They Didn't Believe Me

I said it plainly, without hesitation: I work twenty-five to thirty hours a week.

The room went quiet.

Not the kind of quiet that comes before a question. The kind that comes before a verdict.

One leader looked at me like I'd said something wrong. Another glanced away. A few held their coffee and said nothing.

Then the pushback came.

They didn't believe me.

These were leaders doing serious work — running programs inside California's prisons, carrying communities that most institutions had already written off. Everyone in that room was committed. Nobody was coasting.

That's what made the silence so strange.

When someone in nonprofit leadership says they work fifty or sixty hours a week, nobody questions it. That number reads as devotion. It reads as proof of how much you care.

When I said twenty-five to thirty, it didn't read that way.

It read as suspicious.

I've been thinking about that room ever since.

Not because I needed them to believe me. But because of what their disbelief revealed.

Somewhere along the way, the sector had made the grind into the identity. Not just a reality. A badge. A measure of commitment.

And if you're not grinding, you're either lying or you don't care enough.

What they couldn't see — and I say this without judgment — is what the twenty-five to thirty hours actually contains.

It contains a banking coalition I spent months building, starting from a single conversation with AI that helped me think through Community Reinvestment Act strategies I'd never had the bandwidth to map out before.

It contains the Google tour I took twelve recently released entrepreneurs on — and the conversations that followed. The calls about purpose and reentry and what comes next. Two years ago, I wouldn't have had the capacity for those conversations. I would have been too far in my head, already running to the next thing.

It contains a phone call with someone coming home, where I could simply be present. Not watching the clock. Not half-listening. Present.

The work didn't shrink. The quality of it changed.

I heard something once at Harvard Business School that I haven't been able to shake.

You can make yourself so busy as an executive director that you are no longer you.

You make yourself so far removed from the very people you say you want to serve.

I've felt the edges of that myself. I've watched it happen to leaders I respect.

The people in that room in Big Bear weren't failing. They were running toward their mission as hard as they could.

But somewhere in the running, they'd stopped asking whether the pace itself was costing something.

The sadness I felt in that room wasn't about them being behind.

It was about watching people protect a version of sacrifice that was hurting them.

Protecting it because the culture had made it sacred.

You can't talk someone out of a belief that lives that deep.

But you can show them something different is possible. And hope that, in time, the seeing does the work.

I'm a human being, not a human doing.

That's not a statement about productivity or AI or how many hours are in a workweek. It's a belief about what the mission is actually for — and who has to remain whole enough to carry it.

If that resonates, you can see the thinking behind it at HeadspaceGenie — built around that same idea, that the headspace you protect is the headspace you lead from.