The Corporate Crash Out: #5

What are we crashing out about today, besties?

Burnout has been loud in my world lately. Not the productivity kind. The human kind. The kind that shows up when your body has been holding too much for too long. So this week, I want to talk about three things that don’t seem connected at first glance……but absolutely are

know some of y’all hate when I say this, but I’m going to keep saying it anyway: Your inner child is not a cute concept. It’s a regulation strategy. Your inner child is you.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that rest had to be earned and joy had to be productive. That if it didn’t move the needle, grow the business, or optimize the outcome, it didn’t count.And your nervous system said… queue the burnout.

Play is one of the fastest ways to signal safety back to your body. Not scrolling. Not numbing out. Actual, embodied, slightly unserious joy. Clumsily slow dancing in your kitchen with your partner. Coloring. Laughing too hard with your best friends at something dumb. Doing something with no performance attached.

I play PokemonGo. This weekend my partner and I flew to LA to go to an event, and I wore a silly pikachu hat and laughed so hard my sides hurt. I took pictures with giant Eevees, and ate popcorn while sitting in the grass in the sun.

I didn't think about work. I didn't check my emails. I didn't think of any of my adult responsibilities. I just let myself exist, I let myself play. When you make space for play, you remind your body that every moment of your life is not a threat to survive.

Here are some ways to incorporate play without it being just another to-do.

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Anyway. No meds here, baby. Just vibes. Also, maybe don’t say that out loud. Because burnout doesn’t just come from workload. It comes from moments that make your body tighten in real time.

It comes from the fight or flight that comes with damaging microagressions. It’s the public comments. The subtle corrections. The moments where you realize, oh… we are not actually safe to be people here.

You might laugh it off. You might stay professional. You might keep delivering. But your body is keeping the receipts, I promise. Our bodies do not forget our trauma. And over time, those moments stack into something heavy.

You'll start to convince yourself that they didn't mean harm, but intent and impact often crash right into one another.

Your nervous system doesn’t care about intent. It responds to impact. In that moment, my body did what bodies do when they clock risk: it froze.

Because most of us have been trained, very well at that, to metabolize discomfort quietly. We keep delivering. We keep performing. We keep being “easy to work with.” Meanwhile, our bodies are running on fumes and sadness.

And unfortunately what a lot of leaders (and humans in general), don't understand is-- you don’t burn people out only by giving them too much work, you burn people out by creating environments where they have to constantly monitor how human they’re allowed to be. Can't mess up, can't show emotion, cannot falter.

This is the nervous system tax. And it compounds. and the returns are not pretty.

One comment might not break someone. But moments like that, over and over and over are how many of us quietly disconnect while still technically doing our jobs. We stop raising their hand. We stop sharing ideas. We stop bringing their full brain into the room.

Not because we don’t care but we can no longer afford to show so much of ourselves to those who are committed to misunderstaning us.

So when I talk about burnout prevention, I need folks to zoom out.

Workload matters. But so doe psychological safety in the micro-moments.

So does how you respond when someone tells you something real about themselves. So does whether your workplace actually knows how to hold human complexity without immediately trying to manage it.

Because the fastest way to exhaust your best people is to make them feel like a problem to be monitored instead of a human to be supported.

And whew, some of you wouldn't know how to support your teams, or other human beings if their lives depended on it.

Plot twist: their livlihoods do in fact depend on it.

You’re likely under-supported, overextended, and operating in environments that have normalized running brilliant people into the ground.

That’s exactly why I built Crash Out With Me.

Inside, we get honest about what’s actually driving your burnout and build strategies that protect your energy, your ambition, and your nervous system.

crashoutwithme.co.

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I’ve been telling y’all to stop asking Black women to speak for free. Apparently, audacity is on sale this year. If you are in people’s inboxes asking them to pay to speak…please be so deeply serious right now.

Especially when the people you’re targeting are Black women.

Black women are already over-indexed on being the backbone of rooms we didn’t design, didn’t get equity in, and often didn’t even get properly credited for.

We are the culture. We are the case study. We are the panel diversity fix. We are the “can you just share a few words” emergency contact.

And now… you want us to do all that for free too?

Be so so so so so for real.

That is not community building. That is not exposure. That is not an opportunity. That is extraction, that is IP theft, that is giving MLM.

And yes, this absolutely belongs in the burnout conversation. Because burnout is not just about being busy.

It is about chronic undervaluing.

It is about the slow erosion that happens when you are constantly treated like a beginner, even when you run circles around these folks.

It is about the emotional and intellectual tax Black women are expected to front and do it with a smile, while everyone else gets to call it “collaboration.”

taps megaphone*

When you ask Black women to overgive, whether that is free labor, discounted expertise, pay-to-play visibility, or whatever new gimmick you dream up, you are participating in the exact conditions that burn brilliant people all the way out.

Not eventually. Predictably. Because constantly being undervalued is exhausting. Convincing others that you deserve you flowers is exhausting.

Constantly being positioned as “lucky to be included” is exhausting.

Constantly being in rooms that benefit from your presence but won’t properly resource you is exhausting.

I need organizers, founders, and “community builders” to understand one thing:

If your business model requires underpaying or charging the very people whose voices make your platform valuable.

You do not have a community. You have a dependency problem. And Black women are tired of being the infrastructure for ecosystems that refuse to invest back into us.

Pay people.

Pay Black women.

And if the budget is not budgeting yet, might I suggest sorting that out and leaving us out of it, and no I don't want a discounted ticket to an event i've quite literally never heard of.

Burnout prevention cannot just be about doing less or taking more PTO. It’s about creating environments, including the ones we personally influence, where people feel:

Sometimes the most protective thing you can offer someone isn’t advice. It’s kindness. It’s consideration. It’s not making them armor up just to exist in the room.

So this week, two gentle nudges:

Go do something your inner child would recognize as joy.

And look around your world and ask:

Who around me is holding it together a little too tightly?

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Being here counts. Thank you for supporting work that tells the truth. 🖤