The hardest part of changing or leaving the system is getting it to leave you.
The overwork. The performing. The low hum that something isn't right but you’re stuck. You can leave it, build past it, or stay and try to change it — and still operate exactly as it taught you.
The Recovering Human offers a three-month coaching engagement and a guided practice to actually make the transition into a new way of living and working.
Where You Might BeThree different moments, the same recognition: the system is still running you.
Already Out
You left corporate America or were pushed out, and you're building something of your own — frustrated to realize you're repeating old habits.
Still Inside, On Your Way Out
You're disillusioned and quietly planning your exit — and you can already feel yourself running the same patterns that wore you down.
Staying to Change It
You recognize that business as usual is not working. You're committed to changing the system from within — but you can't do that well while it's still running you.
This isn’t a personal failure. It's what happens when you're absorbing the weight of systems that aren't working — while the ground keeps shifting under you. Recovery offers a way through.
The Work
Name what isn’t working
1
Name what's underneath the overwhelm and stuckness — unfulfilled promises, workplace trauma, lingering post-pandemic disruption, non-stop change, uncertainty in and outside of work — without rushing to fix it.
take inventory
2
Observe how you're operating now, how your environment reinforces it, and what it's costing you, those around you, and the impact you want to have.
build a toolkit
3
Build a toolkit of new ways to respond — grounded in recovery, in your own context. The practice you can keep coming back to.
take courageous action
4
Get clear on what you want, and take meaningful action toward it — with humanity at the center.
Who you’ll be working with
I spent the better part of two decades inside the system — journalism, communications, and leading social-impact work at an executive level. I believed in it. I climbed, I took on more, and I gave it everything I had.
I'm also an alcoholic. It's a disease I carry. But the systems I came up in never gave me real tools for being human, so when life and work got hard I didn't have much to reach for. Drinking was my coping mechanism to deal with being in a constant state of survival mode. When COVID hit, it broke all of that wide open, and I got sober.
That's where this work actually started — not in a framework I read, but in the slow, unglamorous practice of getting honest about how I was operating and why. I won't pretend I've arrived. This is recovery: progress, not perfection, and I'm still in it. But it gave me back something performing for systems had buried: clarity and agency. Recovery transformed my life and how I showed up at work.
It's a common discussion in recovery circles that the practices should be shared with everyone, not just addicts. So that's what The Recovering Human aims to do. I've seen and heard from many people who are really struggling now with how our systems — including corporate America — are breaking under the pressure of post-pandemic disruption, sociopolitical dynamics, economic uncertainty, and a shifting AI landscape. They feel overwhelmed, pulled away from their humanity, stuck in survival mode and confused on what to do next. Some are frustrated with how they've been coping and know something needs to change — within themselves and within the system.
This work offers a way forward. A way to let go of old ways of coping, find clarity, and take meaningful action toward a vision you create, with integrity and humanity at the center.
Rebecca Grey — Founder, The Recovering Human