judge dismissed the case last year, saying she had not shown the “background circumstances” to support her discrimination claim.

The 6th Circuit upheld that decision last December. The 6th Circuit said that background circumstances can include evidence that a member of a minority group, such as a gay person, made the challenged employment decision, or data showing a larger pattern of discrimination by an employer against members of a majority group.

—Daniel Wiessner, Reuters

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Since June, a mounting number of companies have pulled back on their corporate commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tractor Supply and John Deere were some of the first companies to do so, reversing some of their DEI policies and pulling sponsorship of Pride events and other “social or cultural awareness” events. In the months since, several others have followed suit—including Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, and Ford—and revoked their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which evaluates companies on how inclusive they are of LGBTQ+ employees.

Now, Toyota is joining their ranks, as the latest target of an anti-DEI push spearheaded by conservative activist Robby Starbuck. The automaker will no longer sponsor LGBTQ+ events and plans to “narrow our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness,” according to a Bloomberg report.

Like other companies, Toyota will also no longer participate in the Corporate Equality Index. In a letter announcing these changes to employees and dealers, Toyota referenced a “highly politicized discussion” of corporate DEI efforts, Bloomberg reported.

As with other companies, this about-face seems to have been catalyzed by Starbuck’s online campaign against Toyota. The activist drew attention to Toyota’s DEI policies and support for LGBTQ+ employees in a social media post last week, encouraging customers to share their concerns with the company. (Toyota had previously said that Starbuck’s post only prompted a handful of queries from employees, dealers, and customers, calling the effect “negligible.”)

While Toyota and other companies seem to be caving to public pressure, employers across corporate America have quietly taken similar steps in recent years. Since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, conservative activists have set their sights on the workplace, bringing lawsuits over claims of reverse discrimination.

As Fast Company has previously reported, some companies had already started pulling back on their DEI commitments prior to 2023. In the aftermath of the affirmative action ruling, however, the growing fear of litigation has prompted many others to make more substantial changes to their DEI policies and alter recruitment programs that were intended to promote diversity. It’s little surprise that in this climate, companies like Toyota are more vulnerable to campaigns to dismantle their DEI efforts.

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America’s employers added a surprisingly strong 254,000 jobs in September, easing concerns about a weakening labor market and suggesting that the pace of hiring is still solid enough to support a growing economy.

Last month’s gain was far more than economists had expected, and it was up sharply from the 159,000 jobs that were added in August. And after rising for most of 2024, the unemployment rate dropped for a second straight month, from 4.2% in August to 4.1% in September, the Labor Department said Friday.

The latest figures suggest that many companies are still confident enough to fill jobs despite the continued pressure of high interest rates.

In an encouraging sign, the Labor Department also revised up its estimate of job growth in July and August by a combined 72,000. Including those revisions, September’s job gain — forecasters had predicted only around 140,000 — means that job growth has averaged a solid 186,000 over the past three months. In August, the three-month average was only 140,000.

“There’s still more momentum than we had given it credit for,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at the banking company Santander, said of the job market. “I would call it solid — certainly not as explosive as what we were seeing last year or the year before, when we were catching up from the pandemic. But the pace of job growth overall is very healthy.”

The September job gains were fairly broad-based, a good trend if it continues. Restaurants and bars added 69,000 jobs. Healthcare companies gained 45,000, government agencies 31,000, social assistance employers 27,000 and construction companies 25,000. A category that includes professional and business services added 17,000 after having lost jobs for three straight months.

Average hourly raises were solid, too. They rose by a higher-than-expected 0.4% from August, slightly less than the 0.5% gain the month before. Measured from a year earlier, hourly wages climbed 4% in September, up a tick from a 3.9% year-over-year gain in August.

The economy’s progress in taming inflation led the Federal Reserve last month to cut its benchmark interest rate by a sizable half-point, its first rate cut in more than four years, and said further cuts were likely in the coming months. The Fed said it wanted to ease the cost of borrowing to help bolster the job market. In light of Friday’s strong jobs report, the Fed is now likely to reduce its key rate by more typical quarter-point increments.

“The September jobs report shows a nice bump in labor demand at the beginning of the fall,” said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank. “The U.S. economy is growing solidly in 2024 even as inflation slows to near the Fed’s target.”

The resilience of the economy has come as a relief. Economists had long expected that the Fed’s aggressive campaign to subdue inflation — it jacked up interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023 — would cause a recession. It didn’t. The economy kept growing even in the face of ever-higher borrowing costs for consumers and businesses.

Most economists say the Fed appears to have achieved the once-unlikely prospect of a “soft landing,” in which high interest rates help vanquish inflation without triggering a recession.

The economy is weighing heavily on voters as the Nov. 5 presidential election nears. Many Americans are unimpressed by the job market’s durability and are still frustrated by high prices, which remain on average 19% above where they were in February 2021. That was when inflation began surging as the economy rebounded with unexpected speed and strength from the pandemic recession, causing severe shortages of goods and labor.

The public’s discontent with inflation and the economy under President Joe Biden has been a political burden for Vice President Kamala Harris in her race for the White House against former President Donald Trump.

The jobs report for October, which the government will issue four days before Election Day, will likely be muddied by the effects of Hurricane Helene and a strike by Boeing machinists.

Across the economy, though, most indicators look solid. The U.S. economy, the world’s largest, grew at a vigorous 3% annual pace from April through June, boosted by consumer spending and business investment. A forecasting tool from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta points to slower but still healthy 2.5% annual growth in the just-ended July-September quarter.

While most U.S. companies are still cautious about hiring, some say they’re struggling to find workers. At Overthrow Hospitality, which operates 11 vegan restaurants in New York, Drew Brady, the chief operating officer, has stopped requiring job applicants to have restaurant experience.

Brady is seeking applicants who have a passion for food and a sense of the theatrical. His hourly staff now includes actors, students and foodies.

It’s difficult, he said, to find experienced restaurant managers. His latest crop includes a former school principal and a server who had no management experience.

“I can teach you how to manage a restaurant, but I can’t teach you how to care,” said Brady, whose restaurants employ between 100 and 150 workers.

The new approach, he said, appears to be succeeding, and he plans to maintain it even if more experienced applicants become available.

“The circumstances pushed us here,” Brady said. “But because of them, the light bulb went off. It’s a lesson in adaptation.”

Given Friday’s robust hiring report, economists say the Fed will almost certainly cut its benchmark rate in November by a modest quarter-point, after its larger-than-usual half-point reduction in September. The healthier the job market appears, the less aggressive the Fed would need to be in easing borrowing costs. The policymakers would want to avoid easing credit so fast as to reignite inflation pressures.

“The bottom does not appear to be falling out of the labor market,” said Jason Pride, chief of investment strategy at Glenmede.

After Friday’s jobs report was released, Wall Street traders priced in a sharply higher likelihood of a quarter-point, rather than a half-point, rate cut at the Fed’s November meeting: 93%, up from 68% on Thursday.

At Otis AI in New York, founder Miguel Guerrero said he’s optimistic that Fed rate cuts, which should lead to lower borrowing costs across the economy, will make it easier for startups like his to obtain financing to expand and hire.

“There’s a lot more optimism in the startup ecosystem for getting more funding,” he said. Otis AI helps companies advertise online.

After a round of tech industry layoffs last year, Guerrero said, “It’s easy for companies to find top-level talent right now.”

Yet the availability of experienced tech workers can make it difficult for younger applicants to find work. For a startup, Guerrero said, “it doesn’t make sense to put an entry-level person in there. You’re not going to have time to bring them up to speed.”

—Paul Wiseman, Associated Press economics writer

Anne D’Innocenzio and Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

East Colfax Avenue was the best place to find a job. That’s what everyone told Sofia Roca.

Never mind the open drug use, the sex workers or the groups of other migrant women marching the sidewalks soliciting work at the very same Mexican restaurants and bakeries.

On East Colfax in Aurora, Colorado, bosses and customers would speak Spanish and might be willing to hire someone like Roca—a 49-year-old immigrant from Colombia—without legal authorization to work. That was the rationale for going back to Colfax each morning, fruitless as it was.

“Do you know how to cook Mexican food?” asked one woman, looking up from the limes she was quartering, when Roca inquired about a kitchen position advertised on the door. Roca’s accent was a giveaway: not Mexican.

“I can learn,” Roca replied in Spanish.

Responded the woman: “We’re not hiring.”

As record numbers of South Americans attempt to cross the U.S. southern border seeking better economic opportunities, many are landing in communities that are unprepared for them—and sometimes outright hostile.

And many migrants have also been unprepared for the realities of their new home.

An influx of migrants strains one town

Women are leaving Colombia, and to a greater extent Venezuela, to escape starvation and violence, to provide for their children and to seek medical care. They represent some of the more than 42,000 migrants who have arrived in the Denver area over two years. Many didn’t know anyone in Denver. But it was the closest city to which Texas was offering free bus rides, both to relieve pressure on its towns and to make a political point to liberal-leaning cities about immigration’s impact on the border.

From Denver, untold numbers made their way to the neighboring suburb of Aurora, lured by cheaper rent and abundant Spanish speakers. But finding a job and an affordable place to stay has been anything but easy, and women face their own particular challenges.

Last year, nearly 900,000 women and girls tried to cross the U.S. southern border, more than a fivefold increase over the last decade, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows. Like many of them, Roca came to the United States to help her children. Her adult daughter back in Colombia suffers from lupus and can’t afford “the good medicines.”

The economy in Colombia never recovered from pandemic shutdowns, and Roca heard from acquaintances that in the United States she could earn $1,000 a week. “That’s a lot of money in Colombia,” she said. Back home, “one U.S. dollar can buy breakfast for your entire family.”

Roca set out for the United States with an uncle. He was detained in Mexico, but Roca made it across the border in Juárez and told U.S. agents she was seeking asylum. She heard from a shelter worker in El Paso that Denver was offering free housing for migrants and Texas would pay to get her there.

As of September, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bused at least 119,000 migrants from the border to cities run by Democratic mayors, including Denver, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., according to a press release from the governor’s office.

Roca arrived in November and stayed for two weeks in a hotel-turned-shelter paid for by the city of Denver. When she went looking for work in front of Home Depot and along East Colfax, she observed an icy reception from locals. “They said horrible things about Venezuelans,” she said.

She didn’t know the benefits many recent migrants have received—specifically, a path to a temporary work visa and with it better-paying jobs—were causing resentment among Aurora’s large Mexican community. Many have loved ones in the country illegally or have themselves lived for years in the United States without legal permission to work.

As chaos and economic collapse drove more migrants to the border, President Joe Biden’s administration created and expanded legal pathways to enter the U.S., with the possibility of applying for work permits. However, in June, Biden temporarily suspended asylum for new immigrants who cross illegally, ending a main pathway to legal work.

Roca never was eligible for a work permit, but Mexican residents in Aurora still associate her with the many migrants who are.

Resentment for newcomers was building in another corner of Aurora, too—City Hall. Aurora officials in February had warned other communities against housing migrants there, vowing not to spend city money to help them. This summer, Aurora’s mayor repeated a landlord’s claim that a notorious Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building, saying he would investigate how so many Venezuelans ended up living in Aurora. Even though police say gangs hadn’t taken over the building, former President Donald Trump took up the claim, mentioning it at his campaign rallies. The mayor last month walked back some of his comments.

She wants a job—but not in ‘the business’

Roca never made a deliberate decision to settle in Aurora. To her, it wasn’t clear where Denver ended and Aurora began, or that Denver was more eager to help migrants coming to the area.

So when her time is almost up at the Denver shelter, she does the only thing she knows to do: She heads to East Colfax in Aurora.

