Reclaiming My Time: How to Identify Your ‘Professional Why’ for Your Lifestyle

By Alexandria Noel Butler

I have spent my whole career in the tech industry and so far, my career has been based on my ability to work on someone else’s dream and not my own. I have always been a small piece to a larger elaborate tapestry that has an original architect. Now this is not necessarily a bad place to be: I enjoy being a piece of thread to a great idea and I find power in working on cross functional teams to spin hay into gold. But this journey hasn’t been without its battles. I’ve navigated through a myriad of highs, lows, bad decisions, better decisions, thinking out loud and pretending to know what is going on. In order to keep my sanity, I have to always remind myself of what I am getting out of the tapestry. Why am I here? 

Five years ago, I had a conversation with my therapist about why I was at a particular job doing a specific role that was not fulfilling me completely. I told her that I needed to make money to exist and her response was striking, “You can make money at another place that fulfills you more than this.” It was the first time someone had given me permission to be intentionally selfish. I started to think: What drives me to succeed in my job? What pushes me to do my best work even when I disagree with the direction of the plan? What motivates me to continue spinning when I do not feel supported or appreciated by management? I left her large purple couch with a whole new outlook and promised myself that I would always seek my professional why. I realized, the more I know about me, specifically what I value and how I want to live my life, the easier it is for me to find career opportunities that cater to my actual wants and needs.

Alexandria Noel Butler, Founder of Sista Circle: Black Women in Tech and Unfiltered By Lexi B. Photo source: Lexi B

Alexandria Noel Butler, Founder of Sista Circle: Black Women in Tech and Unfiltered By Lexi B.
Photo source: Lexi B

When you define your ‘professional why’ you begin to unlock your shackles to the opinions of others in regard to your career choices. Your professional why will come from four major categories, each one fulfilling a part of survival, thrift or joy. You choose a category based on your personal life and values. You should map a plan of action based on the specific category. It is quite simple when you think about it. Your professional why is your intentionality behind why you are working where you are working and the amount of stress and tension you are willing to deal with. As you create your personal why, here are the categories to consider. 

Coinage: Money makes the world go ‘round

We all are influenced by money to a certain extent but I can count on one hand the number of people who are truly and solely influenced by the dollar. Despite what capitalism tries to tell us, we all value money differently. The average person wants enough money to fuel their happiness - family commitments, hobbies, shopping habits, savings - the list is endless. But when you make the money that pays for your definition of a comfortable lifestyle, you don’t go searching for more coins. Professionally, there are many times when someone embarks on a new opportunity because of a larger paycheck. But the promise of a paycheck will only take you so far in times of stress and work tension. Your financial why cannot just be more money. The increase in salary needs to be attached to a personal goal. Paying off your student loans, a certain amount of money in your savings, savings for a large purchase such as a home, preparing for a new addition to the family. These are all personal reasons that have a large financial price tag. These reasons are what will keep you calm and collected in times of stress and uncertainty at work until you reach your milestone. 

Benefits: Non-Financial Perks That Smooth Out Your Life

In a full-time position, you will often find other powerful benefits that are not just your regular health care stipend, such as free or heavily discounted mental health benefits, opportunities to travel to different places, childcare stipends, and parental leave for up to six months. Depending where you are in your life, these benefits could support you tremendously. While you may be able to make more money someplace else, these benefits might keep you in your current role longer because they support your current personal goals. 

New Skills: The Lessons You Don’t Want To Learn But Know You Need

A new job can come with an opportunity to learn new skills. It is important to take inventory of the skills you have acquired in your career and the skills that you want to obtain. The best way to get these new skills is not a class or another certificate. It is to shadow someone who is great at that skill or be pushed off the diving board; therefore being required to learn as you go. You may find yourself in a situation where the job is offering you an opportunity. If you want to jump, just do it. Know that there will be times when you mess up or finish last. But be prepared to work very hard to become a master at this new skill. This new skill could offer you a promotion in pay and higher ranking job title. 

