Work is Personal
... but not in the ways we think.
“It’s not personal, it’s just business.”
I was told this all the time growing up. I hear people say it to my clients. I still get told it as proposals for new work are rejected or reconsidered. And as a millennial coming of age and looking for jobs in the 2008-2009 recession, I knew so much of my experience of the work world was indeed not personal.
What I know now, and wish I had language for then, was the ways in which it’s far more complicated than that.
Work feels personal because it can be a window into your relationship with yourself, which is the most personal dimension of our lives.
It’s not that your worth is your work, your value as a human being your output or your job, it’s that the ways we engage with our work reflect back to us, our most personal thoughts and feelings about ourselves. Work surfaces, in more and less explicit ways, the stories and beliefs we have about ourselves.
Think about the last time you made a mistake at work. Big. Small. Varying degrees of impact. How did you relate to and engage with yourself throughout that experience? What beliefs (about your competence, value, qualities - incredibly personal evaluations and judgments) guided your next steps? Mistakes themselves are a part of being human, utterly ubiquitous. But… how you handled them - that’s about you, personally.
Let me explain.
Imagine that you walk into a room, hypothetically it’s your living room with a cream couch and a generations old persian rug, and see your 5-year-old has mistakenly exploded a lootbag gift: pink slime topped with copious amounts of gold glitter. The sticky blobs, and tiny speckles, are all over everything. An honest mistake.
{Please note: No actual living rooms were harmed in the context of learning this pivotal life lesson}
As a parent, you might say with annoyance and anger: “OH MY GOD, WHAT HAPPENED? What were you thinking? Why on earth did you make that choice? What am I going to do now, someone has to clean this! OMG.”
You might also (if you’ve slept, and have the internal resources) say: “ok, this was clearly a mistake. You didn’t want it to happen, you didn’t expect it to happen. I wish it hadn’t happened. We can figure out what to do next, together.”
My point is not to evaluate how we show up as parents, it’s to point to the fact that how we engage with ourselves in everyday situations at work provides a window into how we think about ourselves and the world. When you make a mistake, you can explore it with compassion, with shame, or with any number of other responses. The responses that are available to you: that’s what’s so personal.
What’s wild, and why the glitter example is so prescient, is often the responses we know are what we learned as a children. How did your caregivers, your communities, your cultures, peers, and society conceptualize your worth? What stories about yourself (others and the world in which we live) did you learn to believe in order to succeed?
”Not enough” is a common and loud story I hear.
The story is: Not smart enough. Not pretty enough. Not slim enough. Not funny enough. Not enough keeps us ever striving, ever reaching, ever empty.
The personal belief becomes self-doubt, no matter how much you achieve or how successful you are. The belief shows up in our cringe-worthy relationship with ourselves (the way the first shouting parent might have felt to you as you read their response), born not for the sake of being cruel, but simply because that’s what we know. That’s what we learned.
So as you engage with work this week, I invite you to notice your thoughts about yourself. Notice not just the anxiety, but the story underneath it. Get curious, with gentleness, about how your learned beliefs are shaping how you experience yourself at work (and beyond).
If you feel like you want more: practice seeing yourself as someone who is less concerned with being enough, and more concerned with “figuring things out”. That looks like the second parent:
(1) “You didn’t want this to happen. You didn’t expect this. This feels hard, because it is. This is uncomfortable and distressing, etc. (accurately articulate complexity without blame); and
(2) “I can figure this out” (stay present and focus on figuring it out)
Not because then you will be worthy.
But because you already are.
And you deserve your own company along the way.
As always, be gentle out there. On yourself, and each other.
ps - What’s one story about yourself that shows up at work—and might be ready to soften?
I think it's really interesting to see the difference in how folks handle making mistakes. I'm very much a "man I really screwed that one up" type of person and move on. So I've found it difficult to navigate the waters with folks that tend to dwell more on their mistakes and can't quite let them go. Makes for an interesting both professional and personal dynamic.
I think one area I notice is consistent is with asserting boundaries at work- prioritizing my own wants or needs over someone elses. My assistant would tell you this shows up as my inability to successfully implement our late policy- I let way too many people show up late, and then let the whole afternoon run late because of it. I think this comes from conditioning early on around people pleasing and wanting people to be happy with me. It doesn’t help that there’s a financial incentive for me to also see them- I get paid in this scenario only when I put their needs above my own. Needless to say we talk about this at every administrative staff meeting ;)