She walks up and down the sidewalks, dodging people who’d taken over the bus shelters to shoot up drugs or smoke fentanyl and who sell apparently shoplifted toiletries on the sidewalks. She approaches migrants holding cardboard signs and begging for money outside Walmart, asking if they know of work or a place to stay.

A man standing by his truck parked outside a Goodwill thrift store catches her attention. He is singing along to rap music in Spanish. He seems happy, she thinks. He seems like a good guy.

He says he can help her and her cousin, who arrived a few weeks earlier. But not in Colorado. She can come back to Kentucky with him and his family. To hold her over in the short term, the man—El Cubano, she calls him—gives her $10 and invites her for ice cream.

After more than a week of staying with the family in Kentucky and cooking and eating meals together, Roca learns El Cubano’s wife works in el negocio, or “the business.” There is not much work in Kentucky, so she earns her money through sex work, she tells Roca, while her kids play a few feet away.

A few days later, while they are cooking dinner together at the couple’s trailer, a Mexican man in his 30s pulls up outside in a pickup truck.

He’d seen a picture of Roca and liked her—and would pay $1,000 for two nights with Roca, the wife says. Roca would keep $600, the couple would get $400. Roca would have to pay him $6 for each ride to and from his house.

Roca stops chopping the onion and looks at her cousin. Don’t go with that man, the cousin says. You don’t know him.

Roca considers all of the jobs she’s done in her life. Caring for Alzheimer’s patients as a home health aide. Answering phones at a call center. Selling beauty products on the street in Mexico.

In her month in the United States, she has quickly come to understand she’ll have to make sacrifices in this country. That the reports she’d heard back in Colombia about earning $1,000 a week were likely hyperbole. That she’ll have to push her body to its limits doing manual labor. She’ll have to accept below-standard wages until she gets work permission, if it ever comes. She’ll have to stay in someone’s living room with other new arrivals and give up her privacy.
But subjecting herself to the whims of a stranger in such an intimate and vulnerable way?

“No,” she tells the woman. “I’m not going anywhere with anyone.”

The man is told to leave. The insults start immediately.

How are you going to earn money, girl? asks the woman. You’re not going to just live here for free. The food here is good, isn’t it? But it’s not free.

Roca doesn’t know what to expect—maybe violence. She and her cousin have no money or transportation. They’re essentially trapped. But a few days later, Roca leaves as El Cubano yells insults from his trailer. A Venezuelan woman she met outside Home Depot finds someone to help them leave Kentucky.
Where did they want to go? Somewhere she knew people, she remembers thinking. Somewhere with other migrants.

Back to Aurora and East Colfax Avenue.

Even among Aurora’s migrants, life isn’t better

Back in Aurora, Roca reached out to a Venezuelan woman she’d met briefly begging for money outside the Walmart on Colfax. Soon she took a place in the woman’s living room, sharing a queen-sized blow-up mattress with the woman’s teenage son.

Roca found a job on the weekends helping a man set up and break down his stall at an outdoor flea market. She hefted large sacks of used clothing over her shoulders, put out the clothing on display, talked to customers. All for $10 an hour. “It’s an abusive wage,” she said, “but it’s a job.”

She tried standing outside Home Depot, but found many people propositioned her for sex or wouldn’t pay her after she completed legitimate jobs. She gave up standing outside a day laborer’s center in Aurora when she didn’t feel safe trying to jockey for work against dozens of men, who would push her out of the way and jump onto moving trucks rounding up workers.

On most days walking along Colfax Avenue, Roca says, men would solicit her for sex, holding up their fingers to signal how many hundreds of dollars they were willing to pay.

As she looked for work in March, she came across what looked like an old motel, a place she hadn’t tried before. “Is this a hotel or a motel? I don’t know,” she said as she opened the heavy metal door. “Let’s check.”

In the small vestibule, a 1970s-era cigarette vending machine stood in the corner. A grandfatherly man waited behind a plexiglass sliding window. There were no vacancies, but he urged her to try the bar in the back. “They’re always looking for girls,” he said.

Roca walked to the rear of the building and recognized the name of the bar. “I know about this place,” she said.

At a few Mexican cantinas around Aurora and Denver, women are paid to talk and drink with men. “Ficheras,” as the women are known in Spanish, sell beers at a significant markup to men and pocket the profits. It can be a fast way to earn money, but also a route to sex trafficking or the drug trade. Visit these establishments, and you can see some “ficheras” wearing government-issued ankle bracelets with their sky-high heels. The bracelets were given to them by federal immigration officials to monitor their movements while they await immigration hearings.

“I don’t think I have to do that yet,” Roca said. “But this street—it only offers prostitution.”

She boards another Greyhound—and moves on

Since returning to Aurora, Roca had discovered she has few options for establishing legal residence or working legally in the U.S. She told U.S. Border Patrol officials she plans to plead for asylum at her deportation hearing next year, but she doubts they will grant it. Ironically, what happened to her in Kentucky could help her win a visa. The U.S. government issues special visas to victims of sex trafficking here, but Roca has never wanted to report the Cuban couple, fearing they might come after her.

She had gotten in touch through Facebook with a high school friend from Colombia living for the last year in the northeastern United States. “She’s told me she can get me a job at a hotel and I can stay with her,” she said. “What would you do if you were me?” she asked a reporter. “Would you go?”

The idea of learning to move around a new American city exhausted Roca. But without more work, there wasn’t much keeping her in Aurora. Her roommates were headed to eviction court the next week. She didn’t know where she would go if they lost the apartment.

Two days later, with about $80 in her pocket, Roca boarded a Greyhound bus paid for by the city of Denver. She landed in a new town—one that hasn’t received busloads of migrants from Texas—and reunited with her high school friend. (The Associated Press is not identifying her new location, since Roca is afraid the Cuban couple might seek her out after she spoke about them in the media.)

Roca’s friend followed through on her promises, allowing her to live with her and connecting her to a job cleaning hotel rooms. Roca has already changed jobs and has found one she likes better. She walks through the city with ease—and anonymously.

“It’s a huge difference from my life in Denver,” she says. “There’s less chaos, and no one has disrespected me. It’s been a great refuge.”

She’s not sure how long she’ll stay. But Sofia Roca will never live in Aurora, Colorado, again.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—Bianca Vázquez Toness, AP Education Writer

From Maine to Texas, 45,000 dockworkers went on strike Tuesday after the International Longshoremen’s Association’s (ILA) contract with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) expired. The two sides had reached a stalemate over pay, but also the union wanted a guarantee that technology would not be used to replace them.

On Thursday, the parties reached an agreement to suspend the strike, increase wages 62% wage over six years, and to extend the existing contract until Jan. 15, 2025. However, they did not come to a final agreement on automation.

Now the ILA and the USMX will return to the bargaining table to negotiate dockworkers’ demands for a ban on all automation at the ports.

In a Facebook post prior to the tentative deal, Jack Pennington, president of the ILA’s local 28 chapter, emphasized how important this guarantee is for dockworkers. 

The ILA is “taking a hard stand on the never ending threat of automation that is infiltrating our industry, and I have heard the remarks from those that say we need to learn how to deal with it!” wrote Pennington. “Well I have a message for those people ‘kiss my fat A$$’!”

Pennington and the ILA aren’t the first to see automation as an existential threat. From autoworkers to screenwriters, there is a decades-long history of workers fighting to limit automation. But now, as advancements in technologies like generative AI, machine learning, and robotics accelerate, experts say we are witnessing a make-or-break moment for workers. Many see AI as the defining labor issue of our time. 

Douglas Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, says we are currently at “an inflection point.”

“Right now, we’re in a period of such rapid technological change, particularly with regard to AI and, to some extent, robotics,” says Calidas. “It seems that more jobs are at risk of automation than at any time in recent history. And it seems like the scope of the risk is only going to accelerate.”

Organizing against automation

At the beginning of negotiations in May, the ILA demanded a 77% pay raise for its members over the six years of their new contract—as well as a ban on the use of automation in the use of cranes, gates, and moving shipping containers. The USMX issued a counteroffer promising a 50% pay raise over six years, but only agreed to keep the existing limits on automation that the old contract covered.

In June, the ILA discovered that two of the biggest companies in the industry, APM Terminals and Maersk Line, had been using an “Auto Gate” system, which autonomously processes trucks without ILA labor. Organizers argued that this technology breached previous agreements about the use of automation.

Many ports have adopted new data-driven tools over the past several decades. For instance, some workers now use hardware and software tools to autonomously coordinate the arrival of trucks with shipping containers. However, ILA has drawn a clear line in the sand around technology that replaces, rather than augments, workers. 

“The ILA is steadfastly against any form of automation—full or semi—that replaces jobs or historical work functions. We will not accept the loss of work and livelihood for our members due to automation,” reads the ILA’s message on Oct. 1. “Our position is clear: the preservation of jobs and historical work functions is non-negotiable.”

Automation and safety

The U.S. Government Accountability Office recently analyzed the adoption of automotive technologies in the country’s biggest ports and found that automation can improve worker safety by “separating humans from machines.” However, the GAO report also found that automation had “mixed effects on the workforce, security, and performance.”

“I guess the argument is there are fewer people to be hurt,” says Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department.

Some have suggested that reducing worker injuries and worker mistakes could improve shipping company’s bottom lines. “Apart from accidents, mislabeling or misdirecting cargo at a port could also hit businesses’ revenue. Replacing fallible human workers could thus save port operators a lot of money,” wrote Kit Eaton, a news writer for Inc. 

Stephen Edwards, the Port of Virginia’s chief executive, recently touted that automation helped his port perform well when cargo shipments surged in 2021 and 2022—and again in 2024 when a container ship crashed into the Baltimore Key Bridge, diverting shipments to Virginia. 

Worker safety has been a common argument used by companies dating back to the invention of the assembly line. For instance, when Amazon announced that it would adopt new robotic arms and sorting machines fueled by artificial intelligence into its warehouses in 2023, the retail giant promised that the new tech would also help address safety issues for its workers.

At the time, Chris Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, told Fast Company that it seems inevitable that Amazon may eventually use the new technology to cut jobs, even if it didn’t happen overnight. “I just hope to see that these jobs are unionized and they have some say in how the AI and technology is being incorporated,” he said. 

Amanda Ballantyne, director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute, stresses that automation does not inherently increase worker safety. 

“It is a myth that automating technologies automatically makes everything safer,” she says. “The labor movement is not anti-technology. We are pro-worker and we are totally in favor of technologies that make our jobs better and safer and more efficient. But it is not the case that technology in general just does that. There are good technologies and bad technologies for workers.”

And many, including Regan, don’t buy the argument that employers’ investments in autonomous technology is an altruistic attempt to help workers. “Historically, when our employers try to use any sort of new technological advancement in their operations, it’s never done with a mindset toward improving operations, improving safety, or using it as a tool to make workers better able to do their jobs effectively and safely,” says Regan. “Instead, it’s almost always used as a way to reduce headcount.” 

Historical precedent

Bruce Kogut is a professor of economic sociology and director of the Sanford C. Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. His grandfather and father both worked as dockworkers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But as the shipping industry evolved, Kogut’s father was retrained to be a doctor, right down at the Navy Yard.

He suggests there may be opportunities for AI to augment dockworkers’ work, rather than replace them—similar to how a pilot might use technology. “It’s one of those stories of generational change, but I don’t want to be too [much of a] Pollyanna,” says Kogut.

But what he hopes people learn from his family’s story is that “it’s good when workers have negotiating power.” 

Kogut explains that from New York to New Orleans to Long Beach, dockworkers have historically wielded a particularly high level of political power because they often employ a large volume of workers and because their work impacts a large swath of the economy. Analysts estimate that shipping industry profits have topped $400 billion from 2020 to 2023.

