The Center’s communications team recently shared an Instagram Reel (follow us if you aren’t already, while we’re on the topic!) featuring a montage of U.S. women Olympic champions set to a song from Disney’s animated Mulan. It may sound fluffy or even a little silly, but the way it resonated in this particular moment was striking.
Each of these athletes is remarkable in her own right. Rather than letting this blog wander into a catalog of admiration, I want to focus on one: Alysa Liu, and why she might offer something like a guidebook for protecting our joy in today’s nonprofit landscape.
Liu made waves at the Olympics on multiple levels. Her aesthetic is alt, visually commanding against the traditionally squeaky-clean image of figure skating. Her music choices are contemporary and fun — “Stateside” by PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson is, objectively, an iconic pick. Even her attitude is disarming. She appears untouched by Olympic pressure and has spoken about enjoying struggle because it makes her “feel alive.”
All of this makes her distinct. Magnetic. There’s a kind of legendary aura around her that has sparked genuine internet obsession.
Alysa Liu embodies the best kind of punk rock: a radical approach to subverting the status quo from within the very system she operates in. It is not rooted in negativity. She does not spend her energy criticizing the sport or her peers. Instead, she focuses on doing things her way, and that joy is palpable. You can feel it even watching her skate on your phone.
She shows us how to let go of what doesn’t serve us — how to pursue what we love without making it fraught. But we should not let go of the example she sets: doing what lights us up, doing it for the right reasons, and refusing to bend to pressures that threaten our enjoyment of the work.
All of this is to say: each of us has the capacity to reclaim our joy in our work.
Our missions matter to us. That is why we show up every day. Yet the forces that disconnect us from that joy, external pressures, shifting expectations and constraints we cannot control, do not have to dictate how we experience our work. Even when we cannot change the wall in front of us, we can choose not to keep banging our heads against it. We can redirect our energy toward the parts of our work we can shape.
We can personalize it. Reclaim agency within it. Take pride in how we move through it.
And in doing so, we protect the joy that made us say yes to this work in the first place.