Breathing Room: #TeamTimeOut

I am in full support of #TeamTimeOut. It is a bench that you place yourself and opt into. It is a time when you are working to keep your lifestyle running without adding any extra stress or pressure. Life can be gruesome, especially for women of color. Sometimes you need a break from the long workdays and the pressure we receive from management and ourselves. #TeamTimeOut will not erase the microaggressions that we face. Those are systemic and date back about six centuries before us. But this time will give you the clarity to decide what is next. Also, #TeamTimeOut is a great opportunity to build your own tapestry while making enough money to support your lifestyle. Many famous world leaders, regardless of gender or color, have benched themselves in order to build their next great idea. To do this, you need mental and emotional bandwidth to prioritize your dream while doing your day job efficiently. You look at your current job as a clock-in/clock-out system. Go to work, do the job, come home. Do not bring the job home because your home is a place where the new dream is being cultivated. Do not worry about getting a perfect score on your annual review. You focus on getting an average score that keeps your finances exactly where you need them. 

Identifying your ‘professional why’ is one of the most important parts of your career journey. Your ‘why’ builds the foundation and mapping of your short-term goals. It is your guiding light as you decide what work battles to fight, what office politics to play and what type of leadership you value. The beauty of your professional why is that it can change at any time. The key is to always check in with your ‘why’. Is it still the same as it was when you started this new opportunity? Does it need to be changed? Have you changed? The continuous conversation surrounding your why will ultimately give you more peace in your professional and personal life and also push you to greater success. At the end of the day, you decide what success looks like for you. 

Your career is your job to manage. The questions are the following: Why are you doing what you are doing? What’s in it for you? How is this company, organization or manager helping you build your dream lifestyle? 

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Alexandria Noel Butler - ‘Lexi B’ - is a Senior Program Manager in the technology industry and the founder of Unfiltered By Lexi B, a lifestyle social media account giving career advice to young professionals. In 2017, she founded Sista Circle: Black Women in Tech. She holds a dual degree from Stanford University in Communications and Spanish. 

Activist and Media Maker Alice Wong Brings Us Moving Stories by Disabled Writers

By Karen Gullo

Touring the Deep South, a young Muslim woman visits Elvis Presley’s birthplace on a hot, humid day in Mississippi. The visit happens to occur during Ramadan and normally she strictly abstains from food and water until sundown (though she’s not required because she has a disability). But there was something about being in Elvis’ place that made it OK to break the fast. “I did not want to die where Elvis was born,” she explains.

A Black woman in the Midwest takes a job running an organization that helps disabled people live independently, despite warnings from friends that the place was a “lost cause.” She remembers being called a “lost cause” because of her autism, and struggled for years to hold down a job. But she rejects the warning and goes to work, turns the organization around, decides to run for state office, and is elected to the board of a national nonprofit, the first disabled person to hold an executive position there. “Lost cause, indeed,” she says.

These are snippets from just two of the intensely personal contemporary narratives in Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The 21st Century, an anthology compiled and edited by disability activist, media maker, and consultant Alice Wong. Raw, compelling, funny, and always deeply moving, the stories reveal struggles and triumphs of 37 writers and activists with disabilities who grapple with living everyday lives in an ableist society that often sees them as different and flawed.

Alice Wong - Disability activist, media maker, and editor of “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The 21st Century.” Photo credit: Eddie Hernandez Photography

Alice Wong - Disability activist, media maker, and editor of “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The 21st Century.” Photo credit: Eddie Hernandez Photography

It’s a struggle familiar to Wong, whose drive and belief in herself and her community has made her a leading voice advocating for disabled people in culture, society, politics, and literature.

“Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society, and that work has been a big part of my forty-six years on this planet,” Wong says in the book’s introduction.

Wong is the founder of the Disability Visibility Project in San Francisco, an online community about disability media and culture. No coincidence that the organization, which she runs herself, is also the name of the new book, illustrating the deep connection between the book’s celebration of the voices of writers who are disabled and Wong’s experience.

Born in a suburb of Indianapolis to Hong Kong immigrants, Wong has a neuromuscular disease that results in muscles weakening over time. She gets around in a powered wheel chair, and is dependent on a ventilator to breath and attendants to assist in everyday tasks like eating, dressing, and bathing.

As she told Vox in April, people are freaking out about health risks during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she and other disabled people have been living all their lives with uncertainty and have experience adapting to a health crisis—they’ve always had to adapt because the world “was never designed for us in the first place.”

