Live to work or work to live

Your choice

Living For The Weekend

My brother always said “I work to live, I don’t live to work”.

Sadly, I lost him a couple of years ago but, as I was writing his eulogy, I realised how much he had lived up to this maxim. He’d been hard-working and diligent (many of his clients remarked on these qualities) but his priority had always been to enjoy his life and he’d crammed a lot into it.

It made me reflect upon my life and priorities, much like the pandemic caused many to do the same. I wouldn’t have wanted to do a lot of what he did, we were quite different in personality and interests, but had I got things in the right order? Were there times when I had allowed work to take priority, to dominate my life? Well, maybe, sometimes …

This is a central question of our lives today, the role of work in our life. It’s something that changes over time and yet how often do we reappraise its position? How many of us just drift along and then wake up one day and find it’s way out of line with where we thought it was and want it to be?

It’s a very complex and personal relationship and it can be hard to properly evaluate. We have a lot of social conditioning about what that relationship should be, what’s expected of us, what is ‘right’. We also have different needs at a physical, emotional, social and financial level. Our work can bring us many benefits, it can enable a lifestyle that we want, it can give us opportunities to do things that would otherwise be beyond our reach, it can be the means by which we grow and thrive. However, there can be a dark side to our work, where it demands too much of us, it constrain us and damages us.

We also have different levels of choice, depending on our social position, education, wealth and so on. Those choices are also defined by what we believe is available to us and what is actually available if we throw off the constraints of those beliefs. There are many voices telling us our choice is limited because it is in their interested to confine us, it can be hard to ignore them and go in a different direction. But it is possible.

When I entered work, the dominant narrative was that you got a decent job at a big company and you were sorted for life. You had one career and it wasn’t that unusual to have one employer, certainly no more than a handful. Now there are many different narratives, from digital nomad to corporate intrapreneur to multi-potentialite and many more. We can switch between them over the course our life, our ‘career’ can be a rich patchwork of different elements that we add to as we get older. Now, we can have fluid career, write our own narrative.

I think women have intuitively understood this much better than men because it was normal for them to have a career break to have children. This would often lead to a change of direction, either through choice or because they no longer fitted into the straight-jacket of the ‘corporate career’. Perhaps the ‘glass ceiling’ is simply a reflection of that, a short-coming of the system, a symptom of its dysfunction and maladaption to ‘life’ in it’s broadest sense and as experienced by half the population.

Now it’s all up for grabs. We don’t need to make a choice between the two. Now we can choose work AND life.

Who Are You?

A lot of this is tied up with identity and I know one of the traps I fell into was over-identifying with my work. Another was the need to be the ‘provider’ for my family, something that was deep in my identity and that I could not ignore even though it wasn’t an expectation, not even implicitly, of my actual family.

Identity has been the subject of three experiences this week - a podcast, a Drinking Dialogues session and a lunchtime talk. It’s got me thinking about rigidity and fluidity in our identities and how that influences our thinking about work and life.

The podcast was ‘How to be a man’, in which Rylan discussed this with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the flamboyant interior designed and TV presenter. Laurence pointed out that our ideas about masculinity were very different in the past and that it was a phenomenon of the late 19th/20th century that we had a rigid idea of what a man should be like. The gender fluidity that we see emerging today has much more in common with other historical periods.

This rigidity, it seems to me, didn’t just apply to gender but to our other identities around class, intellect and societal roles. We should note the emergence of eugenics during this period, surely a reflection of this rigidity. Our ideas about work and the workplace are born from this time of rigid concepts, the factory approach applied universally. Taylor’s division of work defined managers, who were ‘educated men’, as the ones who gave the instructions and workers, who were uneducated and so incapable of working without direction, as the one who followed them. These ideas, barely concealed, still hold fast in many organisations today.

The Drinking Dialogues session looked at how leaders can change the collective identity of the imagined communities that we place ourselves in. John Fish Hodgson took us from Drucker’s statement that ‘Leaders don’t think ‘I’, they think we’ by asking who is the ‘we’, through Haslam’s ‘The New Psychology of Leadership’ to Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech and JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. My conclusion was that identity is always fluid, even though we think it is fixed, and we can be led through that change (and therefore can lead ourselves through that change).

The lunchtime talk was on ‘How to create your Drag (King) identity’. I learnt a lot (!), including that Drag is really about playing with identity and questioning it in order to free oneself and societies of it’s constraints.

What’s that got to do with work? Well, we all have a work identity, don’t we? We have a mask that we put on, often a ‘uniform’ too. If we behave at home the way we do at work, our family would be freaked out and possibly repulsed! That identity is not an accident, our employers are trying to mould it onto us all the time. Some of it is obvious, like dress codes and HR policies, but much of it is insidious. By the time we realise what’s going on, we have become someone other than ourselves, possibly someone we don’t actually like.

That’s very much part of dark side of work. It bends us out of shape, sometimes it breaks us. We need to be aware and actively protecting ourselves against it to retain our sense of self and our agency.

I Will Survive

I am reflecting on these things because I am trying to put together a ‘Corporate Survival Guide’. I’m doing some ‘Working Out Loud’ here because I am struggling to get my arms around this at the moment and I’d appreciate some help!

I have been driven for some time by a desire to stop people falling into the traps that I did and suffering in the way that I, and many others that I have spoken too, have. It’s that dark side that I mentioned earlier, which seems to me to have grown larger and larger over the past few decades and is now a common part of corporate life.

The damage that work is doing to people is unnecessary and actually counter-productive but it is a product of how the system has evolved since the post-war social contract began to beak down. Systemic change is needed and that’s why I champion the many alternatives that are available, such as self-management, distributed working, purpose-led and human-centred organisations and so on. However, that type of change takes time and we have to deal with the world as we experience it today.

You might not be able to avoid the dark side but you can take action to protect yourself against it and mitigate the worst of it. That’s what the Corporate Survival Guide will be about. It’s all the stuff I wish I had known when I was in the meat grinder that is the modern corporation. It’s what you need to know to make sure it doesn’t chew you up and spit you out.

So here’s a few questions:

What would you like to see in it?

What do you wish you had known before you got ground down by corporate life?

What are the traps that you fell into?

What are you struggling with right now as a consequence of work?

Where do you need help?

I’d love to hear your answers. DM me on LinkedIN, email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com or book a call with me on Calendly

It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It

If you are interested in self-management then you should check out the course “Moving Towards Self-Management”, a six-session, online programme run by my fellow Work Punks podcast host, Paul Jansen.

Paul has a wealth of experience in this area, including a being COO of Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland, and he and his colleague Tania Eber will will give you a wealth of practical tools and insights to get started on your exploration or implementation of self-management.

You can find out more here on the Trust Works website

Did I mention that Work Punks is now a podcast? You can get all 7 episodes, including the latest one with the fabulous Lizzie Benton, at www.workpunks.co.uk or on your favourite podcasting platform.