What do you have to trust before you have any proof it's warranted?

In this episode of Field Notes from the Work and the Wild, documentary photographer and narrative strategist Lindsey Lerner puts two interview sessions side by side for the first time — a new composite format that braids two people around one shared pattern.

Genevieve Smith runs GV Advisory, a facilitation practice that helps organizations navigate the gap between the values they name and the decisions they actually make. She rebuilds a 1978 Italian steel bicycle in her garage — apart and back together three times, badly at first. The garage is the one place the facilitator gets to stay outside.

Nishi Patel is a product leader and a new mother. For years, her kindness at work was read as softness, until a layoff clarified the difference between being liked and being kept. Every apartment she's lived in has had an L-shaped couch, and the same corner has always been hers.

Two objects. Two private practices. The same lesson underneath: self-trust gets built through repetition in low-stakes rooms, long before it's needed anywhere that counts.

In this episode:

Why invisible labor and personal practice shape identity more than job titles do

How grief and inherited voices become internal standards (Genevieve's father, cycling, and get it right)

The cost of leading with a credential instead of your actual skill

Why being well-liked at work is separate from being valued at work

Clarity is kindness — rethinking directness as a form of care

Building a promise to your future self before you have evidence you'll keep it

The five patterns that surface across 50+ documentary sessions on work and identity

Key phrases from this episode:

"First time you, first time me." — a phrase Genevieve and her best friend Josie use whenever neither of them knows what they're doing.

"Faith in future Nishi." — a promise made to a version of herself she hasn't met yet.

About Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild)

Field Notes is a documentary practice by Lindsey Lerner that records the invisible labor beneath people's visible work. Each session begins with one question — where do you feel most like yourself? — and produces a portrait, a spoken record, and a written frame. More than 50 sessions completed to date.

Subscribe and read the full archive: fieldnotesfromthework.substack.com

Support the work: Field Notes runs on patronage — [email protected]

Eight hours alone in the car coming home from a leadership conference. Which is about four hours too many to be thinking about leadership.

I keep coming back to the quiet ones. The most regulated, most actually present people in that room — the ones who could hold a conversation, stay in the energy, take up exactly the right amount of space. They barely said a word. And they were the ones who made the whole room feel safe to be in.

Nobody built an industry around that. We built one around telling people how to lead.

In this episode I get into the contradiction nobody names out loud: you're told everything is about you — your brand, your vision, your path — and in the same breath, you're told to be responsible for other people. Show them where to go. I don't know how you hold both of those at once. I'm not sure I've ever seen it done cleanly.

I also talk about my friend Milly, who lives on an island with 191 people and walks for hours every day, and who thinks nothing needs to be hard to be worth doing. Which I agree with completely. And also can argue against completely. Both at once.

And I get into the specific tax on people who see things before other people see them — the visionaries, the ones a half step ahead of the room — and the choice between spending your life translating for everyone else or trusting the right people to catch up on their own.

By the end I land somewhere I didn't expect to land, which is usually how I know an episode is done.

What are you actually optimizing for. Proof that you worked hard. Or your life feeling like your life.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this Field Note, documentary photographer and narrative strategist Lindsey Lerner sits down with Cat Addo — a social impact strategist who has spent nearly twenty years helping brands and nonprofits find their voice, from the music industry to her current role leading strategic partnerships at Comic Relief.

The conversation surfaces a distinction that reframes how high-achieving, high-capacity people experience praise at work: the difference between being known — admired for your finished output — and being seen — recognized for the discipline and reaching it took to get there. Cat traces that distinction back to a ballet studio in San Diego, where she trained at eight years old under a demanding German teacher who called her good, period, long before the rest of the world started calling her work great.

The episode also explores Cat's path through the music industry, seven years in strategy consulting, launching her own firm, and now nonprofit leadership — along with a quieter admission near the end of the conversation: the self-consciousness that can come with caring visibly about your work, and the privilege of even having the choice to care that much in the first place.

This is a conversation about invisible labor, first-generation identity, imposter syndrome's less-discussed cousin (being praised for the wrong thing), and what it actually means to feel recognized — not just successful.

What You'll Hear

Why "this is so great" can feel hollow, even when it's sincere

The ballet lesson that shaped how Cat approaches every project since

Cat's first-generation upbringing and how it shaped her relationship to belonging

The real story behind Cat's decision to leave her agency job while newly pregnant

The stigma around caring "too much" about your work — and the privilege of being able to care at all

Lindsey's own parallel: fifteen years learning to notice what other people miss

About Cat Addo

Cat Addo is a social impact strategist, brand and narrative consultant, and the founder of Issue Space, a content and event series for purpose-driven professionals. She currently serves as Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Comic Relief, working to end childhood poverty through the power of comedy. Her background spans nearly two decades across the music industry (Universal Music Group, Reservoir Media), strategy consulting (Purpose), and independent practice through Cat Addo LLC.

About Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild)

Field Notes is a documentary practice by Lindsey Lerner braiding portrait photography, oral storytelling, and anthropology — exploring the interior of a working life. New Field Notes publish weekly, alternating between full Field Notes (photo, essay, and audio story) and Field Notes Radio conversations.

P.S. Save September 26th.

A full day Field Notes workshop in NYC. Info and registration here.

A room built to hold what usually stays invisible. Strangers meeting each other as people instead of titles. Enough of them in one place that something shifts by the end.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My daughter's preschool teacher said it every morning, to a room full of four-year-olds.

We do what we have to do before we get what we want to do.

I understand why she says it. You want them to wash their hands. You want them to sit through circle time without dismantling it. But somewhere between preschool and adulthood, the teacher got replaced. A boss. A culture. A voice inside your own head that still has her exact rhythm.

