Beyond the Work
"Must Be Nice…"
And Other Tales Turned Truth
The Story We Tell Ourselves
Three ordinary words.
Small enough to pass unnoticed.
Common enough that many of us have stopped hearing them.
Yet somehow they manage to carry an entire worldview.
"Must be nice…"
Sometimes they're spoken aloud. More often they arrive quietly — an automatic thought when someone mentions taking a day off, engaging in self+care, leaving work on time, or doing anything that doesn't resemble the perpetual state of busyness we've come to consider baseline.
And in just three words, an entire story unfolds.
One that isn't simply describing our circumstances — but the story we've slowly begun believing about them.
And the stories we believe have a remarkable way of shaping how we move through our work. And ourselves.
The Story Beneath the Story
That thought rarely arrives alone. Before we've had a chance to examine it, it has already brought companions:
"I don't have time for that."
"That's not available to me."
"Maybe when…"
"That's just not realistic."
For many of us, those thoughts have become so familiar that we hardly notice them anymore. They move through our minds like well-traveled paths, appearing almost instinctively when we encounter something we desire but don't believe we can access
These thoughts aren't wrong. They're often honest reflections of how full life genuinely feels. Many of us are carrying demanding jobs, caregiving responsibilities, financial pressures, aging parents, children, communities, relationships, and a seemingly endless list of things asking for our attention.
And often these thoughts stem from a very real feeling of scarcity — a place where rest feels like something other people get to have. People with more time, fewer responsibilities,different demands, or a different kind of life.
Sometimes slowing down really does feel impossible.
And still, something worth wondering remains. Not to dismiss the reality of full, demanding lives — but to sit beside them and consider:
Within everything we've come to accept as certain — are there places where our assumptions have become more fixed than our circumstances? Where more choice might exist than we've allowed ourselves to consider?
Because sometimes we've lived inside the same story for so long that we've forgotten to ask whether it's still true.
Why It Matters
The challenge isn't simply that we're busy.
It's what prolonged stress does to the way we think.
When our nervous systems remain under chronic demand, our brains naturally rely more heavily on fast, automatic thinking — because it conserves energy (Kahneman, 2011). Efficiency sounds like a good thing. Until we remember what it often means in practice.
When every moment is filled, every task is urgent, and every pause feels indulgent, our reflective capacity narrows. We become less curious and more likely to move through our days on autopilot. This isn't simply a matter of feeling tired. It's a shift in how we experience the world around us.
Many of us become accustomed to the constant movement—thinking, planning, responding, anticipating, producing—that it begins to feel normal. Yet our brains and bodies were never designed to sustain that pace indefinitely.
Research continues to reinforce what we’ve often experienced firsthand. Stress doesn't simply disappear because the workday ends. It remains active within us until we intentionally tend to it (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019).
When left unattended, yesterday's stress quietly becomes today's starting point.
Over time, our nervous systems adapt.
Constant activation begins to feel ordinary.
Busyness becomes our baseline.
Burnout becomes a badge of honor.
Exhaustion becomes evidence that we're committed.
What should have remained warning signs slowly begin to look like professional virtues.
Like a tide that moves so gradually you don't notice the shoreline changing. Each day a small shift. The subtle adjustments. The barely noticeable compromises.
Slowly. Imperceptibly.
Until suddenly the space between who we intend to be and how we're actually showing up is no longer something you notice — it's just a version you've learned to live inside.
Mind the Gap
That gently widening space has a name.
Professional Dangerousness.
It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive in a single moment or in a dramatic way. More often it emerges in the gradual erosion of our capacity to stay curious — the reflective part of us slowly crowded out by everything else demanding our attention.
Reflection is what helps us notice the gap between what we intend and what people we serve actually experience (Morrison, 2005; Weld, 2008). Without room for reflection, practice becomes increasingly automatic.
We interrupt rather than inquire.
We assume rather than attune.
We reach for process rather than presence.
We move toward efficiency instead of understanding.
We solve before we've fully seen.
Not because we intend to.
Because the drift was slow enough that each step felt like solid ground.
And therein lies the danger. Because if this shift wasn't intentional — if we didn't consciously choose it — then it begs the greater question:
What made this possible?
The Both/And
Reflection asks us to become curious — not only about the pressures surrounding us, but about the meanings we've quietly made because of them.
Because "must be nice" was never really about what someone else had.
It was about the story we had begun telling ourselves about what was possible. And stories like that rarely stay contained to one corner of our lives. They become the lens through which we interpret the work itself.
What we believe good practice requires.
What feels realistic.
What feels impossible.
What we stop questioning.
Eventually, we stop experiencing them as stories at all. They simply become reality.
The Both/And asks us to hold the full picture at once — without collapsing it into a single cause or a single solution.
Systems create real constraints.
Organizational cultures teach us what gets rewarded.
Policies establish boundaries.
And then something uniquely human happens.
We adapt.
We answer emails at midnight that could wait until morning. We skip lunch. We stockpile PTO we swear we'll use someday, only to convince ourselves there will never be a good time to take it. We begin to normalize what is unsustainable — wearing exhaustion as evidence of commitment and mistaking depletion for dedication. And somewhere along the way, we began confusing being needed with being well.
The “must be nice” narrative and Professional Dangerousness are not two separate problems. They are two expressions of the same thing — gradual assumptions, adaptations, and choices narrowing what we believe is possible.
“Must be nice” and “this is just how the work goes” live closer together than we realize.
And understanding that connection requires us to look honestly at the stories we have accepted — and the ways we may continue to reinforce them.
The Interruption
Reflection doesn't remove the realities of the work. It doesn't shrink caseloads or create more hours in the day.
What it offers is something equally valuable — the ability to distinguish between the constraints we truly must navigate and the ones we've unintentionally tightened around ourselves.
Because wherever we place the problem, we place the possibility of change.
And when we convince ourselves that the problem exists entirely outside of us, we surrender the places where choice still remains.
The system is made of people.
Organizational culture is made by us, not for us.
Which means the most powerful place to begin is not somewhere above us, but somewhere among us.
Meaningful change begins with someone becoming curious enough to interrupt the story they've been living inside.
One person.
Then another.
And another.
Professional Dangerousness has never been about shaming ourselves for where our patterns began. It has always been about recognizing our role in how they continue.
Because our practice rarely drifts without our thinking shifting first.
The most restrictive parts of our work are not always the requirements themselves. Sometimes they're the meaning we've attached to them.
The most dangerous stories aren't the ones we tell out loud.
They're the ones we've stopped noticing we're telling ourselves.
A Few Things to Sit With
Where has "must be nice" shown up in your thinking lately? What story might those three words be carrying?
What is something you've stopped wanting because you've convinced yourself it isn't possible?
What is one thing you've accepted as just the way things are — in your work or your life — that you haven't examined in a while? When did you stop questioning it?
What part of your work feels restrictive? What portion of that restriction is required, and what portion might be interpretation?
© 2025 PD Collective. All rights reserved.
