The Well with Dr. Wendi

In this identity-turn episode, I make the case that finding ourselves through our work is not a flaw — it's a calling. Then I trace how that pure thing gets distorted by an economy that can only measure money and rank, why losing a role costs so much more than income, and why the loss lands hardest on those who traded pay for public-sector purpose — the six hundred thousand Black women among them. We end where the last episode began: with the architecture no title can take.

Replenishment Assignment

Write one sentence describing yourself — but you are not allowed to use your job, your role, or anything you have accomplished.

Name three things you've been carrying for others. Just see them, named, in your own handwriting.

Finish this sentence and say it out loud, once, to yourself: "Before I was anyone's [INSERT TITLE], I was someone who ______."

You are not the title. You never were. You are the one who brought the gifts through the door — and you are still carrying them, whether or not there is a building to practice them in right now.

Who are you when the title is gone? You're the architect. You always were.

Enter The Well & Connect with Dr. Wendi

Learn more at drwendiwilliams.com and book a discovery call here. Follow @drwendiwilliams on Instagram, drwendiwilliams on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

Resources Referenced & Further Reading

The Science — Identity, Calling & the Psychology of Work

• Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin & Schwartz (1997). "Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work." Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 21–33. The job / career / calling framework.  → https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1997.2162
• Bunderson & Thompson (2009). "The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work." Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32–57. A calling is both ennobling and binding — people sacrifice pay, time, and comfort for it.  → https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.1.32
• Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999). "A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation." Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. The overjustification / undermining effect, within self-determination theory.  → https://depts.washington.edu/techdocs/papers/deciExtrinsicRewardsAndIntrinsicMotivation99.pdf
• Lepper, Greene & Nisbett (1973). "Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the 'Overjustification' Hypothesis." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129–137. The classic marker study. (See also Deci, 1971, for the original puzzle experiments.)
• Jahoda, M. (1982). Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press. The latent deprivation model — the five latent functions of work beyond income. Rooted in the 1933 Marienthal study (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld & Zeisel).
• Perry & Wise (1990). "The Motivational Bases of Public Service." Public Administration Review, 50(3), 367–373. Foundational work on public service motivation — purpose over pay.
• Rousseau, D. M. (1989 / 1995). The psychological contract. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 2, 121–139; and Psychological Contracts in Organizations (Sage, 1995). The unwritten agreement whose breach reads as betrayal.

Framing & Further Reading

• Marx, K. (1844). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The concept of alienated labor — work severed from its meaning. Cited as an analytic lens, not a political program.
• Frankl, V. (1959). Man's Search for Meaning. On meaning as the fundamental human motive — the ground beneath the idea of a calling.

Carried From Episode 1 — The Data

• IWPR, "Barriers, Not Bootstraps" (2026) — the ~600,000 figure.  → https://iwpr.org/articles/barriers-not-bootstraps-job-prospects-are-uneven-for-young-black-women/
• EPI (Feb 2026) — the public-sector concentration of Black women's 2025 employment losses (the losses were not transferred to white men).  → https://www.epi.org/blog/black-women-suffered-large-employment-losses-in-2025-particularly-among-college-graduates-and-public-sector-workers/

In this episode, I talk with Shanta Q about her personal health journey and the importance of self-advocacy. She shares her powerful story of overcoming health challenges, using humor as a strategic tool, and embracing her authentic self to inspire others.

Shanta Q reminds us that rest is not a luxury, rest is a necessity. Love yourself by allowing yourself to rest for your mind, body, and spirit.

This episode is a conversation about leadership, credibility, and recovery. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it should replace a conversation with your own clinician. If something in your body has been telling you the same thing for a while, tell someone who can act on it.

Replenishment Assignment

Name one thing you have previously reported and your report was dismissed. Determine who you will report it to next, and when that will be.

Connect with Shanta Q

Learn more at heyshantaq.com. Follow @heyshantaq on Instagram, @ShantaQuilette on TikTok, and Hey ShantaQ on YouTube.

