Recognition. Reckoning. Reclaiming. What Work Is Really Costing Black Women

There are conversations that stay with you long after the screen goes dark. This week’s session with the Network for Black Women Leaders was one of them.

When Work No Longer Works: Reclaiming Energy, Clarity and Choice was a partnership event co-hosted with the brilliant Odette Hamilton, an employee experience and workplace wellbeing leader with over 30 years in HR and organisational culture. And while I came in with a structure and a set of themes, what unfolded in the room shaped itself around three words that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.

Recognition. Reckoning. Reclaiming.

Recognition came first. Before anything else, we had to name what is actually happening. The pressure to prove yourself in spaces that were not designed with you in mind. The experience of being unseen, unheard or undervalued despite consistently delivering above what is asked. The emotional labour of managing how you show up, how you speak, how much space you take and how much you absorb, while still being expected to perform at the highest level. These experiences are too often normalised or minimised. Naming them honestly, without apology, was where the conversation had to start.

Reckoning came next. Because recognition on its own is not enough. Once you have named what work is costing you, the practical question follows: what are you going to do about it? And this is where the conversation got real. Just leave is not always advice. For many of the women in that room there are mortgages, families, responsibilities, pensions and futures to consider. Leaving well or staying well, requires a plan. It requires knowing your numbers, understanding your runway, being clear about what financial security actually means for you. That practical reckoning, turning an emotional question into a workable plan, is some of the most important work I do and the room felt it.

Reclaiming was perhaps the most powerful part of all. Reclaiming the right to choose. To stay because staying is genuinely right for you, not because you feel you have no option. To leave because something has to change and you have prepared for that change. To pause, to build something of your own, to redefine what a fulfilling working life actually looks like on your own terms. Not because someone else has decided what your next chapter should look like, but because you have the clarity to decide for yourself.

I left the session sitting with a thought about resilience. We talk about it so often as the ability to keep going. To absorb, to adapt, to push through. But I think there is another definition that does not get enough airtime. Resilience can also be the clarity to know when you no longer want to keep going in the same way, and the courage to choose something different.

That is not weakness. That is wisdom.

If this conversation resonates with where you are right now, I work with women individually and in groups on exactly these questions. Financial clarity, personal strategy, the practical and emotional work of navigating transition. You do not have to figure it out alone.

Find out more at karenfburke.com or get in touch directly to have a conversation.