500 Words a Week - Taking Work Personally
“Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed.”
-Meg Jay
While I’m aware that many of us will work above and beyond the forty-hour workweek, and this will be seen as what is necessary in our career. This quote still portrays an important message. We have an inability to switch off, to deviate from who we are at work and who we are at home. Eventually both bleeding into each other. Rather than your work suffering, it’s often you life outside of work. You bring your work self home with all its problems and stress. You become tired, short fused, little things bother you, nag at you. You give so much of yourself and all you are to work at times, you have nothing to give upon leaving.
A skill that must be developed is the ability to disassociate, to place space between our work and our home self.
How much added stress do we put on ourselves taking our work home? Quite often it’s not the fact that we have things we must do at home, it’s more that our head is still in work mode. Replaying situations or interactions we experienced throughout the day, endlessly thinking about something that may have bothered us. While we are lost in our own head, replaying these situations, we miss that life is happening around us. We miss the chance to be present and be active in the lives of those we love.
A practice that I have found beneficial for this is to try and be aware and present in moments of transition. Maybe that’s as you get into your car before driving home from work, or if you work from home its going outside for a short walk once you finished work. The point is that we give ourselves a cut-off point. We allow ourselves time to deal with the potential stresses of the day in the drive home or in the walk after work, but upon returning home, we are finished. We leave these feelings at the door and once we cross the threshold of our homes, we are our regular selves.
Unfortunately, this won’t always work. Other aspects I’ve found beneficial is to write down what you are experiencing and feeling, acknowledge what it truly is that is going on. Sometimes we need to allow time for these stresses to simmer down, we need to give them our full attention for a brief moment, to fully look to understand what is it we are feeling rather than just allowing that nagging feeling in the back of our mind to continue into our evening and making a long work day even longer.
The point of this blog is for us to be able to better recognize when it is we are taking our work stress home with us, when we are aware this is happening, we can look to do something about it. There’s nothing wrong with taking work personally and taking pride in what we do, there is something wrong when we do this to the extent that work encompasses our every waking thought and we are unable to be there for those close to us.
