Getting Good at Limits Before Limits Get Good at Us: Practicing a More Sustainable Way to Work

The other night, I opened a drawer in my bedside table to stash something away—little gift-shop bags and receipts from a summer trip to Maine with my mom, aunts, sister, and cousin. (I know… I know, why am I keeping this? I don’t know. I just know that at that moment, I couldn’t throw them away.)

The drawer is admittedly one of those catch-all voids that accumulates the bits and bobs that don't fit anywhere else, and, in it, I found a notebook I hadn’t seen in three years. I flipped it open and landed in another version of myself: pregnant with my second son, working an executive job, and trying to prepare for the impossible math of two under two + partner with chronic illness + high pressure job.

The notes were from a session with my coach, who had me practicing “artificial constraints”: for example, a countdown timer to my due date on my desk, a self-imposed reduction in meetings, and a course on burnout, taken pre-emptively. The idea was to simulate what life would demand once the baby arrived; to get good at limits before limits got good at me.

As I looked at it, I saw it through my three years older eyes-brain-connection and realized…

We are wildly unprepared for constraint and even more unprepared for freedom.

The systems we live and work inside have trained us for one thing only: productivity within someone else’s structure.

Our economy rewards the ability to comply without granting the capacity to adapt. Motherhood exposes this immediately: the myth that “you can do it all” folds in on itself like wet cardboard before you can even try.

Motherhood is what radicalized me.

I used to believe I was made of the sturdiest kind of cardboard, strong enough to hold it all. But the truth is… none of us are water-repellent. The moment motherhood soaked through, I was forced to see beyond the veil of individual empowerment and “rescuing myself,” and to scoff at the branding of balance.

But it’s not just mothers.

It’s every one of us taught to measure our worth by output: to keep producing, scaling, optimizing. No matter the cost to our bodies, our relationships, or the planet. It’s anyone who’s ever believed the lie that success means doing more, faster, forever. (Which… hi. I know that’s me, raised not by my parents but by an entire ecosystem that supports a misplaced promise of meritocracy… never noticing who that promise actually included.)

So when the old world begins to fall, and I believe that it is falling, we won’t know how to build differently. We’ve been socialized for survival within extraction, not creation beyond it.

Of course, the world has been ending and rebuilding for generations. The question now is whether those of us who’ve benefited from its structure are ready to join the work of rebuilding.

This isn’t because we, as a collective or as individuals, are unintelligent. It's the result of conditioning designed to keep us compliant: to self-abandon for the system and to optimize our behavior inside structures designed to exploit our capacity, not sustain it.

For most of my life, preparation has meant efficiency: new planners, color-coded schedules, post-it-notes, another “method.” These are most certainly useful tools, but what if true preparation looks more like practice: learning to live with constraint, to make decisions inside tension, to let discomfort stretch our capacity for the future we say we want?

Three years ago, when my coach told me to put limits in place, I thought it was about surviving postpartum. What I realize now is he was asking me to learn how to live in a world that doesn’t accommodate care, slowness, or interdependence. (The rehearsal I didn’t know I was in.)

Our “systems” of support are only in place to demand infinite output from finite humans.

What if we treated preparation not as anxiety about what might go wrong but as rehearsal for how we want to live when things go right?

That’s what Work in Practice has become for me: the place where I test constraints as creative material. The guidelines we set now (the boundaries, the shared agreements, the slower pace) are not regressions. They are muscle memory for a different world.

Because if the old world ends tomorrow, the question isn’t: can we imagine a better one? 

It’s: have we practiced living inside it?

Both/And Practice

There is a specific yes/and at play here between personal practice and systemic practice; how individual preparation becomes structural capacity.

In 1942, the Screwtape Letters by Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis shared the following: 

My dear Wormwood, 

Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in “broken systems,” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself. 

Keep up the good work,
Uncle Screwtape

Even through the colonial lens of C.S. Lewis, the warning holds. Screwtape isn’t wrong: when we fixate only on “out there,” we forget that systems live in here, too: inside our habits, our hierarchies, our unwillingness to change how we lead, rest, and relate.

But he isn’t right, either. His warning assumes personal virtue is the antidote to systemic decay. And that’s the logic (moral individualism) that lets people justify cutting SNAP benefits while preaching self-reliance. The truth is, both matter. The systems are built to condition us to uphold what harms. (Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, productivity culture, etc. etc. etc.)

Those of us with access, education, margin—the privilege to choose how we work—carry a responsibility to practice alignment personally and structurally. To do the inner work not for purity, but for collective repair.

Practicing on Three Planes

Preparation happens on three planes:

1. Personal practice: build interior capacity.
   Practice pausing before reacting. Examine the part of you that still believes your worth is measured in output. Can you get to the point where you see yourself so clearly that you stop perpetuating harm unconsciously. And because none of us can do this alone, cultivate peers who will tell you when you’re off the path, and believe them.

2. Relational practice: build human systems that can hold more truth.
   Create conditions where honesty and imperfection coexist. This is the antidote to Screwtape’s “disdain toward the rest of the human race.” Practice curiosity before criticism. Start with your team, your household, your partnerships.

3. Systemic practice: redistribute what you build.
   Use your privilege, your structures, your capital to regenerate rather than hoard. Accumulation isn’t the goal; redistribution is. Redistribution isn’t charity; it’s re-entering right relationship with the people and systems our comfort depends on. True preparedness means designing systems that could outlive your participation.

Three Practices for This Week

1. Set a constraint on purpose.
   Work within one deliberate boundary: a shorter workday, a single-tab browser, a fixed budget of attention. Notice what becomes clearer when you can’t do it all.

2. Name what your systems can actually hold.
   Audit one process, meeting, or offer and ask: “Is this built for who I am now or who I used to be?” Realignment starts with telling the truth about capacity.

3. Rehearse restoration, not recovery.
   Don’t wait for burnout to force a reset. Build micro-rituals of restoration into your week: five minutes of stillness after a call, closing your laptop before sundown, taking a breath before you answer the next ping.

These are rehearsals. Tiny, intentional experiments that strengthen your capacity to live inside a system that hasn’t yet caught up.

Practice new reflexes of care, new ways of organizing power, new rituals of restoration. 

And I’m practicing all of this, too. 

The truth is: certainty sells. We all want to buy it. 

But… I’m not certain. If we were certain how to build collectively toward a more utopian future, we’d all be on board. But… we, as humans, you must agree… are messy.

If you want to start practicing for a more humane way of working, that’s what my work is built for. The world we want won’t appear out of nowhere. We can choose to practice it into being.

xo,
Brittany