It appears automation is the final sticking point of negotiations today, and it was back in 1977, too. “The final hurdle, a dispute over job security, was cleared yesterday,” wrote The Washington Post when the 1977 strike officially ended. “The ILA, whose ranks have [shrunk] in the growing automation of the waterfront, had been demanding new income and benefit guarantees.”

And though dockworkers were given a 30% pay increase, then-ILA President Thomas W. Gleason said that the deal would not increase shipping costs because “productivity has gone up 1,500%” thanks to automation.”

Since then, automation—and by association, job security—has been a primary concern for many major labor actions, says Kogut, pointing to the 2007 autoworkers’ strike at GM.

During negotiations, GM pushed hard to offload $51 billion in unfunded retiree health costs for the company’s 339,000 retirees and surviving spouses into a health care trust called a Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association, or VEBA. Workers were still more concerned about job security.

“This strike is not about the VEBA in any way shape or form,” said Ron Gettelfinger, then-president of United Auto Workers. “The No. 1 issue here is job security.”

A more recent example is of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA‘s 2023 strikes. The WGA’s 150-day-long walkout notched wins for union members, including compensation increases and minimum staffing requirements for writers rooms, better residual payments for streaming, and protections against AI being used to replace writers or being trained on their work. (Editor’s note: Fast Company is unionized through WGA East.)

The SAG-AFTRA strike lasted 118 days and established rules that studios must give workers notice, consent, and compensation regarding the use of AI-created digital replicas of actors. In 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom also signed a bill prohibiting studios from making AI replicas of deceased actors without their consent—a victory that SAG-AFTRA fought for. 

The rise of automation

While pay, benefits, and working conditions remain significant priorities for workers across all industries, Ballantyne says many labor unions are focused on limiting AI, fearing it will eliminate jobs, make workers less autonomous, and reduce transparency.

“All of the recent big bargaining that’s happened has included elements of data-driven technology and AI,” says Ballantyne. “What you see consistently is that workers want transparency. They want to know what technology is operating in their shop. They want a say in how that technology can and can’t be used. They want a say in whether and when they use that technology. And they want a share in the benefits that that technology creates.”

A wide range of industries have introduced additional automation in recent years. In 2023, the World Economic Forum reported that automation will lead to 26 million fewer jobs by 2027. And the International Monetary Fund predicts that 40% of jobs worldwide and 60% of jobs in “advanced economies” such as the U.S. are exposed to AI-driven disruption. 

The use of robotic technologies is also increasing dramatically. The International Federation of Robotics estimates that the use of robots increased by 10% last year and that a record-breaking 4,281,585 robots are currently automating production around the world.

Going forward, Calidas says he expects automation to be a major sticking point of labor negotiations because of how far-ranging the impacts are. 

“The risks of automation are, all of a sudden, metastasizing, and hitting all swaths of the economy. And a lot of people [who] never really thought that their jobs were vulnerable will probably start feeling more and more insecure over the coming years,” he says. “That has all kinds of effects on [politics], on the way that people train for new jobs, and on how they consider their careers.”

The idea of a financial fast, a term coined by author Michelle Singletary, is that for a specified period of time, you cut out any nonessential spending. Groceries and utility bills are fine, but DoorDash is a no. 

I knew I needed to make a change in my spending habits, and I was willing to get drastic, so for three weeks in September, I gave it a try. But I didn’t really consider how uncomfortable it would make me and what painful lessons I would learn from the experiment. 

I approached my fast from two directions: squeeze more money and value out of my existing resources, and stop spending on nonessentials. I was decidedly better at one tactic than another.

Take advantage of existing resources

I’ll admit I enjoyed the creative experiment of  digging through the meats and vegetables that had been piling up in the freezer in order to whip up new meals. That staved off a grocery trip for more than a week. By hitting the farmers market the following week I was able to drastically slash my usual grocery budget. Even small things, like squeezing an extra two weeks out of the bottle of dish soap that looked like it was done, added up.

Monthly subscriptions are another simple way to trim the fat from my spending. This was immensely satisfying, actually: app subscription fatigue is a real thing. I had a dozen or more books queued up in Audible anyway, and I even managed to find a couple of streaming subscriptions I didn’t even realize I was still paying for. I ended up cutting $78 per month in streaming subscriptions, that over the course of a year might  add up to a vacation. I discovered a wealth of forgotten favorite sweaters instead of buying new ones; I delved into the books on my “to be read” list rather than buying the newest bestseller.

These exercises helped me realize the riches I already do have. And the savings helped cover the unexpected expenses that life has a tendency to throw at everyone: in my case, an unexpected vet bill and car repair bill.

Curb nonessential spending

The first 10 days were a breeze: I declined invitations for dinner and drinks and was proud of my virtuousness. After that, though, not so much. A friend had a free ticket to see one of my favorite bands in concert, so it seemed like a no-brainer. But a $25 Lyft ride and a $55 bar bill at the concert venue pretty much wiped away the savings I’d added from my earlier frugality. I held a book event and earned money through sales, then frittered away a portion of that with a celebratory dinner immediately afterwards. The initial euphoria at saving soon paled in the face of everything I was missing out on. 

That’s not surprising, says Nicole L. Hoag, a certified financial planner at Schwartz & Co. She doesn’t recommend a financial fast for her clients because “it is unsustainable. Financial wellness is a lot like any other major habit change,” she says. She recommends that her clients instead “gradually cut back to cut it out” instead of trying to drastically fix everything at once and suffer the backlash. 

Slow and steady

“My tip is to make small, almost imperceptible changes at first,” says Hoag. The changes I had already made were a good and sustainable way to start. Fewer dinners out, reevaluating subscriptions, utilities and insurance policies, are all on her list of recommended changes. Even more importantly, she says, is to curb the ‘worry about it later’ mentality. Our reliance on credit cards and need for instant is a major problem. Everyone’s situation will be different,” she says, “but what got you into financial distress is sometimes more important to address than the financial problem itself.” Hoag stresses the importance of building healthy spending and saving patterns over time, rather than a fix-it-all-right-now approach.  

In addition to the slow-and-steady approach to saving, Hoag also recommends regular financial checkups. “Any day that ends in a y” is a good time, she says, but she advises her clients to consult their financial professionals “particularly prior to major life events: moving, buying a house, a major medical issue, marriage, divorce, babies, college, retirement, caring for ill or aging family.”

Although I’m glad I tried the experiment, I’m not sure I’d take such drastic measures again. The financial fast did give me a chance to pore over my expenditures and take a hard look at how lifestyle creep might be affecting my spending patterns. As Emily Guy Birken wrote in a recent Fast Company article, “Financial fasting defines what you value,” and I discovered that I’m happy to trim the budget on groceries but value my entertainment and socializing time too much to quit it cold turkey.

Part of the reason for the financial fast is to distinguish the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. Now I will plan for these expenses rather than imagining that I can abstain. At the very least, my three-week financial reset reminded me to check in with my financial advisor more frequently, and to take advantage of the wealth of audiobooks and sweaters I’ve rediscovered. 

On September 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida. Since then, Helene has swept across the Southeast, demolishing homes, and leaving many cities without water and electricity. According to NBC News, more than 200 people have died as a result of the hurricane’s destruction.

Since the Hurricane made landfall, first responders have been on the frontlines helping people who’ve been affected, removing debris, and providing food and water, and medical aid. And many first responders from states like Alabama, New Jersey, and New York have crossed state lines to help others.

But the important work first responders do doesn’t start with the strike of a hurricane. First responders work tirelessly to make sure as much preparation is done before a natural disaster hits. Here’s what it is like to be, and become, a first responder.

Before the storm

First responders volunteering through Team Rubicon, a nonprofit specializing in disaster response, started preparing for Hurricane Helene as early as May. However, they train all year to ensure that they are ready for any disaster that strikes. 

The organization regularly conducts what they call a “tabletop exercise” in which all the volunteers learn their roles for the coming months. During this exercise, they also plan out procedures for the next few months, from communication to equipment to training. 

When first responders begin training they typically choose which field of work they are most interested in. For instance, first responders can learn how to coordinate with fire departments, how to use heavy equipment like chainsaws, or how to provide medical care. 

“I like to use sports analogies, that in the entire emergency management system, you can’t assemble the winning team on the day of the game,” says Art delaCruz, CEO of Team Rubicon. “You have to practice, you have to train, you have to collect the right people to do it.”

A typical day as a first responder

DelaCruz explains that his team lives by a saying: “Do what you do best and outsource the rest.” For this reason, Team Rubicon volunteers often do tasks such as making sure roadways are clear for other first responders, emergency medics, and supply deliveries.

Recently, Team Rubicon volunteers cleared over 20 acres of covered roadways, which equates to about 16 football fields, 10,000 cubic yards, and “1,050 dump trucks” of debris, according to delaCruz. 

When not out in the field, first responders often sleep on cots in highschool gymnasiums, camp on the side of roads, or live in their trucks.

Teams of first responders typically have systems in place to establish a feeling of camaraderie and promote safety. This ranges from doing a safety briefing before every new work site to debriefing about each day and what they encountered.

“We talk about it internally as a campfire where we can sit around…and share the stories of the day,” explains Jacob Nilz, senior associate of training at Team Rubicon. Nilz stresses how important it is for first responders’ mental health to share stories, process the tragic events they have seen and “to offload the mental and emotional stuff we’re experiencing every day.”

Every group of first responders has an experienced team leader with them as well as a medical person. They emphasize the mentality that each individual is a safety officer and they all team members are meant to look out for each other and keep each other safe.

A range of first responders

While Team Rubicon focuses on clearing roads, other kinds of first responders focus on providing essential goods and services to people who have experienced natural disasters.

Dr. Parinda Khatri, CEO of Cherokee Health Systems in Knoxville, Tennessee says that the hurricane has left many without access to water and medical supplies. 

Khatri says the municipal water supply in Knoxville, Tennessee is out and that she was told that it could be two or three weeks before it gets restored. “Our team went to like 12 grocery stores, got 200 or 300 cases of water, ran out by 11:30 yesterday,” she says. The community is also running out of medical supplies says Khatri, noting that their only pharmacy in Newport is underwater.

Some first responders, such as those who work with Direct Relief, a nonprofit that provides medical supplies during emergencies, are trying to send medical backpacks to help with some of these struggles. 

Many Hurricane Helene survivors and first responders are also struggling with communication because cell coverage is shut down in many rural areas.

Footprint Project, an organization devoted to giving communities clean energy during crises, has sent out first responders who distribute portable batteries and solar power. So far Footprint Project has distributed batteries which are helping to run oxygen tanks at a health and rehabilitation center, as well as three mobile home communities without power or water. In one community that depends on well water, Footprint Project provided portable power which has helped to get the well running again. 

Together, these different first responders are working tirelessly to help people get the supplies and safety they need. Next, communities will start to rebuild.

Over the past couple of decades, attention spans have shrunk. Tethered to our computers and smartphones, we carry our little devices everywhere, a few clicks away from all the information we need to survive. 

The rise of the digital age has impacted our ability to focus and remember. We’re living at a time when memorizing isn’t required to get through day-to-day life. Worried about forgetting someone’s birthday? Just set an automatic reminder. Don’t know the route you’re supposed to take to that restaurant you’ve driven to only once? Enter the destination on your GPS of choice. Forget about remembering your emergency contact’s phone numbers. In a 2023 survey of 423 respondents older than 16, 21% admitted to typing “What’s my phone number” into Google.

What is memory? 

Memory is the process by which our brains filter and retain important information, helping us make sense of the world and navigate its uncertainties. Memory allows us to reason, plan, and imagine, and it’s crucial for communication, connection, identity formation, and grounding ourselves in time and space.

