Hi. I’m Jen. For 18 years I’ve worked in conservation at an AZA-accredited zoo, and for most of that time I’ve been watching what mission-driven work does to the people inside it. This newsletter is where I say the true things out loud. Every other week you’ll get one story, one permission slip, and nothing that asks you to pretend you’re fine. Let’s start with a snake.
A guest stands at a habitat and watches an animal lying still in the shade. "He looks so sad," she says, and she means it. Her whole body means it.
Standing next to her, an animal care professional sees something else entirely. Relaxed posture. Slow, even breathing. A resting spot the animal chose from a dozen options, at the hour he chooses it every day. Not sadness. Contentment, legible to anyone trained to read it.
Both of these people care. Hold onto that, because it's the whole point of this letter. Only one of them is reading the animal. The other is reading herself.
I've spent nearly two decades working with animals, and before we go one step further, I want you to know where I stand: I am pro-empathy. Empathy is the reason anyone looks at an animal long enough to matter. Every conservation win in history started with a person who felt something before they knew something. Empathy isn't the problem. It's the prerequisite.
But empathy tells you to look. It can't tell you what you're seeing.
When we look at an animal and see our own feelings staring back, we're running their behavior through our emotional grammar instead of theirs. It comes from love. It just doesn't come from evidence. In my field we have a discipline for this, drilled into us from day one: make observations, not assumptions. Behavior is observable. Preference is measurable. And because you can't interview a porcupine, we build environments where an animal's choices become the interview. Where to rest. Whether to be seen. When to engage. We stopped assuming what animals want and started building places where they could tell us.
Now here's why I'm telling you this, because this is not actually a letter about zoos.
Social science has a name for what that well-meaning guest was doing. The fundamental attribution error is our tendency to explain other people's behavior by their character and our own by our circumstances. She's late because she's careless. I'm late because traffic was terrible. We do it all day, every day, to everyone. You read your coworker's short email as coldness. You read your partner's silence as anger. You read your teenager's closed door as rejection. Empathy without information, every time. Caring deeply about someone while reading them completely wrong.
And if you're the kind of person this newsletter is for, someone who has spent years pouring yourself into work and people that matter, I'd bet you run a special version of this error that almost nobody talks about.
You flip it on yourself.
You extend circumstances to everyone else and character to you. Your colleague drops a ball and you think, she's stretched too thin, the system failed her. You drop a ball and you think, I'm failing. Someone else is exhausted and you see their workload. You're exhausted and you see a flaw. The most generous observers I know, people trained by life to give everyone else the benefit of context, reserve their harshest, least-evidenced assumptions for the person in the mirror.
That is empathy without information, pointed inward.
So let me offer you the discipline my field taught me, because it works on humans too, including the one you see in the mirror. Make observations, not assumptions. Your exhaustion is not a verdict on your character. It's behavior, and behavior is information. If you watched yourself the way a good keeper watches an animal, what would you actually see? Where do you rest when you finally get a choice? What do you avoid? When do you engage, and when do you go still? Those choices are telling you something true about what you need. Most of us were never given a habitat that let us listen.
The animal in the shade wasn't sad. They were somewhere they chose, at an hour they chose, doing exactly what their body needed. Legible to anyone trained to read it.
You deserve to be read that carefully. Start by doing it yourself.
Permission slip
You're allowed to care before you understand. You're allowed to check your assumptions without treating it as a betrayal of your caring. And you're allowed to give yourself the same context you hand out so freely to everyone else. Observation is not coldness. Sometimes it's the most loving thing you can do, especially when the being you're observing is you.
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I’m Jen Rudolph, a social scientist applying conservation psychology to burnout prevention and systems change. Through Tigerlily Social Impact Consulting, I help mission-driven organizations get change right without losing the people or the purpose they came to protect. And when you need a place to breathe, The Little House is a barn cottage retreat in Clayville, Rhode Island: thelittlehouseri.com.
Coming soon: Ted Lasso Saves the World, a podcast about what a fictional soccer coach gets right about real psychological safety.