I led a La Mesa community coaching call last week, and it opened with what I thought was a soft prompt.
“What’s a recent glimmer you’ve experienced?”
A glimmer is a small moment that tells your nervous system you’re safe. The warm sun on your face. A stranger who slows down to let you cross. The first sip of coffee before anyone needs anything from you. Touching grass, if you want the internet version.
They are deliberately small. Graduating, getting married, closing on a house— are milestones. They come with a whole emotional apparatus, and you can see them coming for months. A glimmer lasts 4 seconds, costs nothing, and you can miss it entirely if your attention is directed somewhere else.
Which, for most of the women I work with, it is.
Mine was a book
“The Wishing Game” by Meg Shaffer. It’s a book about books, which is my happy place. A woman trying to adopt a boy, an author from her childhood, and their stories intersecting for a happy ending.
It pulled me out of reality and reminded me about wish-making. Believing in possibility, without a plan attached to it.
That is not my native setting. I’m a pragmatist. I plan for every edge case, I require evidence before I decide, and I have built a career on being the person in the room who has already thought about what goes wrong.
But I can be woo woo adjacent, too. I get a daily dose of it watching my daughter experience her firsts in the world. The joy she gets from pointing at dogs and saying “daw” or her gently stroking a leaf. She has no model for how things are supposed to go, so nothing disappoints her. Every ordinary object is full of possibility. I get to be a part of that for a few moments every day.
What we are collecting instead
Attention is a budget, and it’s really challenging to spend it on purpose.
If you’re mid-career, running a team, and also the person your family calls when something breaks, your attention is already committed. Aging parents, small kids, a job that expanded without a corresponding title change. You aren’t choosing where your focus lands, because it’s getting claimed by others.
And under that kind of load, attention goes exactly where you’d expect: toward threats. Toward whatever might blow up next. Your brain is doing its job. It has identified that you are the last line of defense on about six to a million things, and it is staying hyper-alert to monitor them.
A job search makes this visible faster than anything else I’ve seen.
You start reading everything as data. The recruiter who went quiet after a great call. The role that closed before you finished the application. The connection who said “let’s talk next week” in March. Nothing is neutral anymore. Every silence is information and all of it points in the same direction.
Your field of vision tunnels into what’s going wrong, because that’s where the threat lives, and you have appointed yourself the person who catches it early.
The same thing happens inside a job you’re tolerating. You track the meeting you weren’t invited to, the project that went to someone else, the tone in an email you’ve now read six times. You get very, very good at it.
The searching brain and the noticing brain are the same!
Is this really what you want to be good at?!
Nine months of practice at scanning for what went wrong doesn’t stay in the container you built it for. You don’t clock out of it at 6pm. It follows you to dinner. It sits with you while your kid tells you about her day, and it keeps running in the background while you’re supposedly relaxing on a Saturday.
It’s a real skill in hyperdrive and taxing your well-being.
This is where I part ways with most of what gets written about burnout. Rest is the standard prescription, which has its uses, but it treats exhaustion. Attention is a separate problem. You can come back from two weeks off and resume the scan within an hour of opening your laptop, because it was never about being tired.
The smallest possible intervention
One glimmer a day. Write them down for at least a week. I shared one yesterday.
One small thing that registered as good. Something that brings a brief smile to your face or positively distracts you.
Two rules that make it work.
It has to be small.
🛑 “My daughter is healthy” is gratitude.
🟢 “The light in the kitchen at 7am,” you’re on the right track.
Write it, don’t just think it. This is part of the training. A passing thought takes 2 seconds and leaves no trace.
After a week you’ll have 7 lines. That’s evidence at your fingertips, but you may start to see a pattern. Maybe around 4pm on day 3, you catch yourself scanning for something to write down. That’s the reversal. You’ve pointed the same machinery in the other direction.
I won’t tell you that this fixes a job you need to leave or a search dragging into month 10. But it’s a tool to stop those things from taking over the rest of your life while you sort them out.
The vigilance your ambition requires doesn’t come with an off switch. So you build one.
Over the next week, I’d love to hear about one of your glimmers.