20: Nkem Ndefo on Workplace Trauma, Power, and Leaving Well
Nkem Ndefo is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, researcher, and community strategist to innovative programs that address trauma and inequity, build resilience, and shape liberatory change for individuals and organizations throughout the US and internationally. She is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.
“How does your organization do supervision or mentorship? Hard things come up all the time. Are you practicing sitting with people, noticing when people are having hard times?”
Additional Quotes:
They have decision fatigue. It's like a sign of decreased resilience or small bandwidth. Like, I just can't make another decision because I'm weighing so many different possibilities, many of them unknown, and the more that are unknown, the more things are there in the air, and there's more contingencies that I have to, you know, hold, not just mentally, but like energetically and emotionally, all those contingencies, and it takes energy. And if we are resource constrained with our energy, our attention, our capacity we're not resilient to make decisions.
When you see a binary, trauma is afoot. Because trauma polarizes, and so you'll see these sort of extremes, it's hard to find that nuance in the middle that can see the complexity and sit with the complexity. And so when we see these sort of extremes of I have all the power, I have no power. Somebody has all of the control or no control.
Not everything works for everybody and it may work for you sometimes and not others. And so when you have that self awareness, you have all kinds of choice opens up and the ability to attune your responses. So you're not wasting energy. In these over responses gives you more capacity to make more decisions to sit with more uncertainty to juggle all those contingencies of decision making more easily.
Transitions are hard because for most people they're associated with grief and, I'm going to say the dominant, North American, Western European, cultures are absolute, in my very professional language, shit at dealing with grief. And so we don't have good models. We don't have good skills and we need them because transitions are a change.
I try not to ask, could this be worse? Because usually the answer is yes. And, I really would rather spend my energy imagining what would be possible if we got it right.
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Transcript:
How does your organization do supervision or mentorship? Hard things come up all the time. Are you practicing sitting with people, noticing when people are having hard times?
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose. And when possible, Joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief, confidence, leadership, and career development.
Braided Throughout will be solo episodes sharing my best practices and leaving well framework. Expect to be inspired, challenged, and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice. Of leaving. Well, as you seek to leave your imprint in this world. Nkem Ndefo is the founder of lumos transforms and the creator of the resilience toolkit, which is a model that promotes embodied self awareness and self regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context.
She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, researcher, and community strategist to innovative programs that address trauma and inequity, build resilience, and shape liberatory change for individuals and organizations throughout the U. S. and internationally. She is particularly interested in working alongside people most marginalization.
And Nkem, I'm so glad to have you for this conversation. And I'm curious to start off with this question. What three words would you use to describe your personal relationship with change or transition? First, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be in conversation here. I feel very honored and I'm excited.
And that would also be my first word for my relationship or to change. Transformation is exciting. And if I could cheat. I have a good friend, E. J. Uday of Turtle Tank, who coined the word, or I don't know if she coined it, but nervicited. So it's a little bit nervous, a little excited. It's not quite anxious, it's more on the excited, but you're just a little nervous about it because there's so much unknown.
So I'm both excited by unknown and I will say it can be on the border, so nervicited. So that's a little cheating because I got two words in there. Hopeful, because it's, I think, very ripe with potentiality. And I don't know the word. It's not grief. It's not sad. It's wistfulness. Maybe. Yeah. So that sense of.
You know, that there's some transition and laws like, you know, it's fall right now here in the northern hemisphere and the days are as they get shorter. There's a sense of, okay, we're transitioning seasons. Like, you can really feel it when the light starts to ship and it's a wistfulness and it's interesting because then in spring, as the light gets more, I get that hopeful, blossoming.
Nervous sighted feeling. So I get both. I'm curious, though, as as the days get shorter, the light gets shorter. Does that create some coziness and some calm that might not happen when the light is more plentiful? For you, as my dear friend who's an Ayurvedic practitioner points out that I'm very Vata imbalanced.
And so I'm like, let's go. Where's the big, where's the expansion. But I'm also, if you like a whole nother, I love a paradigm, like the ways that we understand, you know, used to understand ourselves and each other. If I think about like Western astrology and like all kinds of cancer, my cancer stellium. So of course I love home and cozy and my bed.