She started Disability Visibility in 2000 as a one-year oral history campaign in partnership with Story Corp. It’s grown into an online community on disability media and culture, broadcasting podcasts, interviews and radio stories, hosting Twitter chats, and publishing essays about ableism and politics from the perspective of disabled people.

Wong’s advocacy for the rights of the disabled has been recognized by Time magazine, which this year named her as one of 16 people fighting for equality in America, and by Bitch Media, which named her one of 2018’s top 50 impactful activists in pop culture. In 2015 Wong was invited to the White House by President Obama for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disability Act (ADA). She could not attend in person. Instead, she met the president using a telepresence robot, whose movements she controlled via her computer at home while her face and voice were projected on the robot’s “head”—a computer screen.

Wong has been speaking out frankly, and angrily, about COVID-19 and policy conversations about who deserves care as the pandemic spreads and creates competition for ventilators, masks, and hospital beds. Early in the pandemic, some states were drafting care guidelines that could lead to people with autism and other intellectual disabilities being denied access to lifesaving care.

Doctors treating COVID patients might look at the health history of a disabled person and decide that others with a better shot at survival are more worthy of getting a ventilator, Wong posits.

“I am angry seeing so many people outdoors not wearing masks or social distancing,” she said in a telephone interview. “They are going to create more infections, and more deaths,” and make it more difficult for high risk people to stay safe.

Disability Visibility, published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, was released June 30 in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the ADA. “These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy,” Wong says in the book’s introduction. “Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts.”

“Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The 21st Century” edited by Alice Wong and released in 2020. Book cover by Madeline Partner.

“Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The 21st Century” edited by Alice Wong and released in 2020. Book cover by Madeline Partner.

The book features essays, blog posts, Congressional testimony, and eulogies by writers who have very unique but also interconnected takes on life as disabled people in the U.S. Anna Kaufman, who edited the book for Vintage, calls the book an “urgent, vital call to arms.”

“These stories show how diverse the disabled community is, and that so many of the issues at hand are astoundingly intersectional -- there's something for everyone, and that affects everyone,” Kaufman said by email.

Contributors include Jeremy Woody, who was incarcerated in a Georgia state prison, and writes of the discrimination he experienced as a deaf prisoner in a system that offered no accommodations. “Prison is a dangerous place,” he writes, “but that’s especially important for deaf folks.”

Standup comic, actress, and activist Maysoon Zayid, in “If You Can’t Fast, Give,” says her cerebral palsy, which makes her shake “like Shakira’s hips,” finally forced her to stop fasting during Ramadan, a practice she misses dearly. Fasting is important, she says, but “it’s important not to die in the process.”

“I have participated in several other projects that highlight disabled voices, but the editors and decision makers did not identify as disabled and the compilation suffered because of it,” said Zayid in an email. “This anthology really does our community justice and serves as a great resource to our non-disabled audience so that we can stop educating them on Twitter.”

Throughout the book, contributors talk about being made to feel like they are people who are broken, in need of fixing, people who should be seeking a cure, a new medicine or therapy that will make them able. Through struggle and with courage, they write of rejecting the boxes they are put in and realizing that the mindset that identifies disabled people as broken is itself a sign of a society’s lazy disinterest in seeing them as people who are simply part of a world of diverse human beings.

“I felt like a piece of clockwork waiting to be fixed,” writes June Eric-Udorie, a journalist and activist who writes in the anthology about her life as a young woman of color living in London. Eric-Udorie was born with a congenital condition that causes her eyes to move involuntarily and partial blindness. Attending church at 15, her grandmother tells her to put the communion hosts soaked in wine on her eyes so that she can be cured. She was brought to many doctors, none able to cure her.

Nearing adulthood, Eric-Udorie writes, she goes by herself on a trip to Bath to see if she can overcome a fear of being independent, and “move through the world on my own terms.” Nothing bad happened on the trip. “I felt like a winner” sitting at a café on her own, she writes. Later, in London, she still attends church, not as someone “with a heart that is begging for the most special part of me to change,” she writes. “I come to church free. I come to church knowing that I am not a mistake waiting to be fixed.”

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Karen Gullo is a freelance writer and former Associated Press and Bloomberg News reporter covering technology, law, and public policy. She is currently an analyst and senior media relations specialist at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco.