Enter The Well & Connect with Dr. Wendi

Learn more at drwendiwilliams.com and book a discovery call here. Follow @drwendiwilliams on Instagram, drwendiwilliams on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

Resources Referenced & Further Reading

The credibility deficit — why eight years is a pattern, not an accident

• Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, 2007). Testimonial injustice: a hearer assigns a deflated credibility to a speaker because of prejudice about who they are. The conceptual anchor for the whole episode, and it transfers to organizations without modification.
• Pope et al., “Missed diagnoses of acute cardiac ischemia in the emergency department,” New England Journal of Medicine 342:1163–1170 (2000). Women under 55 were substantially more likely than other patients to be discharged from the emergency department while having an acute cardiac event. The canonical citation for symptom dismissal.
• Mehta et al., “Acute Myocardial Infarction in Women,” AHA Scientific Statement, Circulation 133:916–947 (2016). Documents under-recognition, under-treatment, and worse outcomes in women, with the disparity most pronounced for Black women.
• Hoffmann & Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 29:13–27 (2001). Women’s pain reports are more often attributed to emotional or psychogenic causes. Useful for the “it’s in your head” beat specifically.

Stress as a finding, not a dismissal — the occupational evidence

• Kivimäki et al., “Long working hours and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke,” The Lancet 386:1739–1746 (2015). Pooled analysis of more than 600,000 individuals: working 55 hours or more per week was associated with roughly a one-third higher risk of stroke than a standard week. This is the single most useful citation in the episode — it makes her working conditions a cardiovascular exposure rather than a mood.
• Sherman A. James, “John Henryism and the health of African-Americans,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18:163–182 (1994). High-effort active coping against sustained structural adversity carries a measurable cardiovascular cost, concentrated among those with the fewest resources to draw on.
• Woods-Giscombé, “Superwoman Schema,” Qualitative Health Research 20:668–683 (2010). Five features — the obligation to present strength, to suppress emotion, to resist vulnerability and help, to succeed despite limited resources, and to help others. Names her life and much of the audience’s.
• Siegrist, effort–reward imbalance (1996), and Geronimus, weathering (1992; AJPH 2006). Carried over from Ep 8 and forward into Ep 9 — name once here, develop there.

The leadership cascade — what an unreported condition does downstream

• Byrne et al., “The depleted leader,” The Leadership Quarterly 25:344–357 (2014). Leader resource depletion predicted lower transformational leadership and higher abusive supervision, which in turn drives employee exhaustion and turnover. Carried from Ep 8; the cascade is measurable.
• Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983). Surface acting — performing fine — is real labor with real cost. Directly relevant to a leader who has learned not to report.

Organizational silence — the boardroom version of “it’s just stress”

• Morrison & Milliken, “Organizational Silence,” Academy of Management Review 25:706–725 (2000). When employees conclude that speaking up is futile or dangerous, management receives a systematically filtered picture and loses the capacity to detect problems early. This is the structural claim of the episode.
• Detert & Edmondson, “Implicit voice theories,” Academy of Management Journal 54:461–488 (2011). People hold taken-for-granted beliefs about what is unsafe to say at work — and act on them without ever testing them.
• Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44:350–383 (1999). The condition under which a report gets made at all.
• Human-capital governance: NACD guidance that boards treat human capital with the discipline applied to financial capital — a standing agenda item rather than an annual one. Carried from Ep 8 and reinforced here through the leading-indicator frame.

Humor as a leadership technology — why her method works

• Bitterly, Brooks & Schweitzer, “Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 112:431–455 (2017). Appropriate humor raises perceived confidence and competence; inappropriate humor lowers status. Humor is a high-variance instrument, which is exactly why hers is deliberate.
• Cooper, Kong & Crossley, “Leader humor as an interpersonal resource,” Academy of Management Journal 61:769–796 (2018). Leader humor improves the leader–member relationship and, through it, engagement.
• Mesmer-Magnus, Glew & Viswesvaran, “A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace,” Journal of Managerial Psychology 27:155–190 (2012). Positive humor associates with better performance, cohesion, coping and health, and with lower burnout and stress.
• Martin et al., Humor Styles Questionnaire, Journal of Research in Personality 37:48–75 (2003). Affiliative and self-enhancing humor support wellbeing; aggressive and self-defeating humor undermine it. This is the evidence behind question 4a — the line between a door and a hiding place.
• McGraw & Warren, “Benign Violations,” Psychological Science 21:1141–1149 (2010), with Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance (1966). Together they explain the mechanism she describes intuitively: humor makes a threatening subject safe enough to look at, and lowers the resistance a direct warning provokes.