And so that idea of turning inwards is also appealing. Yeah, I'm so thankful for seasons, even if it makes me nerve sided. I'm glad you're adopting the word, too. I love it. I love it. I'd like to start out with the concept of resilience and your expertise and your knowledge around the concept and the reality of resilience.
How does, I guess first, how do you describe resilience and how does that play into one's ability to make decisions? I mean, I'm a big fan of snatching resilience out of the jaws of late stage neoliberal racialized capitalism. Just grab it back because it's been individualized, um, it's been weaponized, it's like all kinds of things.
And so I think we can all agree that, you know, definitionally resilience is flexible strength. It's the question of for what? Resource by whom and what and so I like an expansive definition that we're looking at individuals and communities that they're inseparable. We exist in systems. We exist in culture.
We're rooted in history that it is this flexible strength and increased capacity. Right to overcome adversity, adversity and resilience are that fellows and also heal. I like to think of what we, at Lumos Transforms, my organization, we've, as a team, have sort of shaped this definition of alchemical resilience, which is all of those things.
In service of not just the healing and the joy and how do we transform the systems that are creating the adversity and inequity in the 1st place. So it's a both. And and so when I think about. That flexible strength and especially increased bandwidth around decisions. You'll see it went around people say they have decision fatigue.
It's like a sign of decreased resilience or small bandwidth. Like, I just can't make another decision because I'm weighing so many different possibilities, many of them unknown. And the more that are unknown, the more things are there in the air. And there's more contingencies that I have to hold, not just mentally, but like, energetically and emotionally, all those contingencies.
And it takes. Energy and if we are resource constrained with our energy, our attention, our capacity, you know, we're not resilient to make decisions. And we often will either. Be sort of that hurried, like, quick, just make a decision just to get out of this uncomfortable feeling of. All this to hold, or we just collapse and are passive and let the decision be made for us, I think is what happens.
So when there's low resilience, we're not. Active participants in the decision making process, or we over control it that also makes me think as you were talking about the constraints, and it just made me think about people who haven't had as much practice with the power that comes from decision making.
And I think there's a lot of conversation we could have about that, but that leads kind of into a really good next segue about power and how how it and our understanding of it. Has a lot to do with our experiences in the workplace. So I'd love for you to share a little bit about power. I recently attended a really amazing workshop with you around power, and we'll have a link in the show notes to learn more about that.
But how does power interchange and intersect with the workplace when it comes to all the things leaving well. I think there's very little, it's like, it's also like talking about politics when you say like everything is political like power touches everything. And both that's an internal like power is the capacity to affect change of some kind, and to influence.
You know, depending on your positionality, both your social location, your identities, as well as your official and formal power that you hold in your role, there's all kinds of powers associated or lack thereof, relational power, you know, the quality and the relationships that one has. And so power shows up in all kinds of ways.
Like I think about gossip in the workplace, right? People always, Oh, gossip is I've seen leader. I've done leadership coaching, like super huge. Multibillion dollar orgs, where, you know, chief executives trade and gossip that it's not just everyone else that that's actually the currency of power. And so who knows what right?
So the knowledge is that power and who. Like, who has access to that information? And then when people are shut out of power, they will use gossip also to regain power, like, collectively or individually. And so I think in terms of transitions, did you hear who's leaving? Why are they leaving? Are they being pushed out?
Like, all of this, right? That's what just came to mind. And like, who's in the know? And who has the control over how they leave? When they leave, what all that shapes and looks like, um, is definitely a function. Like, most people don't. They're terminated unceremoniously, things have to be kept hush hush about what the reasons are for, you know, whatever legal or fiduciary responsibilities.
So there's all kinds of places where power plays in how we make transitions. Or, you know, yeah, I also think. That there might be some things to say, and whether we touch on them now or later is up to you. But I think around the conversations of funders and funding the nonprofit work and how much power comes into play with withholding with gossip with deciding who gets.
Who gets the graces of our funding. I don't know if you have anything to add there. Um, if not, we can keep moving on. I don't know. I mean, I chose to find a fund to create and social enterprise because I was very hesitant to enter the nonprofit industrial complex and all of its bureaucracy and layers of.
