It’s been a year of realisation, healing and going to work.
At the beginning of the year, I landed a stable office job with a great team of people. Very quickly, I was confronted by my unbalanced work ethic and was left trying to balance the remainder of my time between the podcast, Júlia, friends, family, exercise, and self-time. It was difficult.
But I was grateful for this situation because I became highly aware of some of the dysfunctional beliefs I hold around work, and why work takes priority over most other areas of my life.
The troublesome belief I became aware of was:
My value as a person is determined by the outcome of the work I produce. If people approve of my work, then I feel good, well and worthy. If they feel it’s lacking or needs improvement, then I feel worthless (worth-less) and need to work even harder to make up for the self-worth deficit I’ve just created.
This is a very intense belief. However, there is something I found helpful when I was deep in moments of being my own worst boss.
Every time I felt the pressure to work harder, I would look around the office and become aware of everyone else working around me. While I did this, I recalled the times they had shown their work to others and received feedback on things they needed to improve. From this, I realised that not everyone puts the same amount of pressure on themselves as I do, and they seem perfectly ok, maybe even a little happier…
I realised my workmates weren’t working for their worth. They were just working. They knew they were valuable even if their work falls flat and they have to do it all again.
Of course, not everyone in the office had this worked out. I found it quite sobering when I saw others putting pressure on themselves to produce good work or work harder.
I got to see this belief from the outside and realised it only serves to add extra pressure to perform which makes it even harder to work efficiently because suddenly my self-value is riding on the quality of my work.
Anyway, enough of this intro. Let’s get to this post!
