Anthony Hunter fell in love, even though it wasn’t part of his plan.  His life at Morehouse College was packed with his finance major, his family business, his own work as a producer and creator, and his service with the organization CHILL (Counseling Humans in Life Lessons, the Atlanta University Center Consortium’s peer to peer mental health advocacy and education program), of which he is now President. Anthony had big goals and his motto for keeping focused was, “If I stay ready, I don't have to get ready.” He told me, “I wasn't dating, but I met this amazing young woman and we built up our relationship though I was actually very against being in a relationship because of those very reasons. And around spring break our freshman year, she and I had both just really confessed our love for one another.”

A year later, the relationship ended and Anthony was bereft. “When we broke up, I felt like, wow, I am probably the worst person in the world. How could somebody this amazing not want to be in my life anymore? And so for the next year, I was battling with how terrible I thought I was as an individual…She broke up with me. And I had to recognize why, I had to recognize where I needed to heal. I needed to recognize where I needed to grow.”

School and work were difficult for Anthony after his breakup. “I hated every moment of doing classwork other than maybe a couple classes with some of the teachers that I really liked. I really was worried about crying while on Zoom in a class. And so I'd have to turn off my camera and I hated teachers who were like, ‘keep your cameras on.” 

One class mattered deeply to Anthony: Personal leadership and development with Dr. Lawrence Henderson. “We studied servant leadership and every week we taught people. My group worked with women recovering from addiction and getting their start back in the workforce. And seeing those women every Friday and just serving and building the relationship that I did with them, and going through what I was going through with my family and my internal and my emotional needs… It was tough. It was really, really tough. But that class really saved my life.”

The class inspired Anthony to help others uncover the role both life experience and personal identity play in how they lead. He had to integrate who he was post-breakup with the person he wanted to be in the world. He says, “Everybody has a leader in them. Everybody is a leader in their own right. And the idea that some people are leaders and others are not is such a misnomer. My whole journey with intentional leadership really came with recognizing that everybody is led differently and everybody leads differently. And I had to figure out how to open myself up to just being able to learn from other people. It became about humility.”

Anthony is a young leader who now seamlessly integrates his mental health and his leadership. 

And his story reminded me of my own experiences trying to show up, focus, and perform when my heart was broken.  Even now after I’ve been married for over 16 years, I can feel this feeling so viscerally from my youth. And even now, if my husband and I have had a particularly devastating fight, the idea of turning those feelings off, showing up, and performing at work feels really hard. When I was younger I tended to lose myself in the people I was involved with. This made it really hard to keep it together when they left me and I felt like a piece of me had left, too. I lost days and hours to distraction and rumination. 

But-- connecting with the piece of yourself that is tied to your work or academic identity can help the healing. I asked Carolyn Glass, psychotherapist and clinical advisor to The Anxious Achiever to lend some advice on how to show up and perform at work after a breakup.

“The thing about a breakup is that it's actually an experience of grief and loss in a way that a lot of people, especially those who are young, have never had. You spend time in the relationship projecting out into the future and all of a sudden you can't do that anymore. You’re just sitting in the present and you have to go through the process of grieving it.

Glass urges, remember who you were outside of this one relationship. “We all have multiple selves: there was this part of you that engaged with your team or your boss or your professors and did your work. So you almost want to be grateful that you're being reminded of that self. This is still who you are. You still have this sense of permanence, even though this impermanent piece went away.

The biggest guiding principle is that you really do want to connect with the piece of you who feels a sense of efficacy and competence and control. And usually that is you at work. You want to show up for that person, even if you're feeling really sad inside.”

And even if you start work with that pit in the stomach telling you, “I need to be in bed binging Netflix and crying right now,” you might reframe that to: it's a really good day to have to be here. If you work remotely, you might want to find a way to be with colleagues, or be outside of your home. Can you shift your energy into the tasks ahead? Getting into action is a wonderful way to shift your emotions and get caught up in the present, which is helpful when your heart hurts.

Glass says, “Sometimes it's tempting to just go back to bed, but if you actually play out the scenario of ‘I'm going to lie in bed for eight hours and process my breakup' it doesn't sound so good, since probably for six of those hours you're actually going to be watching Netflix. Maybe start an hour late if you really need to get yourself together.”

When we’re managing a breakup, we might want to talk about it constantly as a way of processing the impact. We might want to talk about it with friends at work; how can we set limits so it doesn’t eat up the day? Obviously this is a big thing that's happened in your life and colleagues might want to know about it but Glass says, “you don't want to also relegate that person to a corner of your soul by using your work time to talk about them. So by all means message your friend and ask, “Hey, can you meet me for a drink after work? And they'll be like, "oh my gosh, are you okay?" And you'll say, "yeah, let's talk about it after work."

Because (presuming you weren't actually dating someone that you worked with) you want to protect the spaces that were not part of your romantic world.

“You shift and change in the context of a relationship and hold on to some of those things after the partner goes, but it's important to stay connected to your fundamental self,” says Glass. I think a lot of times people have a lot of difficulty processing breakups and loss if they feel as though so much of themselves was their identity with that other person. This can be when getting back in touch with your strong, powerful work identity can really help!

Wishing you warm hearts,

Morra 

PS: Listen to my episode on working and grieving with the amazing Rebecca Soffer here. And check out HBS’s Martin Sinozich on how a divorce disrupted his life, and led him to move beyond fear.