Rather than being a perfect record of past events, memory serves as a dynamic resource that evolves based on new experiences and insights, according to professor Charan Ranganath, director of the Memory and Plasticity program at the University of California, Davis. 

The things we usually call memories are part of the episodic memory system, which stores memories of episodes of your life, like having a conversation with a colleague or going to the grocery store, explained Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, in a previous Fast Company report. 

When we recall a memory, we don’t simply replay the past as it happened. Instead, we reimagine how the past could have been, adapting our memories to fit the present context. For instance, if someone you trust lies to you, or you get food poisoning after enjoying a meal at a restaurant, you revise your memories based on this new information to better navigate similar situations in the future. This adaptability helps our memories stay relevant as our lives and environments change​. 

“When we look at memory as a resource to pull from, as opposed to a comprehensive archive of the past, we can make mindful choices in the present to curate a rich set of memories to take with us into the future,” Ranganath said in a previous Fast Company report. 

One approach to thinking about how the brain stores memories is based on economics, Markman wrote in a previous Fast Company report. The currency of the brain is energy, and the brain itself is an energy-hungry organ. To build a new memory, structures have to grow that influence the neurons in the pathway that is storing that memory, to ensure that the pattern of brain activity associated with that memory can be created again.

Memories are more likely to be stored when the cost of creating the new connection is likely to reduce the time the brain will have to spend doing something in the future. The brain is investing energy now to reduce future costs.

For example, if you have an important and deep conversation with a colleague, there is likely to be future time savings in storing a memory of that conversation. When you see that colleague again, remembering that conversation will make the next discussion more efficient.

This energy-based evaluation is further influenced by two key factors, according to Markman: desirable difficulty and intense emotions. Desirable difficulty is when a task is challenging but productive, signaling to the brain that it is worth storing the memory to improve future performance. 

On the other hand, intense emotions—whether positive, like excitement, or negative, like shock or pain—amplify the brain’s calculation that the memory will be useful later.

By leveraging these mechanisms, the brain dynamically stores memories likely to enhance our ability to navigate similar future scenarios, rather than simply serving as a comprehensive archive of every experience.

Three situations when you’re more likely to forget—and what to do about it

When multitasking: This one feels obvious. You can’t remember something if you aren’t paying attention.

Multitasking is a major culprit when it comes to memory issues. Studies show that most people are not good at multitasking, despite thinking otherwise. Every time you switch tasks—such as checking emails or responding to messages while in a meeting—you pay a “switching cost,” according to Ranganath. 

This constant shifting leads to fragmented, blurry memories, making it hard to retain important details. You’re more likely to make mistakes, it will take longer to complete tasks, and you won’t retain much of what you did. To improve memory, you should focus on one task at a time and minimize distractions.

Research shows a strong correlation between poor memory and attention lapses and media multitasking. Memory depends heavily on goal-directed cognition. Essentially we need to be ready to remember, have attention engaged, and a memory goal in mind to retrieve our memories, according to Anthony Wagner, the Lucie Stern Professor in the social sciences at Stanford University. 

“While it’s logical that attention is important for learning and for remembering, an important point here is that the things that happen even before you begin remembering are going to affect whether or not you can actually reactivate a memory that is relevant to your current goal,” Wagner said to Stanford Report. 

When you intend to do something and it slips your mind: At home, if one partner always intends to do household tasks but forgets, it increases the mental load of the person picking up the slack. At work, forgetting to send out that email or attend that meeting can impact your career. Forgetfulness can build a lot of resentment if left unaddressed. 

“Whether you intend to vote, get a flu shot, or meditate, there is an action/attention gap that’s as wide as the Grand Canyon. And it’s so solvable,” Katy Milkman, a professor of operations, information, and decisions at the Wharton School, told Fast Company reporter Stephanie Vozza.

To overcome that gap, Milkman suggests thinking through all the logistical details required to implement the given task in order to anticipate pitfalls in advance and commit to the plan. 

“You’re more likely to follow through once you make a commitment. It feels uncomfortable to go back on it when something is concrete versus a vague intention. If you commit, you’ll be backing out on yourself,” Milkman told Fast Company. 

She also recommends setting up “cues”—anything that triggers your memory, such as an event or location—to prompt you to take action. For example, getting a raise could be a cue to increase your monthly retirement contribution. 

Reminders are useful when we can act on them immediately. Plan ahead and leverage technology to send yourself timely reminders in advance. 

When you work with others: After an argument with someone, they often seem to have a totally different recollection of events—one in which they didn’t do anything wrong. At work, if you ask coworkers how a project came together, they may have totally different memories of who came up with what ideas.

Why? One reason is ego. We all tend to paint ourselves as the hero of our own life story. 

Our brains tend to rewrite history even as it’s happening, Markman explained. We tend to interpret our own actions in the most charitable way and give less credit to others than they may deserve. As much of this interpretation happens as the event is initially experienced, they become baked into the memory of the event. 

While it’s not a bad thing for our memories to focus on our side of the story, to get a full picture of what happened, we need to use each other to fill in our gaps. If all else fails, we can always fall back on the tried-and-true method of taking notes by hand. 

“When you’re writing, you’re thinking more, and you might have more insight about what is most important at the time,” Princeton University psychological scientist Pam Mueller told Fast Company. Science has shown that taking notes by hand makes you more likely to retain information. 

Strategies to improve your memory for a specific task

While memory can be tricky, there are plenty of ways to boost it now and over time. Here are some actionable tips to improve memory in the moment, as you aim to memorize, remember, or recall lectures, notes, lists, and more. 

Utilize systems and associations: Our brains can handle only three to four chunks of information at a time, according to neuroscientists. To get around the loophole, sort facts and information into chunks through mnemonic devices, such as acronyms, rhymes, and songs. 

Teachers regularly employ mnemonics: Young children often learn their ABCs with the “ABC song” and the 50 states in alphabetical order through the “Fifty Nifty United States” song. Kathleen Davis, deputy editor at Fast Company, adapted this technique to teach her kids to remember her phone number by turning it into an earworm of a song.

The ultimate proof that this method works: When I was in elementary school, my friend taught me how to remember the four cardinal directions (Never Eat Soggy Waffles). Fifteen years later, my brain still recites it on autopilot. 

Focus on what you want to remember: Hopefully, you remember the pitfalls of multitasking. (You’re more likely to make mistakes, it will take longer to complete tasks, and you won’t retain much of what you did.) So, it makes sense that one of the best ways to remember things is to focus. 

While the first step is to switch off and remove yourself from distractions, Fast Company’s Davis said she takes it a step further by purposefully pausing in the moment to soak it all in. 

“Before I got married, everyone told me that my wedding day would be a blur and I wouldn’t remember much of it,” Davis wrote. “So on the day, in the middle of a beautiful moment, I made sure to pause and tell myself to remember it. Twelve years later, and I still remember those moments.” 

Write it down: Writing by hand is more than just a nostalgic practice; it’s a powerful memory booster. 

Many studies show that writing notes by hand is more effective for retaining information. The most annoying thing about writing by hand is also what makes it so effective for learning: It forces us to slow down.

When you write by hand, you write more thoughtfully. Such mindful writing rests the brain, unlocking potential creativity, said neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre. “Recent neuroscientific research has uncovered a distinct neural pathway that is only activated when we physically draw out our letters,” she wrote. “And this pathway, etched deep with practice, is linked to our overall success in learning and memory.”

Embrace error-driven learning: The brain is wired to learn from mistakes and challenges, a phenomenon called error-driven learning. 

Attempting to recall a memory is like a stress test, said Ranganath. If your brain struggles to do it, once you get the answer, the brain can repair the coalition of neurons that are responsible for pulling up that memory so that next time, it can come up more easily.

Error-driven learning explains the benefits that come when we actively learn by doing rather than passively learn by memorizing. It helps explain why students benefit more from practice tests than simply studying. This is also a key reason why students are generally better at retaining information after they have been tested on the material rather than if they only studied it.

The implication is huge. We learn the most when we are being productively challenged. 

Engage your senses: Focusing on the sights, smells, sounds, and other sensory information in the moment can help create lasting memories, according to Ranganath. This approach can be especially helpful in locating misplaced items, like keys. So, if you’re trying to create a lasting memory, stop and take in all the sensory information you can, even momentarily, while you put your keys away. 

“Later on, when you need to find your keys, you’ll call to mind that sensory information that puts you back to that moment where you set them down,” Ranganath said.

That may seem impossible when you’re doing common, everyday things, but that’s the point. If you are chronically forgetting something, taking that extra time can provide a solution. 

Tie your memory to a creative storyline: Although there are a number of science-backed strategies when it comes to making connections and enhancing your memory, when you really think about the underpinnings of a strong memory, it has everything to do with creativity, memory training specialist Harry Lorayne told Fast Company. 

To enhance your memory, instead of coming up with devices that have no association in your brain, pretend you’re working on a creative project and come up with a story about whatever you’re trying to remember. 

When it comes to memorization, it’s the feelings and senses that make all the difference. Think back to the strongest memories you have—there’s a good chance those memories are linked to some kind of strong emotion or sensation. 

Create a “memory palace”: Katie Kermode, one of the top 100 memory athletes in the world, told Fast Company that she creates what she calls a memory palace in her head to store and recall information by anchoring it to familiar locations. 

To build one, choose a space you know well, like your home, and mentally assign pieces of information to different rooms or objects within that space. For example, if you’re trying to memorize a list of kings and queens from England, you might anchor each name to a specific object in the palace. Then, create a story around each name and its corresponding location and object in your memory palace. 

When you need to recall the information, simply “journey” through your memory palace. 

“If they’re just names, it doesn’t really mean anything, but if they all have a different place, you can create a whole story and environment around each one,” Kermode said. “So, every time you learn a new fact, you have somewhere to put it and it helps you anchor that new fact somewhere.”

Lifestyle changes to improve memory over time 

In addition to the tips and tricks provided above to bolster your ability to remember specific things in specific situations, below is a compilation of several research-backed lifestyle changes you can make to improve your memory over time. 

Exercise: Recent research shows that physical activity has positive impacts on the brain, particularly as it relates to memory. Healthy individuals who did moderate exercise for 25 minutes at least four days a week had bigger brains than those who didn’t. The differences were especially prevalent in the aspects of the brain that are responsible for thinking and memory. 

Memory champion Kermode said she is more alert when she tries to memorize something after exercising. 

Diversify your brain’s “training data”: Advanced artificial intelligence products acquire knowledge by plowing through massive amounts of human-generated training data. Humans, in contrast, get “training data” from our lived experiences, as we go to different places and interact with different people. 

Episodic memory (the ability to travel back in time to past events) allows us to use our unique experiences to update our knowledge and flexibly adapt to new situations rapidly. To maximize our episodic memory, Ranganath recommends diversifying our training data.

By changing our scenery, stepping out of our comfort zone, and exposing ourselves to people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, we can form richer, more distinctive episodic memories. 

When we don’t diversify our training data, like during the pandemic lockdown, we have impoverished memories. As we spent each day sitting in the same room, interacting with the same people (mostly over screens), the days seemed to go on forever, and yet by the end of the week, we were left with few memories of what we did during that time.

In the age of generative AI, Ranganath said we can expect a premium to be placed on human creativity and innovation, which benefits from diversified lived experiences. 

“A new work of art, music, or literature doesn’t arise out of thin air—it emerges from the process of integrating elements from different past experiences,” he wrote. “What makes human imagination special is that it offers a version of reality marked by the idiosyncrasies of its creator, rather than a perfect recording. The same can be said of memory because our memories reflect both what we experienced and our interpretations of what happened.”

