The selfless impulse to take responsibility and to repair is a marvel to behold. Under the right circumstances, it is a precious gift that has the power to change lives and heal a broken world into wholeness. But without anger to remind us where we end and others begin, we have no way of knowing whether we’re using our gifts out of choice or compulsion. Trust that you can bear what your anger already knows, because your gifts are far too precious to be lost in self-forgetting.

Lean in, embrace the suck, fuck your feelings — if you’re looking for a stick to beat yourself up with you need never look far, but I have yet to see management advice that suggests it might be helpful for us to more fully feel the pain we experience in our professional lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with capitalizing our pain for the promise of some future payoff. The problem is that what begins as an intentional decision to trade off present pain for future reward too easily becomes a numbing and forgetting of what pain feels like entirely.

Before it goes the way of other corporate fads, consigned to the graveyard of hollow management rhetoric, it’s worth attempting to recover some of its initial promise: What are we actually inviting into the workplace when we ask people to bring their whole selves? What do we owe one another, as employees and leaders alike, if we intend to take this invitation seriously?