Hello friends. It’s been a minute since I’ve been on here. Time to repurpose this website.
Last time we spoke I was finding myself, making a career transition, and pouring my heart out in terms of my past life as a historian, sharing my thoughts on the politics of representation, the sugarcoating of history, and the pressures of saving the world as a brown person in academia.
Since then I’ve moved into management consulting and am tackling new challenges in terms of client management, project management, and working on a team. I’m really happy in my new role and have been able to think more about organizational development, how to support staff, how to create a unified communications strategy, and other issues. But most importantly, I’ve had a lot of time to think about mental health and its role in professional development.
All that to say that I’ve had to do a lot of personal growth in order to do my job well.
Basically, I’m healing to succeed.
I’m not a corny person so never really got into meditation or mindfulness or a lot of other things that are actually really important. Instead, I’m one of those people that tries to just do the work and numb out all other things, including sometimes even my body, until the task is finished. I guess you could say I’m someone who operated in survival mode for most of my life. But the thing is, those habits are not so helpful to do the work I’m doing now.
I need to be more confident and take myself and my needs seriously to lead a team and a project. So even though I cared about mental health before, and my personal healing, over the last year, this got even more real, and I’ve been working overdrive on how to listen to my body, how to set boundaries with work, home, family, and how to assert myself, delegate, ask for help, and be more patient. I was also reminded of what happens when I try to do everything myself, and looked into why I do that.
Anyway, the point is that these are valuable lessons for first generation professionals and healing and therapy can be useful tools to advance in your career. I know that I developed some not so great habits growing up, because my mom did the best she could, just like my grandma did the best she could, surviving in a pretty unfair and sexist system, but those survival strategies are not the soft skills you need at work. :)
So going forward I plan to talk about these things. What is the relationship between mental health and work, for people who are healing to succeed, and figuring it all out as they go. You can expect me to talk about this from my own perspective, based on conversations with friends and personal experiences. I plan to bring my background in academia, nonprofits, and consulting as well as my cultural background as a first generation Mexican immigrant, now back home in San Diego.
I’m obviously not the only one doing this, but I’m doing it my own way. Inspired in large part by the new generation of Latino influencers who have so much to share, I am creating my own content to address this huge need for first generation professionals, which will also include tackling some stereotypes about Latino families that I’ve struggled with in the past.
I hope to see you every two weeks delving into this content. You can also follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Hasta la próxima!