Know thy working self
A podcast!
Before we start … by popular request, there is now a Great Work podcast! If you’d like to listen rather than read, click above the photo.
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I’ve turned the first weekly email, about work that matters, into a podcast, and this one too (above). I’ll try to get through the back catalog, as well as future emails. Please help me with feedback!
And now, our feature presentation:
Know thy working self
The center of the world, to the ancient Greeks two and a half thousand years ago, was Delphi. It’s said that three maxims were inscribed on a column in Delphi’s Temple of Apollo. The first was Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, Know thyself.
Few of us truly understand who we are when, if we have the luxury of choosing our careers, we’re doing that. What it is that matters most to us, what will fulfill us, how we cope with challenges at work, what are our foibles, what will remain important when the new-job smell has faded and the work becomes routine: these things take decades to work out, if we ever figure them out at all.
But understanding how we work, what our own bugs are, and what matters to us—these insights are vital to level-headed fulfillment. We have the capacity throughout our lives to evolve and develop even core aspects of our personalities and to know thyself is much of what thou needst to grow thyself. Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius may have been overdoing it when he wrote that those who do not observe the stirrings of their own minds are necessarily unhappy.1 But only a bit.
What, at work, are you good at? Why do your colleagues like and respect you? What, when you’re on top of it, do you love about it? Is there exhilaration in being good at something, or a secret pleasure in being admired? Do you find meaning in doing something useful? The all-absorbing flow of creative or intellectual work? The fun of working in a good team, or of working with people you’ve grown fond of?
How do you cope with pressures? Can you become irritable, self-important, withdrawn, or overwhelmed? Do you become incapacitated by self-doubt? Do minor inconveniences disproportionately frustrate you? Does stress seed headaches or other physical symptoms? Are you sarcastic or patronizing when someone presses your buttons? Do you take pleasure from things from which you shouldn’t take pleasure, such as terminating a relationship with a client who’s annoyed you, reprimanding someone, or making a decision that’s going to make life harder for someone else?
What are you like to work with? Is the team better when you’re there? (Consider how your colleagues would answer that question: the answer is normally a more emphatic yes than we think it is.) Could you ever be a problem at work?
What are the things your demon says to you when you’re not seeing things in perspective, the lines that play in your head? Common ones include I’m not good enough for this, I’m not being treated with the respect I deserve, I’m going to screw something up, everyone else is smarter than me, my boss is an idiot, my colleagues are lazy, everyone thinks I’m no good, someone whose opinion I care about is annoyed with me and this is a disaster, our clients/students/customers/patients are so damn entitled, I’m near to not being able to cope, I’ve made a fool of myself, I need to escape. When things are going better, it’s easy to see that none of these things is true, and to forget how clear they seemed at the time and how hard that made everything.
If you’re not sure who you really are at work, what your strengths are, where your foibles are, who you become when you’re not at your best, ask others. They probably understand you better than you realize and, in some ways, better than you do.
Me? Most needing my attention currently is a liability to overcommit (everything’s so interesting!) combined with an ability to drive myself hard for longer than is good for me. The eventual price is stress, poor sleep, proneness to anxiety about things involving others, irritability, and difficulties unwinding. Prevention is better than cure. Another, day-to-day thing: a growing anxiety, when things are coming at me from many directions, the list of things I need to do is growing (as is often the case in my current job), and I have finite time, that my control over my day is fragile, that I’m out of control of the work and something bad may happen. But knowing these foibles is great: with awareness, they aren’t hard to manage. (One answer to the control-over-the-day thing is the realization that my day’s always out of my control, so there’s no point worrying about it.)
Once it would have embarrassed me to acknowledge things like this, and wouldn’t have dreamt of writing that last paragraph publicly. I’ve slowly learned that there’s nothing vulnerable about being candid about most of my own shit, even with people I don’t know well. In fact, it helps.
So: know thyself, and keep learning as thou evolvest. Spot those dysfunctional scripts we all have, learn to recognize them in the moment, and you can begin replacing them with ones that will do better for you. To which we will come.
Fiction recommendation: Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a beautifully-written study of love, coming of age, and, perhaps, knowing thyself. Thank you to Great Work reader Amy H for the recommendation.
Next week: almost nothing is a crisis.
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Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 2:8.
brilliant... so true and yes, helpful to hear it discussed... lack of self knowledge is a big problem. LOVE hearing your reading voice... so clear with beautiful enunciation.
Decades ago I was in a training session that involved a triad of co-workers. One listened while the other two expressed their thoughts about solving an assigned problem. Afterabout 15 minutes,the third one said what he/she had heard from each... and the way their style affected their effectiveness. The lessons learned in that short exercise have stayed with me for a lifetime.