In this Repair & Recover episode, I take apart the phrase everyone is repeating right now — it’s not burnout, it’s moral injury — and replace it with something more useful: three distinct things, one mechanism connecting them, and three different asks. Because the wrong name sends you to the wrong help.

Replenishment Assignment

Three sentences, in your own hand: name which one is truest, name the specific thing that was asked of you, and finish "Even then, I did not ______." Keep all three. We build on the third one all season.

You were never too sensitive for the work. What you felt in that room was your conscience, doing exactly what a conscience is for. The problem was the room.

Enter The Well & Connect with Dr. Wendi

Learn more at drwendiwilliams.com and book a discovery call here. Follow @drwendiwilliams on Instagram, drwendiwilliams on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

Resources Referenced & Further Reading

The Three Constructs

• Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). "The measurement of experienced burnout." Journal of Occupational Behaviour, 2(2), 99–113 (now indexed as the Journal of Organizational Behavior). The paper that gave burnout its three dimensions — exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment. doi:10.1002/job.4030020205 → https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205

• Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The Truth About Burnout. Jossey-Bass. Where the six Areas of Worklife — workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values — are laid out. This is the source for the correction at the center of this episode. Widely available in libraries; ISBN 978-0-7879-0874-4.

• World Health Organization (2019). "Burn-out an occupational phenomenon: International Classification of Diseases." ICD-11 code QD85. Burn-out is classified under factors influencing health status, not as a medical condition. Free. → https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

• Jameton, A. (1984). Nursing Practice: The Ethical Issues. Prentice-Hall. The founding definition of moral distress. Out of print and hard to obtain; for an accessible account of the definition and its afterlife, see Epstein & Hamric below.

• Webster, G. C., & Baylis, F. (2000). "Moral residue." In S. B. Rubin & L. Zoloth (Eds.), Margin of Error: The Ethics of Mistakes in the Practice of Medicine (pp. 217–230). University Publishing Group. Book chapter, not available free online; the concept is summarized in Epstein & Hamric.

• Epstein, E. G., & Hamric, A. B. (2009). "Moral distress, moral residue, and the crescendo effect." The Journal of Clinical Ethics, 20(4), 330–342. The crescendo effect — the single most useful idea in this episode. doi:10.1086/JCE200920406 → https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/JCE200920406

• Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Atheneum/Scribner. And Shay, J. (2014). "Moral injury." Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182–191. The betrayal lineage: moral injury as betrayal of what’s right, by someone who holds legitimate authority, in a high-stakes situation. doi:10.1037/a0036090 → https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090

• Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). "Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy." Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706. The transgression lineage — perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness. Free PDF: → https://www.penncerl.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/4603-moral-injury-and-moral-repair-in-war-vets-litz-et.pdf

The Argument This Episode Is With

• Talbot, S. G., & Dean, W. (2018). "Physicians aren’t ‘burning out.’ They’re suffering from moral injury." STAT, July 26, 2018. The essay that launched the phrase. Free. → https://www.statnews.com/2018/07/26/physicians-not-burning-out-they-are-suffering-moral-injury/

• Dean, W., Talbot, S., & Dean, A. (2019). "Reframing clinician distress: Moral injury not burnout." Federal Practitioner, 36(9), 400–402. Their expanded argument — this is where the claim that the word burnout locates the problem in the individual is made, not in the 2018 STAT piece. Free full text. → https://www.mdedge.com/fedprac/article/207458/mental-health/reframing-clinician-distress-moral-injury-not-burnout — PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31571807/

• Dean, W., Talbot, S. G., & Caplan, A. (2020). "Clarifying the language of clinician distress." JAMA, 323(10), 923–924. Their case that moral dilemma, moral distress, and moral injury describe more accurately what gets called burnout. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.21576 → https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2760549

• Dean, W. (2023). If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First. Steerforth Press. The book-length version.