Journal: Once seen as the hobby of teenage girls, journaling has now become a staple of the self-care movement. And for good reason—research highlights numerous health benefits, including enhanced working memory.

I’ve personally not been able to fall into a daily routine of filling a journal page, though I do find that in times of high emotion, writing it all down is the most effective way to calm myself down and organize my thoughts. 

I have found a small routine. I’ve downloaded a journal app that sends me a notification daily. Though I often don’t find time to write as much as I think I should, I can always find a minute to at least attach a picture of my day and add a little note about my current moment. Reading the daily details and scrolling through the photos jogs my memory, helping me reconstruct days otherwise forgotten. 

Remove memory blockers: Set up your environment for success. That includes everything from your physical surroundings to how you’re notified about messages and tasks. Take time to eliminate “memory blockers.” This means choosing your technology’s notifications carefully, arranging your workspace thoughtfully, and setting up reminders to support your memory. 

Pause and rest: While getting enough good sleep is important for memory, it’s also important to take breaks and pause on the information you’ve taken in. 

These pauses are “exceptionally important,” Ranganath told Fast Company reporter Gwen Moran. Depending on the context, pauses let you strengthen a memory or prioritize the information you’re taking in. 

Pick up a book: While puzzles like sudoku and crosswords are often touted as memory-building tools, research from the Beckman Institute found that reading novels may be even more effective for preserving memory as you age. According to the study, reading engages both working memory and episodic memory. As we dive into a novel, our episodic memory recalls what happened in previous chapters, while our working memory helps us keep track of what happened in recent paragraphs.  

Call a friend: Stress can negatively impact your memory, but low to moderate levels of stress, when managed well, can actually improve it. A study from the University of Georgia found that participants who claimed they had support from family and friends also appeared more able to cope with low to moderate stress levels in a healthy manner. Those who had low to moderate levels of perceived stress also had elevated working memory neural activation, resulting in better mental performance.

Calling a friend or leaning on your social circle during stressful times can strengthen your mental performance and memory, as numerous studies show social support is essential for maintaining psychological health. 

Use your smartphone: Contrary to popular belief, relying on your smartphone can actually boost your memory. Research from University College London (UCL) shows that digital devices help people store and remember important information, in turn freeing up their memory to recall additional less-important things. 

“The results show that external memory tools work. Far from causing ‘digital dementia,’ using an external memory device can even improve our memory for information that we never saved,” Sam Gilbert, professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL, said in a statement. 

A relaxing and creative endeavor

Improving your memory doesn’t have to be a daunting task. By incorporating simple lifestyle changes—and embracing creative strategies and mental tools like the examples above—memory enhancement can be both rewarding and enjoyable. 

Memory champion Kermode said she views memory training as a fun and relaxing creative endeavor. 

“You can take time out and remember what you learn, and it’s quite relaxing, in a way,” she told Fast Company. “I think it’s a shame that we don’t memorize anything at all. Those abilities are still there. We just need to use them.”

Whether you’re mentally designing a memory palace, writing notes by hand, or even leveraging the technology around you, improving your memory is ultimately about enhancing your daily experiences and sharpening the way you navigate the world.

One of the most valuable skills a leader can have is the ability to identify and nurture high-potential talent. Drawing from my own experiences on both sides of this relationship, I’ve learned that investing in your team’s growth isn’t just beneficial for individuals—it’s crucial for the long-term success of your organization. 

When I joined IBM in 2006, I worked with a truly great manager who exemplified the importance of recognizing and investing in high-potential talent. Her approach highlighted the value of internal promotion, strategic networking, and mentorship. These insights have shaped my leadership philosophy throughout my career. 

Recognize future leaders 

Identifying high-potential employees isn’t always straightforward. They may not be the most vocal team members but high performers who see and act on gaps or opportunities that others may miss. The key attributes I’ve learned to look for are: 

• Intellectual curiosity: Pay attention to employees who ask insightful questions and demonstrate a genuine interest in understanding the company’s broader mission and operations. This curiosity often leads to innovative thinking and effective cross-functional collaboration. 

• Adaptability and teamwork: Notice individuals who consistently contribute their best effort, regardless of the task at hand. The most promising future leaders understand the importance of flexibility and are willing to take on diverse responsibilities for the organization’s benefit. 

• Positive impact on others: Implement comprehensive feedback systems. When colleagues consistently report positive experiences working with someone, it’s a strong indicator of that person’s potential and their ability to influence others positively. 

How to invest in high-potential talent 

Once you’ve identified these promising individuals, it’s essential to invest in their growth. Here are strategies I’ve found effective: 

• Facilitate meaningful connections: I regularly host small group discussions with high-potential employees from various departments. These sessions are a great way to encourage connections, foster collaboration, and provide valuable insights into their perspectives and aspirations. 

• Broaden their organizational understanding: Introduce your high-potential employees to colleagues in other departments. This expands their comprehension of the organization and helps them build valuable relationships across different business areas. 

• Provide leadership opportunities: Entrust these individuals with leading key projects. With appropriate support, they can further develop their leadership capabilities. 

• Create individualized development plans: Invest time in understanding each person’s career goals and collaborate to create a tailored roadmap for their growth within your organization. 

The organizational impact of talent investment 

Investing in high-potential talent goes beyond individual growth—it’s building a more resilient and capable organization. When you nurture your team’s potential, you’re creating a pipeline of skilled leaders who deeply understand your company’s culture and operations. 

It’s also the kind of investment that communicates a powerful message to all employees that you value their growth and envision a future for them within the company. This approach can enhance morale, improve retention rates, and foster a culture where people want to continue learning and improving. 

Every manager has the opportunity and the responsibility to shape the next generation of business innovators. By refining your ability to recognize potential and committing to nurturing that talent, we can create more dynamic, adaptable, and successful organizations. 

I encourage you to take a fresh look at your team. Who are the individuals demonstrating intellectual curiosity, adaptability, and a positive influence on others? How can you invest in their growth? Remember, the high-potential employee you develop today could become a transformative leader tomorrow.  

The future success of your organization will greatly depend on these efforts. 

Guess what word doesn’t appear in Vogue’s recent 1,000-word story on how Hilaria Baldwin takes care of her seven kids?

“Nanny.”

 Or “babysitter.” Or “childcare.”

The story (accompanied by a nine-photo Instagram post that is also childcare-free) is one of those hour-by-hour summaries of a person’s day, starting with Baldwin waking up at 5 a.m. to head out for a run, and then ending at 8:30 p.m. with all the kids tucked into bed.

Baldwin and her husband, actor Alec Baldwin, have seven children together, from toddler age to 11 years old. But nowhere does the story mention all the household help the couple no doubt employs.

This isn’t just tone-deaf. It’s a giant missed opportunity.

Sure, for decades, women celebrities—and the media that covered them—collaborated to keep helpers out of the frame. There was pressure to perpetuate an idealized version of working motherhood, where women somehow do it all.

Admitting you had help was somehow shameful. Not to mention celebrity fathers were never asked about “how they manage it all”—just as male executives rarely are (although Fast Company has endeavored to change that).

National attention for the childcare crisis

But we’ve turned a corner. Childcare is finally part of the national conversation. For all working parents (not just moms).

Not just because of the “question heard ’round the world” that Reshma Saujani posed to Donald Trump at the New York Economic Club last month. Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, made childcare a hot topic in the presidential race when she asked the Republican contender about his plans. (The issue also notably came up in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.)

All those Zooms during the pandemic pulled back the curtain on home life. For the first time, it became broadly apparent how much working parents struggle to make everything work. That tension is now one of the reasons there’s so much resistance to mandatory return to office. Most parents simply can’t juggle two sets of full-time jobs without some kind of support.

For some families, that means childcare. But that’s an expensive proposition, even for those who have the money. A report by Care.com this year found that a third of families are dipping into their savings to cover the cost of help. Two-thirds of families are spending more than 20% of their income on these costs.

And even when parents can afford care, the supply of qualified caretakers is dipping as demand shoots up. “The imbalance of supply and demand . . . is now at its most extreme,” Care.com’s report said.

Workplace flexibility can offset some of this. Marissa Mayer’s own experience as CEO of Yahoo famously, though perhaps unintentionally, highlighted this point. After giving birth, she famously brought her infant into the office with her. The arrangement gave her the ability to tend to her work and her family simultaneously. Other parents want the same—just from home, not the office.

The need for flexibility

Much has been written about the shortsightedness of CEOs who demand a total return-to-office. Many observers note that these orders often come from older male leaders with no firsthand experience of what it means to juggle home and work.

Lack of flexibility is one of the reasons senior women leave their employers, according to research from McKinsey and LeanIn.org. But the simple inability to access affordable childcare keeps many talented workers from seeking employment in the first place. And just this year, the surgeon general declared that parents are experiencing unprecedented amounts of stress as they try to juggle competing demands.

The false ideal of “doing it all”

There’s another reason publications like Vogue should start bringing childcare out of the shadows. We need to change our ideas of what it means to have help. For too long, parents, especially mothers, have felt guilt about not being able to “do it all.” But it was always a false ideal.

Vogue has often been a leader on women’s issues. They could have set a new standard here by normalizing the idea of having childcare. By showing how incredibly necessary it is—how it enables parents to manage their many responsibilities.

The Baldwins are reportedly gearing up for a new TLC reality series next year. Let’s hope it showcases the help these stars have in managing their family. Instead of keeping childcare in the shadows, they should bring it out into the open. It’s the only way our ideas will change about how necessary and central parental support is.

In the world of content creation, AI can be your best assistant: helping you come up with ideas, accelerating the research process, helping you write, and helping you edit. AI can also torpedo your thought leadership. The key to avoiding that fate is this: leverage Artificial Intelligence to highlight your human and emotional intelligence.

I had the privilege of speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City last month on this topic. If you missed the workshop, here are some key takeaways: 

Make Content Unique To You

AI is powerful, but your superpower is YOU. AI can never be you, even if it’s impersonating you fairly well. The biggest value is getting content that helps you shine, that attracts ideal clients, and isn’t vague, wooden or robotic. But how can you make content that is unique to you? Here are a few ways:

AI Can’t Know You If You Don’t Know Yourself

I help my clients identify and tap into their strengths through my customized messaging and branding system. We do a deep dive into who you are, what makes you unique, all to figure out what we plan to amplify and show to the world. If you don’t know who you are, how will AI create content for you? The phrase garbage in, garbage out” is especially true with AI. “Garbage” in this context is bland, generic inputs. Chaos goes in, confusion comes out.

Do your own Mad Libs, in which you tell AI who you are, your job, your audience and your tone of voice. For example, I’ll tell ChatGPT that I am a video expert and public speaking coach. I run workshops and consult with clients to help them with video strategy and public speaking. I write in a professional but light tone of voice. I also add that I don’t like a lot of puns (warning to you all: you can get some corny output). Tech experts can help you further hone your prompts, but you need that understanding of who you are as a starting point.

Run it through a Checklist

Run any creative output from AI through a checklist. My checklist involves asking three questions: my S.A.G. Checklist. The AI output must meet this criteria to get a thumbs up. 

My S.A.G. checklist asks these three questions: Does it “Sound” like Me? Do I “Agree” With It? It is “Generic”?

Does it “Sound” like Me? Ask yourself is this something I would talk about? Does this match up with my area of expertise and is it what my audience wants?

Do I “Agree” With It? We’ve all gotten some AI content that makes us shake our heads. Maybe you don’t agree with the analysis, maybe you have a contradictory viewpoint. 

Is it “Generic”? Generic in this case is bad. The goal of being on social media is showing people your unique professional and personal POV. Being generic means anyone in your field could have posted that piece of content, and will post the same exact thing.

