My five Trust & Safety mantras for difficult moments

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

This week, I'm thinking about how to get through a difficult time. I'd love to know how you're doing and what's helping you.

Here we go! — Alice

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The things I tell myself when times get hard

There are five things I remind myself of on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. You could call them my mantras; phrases that help to calm me and keep me focused during times of stress. 

Recently, I’ve felt overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in the world and the online safety industry. So I’ve gone back to my mantras more often than usual. If you’re working in Trust & Safety, maybe they will help you too. Here they are, in no particular order:

Resilience is resistance

This is an especially dark time, and the bad news is never-ending. We need to be resilient so we can weather the storm.

One of the most important ways that I can stay resilient is to understand what I can control and what I can't. For those of us working in online safety, it's important to recognise that we have a role to play in making things better for others, but we cannot solve all of humanity's problems on our own.

This classic reminder is especially helpful for those of us who may be tempted to take on the burden of solving every societal ill:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

You are not your job and your company is not your identity

A lot of people who work in T&S or online safety are do-gooder over-achievers (looking at myself here too). When we’re faced with a situation where we aren’t recognised or valued, we often default to wanting to prove ourselves even more. This can create an unhealthy work-life balance and a reliance on career success to fill self-esteem

It’s ok to love your work. When your job is emotionally difficult, the little dopamine hits we get when we do a job well are important, so we seek it out more. However, for many of us in mission-driven roles, especially when we don’t have a lot of external validation, it’s easy to fall into a trap where your career becomes your identity.

Especially in a volatile job market like we have at the moment, we must remind ourselves that we are not our jobs. We are also not defined by the companies we work for.

That's easy to forget because some tech companies have strong internal branding that convinces people they’re part of an elite group that could never be replicated elsewhere. It’s easy to get sucked in by the hype, and to feel like you’re special because of where you work.

But remember, that this is by design: you don’t have to fall for it. Yes, you can work for a prestigious company, but this doesn’t define you; you had worth before you worked there, and you’ll have it after.

Create new grooves

To be totally honest and vulnerable here, I don’t have a large circle of friends outside of Trust & Safety. The professional relationships I have built are meaningful for me and some of my only sources of social connection outside my family. Community is important and helps keep me sane. Because of this, I volunteer a lot for various industry committees and advisory groups.

That said, I am prone to feeling jealous of other people’s accomplishments and this means that I end up taking on more to try and prove myself. Sometimes these projects give me immense satisfaction (like this newsletter) but it can also be exhausting when your hobbies and volunteer work are linked to your day job.

Sometimes the answer to burnout isn’t to do less of what you love, but to do something different. Alison Green from Ask A Manager says,

For years it seemed self-evident that I’d need to do less work, not more, if I wanted to feel less burned out. But somehow, after just adding something entirely different, I am no longer cranky, exhausted, or stressed out.

That’s what I meant when I talked about wearing the same grooves into your brain over and over. That’s the part that had run me down, not the busyness itself. I started some new grooves, and my brain feels … recovered. From adding work, not subtracting it — the exact opposite of what I had always assumed about burn-out.

I feel like I’ve fallen into the same groove of late and have to remind myself that I am a person who is capable of doing good outside of Trust & Safety too. You might have similar feelings; now may be a time where you should actively seek out a new groove.

Don’t be afraid to say no

With work so closely tied up with my identity, and with it being an especially dynamic time right now, it’s easy to try and do everything. I have to actively set boundaries for myself so that I don’t go too far.

For example, it’s important to me to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the industry, but I limit this to text media only, and only in the morning while I’m drinking my coffee. If there are interesting articles I want to read/ save for later, I use a Notion shortcut to save to alicelinks.com; this way I can easily stop what I’m doing and not lose a good link in a sea of tabs on my phone. I don’t watch videos and I don’t listen to podcasts (ironic, since I host one). I find the detachment helpful.

I also have strict boundaries about when and how often I have coffee chats or answer career questions from people. Usually this is just once or twice a week outside of my regularly scheduled commitments.

These guidelines don’t always stop me from getting lost in research or work, but they’re immensely helpful boundaries that I try and stick to.

Your authentic self is your best self

Some folks working in T&S put on a front at work but I find it impossible to not be my most authentic, quirky self all of the time. I’m not very good at parroting corporate lines and, courtesy of my tattoos, I look different to most colleagues that I’ve worked with.

This has the potential to hold me back professionally in some workplaces, but over the years, I’ve recognised that it’s also my superpower. Friend of EiM Katie Harbath wrote about this brilliantly this week:

We get to decide what energy we will put into the world. We get to choose how we show up—not reacting to the noise but in alignment with our values. For me, that means rejecting the hyper-masculine narrative that’s being pushed by tech leaders and others and leaning into something different: feminine energy, radical empathy, and the confidence to lead in my own way.

To me, being successful is never losing sight of who I am. It means taking risks and speaking up about online harms. I can show strength by being vulnerable (like I’m doing here today) and I can make room for others who offer different perspectives. I hope you can do the same.

Also worth reading

Trust & Safety VP Reveals: Tech Career Secrets (Soribel Feliz / AI Careers - YouTube)
Why? An interview I did about careers in T&S, what skills you need, and how I got started.

The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification (TechDirt)
Why? "Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify."

Building trust with ethical AI: a guide for CX and T&S leaders (PartnerHero)
Why? In CX and Trust & Safety, ethical AI practices determine how businesses retain loyalty, ensure safety, and build credibility with their customers. (My colleagues and I wrote this).

Apropos of everything (Raw Signal)
Why? A guide to creating policies about company values and what you're willing to work on.

Fact-checking’s future: can social media handle the truth? (New_Public)
Why? A deeper look at fact checking and how to layer services to prevent misinformation.