📝 Practice: Take back your power over work, part two

Defining success as a rich, unfolding and interesting life.

“Did you hear that?!” Peter shout-whispered as we left the annual revenue meeting.

“He just said that everyone is getting a box of fancy pencils instead of a bonus this year so they can keep paying our salaries!!” he finished, eyebrows up to his hairline as he slipped off to grab an extra container of Siggi’s from the company fridge.

I felt sick.

Everything about the place was impeccable. Dressed in steel and glass, the office brimmed with a sticky, self-satisfied hush and the client list read like the invitations to an Oscar’s party. Everyone on staff was impossibly smart, well dressed and polite — even casual conversations floated just above authenticity on a cool puff of professionalism. I was in awe of how perfect it all was and spent my days on edge, worried I’d smudge the glass with a weird comment or unpopular opinion. This place was for the best of the best and I just about left my body trying to prove I belonged.

I’d been on the team for about a year, hired by an engineer who “was really more of a poet” and along with a team of 5 others, tasked with the artful translation of 20+ years of management consulting into a simple, effortless iPad app. For months we’d come in and loaded our plates full of the most expensive snack food you can imagine and headed down to our little workspace on the lower floor to spend the day debating nothing. We’d been given a vague sense the app should mimic the firm’s consulting process but no would tell us what that processes was. I tried to interview some of the consultants to figure it out, but my boss told me not to waste their time. So we happily did what we could with no content, no requirements and no sense of direction.

If you’d asked me I would have told you I loved that job. I would have beamed and recited the list of every important but hush-hush person we were working with. I would have name dropped the CEO like we were personal friends. I would have told you about how much fun I was having. 

I would have ignored how often I pulled barbs out of seemingly innocuous comments or how ashamed I felt when my boss insinuated that the reason we’d made no progress that year was down to my personal failings. I wouldn’t have mentioned the time I came into a conference room to find one of the practice leaders making fun of me to the rest of his team. I didn’t want to see any of that. I needed this to be My Place and now the CEO was giving a motivational speech about how it was actually better to get a box of Blackwing 602 pencils instead of a $50k bonus so that I could keep my job … I literally couldn’t believe it.

When it finally fell apart I was crushed. For years I believed that I really was as hopeless as I’d been made to feel until I became a leader myself and realized how absurd the situation had been. It broke my heart to think how badly I wanted to make it work, about how much of myself I was willing to give up in exchange.

“Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn't require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

— Brene Brown

We talk about fitting in more in relationship to small groups of people, but we do culturally too. All of those goals we looked at last week — the promotions, the big salaries, the prestigious job titles and important organizations — it’s just fitting in at scale. There’s this persistent belief that if we can just become the kind of person who achieves those goals, a switch will flip and we’ll finally feel good enough … so we trudge along, pushing past our intuition to convince ourselves that this next milestone will finally unlock peace.

In his book on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about the idea of autotelic personalities — a million-dollar way to describe someone who does things for their own sake. Our puritan ancestors might have called it hedonism, but it’s more closely related to deep curiosity. Autotelism is about taking on challenges for the enjoyment and pleasure of the challenge itself — not for the outcome that overcoming the challenge may someday create.

In my research, the folks who have the most freedom and ease are the ones who set goals for how they want to feel and what they want to experience over the milestones they want to accomplish. They stop asking what will help them reach success and focus on what will feel successful right now. They think a lot about how they could have more fun. What they want to learn about. What would be satisfying to master.

Let’s explore it

So for this week’s half of our exercise, I want to go back to the goals we looked at last week and start to hunt within them for the experiences you’re hoping to have once you reach your goal and see if we can figure out how you can get more of that right now. You may just find that focusing your attention on the work that satisfies your curiosity may lead you to a version of success you couldn’t have dreamed up any other way.

Here’s a link to last week (You’ll need the goal setting exercise in this post if you haven’t done it yet.)

📝 Practice: Take back your power over work, part one

And here are this week’s worksheets:

This week all of the instructions are here in the worksheets — should make for a more cohesive exercise!

On Purpose September Practice Worksheets

927KB ∙ PDF file

Download

A self-reflection exercise to help you uncover the kinds of experiences that create your most alive, joyful life.

Download

And as always, connect in the comments!

If I’ve learned one thing this year, it’s that we can’t do any of this alone. We need one another to support these new ideas and ways of living so we can rest easy knowing we’re not as crazy as capitalism wants us to feel.

Sharing is powerful — it’s a way of holding yourself accountable and opening up the floor for other folks who may be struggling.

ICYMI

📝 Practice: Take back your power over work, part one

🏝️ End of Summer Guide: Links & Recs for Lizard Mode

🫀 Yeah, you can love your job. You've just gotta love yourself more.