Stop Waiting, Start Relating

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” - William James

What opens up when we stop waiting for permission to care?

In many workplaces, there’s an unspoken belief: if leadership doesn’t change it, nothing changes. It’s a belief often linked to experience. Efforts that went unnoticed, energy spent with little return, promises of change that never came. Understandably, we begin to wait. We withhold. We disengage.

And yet, something else is also true.

Even when the system stays the same, how we relate to our work shapes what it gives back to us.

Behavioural science and organizational research both point to this: when we connect their effort to learning, contribution, or usefulness, they we more engaged. When we reframe a task as a way to support someone nearby, rather than simply a requirement to fulfil, our experience shifts, even if the task itself doesn’t. These shifts don’t require positional authority. They’re small acts of relational agency.

I remember working with someone who had grown cynical after years of change initiatives that didn’t change much. What shifted for them wasn’t a new leader or big announcement. It was their quiet decision to stop waiting for someone else to go first. They reimagined their role, not as executing tasks, but as being reliable for the people beside them. The structure didn’t change. The meaning did.

If you’ve been waiting for something to change, consider experimenting with a few gentle shifts:

• Shift from fixing to framing
  Instead of focusing on what’s broken, try clarifying how you want to be. How do you want to relate to the work in front of you?

• Choose where you invest care
  Not everything can receive equal attention. You might choose a colleague, a client, or a moment that matters, and invest there.

• Interpret effort as contribution
  Effort as burden can drain us. Effort as contribution can sustain us. Where could your effort mean something to someone else?

This isn’t about pretending conditions don’t matter. They do. Leadership still sets the water level. Yet relationships shape whether we feel like we’re treading or swimming.

We don’t need permission to care. We only need to remember that how we engage still matters, even when systems are slow to catch up.

With understanding,

Maria

Sources:

Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (2001). On the self-regulation of behavior. Cambridge University Press.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717

Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201

Wrzesniewski, A., LoBuglio, N., Dutton, J. E., & Berg, J. M. (2013). Job crafting and cultivating positive meaning and identity in work. Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology, 1, 281–302