If you are embedded within bureaucratic systems, it is very likely you have felt disempowered and maybe even depressed at multiple points in your career.

You got into this field to make a difference with young people. You wanted to find a way for improvements. And then, once you arrived, you experienced myriad obstacles from the “red tape” of policies and processes to ego-centric managers to your own knowledge gaps. How do you actually make a difference in your work when you are dealing with all these challenges?

Of course, you resist. You are a resister. You are happy to rebel. You buck the system. You fight against the systemic inequities and use your skills, talents and focus to change the way things are.

And yet.

What happens to you

while you are constantly pushing against the current? While you are fighting the fight, while you are banging the drum, while you are speaking up and speaking out?

If your sense of reason takes charge, you fall in line. You go with the flow. You find ways to “not let it get to you” and you bide your time to retirement. Of course, you still find ways to push your agenda. You still find ways to pry open that crack in the system you’ve been working on all these years. But you let your edges smooth. You find yourself sighing frequently.

If your passion drives the bus, you keep burning. You put your personal life aside in many ways and focus on making this change. It’s for the greater good. It’s for the community. It’s for the children. Meanwhile, you put off your doctor’s appointment, skip the therapist and grab lunch between meetings. You hear yourself shouting more often than you’d expected.

I’d love to tell you there is a happy medium. I’d love to tell you that it does not have to be one extreme or the other. But, this is changemaking work. You are working toward a point, toward something that is different. Way different. If you’re not battling upstream toward the mouth of the river or being dragged down over the falls, then you’re treading water. Remaining in place.

The funny thing is that all of it takes energy. So. much. energy.

Lucky for you, I studied Physics. I know a few things about energy. And lucky for us, there is already is so much energy available.

It just happens to be going the other way right now.

How can you capitalize on the energy of the rushing waters of the way things have always been? How can you neither be swept downstream nor exhaust yourself by swimming upstream?

Create a turbine.

Just like the ancient peoples bent the flow with aquaducts and today’s engineers continue to upgrade the turbine, we can harness existing energy and change it into something new.

Something electric.