And most of us never stopped following the rule. We just forgot it was ever a rule. We started calling it the truth.

That's what this episode is about. This one goes underneath the productivity systems, the five-year plans, the calendar — down to the belief installed before anyone was old enough to question it: obligation comes before desire, duty comes before self, you earn your presence before you're allowed to have one.

I trace where that comes from. I talk about records, and what happens to a life when the parts that made you never get written down. I tell you about a 24 year old named Lydia Lee, and the line she said that I have not stopped carrying since: the question was never whether I belonged. The question was whose permission I was going to ask.

And I get into Ram Dass, and the idea that we are all G-d in drag. Which sounds like a bit until you watch it happen in a Field Note session for the fiftieth time. Someone stops performing. Something older than the performance comes through.

At the end, I ask you to write yourself a permission slip. People have cried doing this. People have laughed like they got away with something. What they got away with was themselves.

The forgetting doesn't have to be permanent. Somebody has to keep the record of the walk.

[Listen to Episode 3: The Forgetting →]

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I go straight for the fire. I’ve never torn anything apart first.

Maricella did.

The month she quit her job, she went home to El Salvador. She found every journal she’d kept since she was a girl. She tore them apart with her hands. Then she burned them.

For eleven years before that, people said the name of the company she worked for more than they said hers. “I didn’t have a last name,” she told me, laughing the way people laugh when they’re only half kidding.

I went looking for her story. I came home holding a mirror I didn’t ask for.

I switched up the format on this one, less profile, more like sitting at the table with her. Press play and tell me if it lands.

If this landed, send it to someone who’s been performing fine for too long. They’ll know exactly what you mean.

With gratitude,Lindsey

P.S. Save September 26th.

A full day Field Notes workshop in NYC.

A room built to hold what usually stays invisible. Strangers meeting each other as people instead of titles. Enough of them in one place that something shifts by the end.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

She said it like a confession. Everything she does, she does to share it. Even walking. Even the books she reads.

The whole room went quiet. Because everyone sitting there did the same thing and nobody had said it out loud before.

So I asked them when’s the last time they did something with no audience. And people actually slowed down like the question caught them.

I spent fifteen years backstage.

Tour buses at 2AM, boardrooms, the whole thing. Being useful is a seductive identity — you get praised for it constantly, people start introducing you by what you do for them, and one day the usefulness is just the whole self and you can’t remember there was someone underneath it.

That someone didn’t go anywhere. She’s still melting in the park on a Tuesday with nothing to show for it. Still the most herself in the moments she’d never think to photograph.

This one’s me catching the exact second it flips. When a true thing turns into a thing you’re doing because it’ll photograph well.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode of Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild), Lindsey Lerner sits down with Emily Pantel — career coach, facilitator, and founder of Self Over Should — to talk about the slow drift from yourself that happens when you spend years being exactly who everyone needs you to be.

Emily spent years as the star student, the first chair, the reliable one. She journaled since age six, studied psychology at Vassar, built training programs at Lululemon, and coached employees at Verizon — all while quietly wondering if any of it was actually hers.

It wasn't until she left her role, a grad school rejection, and a mantra she gave herself — follow the fun — that the path finally opened up.

In this conversation, Emily and Lindsey talk about:

- The root cause of burnout — and why Emily calls it self-estrangement

- What it means to follow the reinforcement vs. follow the desire

- Why Emily brings astrology into career coaching — and what the skeptics get wrong

- The tug of war between responsibility and aliveness

- What happened to her anxiety when her inner world and outer world finally started to match

- The practice of coming home to yourself before you update anything else

FIELD NOTES RADIO Episode 1: The Thing I Knew Before I Knew Anything

Fifteen years behind the scenes. Tour buses at 2am, boardrooms, other people's rooms, other people's work. The whole time, I thought I'd put down the camera I picked up at six years old.

I hadn't. I was just using every other instrument available to me.

This episode is the origin story of Field Notes from the Work and the Wild — Chinatown, freshman year of college, the question that changes every conversation it touches, and what it actually costs to build something honest while still paying your mortgage.

The question underneath this one, and every episode after it: when do you feel most like yourself?

Not what do you do. When do you feel most like yourself.

Majora Carter is an environmental justice pioneer, community developer, and TED Talk veteran who never left the South Bronx. In this episode, she talks about building Bronxlandia — a 1908 rail station her father used to look up at from a passing train — into a community venue, the artist question that drives everything she builds, and the invisible work of believing in yourself as hard as you believe in your neighborhood.

You can learn more about Bronxlandia here.

You can follow Majora's work on LinkedIn here.

You can become a patron here.

Tickets for The Human Record — a live Field Notes experience at Bronxlandia on September 26th, 11am–4pm — are on sale now here.

This essay started as a sponsored piece for Sublime. It became the first time I've written honestly about my own process — what it actually looks like to build a practice on saving things before you know why.

I've spent the last year sitting with founders, artists, executives, and community members, documenting the invisible labor underneath their work. Turns out I had never documented my own.

This is that.

In this piece:

A stranger in Chinatown who let me photograph him because I said something true. The Ram Dass quote that sat in an app for six months before it became the spine of someone's story. What fifty Field Notes taught me about the thinking that precedes the thought — and why most tools are built to ignore it.

Links mentioned:

Life Is the Curriculum — Nikita's Field Note

The Ram Dass Lectures collection on Sublime

The Field Notes collection on Sublime

Ram Dass Here and Now — Episode 175 — the episode where Emmanuel says: "You're in school. Why don't you take the curriculum?"

Field Notes from the Work and the Wild — the full archive

This essay was written in partnership with Sublime.

Use code FIELDNOTES for 20% off any paid plan → sublime.app