• Čartolovni, A., Stolt, M., Scott, P. A., & Suhonen, R. (2021). "Moral injury in healthcare professionals: A scoping review and discussion." Nursing Ethics, 28(5), 590–602. The clearest summary of the Dean/Talbot argument and its reception — and the source for the finding that thousands of database hits yielded only a handful of empirical papers. Free full text. → https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0969733020966776

Limits & Cautions

• Molendijk, T. (2021). "Warnings against romanticising moral injury." The British Journal of Psychiatry, 219(2), 447–449. That the concept carries built-in normative claims about victim and betrayer, and that its emotional weight has discouraged scrutiny. → https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/warnings-against-romanticising-moral-injury/90597166D4C24449D9B5651E299EA69E

• Habib, T., Noorloos, J., Woodley, H. J. R., Serrano, F., Gardiner-Davis, M., Said, C., Nowrouzi-Kia, B., & Gohar, B. (2026). "Moral distress and moral injury in healthcare: A review and instrument analysis." Journal of Health Psychology. Item-by-item analysis of the measures: moral distress instruments focus on antecedents, moral injury instruments on symptoms, and moral injury items overlap with burnout’s exhaustion and cynicism. → https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13591053251398337

• Moral injury among French healthcare workers (2025). National survey; over half reported moral injury, distinct from burnout but moderately-to-strongly correlated, with compounding effects on depression and anxiety. Free full text. → https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12437742/

• Downstream effects of moral injury exposure (2024). Scientific Reports. Longitudinal study of morally injurious events, burnout, and turnover intention in US healthcare workers, 2020–2021. Free. → https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-74086-0

• Haslam, N. (2016). "Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology." Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. Background on what happens when a harm concept broadens. Search the title in Google Scholar for accessible copies.

Repair

• Walker, M. U. (2006). Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge University Press. Repair as a relational and institutional obligation rather than an individual coping task. ISBN 978-0-521-00885-1.

• Rushton, C. H. (Ed.). (2018; 2nd ed. 2026). Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare. Oxford University Press. Read alongside this episode’s caution about how organizations use the idea. → https://global.oup.com/academic/product/moral-resilience-9780197667149

• Rushton Moral Resilience Scale — Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. Free description of the instrument and its use. → https://nursing.jhu.edu/faculty_research/research/projects/rushton-moral-resilience/about-the-scales.html

• Adaptive Disclosure (Litz and colleagues) and Impact of Killing (Maguen and colleagues) — the two best-developed treatment protocols for moral injury. Both military-derived; adaptation to civilian occupational settings is still under-tested. Described in Litz et al. (2009), above.

Today I am joined by Dr. Thema Bryant, a trauma psychologist, an author, and a teacher. Dr. Bryant has shared the truth about her own healing and we have a conversation about what it takes to recover when your identity is built around being available to everyone else.

Dr. Bryant’s powerful final words for us are that we are worthy of joy, of rest, of liberation. It is not for us to wait for other people to give it to us, but for us to go after it and receive it ourselves.

Connect with Dr. Bryant

Learn more at drthema.com. Follow @dr.thema on Instagram, Thema Bryant on LinkedIn, and listen to The Homecoming Podcast with Dr. Thema.

Enter The Well & Connect with Dr. Wendi

Learn more at drwendiwilliams.com and book a discovery call here. Follow @drwendiwilliams on Instagram, drwendiwilliams on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

Welcome to The Well, a wellness-centered leadership podcast and I’m your host, Dr. Wendi Williams.

Throughout this podcast, I will be referring to The R-Cycle, which is a renewal practice for cultivating sustainable leadership, especially in difficult times. The R-Cycle is Remember → Repair & Recover → Regenerate → Reemerge. This is a Remember episode.

