Say No to Martyrdom

Society has thing for sacrificing our heroes. So many of our stories act like this is a good thing, but it feels like those stories are broken now. They don’t fit the world I live in.

From where I sit, our obsession with celebrating martyred heroes instead of doing what we need to support them is twisted and it needs to stop.

I know this is going to challenge a few of you, but a core teaching of mine is that we do not need to sacrifice ourselves to do our work. In fact, we can't self-sacrifice if we want our work to have an impact.

This is obvious in the workplace, when someone on your project team quits and now there are fewer people around to do the same amount of work. We also see this reality when we look at how COVID is killing health workers, and for each one lost we see more stress on the system with the same amount of work to go around.

The reality that we consider our heroes expendable is clearer now with COVID. What this looks like in our society is celebrating health care and essential workers as heroes without doing anything that could help them not to die.

It’s uncomfortable because it’s true.

It’s a bad feeling, watching health care workers plead for support and supplies, and tell us that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for us. It’s hard to keep reading the news after seeing a message like that, but because of our leadership stories, we do. We consider martyrs an inevitable outcome of the system, but what if that wasn’t true?

We do not need to sacrifice them. We do not need to sacrifice anybody. We need to look closer at our assumptions when we assume that self-sacrifice is necessary, because there are almost always other ways.

This hero-worship of health care and essential workers obscures the fact that those of us doing the venerating are usually privileged enough to stay at home, while the workers are forced to go outside —no matter the risk — because they need the pay.

We should not stand by and venerate people as heroes who, as a matter of survival, have to go to work while we do nothing to protect them. We should not be content to tell people they are brave when they have no choice but to show up for their shift because they need the paycheck. 

Our health care and essential workers are brave, there is no doubt about it. But they should not be asked or expected to sacrifice themselves for doing their job.

We need to wake up to the trance we're in around martyrdom, because martyrdom is not a healthy way forward.

Many of us were raised on stories and legends of bloody self-sacrifice and heroes dying "at the end." Our stories center action figures who often never get to enjoy the world they saved.

Our stories are sad and we need to rethink them, so we can imagine a better way. We can have compassion for where we are right now and give ourselves some time and space to imagine a different way.

Leadership Archetypes

In western culture we have a leadership archetype based on self-sacrifice. It's everywhere. Heroes die at the end, in a blaze of glory. They are always doing something important, like saving the world. Yet it is only when they die that they become heroes.

Right now, health care and essential workers are keeping our hospitals, grocery stores, and gas stations alive so that billions of people in isolation can stay that way. They are keeping us all safe. They are heroes.

But what if they didn't have to sacrifice their safety? What if we recognized that their heroism isn’t something we’re entitled to?

Martyrdom is a choice and it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to sacrifice our leaders. We don't have to sacrifice the people who are keeping the world going, one underpaid worker at a time. Instead of writing them laudatory poems and social media posts, we could take a stand for them, and for their lives.

It's up to all of us to decide, as society, that this kind of self-sacrifice is not requested or required. Not just that we don't want our heroes to die to save us — that we won't let them.

We need to stand up for the workers who are literally keeping us alive during COVID. Before we lose any more of them, we need to do it now.

Martyrdom Serves the Status Quo

When health care and essential workers martyr themselves to the COVID response, the status quo sends a clear message that heroes are expendable.

People are not disposable. We are not commodities. But most of us don’t have an economic choice about whether we participate in systems that expect us to martyr ourselves.

Venerating the self-sacrifice of heroes obscures our own responsibility to demand better from our communities, our countries, and our systems. Celebrating the fallen gives us a sense of power, because we become the narrators of their stories. They never get to protest, because they are gone. But they did not ask for this, and it should not be required.

When we see the archetype of self-sacrifice presented in our conversations, we can offer another way. When we are told that health care and essential workers are heroic but ultimately expendable, we must insist that we find other ways.

We can demand better support for workers, not just now but moving forward. It is when we are forced to confront the dissonance of our assumptions and archetypes, that together we can imagine a better way.

When we see a story that needs changing, it's up to us to change it. That is our power as leaders. It’s up to us to tell new stories from a place of possibility.

At the same time, with the stress and fear of COVID, it takes work to feel resourced enough to advocate for others. 

What to Do About Self-Care

Self-care is the most strategic thing we can do to create resilience for ourselves.

COVID has collapsed our world, but our responsibilities have multiplied.

Moving out of martyrdom means giving yourself the support you need to feel good in your life and to do your work for the long-term. I’m here for that, and it would be a privilege to support you.