Spare Some Change: Emotional Debt, Technical Debt, & Preparing for Change

I like to imagine one’s life and career as The Business of You — not because I think we need a financial return on every moment of every day but because it helps us apply familiar systems to complex problems.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the concept of emotional debt, and I think we can learn a lot about managing our emotional debt (and the emotional debt of our employees) if we consider how businesses accrue and pay off technical debt.

So, first, what is technical debt? What is emotional debt?

We’re all familiar with financial debt. Usually through credit or a loan, you are able to spend money that you don’t have with the promise of paying it back later. If you don’t pay back a financial debt, you start to accrue interest, ultimately owing more than you originally borrowed, and that’s where financial debt causes problems.

Technical debt is the result of trading efficiency for expediency in either design or implementation. Interest accrues in the form of lost time and efficiency, and one decision in your code base or documentation can affect and hinder countless future decisions. The longer you allow tech debt to accrue, the more complex and expensive it becomes to fix.

Emotional debt is the result of experiencing some kind of trauma or emotional burden, big or small, and not adequately acknowledging and/or processing it. This emotional debt accrues as physical and emotional stress, consciously and subconsciously, which bleeds over into our health, relationships, and career. And with workplace stress reaching an all-time high in 2022, according to Gallup, I think a lot of us are currently dealing with this debt — or accruing interest without even realizing it.

Preparing for change

The tricky thing about emotional debt, in particular, is that the collectors are unpredictable — you can defer payments for months or even years without a single letter or call, then you run into a health scare, an unexpected bill, or just an especially bad day, and all of these feelings that you’ve been deferring come crashing down on you all at once. And it’s important to recognize this emotional debt translates into workplace well-being; a recent Deloitte study indicates that many employees are struggling with unacceptably low levels of well-being. How bad has it gotten? The study found that 60% of employees, 64% of managers, and 75% of C-suite executives are seriously considering quitting for a job that would better support their well-being.

I had one of these moments recently. I ran headlong into a mental and emotional wall that I didn’t see coming at all, and at first, it made every part of life overwhelming. These are the moments when understanding and applying a strategic planning framework like I provided in my book, Building the Business of You, provides much-needed structure. I’ve never tackled some of the challenges I’m dealing with in my personal life before, but I have been a manager, which means I’ve helped create strategies to help to manage change and facilitate progress, so I know I can do that.

So I trust the process, what I call the Fluid Career System:

Spotting the trends is an internal and external process. In a business context, this means looking at the market, competitors, and larger economic trends as well as what’s going on within yourself or your organization. When we’re tackling emotional debt, we want to focus on identifying what parts of our external life are triggering stress in our internal life. I like to say you have to get a lay of the land before you can chart a course — you’re unlikely to solve any problem if you just start taking action blindly.

Creating your compass is a goal-setting exercise. It’s about developing clarity around where you really want to end up, then working backwards to figure out what you actually need to do to get there. Spoilers: many solutions for emotional debt are going to involve asking for help, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Preparing for change is critical since most emotional debt is a byproduct of resisting change. What is a small thing that you could just do and try to help you build that courage and confidence along the way? Hearing stories from people who have already walked the journey I intend to walk is a huge help for me, personally, when it comes to preparing for change. Using a framework like this helps me a lot, too, because it takes some of the decision-making out of my hands.

Building your (support) network — AKA asking for help. I don’t think it’s possible to tackle your emotional debt without taking this step. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong. But if resisting change is the leading cause of emotional debt, trying to take on too much by yourself is probably the second most common contributor.

Building your skills looks different for everyone, but doing the first two steps of this process should give you some hints about what’s causing you stress and what you want your life to be like. Figure out the small small steps that take you from that place of stress to somewhere better, even if it’s just a little better at a time. I don’t recommend taking on this task alone, whether you seek professional help or help from your personal support network.

Finally, this is an iterative process. The goal is to feel a little bit better than you did yesterday, every day. As you change and evolve, you’ll need to check back in with yourself frequently, with where your compass is pointing, and to recalibrate for what you need in the moment. I think this is the best — and really, the only — way to pay off that emotional debt that can stack up over time without you even realizing it.