I share my own dispossession story. I acknowledge that this situation is similar to what many people are facing and I share data that highlights the current and projected trends.

Replenishment Assignment

I provide a two-part Remember assignment to create some space for you to replenish. As you remember your own loss, 1) name what it cost you and 2) name the architecture to pivot you out of the situation.

When loss happens you can feel alone. But you are one of many. And you can get through this with community. Because much of what you are carrying was never meant to be carried alone.

Enter The Well & Connect with Dr. Wendi

Learn more at drwendiwilliams.com and book a discovery call here. Follow @drwendiwilliams on Instagram, drwendiwilliams on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter on Substack.

Resources Referenced & Further Reading

• "Barriers, Not Bootstraps: Job Prospects Are Uneven for Young Black Women" — IWPR, 2026. The report behind the ~600,000 figure; systemic barriers, not qualifications, drive the push-out. → https://iwpr.org/articles/barriers-not-bootstraps-job-prospects-are-uneven-for-young-black-women/
• "Black Women Disproportionately Sidelined in Year One of Trump's Second Term" — IWPR, Feb 2026. The net 113,000 jobs lost and the 54.7% share of all women's job losses (vs. 14.1% of the female workforce). → https://iwpr.org/press/iwpr-new-report-black-women-disproportionately-sidelined-in-year-one-of-trumps-second-term/
• "One Year Into Trump's Second Term: Black Women Face Disproportionate Job Losses" (Quick Figure, PDF) — IWPR, Feb 2026. The 251,000 (Jan–Aug 2025) figure and federal-sector loss rates. → https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/One-Year-Into-Trumps-Second-Term-Black-Women-Face-Disproportionate-Job-Losses-QF-2026-1.pdf
• "Black women suffered large employment losses in 2025…" — EPI, Feb 2026. The 1.4-point drop to 55.7% (sharpest in 25 years), the public-sector concentration, and the cross-group comparison (losses not transferred to white men). → https://www.epi.org/blog/black-women-suffered-large-employment-losses-in-2025-particularly-among-college-graduates-and-public-sector-workers/
• "A snapshot of Black employment trends under Trump 2.0" — EPI, 2026. First-quarter 2026 update on Black women's and men's employment. → https://www.epi.org/blog/a-snapshot-of-black-employment-trends-under-trump-2-0-black-workers-particularly-men-are-experiencing-lower-employment-compared-with-a-year-ago/
• "What's behind rising unemployment for Black workers?" — EPI, Sept 2025. Early tracking of the sectors driving the decline. → https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-rising-unemployment-for-black-workers/
• Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls — Letter to the Department of Labor (PDF), Nov 2025. The 106,000-in-April-2025 figure and the call for accountability. → https://pressley.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/DOL-Black-Women-Unemployment-Letter.pdf
• "600,000 Black Women Pushed Out of the Workforce" — The Black Wall St. Times, Aug 2026. Popular coverage; notes the on-paper unemployment rate fell even as women were pushed out entirely. → https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2026/08/05/600000-black-women-pushed-out-of-the-workforce-new-iwpr-report-examines-why/
• The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy — Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres (Harvard University Press, 2002). The canary framing: the distress of the most vulnerable is a diagnosis of the whole system.
• "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" (1989) & "Mapping the Margins" (1991) — Kimberlé Crenshaw. The origin of the intersectional lens.
• "Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote" — Diana C. Mutz, PNAS 115(19): E4330–E4339 (2018). The status-threat engine. An influential and debated finding — cited as one account, not the last word. → https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1718155115
• Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America — Melissa V. Harris-Perry (Yale University Press, 2011). On recognition and citizenship — being seen beyond one's labor.
• "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (Feb 24, 2019). On work as the source of identity and meaning. → https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/
• The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class — Guy Standing (Bloomsbury, 2011). Precarity and the basic-income conversation.
• Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) — Dean Spade (Verso, 2020). Communities holding one another when institutions withdraw.

Welcome to The Well, a wellness-centered podcast for leaders.