Native American Dr. Leslie Gray practices psychotherapy informed by principles of indigenous healing

By Jessica Semaan

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

There are times when you listen to someone speak, whether through a book or in person, and you resonate with every word, yet you realize that you could have never articulated them, or connected the dots to get to them. 

This was me, that Thursday morning, during my Transpersonal Psychology class, when Dr. Leslie Gray, a visiting instructor, came to share with us the Native American medicine wheel. As soon as she entered the classroom, I was jolted awake. Her powerful posture and fast movement captured the class’ attention. Her eyes that feel as if she is looking through your soul, and the no nonsense, preciseness and wisdom of her words, left many of us still talking about that three-hour experience weeks after it happened. 

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

She had asked us not to take notes, as in her tradition teachings are transmitted orally. Suffice it to say, this is the class I remember the most. I felt compelled to ensure that her words and her wisdom reach more people, especially women, so I proposed to interview her for Seismic Sisters. We met up at her office in San Francisco. 

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist who has studied with medicine people and elders from various tribal backgrounds. Based in San Francisco, she is also the executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. 

 Q&A

Jessica Semaan: Can you share a little bit about your path to where you are now, specifically starting from a clinical fellowship at Harvard to practicing psychotherapy informed by principles of indigenous healing?

Dr. Leslie Gray: Though I was pursuing an education in social sciences, I had been around indigenous healing and always had both going on in my head at the same time. A turning point was when I read a book by H.F. Ellenberger titled, “The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry”, in which the author purports to trace contemporary psychiatry from shamanism to hypnotism to mesmerism to Freud. The book starts with the description of a great Kwakiutl healer. As I read on however, it began to dawn on me that what was being described was not an evolution but a de-evolution—moving away from a sophisticated application of the spectrum of consciousness for healing to a binary notion of "conscious and unconscious".

I presented a paper on shamanic healing in my first year of graduate school, and I was fortunate that the professor understood it because my classmates laughed nervously at what they perceived as primitive. Oddly, tolerating the temporary discomfort of their laughter seemed to clarify for me my own indigenous background and worldview. I decided then and there to seek out traditional healers and learn from them. I was lucky that the first healer I learned from was wise, gifted and highly skilled. That provided me with a standard that I applied in subsequent years of studying with elders and healers from other tribes.

Semaan: What does it mean for women to come into their power? Could you speak about how you define power in that case?

Gray: In this conversation we are limited by the English language, which makes it difficult to discuss situations with equal distribution of power. In English the word "power" is used equally for personal strength and for dominance over others, unlike the case in some other major languages. In the U.S. right now when a woman talks seriously about power, she is often responded to as if she were seeking to be authoritarian, whereas when a man talks about power he is simply responded to as an authority. And then women are made to fear the dreaded B word, and begin to behave in ways that weaken them in order to avoid being seen as controlling or dominant. In the West, fear of being labeled and rejected goes a long way toward stunting women's dreams and accomplishments, whether within the realms of business or healing.

Semaan: Many of our readers are actually women in the workplace. What do you have to say to them about their own power and how that could look?

Gray: That's where indigenous spirituality comes in. The indigenous relationship to spirit is immediate and personal. It employs a broad array of consciousness alteration techniques including contemplation, ritual movement, trance states, direct hypnosis, plant medicine, et al. that can allow ordinary reality to recede long enough to directly access spirit. Male controlled state religions basically tell you that access to that which is holy should be mediated by a cleric, a priest or guru or rabbi, etc. and those are usually men. With indigenous methods, a woman can strengthen herself directly, can receive power directly. When she has that rock solid center of spirit, she becomes less dependent on external approval.

Semaan: Do you think men are afraid of our power as women?

Gray: I don't think there is a shred of benefit to be derived from trying to look into male heads or hearts. You can't rely on someone identifying as a man, or having male genitalia, as accurate predictors of their respect for women's power. Nor can you rely on females to respect it. We need to make direct changes to a system which is permeated with misogyny. And we need to do so now. You cannot wait for an oppressor to take their foot from your neck, you must throw it off. On the societal level this means political elections and institutional promotions, but it starts with the individual woman getting in touch with her own ground of being and infusing the power that comes from that into her specific interests and abilities.

