How to Rebuild Confidence After a Career Setback
There's a particular kind of quiet that settles in after a career setback.
Maybe you were passed over for a promotion you'd earned. Maybe a project you led fell apart publicly. Maybe you were demoted, let go, or watched a peer sail past you. Whatever it was, something shifted. You used to walk into work feeling capable. Now there's a voice questioning whether you're actually any good at this — whether you ever were.
Setbacks don't just cost us opportunities. They can quietly rewrite the story we tell about ourselves. The good news is that confidence isn't something you either have or don't. It's something you rebuild, deliberately — and this post is about how.
Code-Switching Isn't a Soft Skill - It's a Survival Strategy
Walk into almost any white-collar workplace, and you'll hear the word professional used often.
But for many professionals of color, "professionalism" carries an unspoken expectation: be excellent—but not too different.
That expectation often leads to code-switching—the conscious or unconscious process of changing one's language, tone, appearance, behavior, or cultural expression to fit the dominant workplace culture. While everyone adapts to different social settings to some degree, racialized code-switching is fundamentally different. It is often rooted not in convenience, but in safety, acceptance, and survival.
The Monday Scaries: When Sunday Anxiety Is Trying to Tell You Something
If you've ever spent a beautiful Sunday in Seattle hiking, grabbing coffee with friends, or enjoying a rare sunny afternoon—only to feel a wave of anxiety hit around dinner time—you've experienced what many people call the Monday Scaries.
That sinking feeling before the workweek starts has become so common that we've almost accepted it as a normal part of adult life. People joke about it on social media. But here's the question I find more interesting: Why are so many people dreading Monday in the first place?