Who are you at work?

Do you shift who you are when you walk in the doors of your workplace?

Do people at work have a different idea of who you are than your family or friends?

Is that normal or natural? Should there be a differentiation between work and home?

Professionalism

If you google this term, you come up with a few answers:

"The competence or skill expected of a professional."

"Conducting oneself with responsibility, integrity, accountability, and excellence."

"Communicating effectively and appropriately and always finding a way to be productive."

I don't know if I've ever stopped to come up with my own definition of "professional" but I have definitely used the phrase, "that's not very professional." So what am I referring to? Clearly I have a list of expectations in my head of what makes someone a professional and characteristics that fall in line with professional behaviour.

When I think about professional behaviour, I am thinking about someone that is conscious of their role, aware of their impact and behaves respectfully to the other people in their daily interactions. I am thinking about someone who is grounded in who they are, confident in their skills and doesn't allow minor disruptions to throw them off their game. When I use the phrase "they are very professional," I am referring to someone who I trust to respond well in uncertain circumstances and with an ability to see the bigger picture of what is going on rather than reacting impulsively.

When I think about professionalism, I'm really thinking about, self-awareness.

Self-Understanding

Maybe it is just me, but I think some of us have begun to grow tired of the term self-awareness. I would like to suggest the term, self-understanding. An ability to understand how you are going to respond in different experiences in your life. This could be a work environment, a social environment, a solitary environment or anything in between.

To answer the question, who are you at work, I think we need to answer the question, do you understand yourself?

Our ability to understand how we will behave or react in any environment really comes down to the level to which we understand why we are responding in these ways. In my opinion, it has less to do with shifting or behaving differently in different spaces in our lives and much more to do with our ability to step back from our regular patterns and choose how we want to respond in the different spaces in our lives.

Disconnect

We have spent a lot of years creating a dividing between business vs. pleasure or work vs. home and as I have interacted with people in my own work experiences and now with others, the bridge that connects these two spaces is self-understanding. We are not different people when we walk into work vs. when we leave. We are not different people when we talk to colleagues vs. family and friends. The same person arrives and the same person leaves. How we choose to engage in those spaces is what is changing.

So, who are we at work?

We will always be ourselves in every space we occupy, whatever version of ourselves we feel comfortable presenting. The work of self-understanding isn't to undo all of those adjustments that have been put in place for our safety and comfort. The work of self-understanding is to look at those adjustments with curiosity and wonder why they are there and whether they are working the way we had hoped.

Take a step back this week and ask yourself, who am I at work?