Stuff and just, you know, the moral, like, why are we here in a philanthropic, you know, it's extracted and then graced back. Like, it's just, I have so many problems with it and we just got a fiscal sponsor and are taking grants. So here we are. So, I mean, they kind of get you coming and going and, you know, I do see a move.
I've been doing more work in the philanthropy sector and I do see funders who are more conscious of their power and trying to. You know, in the conversations from the summer of racial reckoning around equity, and now we're really seeing how it's like, well, what's your relationship to power here? And how is there an ethical relationship that you can have?
I see like funders more willing to move money more quickly, but in some ways, there's a Shame around the power that it has and so there's more collapse. Like, we can see, I don't know, you know, about Lankley chase and that whole thing, you know, which is like, we're like, this is amazing. The money's being returned, but it's, you know, I question, like, is it being done in a collapse format where it's like.
I feel so guilty. I feel ashamed that I've had this power. I don't know how to do it in collaboration. So here you take it or let's just move the money. They'll decide. Right. And so I see that too. Like, lately, there's a thing that's come out of my mouth a few times in the last several weeks. And it's something I've known and I've said before, but it seems to be really present in the conversations and spaces that I've been in when you see a binary trauma is afoot.
Because trauma like polarizes and so you'll see these sort of extremes. It's hard to find that nuance in the middle that can see the complexity and sit with the complexity. And so when we see these sort of extremes of I have all the power, I have no power. Somebody has all of the control or no control.
Yeah, that's powerful. I'm I'm remembering also around funding decisions and how many folks I've worked with who are in executive director roles. And 1 of the 1st things that comes out of their mouths when we talk about timeline is, well, I can't. Leave until and they say a certain date and I'll say, well, what's what does that date have to do with anything?
Well, we're applying for funding. And 1 of the boxes on so many grant applications is, have you had transition in your executive leadership in the past? However, many months and I'm, I'm curious for a day when we can have nuance around that as well. Instead of punishing folks for necessary endings. Yeah, so it just came up to for me.
Like it's not just an executive leadership, like just what's your turnover rate, period. To me, that question is just so blunt. It's like, what if the tenure was 20 years? Like, hi, like the question can be, have you had turnover? What is the tenure? What is the succession planning that those questions, right?
Maybe this is the best thing that could happen for this org. Right. Could you talk a little bit about. Your work with the resilience toolkit and semantics and self regulation, all of that. I'm just wondering what what advice and maybe you wouldn't call advice. But what what of your knowledge? Could you share with those that are listening who might have some fear?
Or some, and this isn't probably a nerve sided thing, more of like actual fear, uh, and some barriers that are holding them back from expressing their power or making decisions. I actually created the Resilience Toolkit because I realized how, like, one of the major obstacles for change work and healing work, which Liberatory work, this type of stuff is the lack of resilience, the lack of ability to sit with hard things to sit with the unknown to sit with trauma and, you know, when you're not taught something and then you're expected to do it, it's really unfair.
Right? So we have a shh. I don't have, and especially in the nonprofit world, I'm going to say it's a rather spicy thing, but there is an over focus on the external in some ways, almost as in an addiction, because if I focus on the external, I don't have to focus on the internal and somebody in, you know, has it worse than me.
And so I'm doing this work, which is noble work, which there is altruism, but it is also simultaneously. And I'm going to say, and it is important and necessary and critical work. And it is also relieving you of the needing to stop and slow down and feel. And so when that is the case. It's going to be lopsided.
It's just going to be the work is going to be lopsided. And I think we can criticize funders. Like, there's a lot of criticism of funders of, like, over focusing and micromanaging their grantees and not doing their internal work. Hey, nonprofits, it's a fractal and that same nonprofit who's, like, criticizing the funder has the same process of not being able and for many, and there's also structural reasons who gets general operating funds to do Okay.
Internal work, you don't get it. It's all about programmatic impact because that whole thing about focusing outwards and you probably that word is probably working with people who are substance abusing who are also avoiding everybody. It's like a chain of people. But some of these avoidances are socially acceptable and.
