Mind Games
“What do you do?” Is the most stupid, terrifying and over-used question ever.
When ever we meet someone new, one of us will ask it of the other. If it’s a ‘Business Networking’ meeting, it’s the default, reflective response to an introduction. We all do it, we should all stop.
It’s terrifying because it throws us into cognitive turmoil. It’s unspecific, unmoored, unbounded. What do I do when? In what sense? In what roles? And all of it, or specific bits? See, now you think about it, you’ve had that sudden brain fog, haven’t you, as your mind gets tied in knots. That’s why we have an ‘elevator pitch’ or reach for a convenient label, because it’s only by trotting out some bland, meaningless pre-rehearsed drivel we can get out of this mental bind.
But the real problem is that it’s stupid. What we do as an occupation is the least interesting and meaningful thing about us. It says nothing of who we are, how we carry ourselves in the world, our values and beliefs, our hopes and dreams. It says nothing of who we are trying to be.
It’s also more insidious than that because it ties our value to the other person to what we do. It reduces a potentially rich and complex relationship between two humans to a transactional one. It re-inforces the idea that our self-worth is determined by our job, that we are defined by how we make a living. And that’s the worst part of it all.
So let’s stop asking people what they do, let’s start inviting them to tell us who they are - and who they want to be.
Who Are You?
It’s becoming increasingly meaningless anyway, as people will have several different jobs during a working career. I think we are moving to a more fluid approach, where people will move between employment, freelancing and contracting, entrepreneurship, and periods without working (by choice or otherwise). As well as having many different professions, people will have many different statuses.
In fact, I’m probably being a bit man-centric as women already experience this but they are often penalised for it. So what I’m saying is that when us blokes start doing it in significant numbers, then the stigma will disappear. Yes, I know that’s not great but, well, patriarchy. However, we should start to design society around fluid careers like this.
It’s very different from when I stared out in the world of work. Careers were much more delineated and fixed, there were still jobs for life and men, in particular, were defined by their jobs. A trap that this set up for us was over-identifying with our jobs, along with our role as wage-earner/provider for the family.
This is a trap that certainly fell into. When I left corporate life, I was thrown into an identity crisis. I had become so detached from myself, so disconnected from my emotions and my inner world (a defence mechanism to numb myself enough to cope with the abuse of corporate life) that I had lost my sense of who I was.
Suddenly, I no longer had a profession, I was no longer the provider for my family (a role that had a visceral grip on my psyche, as I found out), I was nobody. In panic, I grasped for a new identity, which led to my ill-fated purchase of a business advisor and coach franchise.
Instead of figuring out what my desires and motivations were and designing a life around those, I sought a new mask to put on, an ersatz identity to fill the gap.
I’m not alone in falling into this trap, not by a long a chalk. I’ve met many others who have done the same. We were encouraged to over-identify with our jobs because then it became the focus of our life, so we invested our emotional capital in it and freely gave our discretionary effort. I always tried to balance it with family, but we weren’t discouraged from putting the job first. Indeed, some companies expected it, especially as you got more senior.
It’s not healthy. It’s not sustainable and it’s a position that lacks resilience. Even though I put family first, I still think back to sacrifices that I made for the job - business trips away from the family, late nights, bringing work home - and wonder if I got those calls right.
You are not your job. You are so much more.
Who Do You Think You Are?
After some failed attempts at grasping what I thought was the life-belt of a new work identity, I realised that I no longer knew who I really was or what I wanted in life. It was then that I determined to start the journey back to me, to the person I was when I was 25 (originally I though I was aiming for the 18 year-old me but I came to realise what an awkward and naive person I was then!).
It’s a little ironic that although I trained to be a coach, it didn’t trigger this odyssey of self-knowledge but that was because I was looking for the ‘coach’ identity to adopt back then. However, the training did help me enormously when I started on the path.
I have come to realised the wisdom of Heraclitus’ words “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” I have not journeyed back to my 25 year old self because that’s not possible or desirable but I have reconnected with my emotions and motivations and got clarity around my values, beliefs, needs and wants. I’ve got in touch with the essence of who I was back then.
I now have an identity that is separate from what I do, although it still feels like a challenge to maintain it. The conditioning of my early years runs deep and the simplicity of being defined by my job, having an easy and unthinking answer to that dreadful question “What do you do?”, still holds attraction to me. However, I know I am on a much richer path now.
I haven’t found my real authentic self, though. Rather, I have rejected the idea of such a thing. I believe we have multiple selves and they can be quite different, although they are built around a common core of values, beliefs, worldview and other elements I haven’t quite identified yet. All these selves are me no matter how diverse they seem and maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about authenticity.
So do I now know myself? Well, I know myself a whole lot better but I’m not sure we ever get to the end of the path. We are constantly evolving and developing, exploring new dimensions of ourselves. We are always becoming, so there are always new parts of ourselves to discover. We also have a dark side that is often less-examined, or possibly denied.
It’s a work in progress but it’s work that’s well worth doing.
Knowing Me, Knowing You
This sort of enquiry into self, and the knowledge that we gain from it, is an essential part of learning how to lead. How we lead should be grounded in who we are, our role as leader is just another self.
I always found leading to be quite natural because I had the opportunity to develop my own leadership style, so it began as an extension of myself. I didn’t adopt any model or try to copy anyone else (although I did pick up ideas and inspiration from the people I worked for).
I wasn’t consciously self-aware when I began my career, the very idea wasn’t really talked about back then before the days of self-help books. However, I did have a reasonable sense of my identity and even if I couldn’t have articulated it, I intuitively understood it.
However, a lot of today’s ‘leaders’ are lacking in self-awareness and their leadership style is often something they have copied from their bosses - and not in a good way. Their default style is to be highly directive, projecting certainty and confidence and being the one who knows the answers, but this is increasingly unsuited to the world of uncertainty and ambiguity we find ourselves in today. The move to more flexible working arrangements just puts further strain on this leadership style, which we see with mandates to return to the office that are at odds with the wants of employees.
These leaders are disassociated from themselves, as I had become, and have become rigid and inflexible in their responses to the dynamic circumstances they face. They need to become more adaptive, which in turns means they need to do the inner work to develop their self-awareness and find out who they really are.
The question is, are they willing to go there? Having spend most of their lives denying their emotions and constricting their inner world, are they now willing to undertake this challenging and often confronting work? Do they want to open that Pandora’s Box? I think, for many, the answer is going to be no.
I don’t blame them for that. If circumstances had been different, I might not have gone there either. However, it is the reality and so the changes that we need, and that people want, aren’t going to be driven from above. The people at the top there aren’t capable of it right now and aren’t willing to develop themselves so they could be.
This means that change has to begin elsewhere. I believe it is the junior and middle managers, the people who actually make stuff happen, who will cause the change through a series of mini-mutinies (and maybe a few big ones).
What it really means is that the change has to start with you. All change happens inside out anyway, so it was never going to start anywhere else, in truth. Now is the time to grasp the responsibility and the opportunity that it holds.
You need to understand yourself better but don’t wait until you have got it all figured out. Start to take action now, because it is through action that you will find out who you really are.