What You Do Is Not Who You Are
Curated from an article by Tim Herrera, The New York Times
One of the best pieces of career advice is to think of jobs as verbs, rather than nouns. So: “I do journalism,” rather than “I’m a journalist.” It is a mental shift that can help to disentangle who you are as a person from how you spend your days to make money.
That balance is difficult to strike even in normal times. When the home becomes the office and working hours bleed into personal hours, it’s more important than ever not to tie your entire identity — and, in particular, your life satisfaction — to the thing you do for money.
“If everything you have going on in your life is focused on work, it means your entire life rides the roller coaster.” — Art Markman, professor of psychology, University of Texas at Austin
From that moment we’re asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” early in childhood, our identity becomes inseparably tied to the thing we do to make money. As we embrace this mindset, a career becomes a singular force pushing our lives forward — and if we’re good at what we do, it can be difficult to have perspective.
“If you’re conscientious and you like what you do, it’s very easy to get your identity all tied up with your job… There is a dark side to it that you don’t really spot until it’s no longer a force for good in your life.” — Alison Green, Ask a Manager
Why compartmentalize?
Experts say it’s important to protect yourself from letting problems in one area of your life affect the other areas. A bad week at work is a drag on your mental health, but if your work is only a part of your identity — not defining it completely — the overall emotional impact of that bad week is less severe.
Not only does compartmentalization help protect you from lows in one area creating lows in another, having space can improve your performance overall. The brain needs downtime. You can’t sustain concentration indefinitely — unless you can get away from the problems you’re trying to solve in your work life, you don’t give your brain a chance to reset.
Where to draw the lines
Often, people realize they can just start putting boundaries in place — without needing permission. Not answering email after your workday has ended. Not engaging with Slack messages during a mental health break. When people start carving out those boundaries for themselves, they often discover it’s fine. Nothing happens.
The identity you choose to bring to work won’t always match with your co-workers. When we talk about authenticity in the workplace, we have to realize that encouraging people to bring their authentic self to work also means encouraging people to leave the parts of themselves they’re not comfortable bringing — without being penalized.