So creating the resilience toolkit was like, how do we use the neuro, the new neuroscience that we understand trauma? How do we use semantics? How do we use critical theory? How do we use all of these pots of knowledge and experience and wisdom to help resource people? To be able to slow down to turn inwards so that we can have a rebalancing effect and we can because I don't know how we're going to really affect the kind of change that we want if it is not just everybody's not part of it.
And if it's we're never looking at ourselves and we're only looking outwards. It's again. That's that imbalance. That's not the liberatory change. It's not truly collaborative. It's me doing for it's paternalistic. It's all those things. So I said a lot of spicy things. Maybe you have a comment or a question.
Well, I love that. One of my questions every time I have a guest is what's something about change and transition that people might be shocked or surprised to hear. And I think this whole podcast will just be spicy and that's okay. You've got me. I'm a little jet lagged and I've always like when I'm a little tired.
I just, my associations are looser, and I actually do some of my best thinking and feeling in those places, because I'm not trying to just say just the right thing, or, like, I can solve a crossword puzzle much better in this state. So you're gonna, you're getting a better interview. Perfect. Well, we'll always plan any time we need to talk.
We'll always plan it when you're jet lagged. So you said, you said these words, and it's quote, the embodied capacities that help us soften and open into the unknown. And, and I think that you were talking around, Self awareness and self regulation and all of those things. How does someone practically use those things that are in the resilience toolkit to help someone prepare for change?
I mean, part of it. Okay. So we know like with change and everyone like jumps on the change, but you've got to 1 build motivation. You've got to build capacity, right? So there's on both sides and they feed each other, right? Like, the more capacity you have, the more motivation you have, the more, you know, and, and I think especially in that direction.
And so when we talk about embodied capacities, it is the capacities to sit with hard things. And so very concretely, it's. Yeah. The toolkit teaches us how to become aware of our own states and not just stress, but also relaxation. That is, I think, overlooked and super important because actually when you focus on relaxation, you can settle.
And in that self knowledge of, oh, this is what my state is. And how do I know so I can read earlier queues and also helping to develop is this useful at this moment because most of us are carrying more than we need almost all the time. And so even if it's like, not a flat out trauma response, but you're carrying 25 percent more stress than you need.
Through the day, that's heavy chain ball and chain around your ankle and that's really stealing from your capacity. And so, if you can 1 recognize it, and then use a very concrete tool, and I'm a big fan of real time tools. That work in 30 seconds or less, and that you can then settle an overactive response by that, say, 25%.
That's a reclamation of your capacity. And if you do it throughout the day and easily, and you're using tools and you're able to, you know, a big part of the toolkit is how do you discern a tool works for you? Because everyone's like, Oh, breathe or do this. Not everything works for everybody, and it may work for you sometimes and not others.
And so when you have that self awareness, all kinds of choice opens up and the ability to attune your responses so you're not wasting energy in these over responses gives you more capacity to make more decisions, to sit with more uncertainty, to juggle. All those contingencies of decision making more easily.
So just like on an energetic level, and I mean, materially, like the energy, like brain is like one of your most metabolically costly activities, you know, uses huge amount of glucose in the body. There's that, that, that real practical piece. And I also find is that when you are able to realize I can settle.
And I can trust I can settle. You're more confident to engage in harder things because you know, you have the tool, like, you know, I'm not going to get in really rough waters and start swimming if, unless I'm a really strong swimmer. And so this helps you develop that strong, that skill to, because we always use it.
Like, we'll use the resilience toolkit before we do anti racism work because. We'll come into organizations. They're like, we really want to do this. And then you ask them, you just mentioned the word white fragility or white supremacy. And you can see people's bodies go like, and you're supposed to write policy like that.
And you're supposed to have a conversation like that. So how do we grow people's capacity to have greater comfort with harder things and know how to settle, then they can engage transitions are hard because for most people they're associated with grief. And I'm going to say the dominant North American.
Western European cultures are absolute in my very professional language shit at dealing with grief. And so we don't have good models. We don't have good skills and we need them because transitions are change. Yeah, and and I think, you know, the beauty that that I'm hearing when you're talking about this, like, think of if we all showed up to our workplaces or to projects or to gigs, whatever in a space.