Adding a Human Touch Helps to Stand Out in a Sea of Robotic Content 

As more and more people adopt this technology, you’ll need to lean in harder to what makes us human. No, not your baby toe, not your obsession with beanie babies, but rather your unique personality, skills, and capabilities. Improve your verbal communication skills in addition to your technological skills to compete in the years to come.

Injecting your human touch into AI will help you not only scale your content to market your business but also help the world—including potential clients and future bosses—understand who you are and your distinct personality.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. With more and more simpler tasks being automated, humans are left with more high-level cognitive work, such as idea generation. If you want to excel in the new era, you’ll need to radically transform how you work to maximize brain efficiency, says Dr. Mithu Storoni, a neuroscientist and the author of Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work.

The problem is that we still follow a psychological and physical infrastructure of work that resembles the era of assembly lines, which doesn’t foster or facilitate the type of work needed today. 

“Instead of generating 100 bad ideas, we have to come up with that one single good one,” says Storoni. “In order to enhance the quality of mental output and not just keep the mind working continuously, producing large amounts of output of mediocre quality, the mind has to work in a very different way.” 

Start by Rethinking Working Hours 

Leaders previously measured productivity in terms of how many hours an employee spent at work or the number of abstract targets they reached. As a result, people worked in a way where the quantity of work mattered most. 

But that type of output doesn’t fit in the era of AI. Instead, we have to make a psychological switch, structuring each workday for quality instead of quantity. 

“Each workday has to be tailored in a way that emphasizes and enhances mental output,” says Storoni. “To do that, we have to follow a completely different template.”

Start by discarding the old method of continuous work throughout the day. Research shows that when the mind works for long hours at a time, the mental output is of a lower quality, says Storoni. 

“The time you’re working continuously is a big barrier against generating quality mental output,” she says. “You’re much less likely to make good decisions and come up with creative ideas this way.” 

Continuous work impairs creative idea generation and high quality, sophisticated cognitive work. Because of that, it’s much better to work in bursts, giving the mind a lot of rest to make that work of quality rather than quantity. Storoni recommends using work sessions that are about 90 minutes long, attacking the hardest part of the task in the first 20 minutes and moving to the slower, easier work during the remaining time. 

Match the time to the type of work

The time of day will also make a difference, depending on the type of work you’re doing. As a result, managers should consider the principal area that a team or individual is working on rather than imposing the same work schedule across a team or an organization, says Storoni. 

Data suggests that it’s better to work on tasks that involve creativity, imagination, and problem solving during the first few hours of the day and again right before you go to sleep. The middle of the day is better for working on something that needs convergence of focus, such as implementing an idea you already have. Storoni recommends scheduling two focused work sessions during the day, one from middle to late morning and another from the middle to late afternoon or early evening. 

In between the focused work sessions, make time for a nap or for easy work that doesn’t require much creativity or focus. 

Build in breaks to maximize brain efficiency

The mind also needs breaks, but the type you take is critically important. The first goal of taking a break is to restore and rejuvenate the brain so it no longer fatigued. When the brain becomes fatigued, the information processing pathways inside the brain start taking inefficient routes, says Storoni.

The second goal is to dial down your state of mind. Storoni says when your mind has become stressed, hyperactive, or distracted from the work you’re doing, it builds up cognitive overload. You need to release that overload.

The third goal of a break is to put your mind in the correct state to begin work again. Before you take a break, Storoni says you should ask yourself, “How do I feel? Do I feel tired and wired? Or do I feel tired and not wired?” 

“Your mind, unlike muscle, doesn’t rest the moment you stop working it,” says Storoni. “If you’re in the gym and stop lifting heavy weights, your muscle relaxes. But if you’re in a busy office and you walk out for a break, your mind hasn’t walked out with you. It’s still on your office chair, especially if the work you were doing left you with a heavy cognitive load that you’re worried about.” 

What type of break to take

If you’re tired and wired, Storoni recommends choosing a break that actively dials your mind and your physiology back into a state of relaxation. This is a good time to go for a brisk walk, engage in breathwork, or play a mental game like Tetris. “Something that grips your attention just for long enough for you to forget what you were just doing,” says Storoni. 

If you’re tired and not wired, your brain will behave more like a tired muscle, falling into a resting mode easily. You can sit quietly and daydream, take a slow walk, or read a relaxing novel. 

The landscape of knowledge work has radically changed, and Storoni says we need to radically change the way we work to enhance the quality of human performance. 

“We need to come to the point where we measure how successful a day has been, not by the number of hours and not by the number of boxes ticked, but by the quality of solutions you’ve come up with, the quality of ideas you’ve come up with, and the quality of your mental output.”

Amid a polarizing presidential race, election season tension is spilling over into the workplace and creating tricky social dynamics for managers and workers alike. One survey found that 72% of Americans are stressed about the upcoming presidential election and 59% are concerned about polarization and social division. Now, these tumultuous political conditions are impacting in-office attendance. 

A recent hybrid work data study by Owl Labs found that 45% of U.S. workers have not wanted to go into the office because of their employer or colleague’s political opinions. This trend is particularly acute for full-time in-office workers (50%) versus hybrid/remote workers (37%). 

Looking ahead to November, company leadership must be aware that 28% of full-time in-office and hybrid workers plan to stay home on election day and possibly for several days afterward if they are dissatisfied with the election results.

Why workers avoid the office during election season

Presidential debates and post-election discussions can intensify workplace tensions, leaving employees anxious about politically charged water cooler talk and uncomfortable face-to-face interactions. In a divisive political climate, many workers may choose to limit in-person work, especially if their views clash with the office majority. Remote work provides a refuge from these debates, allowing team members to disengage from polarizing conversations or take time to respond thoughtfully, avoiding reactive, emotionally charged exchanges.

On the other hand, in-office employees often feel pressured to engage in uncomfortable political conversations, as it’s harder to avoid face-to-face interactions. To avoid potentially career-damaging conflicts with colleagues holding opposing views, some may resort to taking sick or personal days during periods of heightened political tensions. Others may not dip into their personal time but instead circumvent the RTO system, leaning on “coffee badging” in which an employee badges into the office and stays only a few hours. In fact, 58% of hybrid workers admit to showing up briefly to the office before heading home to work in peace.

How to reduce political conflict at work

Offering hybrid or remote work choices, especially during intense periods like elections, can be key to maintaining team morale and driving productivity. Instead of leaving employees to try to manage their concerns on their own, companies need to cultivate a workplace culture that accommodates workers’ individualized needs as much as possible. 

Managers should ensure that employees know they are supported if they feel working remotely will keep them focused and productive. It is truly a win-win scenario, as employees feel emotionally protected, research has shown that flexible working environments are positive for workplace culture, and 79% of managers feel their team is more productive when working remotely and/or hybrid. If you notice someone on your team has become disengaged at the office or is avoiding social situations, make time to check in with them to see if they need a change to their work setup. 

If managers are unable to adjust rigid return-to-office mandates, or if in-person collaboration is critical, it’s crucial to remind employees of their right to opt out of political discussions. Equip them with clear language to de-escalate unwanted interactions and reinforce the importance of a respectful office culture. In doing so, you can help ensure that the workplace remains free from political hostility, where all employees feel safe, respected, and valued. 

How flexibility can improve teams

Leveraging hybrid work to ease political tensions is just another example of how flexible work environments can reduce conflict and maintain and improve productivity. Even after the election dust settles, workplace flexibility should be seen as a long-term strategy for companies capable of virtual collaboration, not just a temporary fix. Fully remote workers report being nearly 20% happier than their full-time in-office counterparts.

And flexibility transcends beyond accommodating election season frustrations, as hybrid and remote work is more inclusive for the 33% of employees who report having neurodivergent differences, disabilities, or health conditions. Removing strict in-office mandates allows employees to determine how and where they work best, increasing trust and driving employee satisfaction and retention. Flexible workplaces also attract top talent, as 40% of candidates would reject a job offer if a company requires specific days in the office.

Whether it is an election year or not, remote and hybrid policies create sustainable, productive work environments that respect employees’ personal boundaries and comfort levels. Flexible workplaces not only benefit individuals but also the overall company performance.

In his new book, Hope for Cynics, Jamil Zaki shares a succinct invitation that captures its essence: “People become who you expect them to be.” Zaki, a Stanford professor and director of the university’s Social Neuroscience Lab, has dedicated 15 years to studying empathy, kindness, and connection. His quote piqued my curiosity: How might we use our expectations to shape positive interactions? 

“The first is to be aware of our power,” Zaki says. “A lot of people imagine that others are who they are, and all we do is observe who they are. We don’t realize that we are part of their environment, and thus, we change who they are.”

“Cynicism is a story of toxic self-fulfilling prophecies, where we lower our expectations of others and they lower themselves to meet those expectations,” he adds. “But, what we can do if we want to wield our power in a more positive way, is to raise our expectations of other people—to treat them like the folks we hope they are, instead of the people we fear them to be. It turns out that when we do that, people step up to meet our expectations.” 

Hope for Cynics is about building—and rebuilding—that sense of trust, as leaders and colleagues, friends and fellow citizens. Here, Zaki shares tools to practice intellectual humility, build communal relationships, and revitalize our faith in each other. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You describe cynicism as “a disease of social health” and express that “there’s no way to change a broken system if it’s a mirror that reflects our broken nature.” Let’s start with your vision for how we can heal them both. 

One of the big moves I’ve tried to make in my own cynical mind—in embracing a different and hopefully, healthier perspective—is to separate the systems we’re in and the world we live in from the people around me. There are so many features of modern life that make it easy to feel like all hope is lost—to write people off [and] decide: Wow, look at what a mess we’ve made. We must be at fault. We’re the problem. I think that is alienating at a number of levels. One, it makes it harder to connect with people. We are lonelier as a species than we’ve been in many decades; I think a lack of faith in one another might lead to that. 

Another problem is that if you can’t separate our problems from our species, then there’s no way out of any of the problems we have. There’s a dark complacency you feel if you think that a broken system reflects human nature. When we separate these two things and realize that systems—of power [and] governance, for instance—aren’t always what most people want. And are very often not what most people want, which allows us to experience two things at once: Anger and recognition of injustice and toxic systems and continued faith in the people around us.

That is critically important. One, for a sense of connection and to break through that loneliness and alienation. And two, for collective action—for holding onto the possibility that we could make a difference and challenge systems when they don’t reflect our common and shared values.

I know that feels impossible sometimes—if you read the news or you’re on social media—but it’s happened over and over again. People have been able to successfully challenge toxic systems. Doing so, again, requires us to have faith in people, even if we don’t have faith in the current circumstances we’re living through. 

You offer an important reframe for navigating disagreements: “Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.” Tell us about the strategies that support mutual respect and peaceful disagreement. 

The first step towards disagreeing better is thinking in better ways about what disagreement is. There’s this assumption that the people I disagree with are extreme, hateful, and violent. It’s, of course, true that there are extreme, hateful, and violent people in the world.

But, research is very clear that in political disagreement, for instance, each side vastly overestimates how toxic the other is. So, before we can disagree, in my opinion, we should try to be humble about the fact that we probably don’t know who we’re disagreeing with, and they’re probably not the caricatures we’re presented with online and in the news.

A second thing is to realize that, [in our culture], we have stereotyped disagreement itself as toxic, when it’s not. A lot of us think: If I’m having a disagreement, that means something’s wrong. I’m in a state of threat. If you think back to philosophical traditions, even political tradition—not centuries ago, decades ago—disagreement was considered an incredibly productive way of learning. . . . It turns out that when you bring people together to disagree about politics, for instance, those conversations, even if you don’t practice the particular techniques, are way more positive and productive than people [realize].

