When you introduce yourself, what do you say?
“I am Kate Maria Artur, and I am an accountant journalist engineer at Apple SpaceX Automattic„… Most of us will use the job title as a representation of who we are.
My mom infuriates me, and it’s teaching me a lesson about work. She infuriates me with a particular voice, a type of preachy „Maybe you should think about THIS” type of tone. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.
See, it took me a pandemic to figure out WHY it’s so annoying.
My wife and I are living in a summer house together with my mom and a new dog. It’s a journey of self-discovery, and one of the lessons I received is seeing my mom work. She is a high school teacher and tries to teach remotely, over Zoom.
And she uses THE VOICE when teaching. The same one I hate. My mom tries to literally lecture me when we have a disagreement!
I, on the other hand, am an engineer. My default reaction is to diagnose and solve every problem. This is what I’m good at. Surely, if we address the core issue of every discussion, we can move on, right? Don’t try this at home.
Turns out, sometimes people sometimes want you to listen to them. Shocker, right? They don’t want to be lectured, they don’t want their problem solved, they just want to get their emotions out. You may not think of this as a professional behavior to have at work, but in your personal relationships, that may be a thing.
We all play our roles.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players
William Shakespeare
Mammals are hell-bent on protecting their identity and acting accordingly. The famous, (but now under reevaluation) Stanford Prison Experiment concluded, that regular people can do horrible things when assigned a new identity. Acting against our identity and assumed roles introduces Cognitive Dissonance, which causes heavy psychological stress. Every cell in our body wants to act according to what we are.
Applied behavioral science recognizes this. Master Key System, Think and Grow Rich, and The Secret all focus on addressing identity first and letting behavior follow. Tony Robbins says that “Identity is everywhere. We do what we believe we are”.
When we tie our identity to work, we continue to perform similar functions at home, which can cause issues.
Information processing choices
When faced with a new piece of information, you can do a couple of things with it. Your reaction can be:
- Reflexive
fight or flight, etc - Pattern matching/ problem solving
- Empathy / Connection
Seek to understand the experience - Mining for potential
Most professionals’ job description will fall on the spectrum of „#2 – Pattern matching/problem-solving”.
Recognizing patterns as „another one of those” (as Ray Dalio puts it) is a cornerstone of not only Engineering and Medicine but also Law, Investing.
Modern economy rewards jumping straight into problem-solving mode. “World’s biggest challenges are also the world’s biggest business opportunities”, according to Peter Diamandis. The more problems you solve, the bigger the big shot you are. And then you get back home.
Every cell in your body will ache to do what you have done all day – solve problems and bark orders.
But at home, you are not a bigshot any more. You are an accountant journalist engineer husband, mother, or a son. Leave the bigshot voice and, better yet – identity at the door. Be human, emphatise or help somebody explore the potential.