Where we were having those real time cues, practicing decision confidence, bringing in the resilience that could be so, so beautiful. And so calming without the urgency, all those things, what is risked or what's at risk if we continue to not get this right with transitions? Like, are we at the edge of the worst?
It could be because I'm, I'm curious about like, what if we don't start proactively managing transitions in the workplace? I mean, I don't think I need to doomsday it. I mean, I think it's like, I mean, we're living it. I mean, I try not to ask, could this be worse? Because usually the answer is yes. I really would rather spend my energy imagining what would be possible if we got it right.
There's a state, like, do you know a little bit about behavior change theory? Yes, I do a little. So, you know, when people don't know that there's a problem, we call it pre contemplation, right? This is the trans theoretical model and I love it. It's a little individualized, but I do like it for some things and this.
If people don't know there's a problem, one of the ways to help them, like, go, okay, we need to do something is to say, like, this is what happens. This is what's bad. But once people know that there's a problem, actually forecasting to what could be will pull up, will evoke. That intrinsic motivation to say, yeah, this is worthwhile.
So it depends like where someone is, what tact I would use. I'm hoping that folks that are listening here are like, no, that leaving we don't leave well, and that they are aware of the problem, but looking for solutions. So they're not solution aware. Yeah. And so I would like to. Think about what you intimated there.
What would it be like if we could show up with these skills to be there for one another without the, you know, ever present boot of the urgent talker see on our necks. I think that there's so many from an organizational standpoint, and this could be corporations, nonprofits, it doesn't matter the legal status of a body of people trying to accomplish work that, you know, I don't know why it is that we seem to be addicted to the pain of transitions without having planned for them.
And I think about, you know, in our personal lives, my family, when someone has died and when they have died without a will, the chaos that that immediately. Descends on the family. It doesn't matter how close the family was, how tight the bonds were. It's still chaotic. And I just think how much better it could be in organizations if we planned for ends, knowing that they're going to happen and knowing that it's reality.
That's the avoidance. This culture doesn't do grief well. Transitions are associated with grief, even when you're, it's just a change. Something has to let go. So you open into something new. And if so many people have traumatic grief and trauma logic. Doesn't look at context in the same way. Trauma logic is sounds like, feels like, smells like, and then the body will say, Oh, this is the thing I better react.
And so change is loss. Any loss that has been unprocessed and undealt with, which is most of us is then triggered. And we're like, Oh, and we avoid. Because we don't have, we have unprocessed trauma and we don't have the skills to sit with and we don't have models and rituals around grief, period, any transitions.
I mean, you look at any life transitions, menopause, menarche, none of them, right? There's very few transitions. Oh, and if they are, they're highly performative. We look at most what weddings look like. Right, highly performative and not as much about, you know, the substantive of what's happening. So it's not a surprise that people aren't planning and we can't because it's trauma logic.
It's the body that you're pushing against, you're pushing against a trauma response. So you can provide all of the logic about why it's important and people still can't do the thing. And then they berate themselves that they can't do the thing and they shame themselves. Wrong tool for the job. The tool for the job is to say, this is hard.
And how do we give you the emotional skills, not just the, the cognitive and executive planning piece? What would you say then about practice? Because I'm hearing what you're saying about, like, you can have all of the knowledge. You can have all the templates. You can do all of the work. But I'd be curious what you'd say about practice in, in thinking of, like, an organization, a nonprofit, a, what have you.
So if they have decided to, decided to say, okay, transitions are normal, endings are necessary, we're, we're going to do the work, how, how does an organization, a body practice in, in the normal day to day of also having to do the work of whatever the work is that they're here to do? There are other things that are hard and it's not like, oh, suddenly we're going to do transitions in a different way, but we're not doing the other things.
I don't think we need to no 1 needs. Like, we all have initiative fatigue. No 1 needs. It's a new initiative. There are some things that are multipurpose. I mean, I think about how does your organization do supervision or mentorship? Hard things come up all the time. Are you practicing sitting with people, noticing when people are having hard times?
Do we not talk about emotions in the work? If you don't talk about emotions in the workplace, you're going to have a hard time with the hard stuff. You're going to have a hard time with the believing you're going to have a hard time with your DEI, right? And so where is the The capacity building around emotional intelligence around and everyone's like, where's the impact?
