What’s yours to carry?
People who work in EDI tend to care deeply about what they do - it’s part of what makes them good at it. But when your work is closely connected to your values, it can be hard to know where the job ends and your personal responsibility begins.
I ran a training session this week on this very topic - it was built around a simple question: what’s yours to carry?
EDI professionals deal with problems that are systemic and societal - they existed before us and will (probably and annoyingly) exist after us. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism weren’t created by an EDI team and they certainly can’t be solved by one, yet it’s surprisingly easy to start feeling responsible for fixing them.
Sometimes other people hand us that responsibility. Sometimes we take it on ourselves because we care, because we know more, or because we worry that if we don’t do something, nobody else will.
The framework we explored was simple: what can you control, what can you influence, and what do you ultimately have to accept and adapt to?
You can control the quality of your work, the advice you give, whether you challenge something and how you respond. You can influence people by creating the conditions for change, but you can’t control what they ultimately decide to do.
And then there are things you care deeply about but have very little ability to change. I used a slightly dodgy scientific analogy in the session that seemed to resonate - when energy isn’t converted into useful work, it is dissipated as heat.
I think anger can work like that too. If something makes me angry and I can act on it, that energy can be useful. But if I have neither control nor meaningful influence, I can spend hours reading, worrying and getting increasingly furious without changing anything. All I’ve created is heat.
The question then becomes: where can I put that energy where it might actually make a difference? That doesn’t mean caring less. Nor does it mean doing less of your job. It means recognising the difference between doing your best work and taking personal responsibility for the outcome.
At the end of the session I asked everyone one final question: What do you need to stop owning that was never actually yours? Not stop doing. Not stop caring about. Not stop trying to influence. Just stop owning. Because caring deeply about changing the world doesn’t mean you have to carry the weight of it on your shoulders.
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