What is your Work?
When I ask you “what is your Work,” I don’t mean the emails you send, or the meetings you hold, or the books you write, or the people you manage. I’m not asking about what you do day-to-day to make a living, even if it’s such an amazing vocation, so well matched to your passions, that it doesn’t even feel like work.
I’m asking about your capital-W Work. That’s the deep, dark mire you wade through. The stuff that keeps you up at night, or makes you send late-night texts even though you know you shouldn’t, or deepens your relationships, or keeps you smaller than you might be, or makes you grow more aware than you knew you could be. It’s borne of your traumas and your humanity and your particular constitution and your struggle, and even born of your strengths and the shadows that inevitably come along with them. When I ask you about your Work, I’m asking you: What is the thing that comes up for you in every relationship, every effort, every endeavor - the thing that drives you absolutely crazy? The thing that impacts how you show up in the world?
I believe that each of us has Work to do in this world. I capitalize Work here because, yes - there’s work - the way we spend our time day to day or the chores we do or what we get paid for. But overlaying all of that, like the air we breathe, is our Work. It’s the lifelong effort of overcoming what seeks to hold us back, as humans and as leaders. It intersects with almost everything we do personally and professionally, and it’s flavor spices up most of our relationships to their own unique taste.
My Work, like that of probably many others, is learning to be enough; to believe in myself so deeply and be so whole that I know I am enough, no matter how much I fail or how often I meet someone that doesn’t like or approve of me. My Work is believing so wholeheartedly in the human that I am that I don’t even try to do more, be someone else, or live someone else’s life. As an executive, this looked like learning to recognize and disrupt perfectionism and attempts for control that kept me feeling like I was doing enough. It also meant disrupting my latent expectations that others around me “hustle for their worth” too. It meant seeing myself, and my team, as inherently worthy, even when systems of oppression would have us do otherwise. I have other Work too, but I find that this one is the most central to my life - the one that is most present in my day-to-day interactions, my most foundational personal and professional relationships, and most of my states of being. It’s Work - because I spend time dissecting it, looking for ways to disrupt habits that don’t serve me, and leveraging it to understand myself and my relationships more deeply.
You find out what your Work is by looking for patterns among the things that make you feel the most broken, lost, and alone. What situations trigger that feeling? What sorts of relationships, what sorts of experiences? What is the connection point between those triggers? It takes digging and diligence. After all, it’s Work! It shouldn’t come easy. You won’t stumble upon it happily. It’s waiting for you to make the mighty effort to put all the pieces together so that you can start dismantling it, piece by piece, across a lifetime, living a more fulfilled, peaceful, and connected life as you go.
Not everyone is willing to dig into or even see their Work. But if you do, you enrich your life; over time you might come to see it as a friend or companion, a helper, and a guardrail. You know that in order to live your very best and most aligned life you need to continue to do that Work.
I know that it’s unlikely I will wake up one day and feel fully enough. But each day I work to be 1% more enough, and to practice ways of being that make me feel more enough in my everyday relationships and in my leadership. I know I’m doing my Work when I see opportunities to dig into it instead of run away from it, and I relish those opportunities as growth moments - however hard and Sisyphean they might sometimes feel.
I am doing my Work. What’s yours?