Now, if you can muster the courage to disagree, there are steps we can take and a lot of them have to do with expressing curiosity and humility. Good disagreers tend to ask more questions than people who get into toxic disagreements. They tend to not just ask about people’s opinions, but try to dig down into the human stories underneath those opinions; Not just what do you think, but why do you think that? What in your story got you here?

Third, when good disagreers notice common ground, they’re quick to point it out, because oftentimes people don’t just disagree, they disagree about what they disagree about. They think the Venn diagram between them is two circles, barely touching, and in fact, the Venn diagram is much more overlapping.

Finally, good disagreers are open about what they don’t know, instead of pretending to be overly confident. 

It turns out, to the point of the quote, that when we can engage with other people in that way, we will learn more from them. It’s also true that people reciprocate the way that we treat them. If you go into a disagreement all bluster and elbows, you’re going to get that back from the other person. Research finds that when we instead are conversationally receptive or intellectually humble in disagreements, then other people are more willing to listen to us, ironically, we become more persuasive advocates of our own side, than if we try hard to change somebody else’s mind. 

You write “Trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to others, is an expression of faith that they will do the right thing. It is how hope lives between people. By eroding trust, cynicism steals our present together and dampens the futures we can imagine.” What are the foundations of trust and how can we build—and in some cases rebuild—them? 

The foundations of [trust] are twofold: one is a set of beliefs or expectations. Trust, in essence, is you placing a bet; Placing a bet reflects your sense of the odds. If you engage in an act of trust, it’s because you have a positive expectation about a person or people. But, where do those expectations come from?

One place they come from is our early experience (and our experience in general), but especially our early experience. In the book, I write about attachment theory: This idea that a lot of us learn early in life whether the world, via our relationships with our caregivers, is a safe and reliable place. If early in your life, you are treated in a way where you feel safe, like you have control, and things are predictable, then you are much more likely to become a trusting adult. If you instead learn that the world is chaos and you don’t know who you can count on or whether you can count on anybody, that lives inside us as well. 

The sad thing here is that we don’t learn equally from all of our experiences. We learn more from our negative experiences—one could argue that we overlearn from our negative experiences and underlearn from our positive experiences. So, the foundations of trust are our experience, but often we mistrust more than is rational based on those experiences because we’re anchoring on the worst of them.

I’m in no way meaning to judge people who have this experience, especially people who had traumatic experiences. It is natural and understandable that we would learn intensely from those experiences, and do whatever we can to avoid their repetition. But, back to this thought of cutting ourselves off from the worst and the best of life, sometimes those experiences hurt us again by depriving us of chances to grow past them.

You embraced the book’s thesis and continued to “treat your inner life like an experiment.” Which new habits have been most pivotal? How do you think and behave differently now than you did before?  

I try to think differently, act differently, and share differently. I try to be more skeptical of my own cynicism. [As I write] in the book, the difference between skepticism and cynicism is: Cynicism is a lack of faith in people. Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. It’s a scientific mindset where you want evidence for any claim or belief that you have.

So, when I find myself defaulting to a cynical worldview, I try to hit the pause button on that inner chatter, and say: Wait a minute. Is there really grounds to make the claim you’re making? If you were a scientist defending this claim, would you have a citation? […] Oftentimes, I realize I don’t have the evidence I need to support this bleak, black and white, general claim. 

In terms of acting differently, I try to take more leaps of faith on people. Ernest Hemingway said: The only way to know if you can trust somebody is to trust them. It’s so scary to take risks on other people. . . . As you know from the book, I’m insecurely attached. I had a really hard time early in my life. So, my default is to try to keep myself safe and not lean on other people. So, in [small calculated ways]—[where] I’m not taking massive risks on people or sending my life savings to a prince who’s going to give me $14 million—I try to notice my apprehension at opening up to a person I’m getting to know or giving more responsibility to somebody in my lab. I try to notice that apprehension and say: Let’s jump in anyways. And, not just let’s go for it, let’s make sure we’re keeping track of what happens because given my default, I know I have a bias here, so, I try to both take leaps of faith and then record internally (or even write down in a journal) what happened, so I can learn from those positive experiences. 

The last thing is to share differently. What I try to do with my kids, for instance, is social savoring: to pay attention to and comment on good things that people do, because just like our minds, our language is biased too. A lot of us go around giving one star Yelp reviews to life and humanity—we love to spread our negative opinions. That’s fine. People pay a lot of attention when we do. But we don’t have to do that. In my experience, positive gossip—being intentional about saying and sharing news about the good that people have done—makes me more aware of the good that people have done. [So], this habit of speech turns into a habit of mind. 

You emphasize an important reminder: “If you are part of a class project, car pool, or product team, it’s fair to ensure everyone does their part. But with people to whom you are deeply attached, resist the urge to keep score. Regularly shred the ledger. This is especially important when helping people. . . . Devotion is an antidote to scorekeeping, a side of humanity cynicism can’t touch.” How can we reframe our mindset and shift from scorekeeping to devotion? 

This is the difference between a transactional and communal relationship. As I write, there are many places where transactional relationships are appropriate. You wouldn’t want to go to a restaurant, eat a delicious meal, and then tell the chef:  Wow, that was fantastic. I’ll have you over to my house next time. Then, leave without paying. That would be deeply inappropriate. Transaction is great in economic markets. But, we tend to have a transactional view of life increasingly leak into our friendships, romantic relationships, teams, and even families. I think that is a tragedy, and it’s a preventable one.

In our research on empathy and helping, we find that people benefit most from helping others when they feel compassion for that person, as opposed to when they feel like they’re doing it to gain favor or pay off a debt. When we think transactionally, we lose the psychological nourishment of connection. Communal connection is what humanity is built for. So, how do we attain it again?

One way is to pay close attention to the person that we’re with, as opposed to ourselves: Who are they and what do they need from us? What do we love about them? As opposed to thinking: What can I gain from this interaction? Asking: What can I give in this interaction? These are little reframes that can orient us towards communal thinking.

Again, that type of thinking is contagious. If you treat other people in a way where it’s clear you’re keeping score, they will notice and start to do the same. If you instead can take those leaps of faith—if you can do for others without wondering what’s going to come back to you—people will also notice that and start to act in a similar way.

You shared a powerful personal example about when you were in grad school and your therapist encouraged you to take leaps of faith by asking: What would happen if I let down my guard once, twice, or even most of the time? What were the results of those experiments? 

There’s this tension in my own story—and it’s interesting, you said: I didn’t realize I was a cynic because I’m a positive person—and I was exactly that: A highly agreeable cynic. I had this very rigid positivity because I felt like: This is the only way I can assure that people will have any interest in me. It’s really a transactional mindset. I felt like, in order for anybody to be my friend, I need to provide value; And, the value I can provide is by grinning at them all the time. But, it’s also a cynical take on who that other person is. It’s the view that they don’t really care about you. They just care about what you give to them. I lived like that for three decades. 

It took therapy to make me realize . . . What if I reveal the diverse shades of thought and emotion I experience? Letting my guard down and trusting people more, ironically, looked like being more negative. Talking about all the things that keep me up at night, the people I feel suspicious of, and the anger and fear I feel a lot of the time.

What I learned from that is that I was dead wrong. I was absolutely wrong that people were only there for me because I was providing them something. It turned out that people really do care about each other, and some people even care about me.

Second, it turned out that people weren’t put off by my complexity. They were relieved by [and] resonated with it. It made room for much deeper connection, because I was opening up about experiences that I thought were just mine that turned out to be universal.  

You shared an awakening realization that many of us likely share: “Hope has never been foreign to me, just forgotten. Cultivating it doesn’t require me to invent anything, but merely to remember.” Let’s close with how your journey of remembering has changed how you move through life, and the first step we might take to embark on our own. 

Hope has gotten a bad rap. We are unfair to hope as a culture. We think of it as cringe and toxic, privileged and naive. It’s none of those things. Hope is not optimism.

Optimism is the belief that things are going to go great and I don’t have to do anything. It’s a pretty complacent feeling. Hope is the sense that things could go well—and that in the uncertainty and possibility of the future—there is room for us to matter. It’s extremely action-oriented, radical, [and] powerful, especially outside of privilege, during adversity, and for people who are struggling in various ways.

I had forgotten all of that. What I remembered—and what I would love to encourage other people to remember—is that we do make a difference. The future is uncertain and we shape it together.

If you’ve been looking for a new job and your current employer caught wind of your search efforts, you might be understandably worried—especially if you were perusing job boards while on the clock. So what do you do now? 

We gathered advice from 10 CEOs, executive coaches, and other experts to help you navigate the tricky situation of getting caught looking for another job. Let’s dive into their recommendations for turning a negative into a positive.

Acknowledge and be honest

I have had this happen to me, and honestly, it’s one of the best things to happen in my career. 

To provide some background, I had been looking for another job in a supervisory position because it wasn’t available in my current organization. Additionally, I had been looking at positions in another state as I was preparing to move because of my relationship. 

Unbeknownst to me, an organization contacted my boss asking for a recommendation about the quality of my work. 

To say the conversation was awkward would be an understatement. 

How did I handle it? I didn’t lie. 

I owned where I was and shared why I was looking, my long-range plans, and why this move was important to me for personal and professional reasons. 

If this happens to you, your best move is acknowledging the situation and being honest about what is happening. It’s not going to do you any good to lie at that point unless you believe your current job is in jeopardy or that instance may give them a reason to let you go. 

There is no reason to be ashamed about looking for another job, advocating for your career, and wanting to advance. However, if you find yourself in a position where your organization knows you are looking for a new job, play it strategically and carefully. But know that one of my strategies is simply owning where you are.

John Neral, owner, John Neral Coaching

Embrace the chaos

This is one of the many times I say, “Don’t waste the chaos!” 

There’s no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube, so own it. Explain why you are looking for another job. What are you missing out on in your current situation that is making you look elsewhere?

Recently, I had a client come to me and say he needed to leave his current employer because he remained on a night shift after 18 months when he was promised a day shift after a year of employment when he was hired. 

When he approached his leader, he shared he was looking elsewhere. The leader was sympathetic, yet explained there were no day shifts available for him. Instead of [having him leave], we searched for openings at the organization and found one that was a tier below where the employee currently was on the pay scale. We came up with a creative way for him to take the job opening up a tier (by offering to take on additional responsibilities) and not only did he get to stay at the organization but he also got a day-shift schedule, which is what he and his family desperately needed. 

I recommend honesty and creative thinking before jumping ship. But sometimes it will still be time to go. Either way, give it your best shot so you sleep well at night. How you feel about yourself at the end of the day is the most important.

Kerri Roberts, founder and CEO, Salt & Light Advisors

Stay calm and open

First and foremost, don’t get defensive. Looking for another job and new opportunities isn’t a crime—it’s a step toward personal growth, and if that’s prohibited at your company, get out ASAP. Stay calm and honest. This moment can open one of the most important conversations for your career. 

Tell your boss why you’re exploring other options. Maybe you want new challenges, a better balance, or a fresh direction. Honesty will transform this awkward situation into a chance for improvement. Let them know what you need and suggest changes that could make your current job more fulfilling. 

I vividly remember when one of my team members faced a similar situation. They felt stuck and were considering leaving, and I knew that. We had a face-to-face, straightforward talk, and I learned what they needed to feel motivated. The next week, I assigned them ownership of our new project. I gave them a shot at happiness in my company and also tested them in a new role. Now they are constantly taking care of our most complicated projects with unlimited growth potential. 

So, don’t let fear trap you in a job that doesn’t make you happy. Life’s too short to stay in a place that doesn’t fulfill you. Use this moment to spark change. Open up, share your thoughts, and work towards creating a better environment for yourself. Fight for your dreams.

