Excerpt from: Uncommon Wisdom at Work by Terrie Lupberger

INTRODUCTION
The End of An Old Story

Re-examine all you have been told … Dismiss what insults your Soul.

Walt Whitman

I was called in to work with a hospital team running a critical clinical trial. Short-staffed, overwhelmed, and exhausted, they were ata breaking point. There was no new funding on the horizon, no reinforcements coming, no more bandwidth, and no room to push back.

Everyone else in the organization was just as underwater.

Senior leadership nodded and empathized. They acknowledged the situation, but still expected the same output, unwilling to accept delays.

The  team  was  angry  and frustrated.  These  weren’t  people just  clocking  in for  a paycheck. They believed in the work. They believed in the mission. But their belief was colliding with burnout. They were exhausted from holding it all together with duct tape and sheer will.

“We feel absolutely stuck,” one of them finally said, the words heavy with frustration and grief.

Not an uncommon situation in business these days where we are asked to do more with less, and I certainly had great compassion for the situation they were in. The good news, however, is that they weren’t stuck. For reasons we’ll explore in this book, I knew they had options they didn’t know they had.

While external conditions were certainly creating roadblocks, the deeper truths that we’ll explore in the pages that follow is that the cause of their suffering, frustration, and upset wasn’t the external conditions but rather the invisible script we have all inherited about what work is and how success happens.

As long as we wait  (or hope)—for a better boss, a better system, better timing, the right circumstances, that prickly colleague to leave, the funding to come through, etc. —we give away our power and our agency to create bolder results. We give away our ease and equanimity and sacrifice our well-being. We consequently play it safer or smaller. And, without meaning to, we contribute to our own suffering.

This script, the old story of work as I call it, is so embedded in our culture and in the way we work that we don’t even see it, much less stop to question it. But question it we will.

The Old Story Is Ending

We inherited a story about work—what it is, how to do it well, even why we should do it. The story, in large part, is based on faulty premises and outdated thinking that inform our behaviors, limit our impact, and keep us trapped in cycles of stress, fear, overwhelm, and scarcity.

This collective story tells us that work is primarily about striving, proving, and producing. That  success  comes  from  constant  effort.  That  emotions  are  liabilities.  That  self-worth  is measured by output. That satisfaction and well-being must often be sacrificed in the name of achievement.  It  tells  us  that  power  comes  from  titles  and  authority,  not  from  wisdom  or presence. That there’s never enough—time, money, resources. That it’s all on you whether you succeed or not. That good professionals quietly endure whatever it takes. It tells us to keep our personal lives separate from our professional ones, as if we could carve ourselves up like that (although we certainly do try).

While we pour enormous resources into teaching people how to work smarter, faster, and better, we haven’t stopped to question the deeper story, partial truths, faulty foundation that those teachings are built upon.

And, we are trying to navigate by old rules in a world that feels increasingly conflicted, chaotic, and uncertain. It’s like working on constantly shifting sands.