“Every career conversation is a mental health conversation.”
I first heard this phrase from amazing Catherine Hajnal, PhD (she/her) at conference where we were both presenting. Since then, it has become increasingly difficult to separate the two in my work.
A conversation may begin with a résumé, a difficult manager, a stalled career or a decision about whether to leave a job. But beneath the practical question, there is often a more consequential one:
How long can this person continue functioning under the conditions they are navigating?
People rarely seek our consulting services because they have suddenly lost interest in their profession.
Many still care deeply about their work. They remain committed to their clients, colleagues, teams and organizations. They are often highly capable, conscientious professionals who have spent months-or years-compensating for gaps around them.
They absorb additional responsibilities when positions remain vacant. They adjust to shifting priorities without corresponding changes in workload. They lead without sufficient authority, support teams without adequate resources and continue delivering through restructures, uncertainty and difficult leadership.
For a time, this adaptability may be rewarded.
The person becomes known as dependable, resilient and willing to step in. Their exceptional effort gradually becomes the expected standard. Temporary compromises become permanent working conditions.
Then something changes.
In Jolted, Anthony Klotz examines how a single event can disrupt a person’s established pattern and prompt them to reconsider what they have been tolerating. The jolt may be a restructuring, a conflict, a health concern, a missed family event, another resignation or one unreasonable request too many.
In our observation, it is often the moment a person hears themselves say:
I cannot continue like this.
At that point, the career conversation is no longer only about advancement.
It becomes a conversation about sustainability, agency and the cost of remaining in an environment that continually requires the person to compensate for organizational failures.
When self-care becomes a transfer of responsibility
“Please take care of yourself.”
“Use your vacation.”
“Take a mental health day.”
“Set better boundaries.”
None of this is inherently bad advice.
Rest matters. Recovery matters. Boundaries matter. Time away from work is essential.
An employee may be encouraged to take time off, but no one redistributes the work.
They return to the same unrealistic workload, now compounded by unanswered messages, delayed decisions and problems that accumulated in their absence.
The vacation provided temporary distance from the pressure. It did not remove the source of the pressure.
In those circumstances, time off can begin to feel less like recovery and more like borrowing relief from the future. The person rests for several days, then returns to repay that relief through intensified work.
That is not a failure of self-care. It is a failure of enablement.
An organization cannot control staffing, workload, deadlines, decision-making authority, management practices and communication expectations-and then assign the psychological consequences of those decisions exclusively to the employee.
When responsibility is individualized while control remains organizational, self-care can become a sophisticated form of responsibility transfer.
- A wellness webinar cannot resolve chronic understaffing.
- A mindfulness app cannot correct workplace bullying.
- A resilience workshop cannot make contradictory priorities achievable.
- A vacation policy cannot compensate for a culture in which people are punished-formally or informally-for using it.
Individual support has value. But it cannot substitute for responsible work design.
The organizational conditions behind individual distress
Career concerns are often discussed as though they originate entirely within the person.
- The employee needs more confidence.
- The employee needs better boundaries.
- The employee needs to manage time more effectively.
- The employee needs to become more resilient.
Sometimes those interventions are appropriate. Skills, habits and decisions matter. But an expert conversation must also examine the ecosystem in which the person is operating.
- Is the workload achievable within the hours available?
- Are priorities clear, or is everything treated as urgent?
- Does the employee have the authority required to deliver what is expected?
- Are staffing gaps being addressed, or simply absorbed by the most reliable people?
- Can employees raise concerns without being labelled negative, resistant or insufficiently committed?
- Are managers equipped to recognize sustained overload before it becomes a crisis?
- Is leave genuinely supported, or does taking it create professional consequences?
These are not individual wellness questions. They are questions of leadership, governance, risk and organizational effectiveness.
When resilience is already carrying too much
The limitations of individualized self-care become even more visible in communities affected by war, forced displacement, migration, racism, financial instability, family separation and prolonged uncertainty.
A trauma-informed approach does not mean assuming that every workplace challenge is caused by trauma. Nor does it mean defining people by what they have experienced.
It means recognizing that employees do not enter workplaces without context—and that resilience is not an unlimited resource.
Many professionals are simultaneously adapting to a new country, rebuilding their professional standing, supporting family across borders, navigating financial pressure and living with sustained uncertainty. They may continue to perform exceptionally well throughout all of it.
High performance, however, should not be mistaken for unlimited capacity.
When workplaces add chronic overload, unstable expectations, insufficient resources or unsafe leadership, prescribing more resilience misses the point. It places another developmental expectation on the individual without examining the conditions consuming that resilience.
The more responsible question is not:
How can this person become better at coping?
It is:
What is this environment repeatedly requiring people to absorb—and what authority does the organization have to change it?
Organizations should continue investing in mental health resources, leave, counselling, coaching, education and wellness initiatives.
But access to support is not the same as creating conditions in which well-being is possible.
Self-care is enabled when workloads reflect actual capacity rather than permanent overextension.
It is enabled when leaders make deliberate choices about priorities instead of asking employees to treat everything as urgent.
It is enabled when vacancies are addressed rather than quietly redistributed among the most dependable people.
It is enabled when employees can take leave without returning to an intensified workload.
It is enabled when boundaries are respected operationally—not merely endorsed in policies or leadership messages.
It is enabled when people can raise concerns, identify risks and challenge unrealistic expectations without being characterized as negative, resistant or insufficiently committed.
The quality of an organization’s commitment to well-being cannot be measured by the number of resources listed on an intranet page.
It is measured by whether people can use those resources without fear, guilt or professional consequences—and by whether leadership is prepared to examine why those resources are required so frequently in the first place.
This is what is wrong with the “self” in self-care.
The language locates responsibility with the individual, even when the conditions, decisions and power to change them sit elsewhere
From “Self-care” to “Shared responsibility”
As we enter the final month of summer vacations, this is the moment to move the conversation from self-care to shared responsibility.
Employees have a responsibility to recognize their limits, communicate them and use the support available. Organizations have a responsibility to ensure that doing so does not carry a penalty. Leaders cannot control workload, staffing, priorities, deadlines and workplace culture, then position well-being as an individual task.
Responsibility must follow power.
Before telling people to rest, ask whether the work has been designed so they can. Before encouraging boundaries, ask whether those boundaries are respected when they become inconvenient. And before saying, “Take care of yourself,” be prepared to answer the question that matters most: What responsibility are we, as an organization, prepared to take for the conditions people are being asked to survive?
