💪🏾What My Father Built
The Work Ethic I Inherited and the One I Am Choosing
Greetings Beloved,
My father was not one man at one job. He was three.
He worked for the Haitian Board of Education by day. He taught at L'École Hôtelière in the evenings, pouring the next generation of chefs into their craft with the kind of precision that said: excellence is a form of love. Simultaneously, he ran his own catering business. I remember those events. The preparation, the presentation, the pride in his hands as he moved through a kitchen that was always, somehow, both his workplace and his offering to the world.
When my mother brought us to New York, she carried the same rhythm. She worked constantly not because she was chasing something, but because working was how she said: I am here. I am contributing. I matter.
It was inevitable that I would inherit the idea that work was who I was.
For a long time, I did not question it. Work-as-identity felt like loyalty to my parents. It felt like honoring the sacrifice of crossing oceans, of learning a new language, of starting over in a country that did not always welcome you. To stop working was to dishonor the crossing.
However, somewhere between the hustle and the mission, I had to ask a harder question: What exactly am I perpetuating?
Because here is the tension I am sitting with as the founder of Love Before ALL, an organization that exists to dismantle the very systems of extraction I sometimes recreate in my own body: I cannot preach against the altar of productivity and simultaneously offer my health, my nervous system, and my labor to it without consequence.
The systems I work to dismantle were built on the labor of people who looked like my parents and like me. To unconsciously replicate those patterns in my own life is not legacy. It is repetition.
So I am making a distinction. And I want to offer it to you.
🧠 The Brain Science
Research by Dr. Christina Maslach, whose work on burnout has shaped decades of organizational psychology, identifies a loss of personal agency as one of the six primary drivers of chronic burnout. When we inherit an identity tied to labor, when rest feels like a moral failure rather than a biological necessity, we hand our agency over to the very system that was never designed with our wholeness in mind. The amygdala reads overwork-as-safety and rest-as-threat. Over time, that wiring deepens.
Unlearning it is not laziness. It is neurological courage.
🎯 What LBA Elevates
There is a version of excellence that is extractive. It demands everything and replenishes nothing. It measures worth in output, values people for their productivity, and quietly teaches those who come after us that survival requires depletion.
And there is a version of excellence that is intentional, love-centric, and inclusive. It is the version my father modeled when he poured into the next generation of chefs without diminishing himself. It is the version that says: I will give my best, and I will protect what makes my best possible.
That is the inheritance I am choosing to keep.
⭐ Leadership Practice: The Legacy Audit
This week, I invite you to look at the work ethic you inherited from your family, your culture, and/or your first workplace and ask:
What am I keeping because it genuinely serves me and the people I lead?
What am I keeping because stopping would feel like a betrayal of someone I love?
These are not the same thing. And only you can tell them apart.
🌸 The Invitation
You can honor the resilience of the people who came before you without passing down the wound of overwork. Excellence is not extractive. Let June be the month we practice the difference.
With deep roots,
Annie P. 💛
Your Curious Cultural Architect
Growing compassion from the inside out.