At the core of all that is finding your courage. Courage starts in the heart. The word comes from the French word for heart, "coeur". This is not something you acquire from academia or social ranking or work. You need to get to a still place in yourself to access the strength that is our inheritance from Mother Earth.

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

Dr. Leslie Gray is a Native American psychologist and executive director and founder of the Woodfish Institute. Photo by Tumay Aslay.

Semaan: I wanted to touch a little bit more on a different topic, on chronic pain, for over 70% of the people who suffer from chronic pain are women. I've been reading a lot about how women’s pain is diminished or silenced. I was wondering if you have some thoughts about where could the chronic pain come from, especially when there is no clear medical explanation. 

Gray: Over the years I've had many referrals for chronic pain, partly because I had some success in turning around chronic pain in myself that was the result of a car accident. It's a complex topic that is physical/psychological/ecological/legal/pharmaceutical. Long term pain particularly highlights our divorcement from nature, because its remedy is often less about technical interventions and more about healing over time, which is not the focus of Western medicine. It involves the complexity of doing what it takes for the immune system to maintain equilibrium after reparative interventions. Also, powerlessness results in pain which becomes expressed somatically. It would be very interesting to see the degree to which women suffer from chronic pain in comparison with men once women have equal power in the U.S.

Semaan: I recently watched a documentary called “The Edge of Democracy” by Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa. She's documenting what has been happening in Brazil with the imprisonment of Lula da Silva and the fall of president Dilma Rousseff, the rise of their equivalent of Trump and how the new president is pulling back on enforcement and environmental protection of the Amazon, leaving it open to increased exploitation. The film suggests we are at the end of democracy. 

Gray: Democracy is so much older than the handful of years in which European hierarchical values have attempted to overrule Indigenous egalitarian values in the Americas. In the U.S., the brilliance and endurance of Iroquoian democracy led to it being studied and copied by the European colonists. By 1776, Benjamin Franklin had attended the governmental meetings of the Iroquois for 13 years and his accounts of these proceedings were among his most popular books. Key to the Iroquoian system was equal governing power between women and men and the prohibition of slavery. In my opinion, the "Founding Fathers’" disparagement of those who devised this ingeniously balanced democracy as a group of “ignorant savages" led to terrible errors from which the U.S. still suffers hundreds of years later.

We were telling those who were trying to form a union like ours that you need to have a "spiritual center" to your democracy for it to last. Unfortunately, the European colonists reduced this noetic insight to "religion" insisting on "separation of church and state". It is in fact about reverence for the principle of balance in the universe. They created a democracy built on the subjugation of women, indentured servitude and slave labor. Moreover, the spiritual void was then filled with profit, rather than balance, as the core value. In this they created a system similar to communism in that they both rest on economic determinism.

Semaan: We often stick to systems we have because the only alternative to democracy is fascism or communism.

Gray: It's a false alternative. The concept of balance of power goes by the wayside in both. We've had a chance now to look at communism in practice, and its forms of government seem to lead to similar tyrannical tendencies, i.e. dominant hierarchies with women as second class citizens. They both engage in uncritical and usually unspoken acceptance of a pyramid model of human relations rather that the model of a circle. It is important for all structures of governing, and of political activism, to examine the underlying model of their endeavors. 

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for readability.

Jessica Semaan is a freelance writer, author, poet and performer living in San Francisco. Chronicling her journey of healing from trauma, she has over 50,000 people following her writing on Medium. Jessica’s debut book. Child of the Moon was published in 2018. She also is studying to become a psychotherapist.



Dr. Leslie Gray, Executive Director and Founder of the Woodfish Institute, is a Native American psychologist who has studied with medicine people and elders from various tribal backgrounds. She advocates and embodies a new vision of health care—the integration of ancient healing and modern medicine. Dr. Gray has a private practice in San Francisco, California, teaches workshops and seminars worldwide, and conducts travel/study programs to ancient sites. She has lectured at universities including the University of California at Berkeley, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and California Institute of Integral Studies. Telephone: (415) 928-4954, San Francisco, California. Email: lgray@woodfish.org

  • The views, practices, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the individuals involved in the article and do not necessarily represent those of Seismic Sisters.