Where's our outcomes? Right? And these are other ways. Of avoiding and they're rewarded, they're rewarded by your shareholders. They're rewarded by your consumers. They're rewarded by your funders. They're rewarded by the press. No one really provides. There's no cultural rewards for self awareness. There's no cultural awards or monetary awards, I think, in the short term for nurturing your people and that kind of culture, you will see it in the long term in terms of employee retention, or, you know, staff retention, you'll see it in productivity, but it's most of the everyone's their cycle is very short of what they're looking at.
They're not looking long term. So we're talking big culture transformation. You chose the topic. I know. It's so funny. I'm sitting here for those that are listening and cannot see my face. When you said outcomes are another version of avoidance. I was like, oh, my eyes got real big and my mouth went in the shape of an O.
That's deep and true. And I don't mean like, I mean, outcomes are important. This is a both. And if you haven't gotten the point yet, like, I'm live in the land of like subtlety and nuance and complexity. It's my natural home. The daughter of a. Fluid mechanics engineer. I don't know if it's nature or nurture, but outcomes are important and just like anything like you can have a glass of wine and it's lovely.
You can use it as an alcoholic. It's not the substance. It's our relationship to it. And if your relationship to outcomes is it's outcomes over people, it's outcomes over process. There's a problem. There's a problem. One of the other questions I was planning to ask you was around the power of being relationally connected and how that matters when making decisions to stay, go, or shift.
And I'm wondering if you have something to share there. In some ways, relational connection can make it harder because there's the empathy. Of how transitions might impact people negatively, but also positively because they can create new opportunities. Like, sometimes, especially the more leadership you have, you may be blocking just by simple virtue of your tenure, your skill set.
You may be blocking growth for others so that there's both. It's a both and there again, another both and on the flip side of that, by being relationally connected, you're able to be there for people. In the hardness of the transition, and that's powerful. So while I don't practice as a nurse midwife anymore, I have training and practice for many years.
And I carry that approach in everything I do. I still say I'm a midwife. It's just not babies. It's change is what I midwife. I love a liminal space. If you've ever been in a childbirth yourself birthing or been present for someone else, it hurts. It's hard. It's kind of like running a marathon, you know, it's hard, but notice that in, especially I might use the marathon analogy more.
We don't go like, Hey, quick, get in the car. I'll drive you to the finish line. People will be like, what are you doing? Like culturally it's. Bizarre, right? Like, no one will know. I'll just drive you to the finish line. We're like, you can do it. And we cheer and we go, we know it's hard and you're doing it right.
And somehow like the hardness is tolerable because you're not alone in it. Usually don't run a marathon yourself. You've got a training group or you're running and you've got people cheering you on. And in labor as a midwife, like we know it's hard, but like when you're with someone and they look in your eyes and they.
I, you know, I guess I'm like mixing all my metaphors and analogies, like, just like left and right. If you have little kids and they fall and they look up at you and they're trying to see your reaction to know how bad it is for them, you know, there's a certain point where it hurts. There's another point where like, what's your reaction.
So when you're relationally connected to your people and you're leaving, they're looking to you and your ability to be with them in the hardness. Also is a source of strength and eases the transition. So again, in some places, it makes the empathy makes it harder in some places. It makes it more tolerable, more.
Okay. Yeah, and that makes me think about each of our, I think, individual responsibilities to also model behavior as we learn and as we lean in to new tools and things that help us along the way. What does leaving well mean to you? With intentionality, awareness, care, and a sense of mutuality. I think that this is an under used word, a sense of shared responsibility with those who are impacted, including ourselves.
And nervous sighted just to bring it full circle and nervous sighted, like what opens up what is possible. I can feel that viscerally when I say what is possible. I can feel the flu, the little opening in the chest and the belly and a little flutter at the same time. What is possible, what is po that that question, that statement can be exclamation point.
It can be question mark. It can be all of it. I love that. What is possible. Income. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you. Joyful. Yeah. This is good. I appreciate you. Likewise. To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit naomihattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide, to shift culture, and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.