Just when I thought I’d rebelled
One of the things I love about my work is challenging assumptions about what makes a good life and career. I do this in both how I operate my business and in what I support women to create for themselves.
We’re sold a lot of bullshit on what we should care about, how we should approach our lives and careers, and what’s normal and appropriate. It’s helpful to remember that most of what we’re told is completely made up. Someone came up with an idea and managed to enroll others to follow their made-up ways of seeing the world.
Think about this example: We have a five-day workweek because someone decided that would be the case. Yes, systems are built around that working norm. But at initiation, it was a made-up idea.
Worse yet is that most of what’s made up is made up by a dominant archetype the women I support don’t fit. These ways of working weren’t designed with us in mind. When we adopt or try to live up to those suggestions, we get stuck and spin, striving to adhere to norms that don’t work for us. The systems create a feeling that there’s one way to do these things and convince us we should adhere at all costs. For women, the costs are high.
This week I realized I was still upholding a made-up idea of what work should look like even after I thought I’d rebelled against it.
For years, I’ve worked fewer than 40 hours in a workweek. And considering 40 hours the norm is generous. Most people I encounter think 60 hours is normal — required, even.
I’ve decided not to adhere to that expectation because hours worked have little correlation to the impact of work. I’ve run experiments, and for me, working more hours doesn’t translate to more impactful work. I need breathing room. So do most things.
My urgency to resist that norm is more pressing in motherhood. Childcare gives me time to work without parenting responsibilities, but I also need to allocate some of those hours to things outside of work. “Full-time” daycare (if there is even such a thing with sickness, closings, etc.) doesn’t allow for full-time work.
This week I realized that, despite reducing my working hours, my relationship with my work had not changed at all. In the hours I am working, the intensity I bring to my work is the same. I’m still driving, going full force and failing to pause for a moment to walk a few laps around my block between things. I’m glued to my chair. All in. I may even bring more to those hours if they are fewer. I’m either working that way or not working at all. I’ve got two modes: on or off.
I’m not the only person who works this way. I see it play out in announcements from people being laid off or quitting over LinkedIn. It sounds like “I worked x years without any real break, so I’ve decided to take time off and focus on y for now.”
Don’t get me wrong; taking time off isn’t a bad thing. This on-or-off style of working becomes problematic when you give so much of yourself to one thing at one pace for so long that you need huge swaths of time to recuperate. When one or even two-week vacations away from the office no longer refresh you and you come back to the office still somehow depleted. When work’s purpose is to get to the next break so you can finally breathe again.
I want to give myself permission to walk away when inspiration isn’t coming easily. To have enough space in my calendar so I can capitalize on the energy when inspiration does hit. I don’t want to have to muster the energy to do something but instead have space to do that thing when the inspiration hits.
Call for Reflection:
Where have you made a shift in your approach to work? What would amplifying that shift a bit further look like?
Shine On,
Alicia
(Image by Nataliya Vaitkevich via Pexels)