This Might Be the Most Taboo Topic in American Business: Let’s Talk about It

Recently, I wrote a brief personal reflection that surprised me by taking off like wildfire: it was about my first ten years in a high-power business industry. It was a scornful peak into the back rooms of the pharmaceutical industry coupled with my divergent awakening to its dark guiding forces and their effect in the world. I thought that in posting how I truly felt about this work I would lose LinkedIn connections, but I did not – instead, I grew new connections. I knew something was there. Others had felt what I had felt.

I learned a lot as my remembered experiences and how I felt about them synthesized into narrative. But I felt the article was not constructive. It was a fiery exercise in truth telling, but I asked myself, How does this benefit my higher goal of helping humanity? I took it down because the thought was not yet complete. I knew I could do better.?

How we feel and think about our work shares a direct relationship to how we feel and think about ourselves. Our companies, our businesses, and our business industries are living organisms comprised mentally, physically, and psychically by each of us, our motivations, our ideals, our intelligence, and our awareness. And like any other organism, they get sick, cancerous, and dissolve to entropy if they lose sight of what is important: our deepest life imperative to expand – not through some self-serving economic ideal of growth but to elevate their essential parts (you, me, our planet, and beyond), and realize new potential through us.

As I continued reflecting on my most intimate experiences, it became overwhelmingly clear to me that there is something we do not talk about in business at large, and we must: career trauma.

What do I mean by career trauma? You mean workplace trauma, like… HR? No. Not quite so clean and externally delegated.

We are in a deeply human moment when we are deciding our fate on increasingly inverse scales of effect and time. We know what we have done hasn’t worked so well. Yet, we still hold onto the same playbooks that make us sick, poor, and vulnerable to disaster. This has led us to scales of institutional corruption, cognitive dissonance, denial, and doubling down upon forces that by definition may be called anti-human. We experience this, perhaps most critically, in our highest-power industries including pharma, tech (including advertising), energy, finance, media, aerospace, defense, and political office. I experienced this firsthand, slowly and compartmentally, in business development of the pharmaceutical industry. And I know others among other identified industries who struggle with similar traumatic experiences.

The gravity of my integration of what my work was doing can only be described as a trauma. The impact our work has on others should be apparent to us, and as humans, we tend to think that we know exactly what impact our work has. We project our intimate filters, founded or unfounded, upon what we want to be true onto our greater shared reality. We may think what we are doing is good for humanity, but if we wish to prove this to ourselves, we must step beyond the compartments and limitations of our own work and its little “milestones” and “achievements,” and look beyond, into what is happening to those we impact. Are we serving them? For years through pharma, I believed so. How I could possibly believe this now is a spiritual teacher to me, because I was so completely and obviously wrong – and this degree of wrongness has been painful. But it also becomes part of my intimate spiritual awareness.

The truth is, it can take days, months, years before we truly realize the human impact we are making, especially in high-power industries. But as we develop ourselves intimately, spiritually, and our own development begins to conflict – particularly sharply – with what we are doing through our lives, we may be beginning to give ourselves license toward realizing what we are doing.

Through my decade in the pharmaceutical industry, I am personally convinced in assessment without any doubt that our highest-power industries are:

• Presently governed by narcissism and sociopathy;
• That their cultures are cultures of addiction, and thus, this is what they produce;
• That the archetypes directing their executive leadership are more often than not fundamentally not in the interests of humanity; and thus,
• Are imbalanced toward moral and spiritual violence.

As I drew these personal assessments through my own direct experiences within the shadows of a high-power industry designed to make people sicker, poorer, and addicted, this awareness assumed a spiritual tour de force.

Integral to this process of healing is recognizing what I call career trauma: this is our awareness – perhaps during, or even years after we decide to leave high-power industries through inner intuition – that how we have chosen to direct our life's actions has yielded more negative than positive systemic impact on humanity and our planet, despite our heart's intentions.

In Jungian psychology, a person’s path to self-fulfillment and self-realization – our individuation – deepens and expands as we become aware of our darkest shadows and cast our greatest illumination. The realization of the shadow comes first. One look at our planet and ourselves tells us that things are deeply wrong, that what we are doing systemically is not in our evolutionary interests. We have to realize this intimately within ourselves in our highest-power business and social industries.

Integral to this process of healing is recognizing what I call career trauma: this is our awareness – perhaps during, or even years after we decide to leave high-power industries through inner intuition – that how we have chosen to direct our life's actions has yielded more negative than positive systemic impact on humanity and our planet, despite our heart's intentions.

I fully believe, without any doubt, that every problem we are aware of always already has a solution. We do not need to innovate some new solution to repair the damage we are doing, and it can’t be mended through some clever ad hoc bandaging. All we have to do is deepen and elevate ourselves. Just as our most intimate personal healing requires nothing outside of us, so too is true for our work, our businesses, and our industries at large.

Our highest power industries can be forces for good. But they are clearly not so today. For this change to happen, their deeply human, spiritual health and vitality must reflect our own. As we heal ourselves and change our work, true innovations that change our world will not be able to be contained.

But the change is not going to come easy for these industries that produce and thrive on violence: those whose currencies are how we feel and think, how our bodies function, and what we are capable of through our use of raw and mental materials and forces.

Is career trauma real? You bet it is. Let’s talk about it.

And I mean this sincerely. I am now opening my calendar for Zoom calls to anyone who wishes to anonymously share their stories and their own experiences. It is my hope that through our sharing, we may find new ways to benefit others, including our children.

If this resonates with you, send it around.

Message me today: let’s do this.