Grzegorz Robok, CEO, ComfortPass

Start with open feedback

When an employee is caught looking for another job, it’s best to start the conversation with, “Are you open to feedback?” This question sets a straightforward tone and determines how open the conversation can be.

In my experience helping hundreds of women regain their authenticity and voice in their careers, I’ve found that honesty about their work challenges and aspirations can lead to significant positive changes. If the employer is receptive, the employee should share any previous attempts to discuss their current role or why they felt compelled to explore other opportunities.

Remember, there’s no need to apologize for looking for another job. It’s a natural part of career growth. Just as companies make tough decisions based on business needs, individuals must prioritize their own well-being.

The act of looking for another job often signals that there are unmet needs. While ideally one should ask for what they need, not all environments encourage or even allow open dialogue about dissatisfaction or career aspirations, which can necessitate looking elsewhere.

Nurturing a culture of open communication can transform a potentially awkward situation into a constructive dialogue, paving the way for meaningful changes. This approach aligns with professional growth and empowers individuals to be authentic and assertive about their needs and desires.

Kelly Barnard, founder and lead coach, the Career Canvas

Use the opportunity

Using the word caught is interesting to me. Unless you were found looking for another job while on the job, there’s nothing wrong with searching for another job if you are unhappy in your current position. 

If your current employer tells you that they know you are actively on the market, first and foremost, be honest. Acknowledge that you are looking for another job. 

Furthermore, use this conversation as an opportunity to share why you’re on the market. If your employer cares enough to bring this to you, chances are high that they want to know why you would consider leaving and perhaps make changes to retain you. 

Being “caught” looking for another job could actually be the impetus for a crucial conversation you’ve been avoiding about your discontent. 

In my work, I typically guide my clients to have these conversations before they really dive into their search. Sometimes, employers are willing to make changes to address your discontent. Others aren’t, but at the very least, you are being true to yourself by expressing your frustration before you become disengaged.

Emily Golden, CEO and strategic talent adviser, Golden Resources

Speak up for change

Having advised employees and leaders in the workplace for over two decades, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of open communication between employees and employers. This approach has consistently led to significant benefits for the company and its employees. 

It’s a common theme for employees to seek a better opportunity perpetually. However, when an employee does, it can often signal a lack of a promotion path within the company. There’s a tendency for employees to move on without making their dissatisfaction known.

My recommendation to employees: Speak up!

Often, a company’s needs align with employees’ needs, but employees hesitate, afraid of appearing “critical,” “ungrateful,” or “greedy” to the employer.

When an employee likes their job for the most part, they must speak up, preferably before getting caught red-handed shopping for a new job. Yet, it’s never too late to salvage their situation; there is little to lose and much to gain.

For employees to voice their needs and concerns, it’s vital to recognize that they can be a catalyst for change and also receive what they seek. Why? Because they provide employers with valuable insights that can lead to a more appealing workplace and a better position for them.

For example, in one company, an employee’s discontent stemmed from insufficient challenge in his work and reaching an income ceiling. I encouraged him to voice his needs. Although reticent, he agreed to present them to his employer. He had a growing family and envisioned a partner stake, so he entertained this goal by combing the internet. His work ethic, dedication, and ownership mindset made him a perfect candidate. He paved the way for achieving his goal without starting over from scratch by alerting the owners and employers. (And yes, it happened!)

In a different company, the issue was an unsafe and unsupportive culture. The employee voiced their concerns respectfully and expressed a desire to help the company succeed. The employee turned a negative into a positive by spearheading an assessment of the company’s values and ongoing emotional intelligence training. This employee’s initiative transformed the culture and they got a higher-paying and more fulfilling position.

When employees dare to give honest feedback, with a perspective of providing value and genuinely seeking a win-win-win for their employer, the company, and themselves, it benefits everyone in unexpected ways. Everyone wins.

Jennifer Williams, executive coach and EQ leadership trainer, Heartmanity

Be diplomatic

Own it. Don’t BS. If they are going to fire you for it, no amount of BS would save you anyway, and it also comes off as desperate, cowardly, and not genuine. 

Tell them why you are looking for another job, but be diplomatic. If you don’t get fired, there is always the off-chance that they will actually listen to you and may have an opportunity opening that may align better with what you want, or may offer better compensation. Nothing makes employers realize your value faster than your possible unexpected departure. 

Somehow the business world struggles with the math of inflation and what it does to their employees. Many employers view it as a good thing that will make you want to hang on to your job with them even more, because even a job you hate beats no job if you are jobless for a long enough time, am I right? 

Sometimes the only way to make businesses value their employees is to be willing to leave, even if the job market sucks (which right now it does). 

Also remember, if you are looking, there is a reason you are looking, and they will never fix it unless you tell them why. Some won’t. Some employers love building a highly toxic culture, and you can usually see these coming a mile away. 

Honesty, although uncomfortable, is generally the best policy.

Matt Jones, senior technical recruiter/recruiting manager, Padilla Talent

Turn it into value

There are several reasons to be looking for another job other than jumping ship. First, though, maybe look for jobs on your own time. 

If you are caught looking for other positions while at work, you could state it is to compare wages, thoughts on how to word your LinkedIn profile, or getting an idea of what your company’s competitors are up to. If you are unhappy at your work, it might be a great time to figure out why and move on. 

I’m currently building a scope of work for a client, and looking at several job openings has helped me craft an outline. Seeing how companies in the same field list job postings helps me think of things I might have otherwise missed. 

To turn this into a positive situation, maybe share that you were looking into other ways you can add value to your current position by holding it up against similar positions at other companies. So, let’s say another social media manager is in charge of internal social media training; you could offer to create a similar program for your company. You sneak out of a sticky situation and show you’re a team player.

Jessica Yost, strategic marketing consultant, Powerhouse Planning

Discuss goals

One thing I can’t stand as a boss is lying. So if you’re caught looking for another job, honesty is your best policy. Overstep your ego and admit the situation—explain your reasons constructively.

You could say something like, “Well, I’ve been exploring other opportunities because I’m seeking new challenges and professional growth. I want to discuss how we can better align my career goals with the company’s objectives.”

I once discovered one of my employees looking for another job. When confronted, they admitted it and explained they felt underutilized. I was fond of them and their contribution, and it would be a pity to cut ends. This honesty led to a productive conversation, and I proposed a new role within the company that better suited their skills and ambitions. Their openness not only salvaged the situation but also strengthened our professional relationship.

So please, don’t lie. Instead, use the opportunity to discuss your career goals. Maybe you’ll explore ways to achieve them within your current company. Sometimes the answer is simpler than we believe it is. Your honesty can turn a potentially negative situation into a positive one, as well as foster trust and possibly uncover new opportunities within your current organization—trust me.

Mike Sadowski, founder and CEO, Brand24

Apologize and seek improvement

This often starts out as an awkward and even frightening situation (fear of getting fired before you secure another job). Still, you can definitely turn it around to improve your situation. 

First, sincerely apologize for being off-task and looking for another job on company time because they are paying you to work for them, not against them. But then square your shoulders back and ask if you could take this opportunity to discuss improving your job satisfaction and productivity. 

Suppose your employer values your work and wants to keep you. In that case, they will be curious enough to give you the time and attention to explore ways to extend your tenure by, for example, re-delegating tasks, increasing schedule or location flexibility, or negotiating a pay or title change (aka a raise or promotion). 

If your employer does not value you or your work, they may let you go on the spot, and that may be a blessing in disguise, giving you the freedom and motivation to find a more fulfilling job!

Linda Evans, career coach, Launched by Linda

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Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits, characterized by a tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and frustration. Individuals with high levels of neuroticism are often more sensitive to stress and more likely to react negatively to challenges.

This trait can significantly impact job performance, mental health, and overall life satisfaction, and can also exacerbate mental disorders, including comorbidity – the co-existence of multiple disorders.

The adverse consequences of neuroticism are usually passed on to public health systems, where the overall economic burden of neuroticism has long surpassed the costs associated with treating common mental disorders.

For sales professionals, the job’s inherent uncertainties – such as long sales cycles, complex negotiations, and reliance on commissions – can create a breeding ground for neurotic tendencies. This is especially true for B2B (business to business) salespeople, whose work differs greatly from the consumer salespeople we all interact with.

A consumer salesperson might, for instance, sell you a car – the process would take a few hours at most, with minimal repercussions if the deal fell through. However, a B2B salesperson would be responsible for selling a large company a fleet of vehicles, or a wholesale shipment of parts to a car manufacturer.

These deals can take a long time to close, and involve large transactions, complex products, multiple stakeholders and unpredictable outcomes. All of this massively increases uncertainty.

B2B sales jobs and neuroticism

Our comprehensive study, which involved around 1,700 B2B salespeople and 24,000 non-sales professionals, found a clear link between B2B sales roles and increased neuroticism. The research shows that the constant uncertainty in B2B sales jobs triggers defensive emotional responses which, when activated frequently, can reinforce and heighten neuroticism over time.

Certain features of B2B sales jobs are at the root of this trend:

• Complex customer needs: B2B salespeople often deal with clients who have multifaceted requirements that need tailored solutions. This can lead to prolonged decision-making processes and uncertain outcomes.
• Long sales cycles: B2B sales cycles can last months, with success dependent on numerous variables, including the decisions of various stakeholders within the client’s organisation.
• Negotiation toughness: B2B sales often involve tough negotiations with clients who are experienced in securing the best deals. This can create a high-pressure environment where the salesperson’s success is constantly under threat.
• Variable Compensation: Many sales roles are heavily reliant on commissions, meaning that financial stability is directly tied to performance. This uncertainty can exacerbate stress and anxiety, particularly during periods of low sales.

Mental health and safety: lessons from construction work

The harmful effects of chronic uncertainty in sales work – namely, a change in personality that may lead to mental disorders – should be treated, in essence, like any other workplace hazard.

Just as the construction industry takes steps to protect workers from physical harm, corporate organisations should consider protecting their employees from psychological harm, particularly in high-pressure roles like B2B sales.

While construction workers wear helmets and safety gear, sales professionals need mental and emotional safeguards to mitigate the risks associated with their work.

The first step for both individuals and companies is to acknowledge the risks associated with B2B sales roles. For employers, this means recognising that these roles can have a significant impact on mental health – similar to how some jobs might carry physical risks – and back this up by offering support to employees. For employees, this means having access to the facts and using them to make informed career choices, as well as taking their own mental health into consideration when accepting new work.

Sales organisations can take proactive steps to support their employees’ mental health. This might include offering mindfulness programs, gym memberships, or access to mental health counselling, as well as making sure employees have time to use these services. Providing paid personal days may also allow employees to take time off when they need a mental health break, promoting a healthier work-life balance and helping prevent an increase in neuroticism.

Managers can also play a crucial role by redesigning sales roles to reduce the factors that contribute to uncertainty and neuroticism. This might involve simplifying sales targets, offering clearer feedback, or providing more stable compensation plans to makes salespeople less dependent on commissions.

Regular mental health checkups should also be required. Just as safety inspections are routine (and often required by law) in physically demanding jobs, psychological assessments should be a standard practice in sales organisations. By regularly assessing employees’ levels of neuroticism and other personality traits, companies can identify when intervention is needed.

Finally, offering training programs that equip salespeople with the skills to handle long sales cycles and tough negotiations can serve as both a development tool and a preventive measure against neuroticism. These programs not only enhance job performance, but also provide employees with strategies to manage the stressors that contribute to psychological harm.

Selma Kadic-Maglajlic is an associate professor of marketing at the Copenhagen Business School.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.