The 3 types of baggage you bring to work and how to unload them.
I’ve had a few conversations with friends about how we can be our own worst enemies at work: self-sabotaging, over/under-reacting or generally repeating unhelpful patterns that get in the way of where we want to go. We’re probably familiar with the baggage we bring with us into our personal relationships, but the same thing happens in our professional lives. This made me reflect on the types of baggage we bring to work and how to unload them (pun definitely intended).
Type 1: The Work Baggage
In one of my first jobs, I had a manager who was an extreme micromanager. He would proof read any external facing document and want to be cc’d in every email, regardless of the seniority and expertise of the person who wrote it. We all knew it was ridiculous and yet everybody in the team adjusted to his behaviour, while searching for new positions. When I moved on to my next role, I asked my new manager if he wanted to read an email before I sent it to a client. He (rightly) looked at me incredulously, said no and thankfully didn’t fail my probation on the spot. It’s amazing how quickly workplace practices, no matter how unhealthy or unreasonable, can become normalised.
Both the method by which we conduct our work (e.g. we always have meetings to discuss X, we use Y approach to gather data) and our cultural norms around them (e.g. we don’t talk about certain topics, we all share updates in this manner) often follow us from company to company and are either integrated into their new environment or discarded, until a new joiner asks “what do we do things this way?” and the cycle starts again. Sometimes it can be a good thing to pack some best practices from your old role and bring them to the new company. Oftentimes people are hired for this reason: “oh he’s scaled from $1m-10m previously”, “she built the playbook at Uber/Google etc. but many times we it can often lead to a cookie-cutter approach being applied to situations that need a new system.
The same thing can happen with our own work practices as we spend more time in a company. I was introduced to the concept of a meetings bonfire a while ago, the idea being every so often you delete all your recurring calendar invites and then decide which are actually missed. Genius! It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of doing things a certain way. It’s worth checking in every so often to see if your practices are still serving you or if it’s time to get rid of your work baggage. Below are questions that can help you reassess, ideally on at least a quarterly basis:
Review your communication cadences (internal newsletters, meetings, slack updates): Are these still achieving what you set out to achieve? Is the time input worth the result? Would anybody really miss these? What can you reduce or replace? Which needs amplification? Which formats need to be re-jigged to help people re-engage?
Review your workflows: Do you know the reason behind what you're doing? Are those reasons still valid? What can be dropped, automated or outsourced? What should be reprioritised as it has more impact?
Review what you enjoy doing: What parts of your role do you enjoy most? How can you get more of this? Where are you gaining mastery? How can you remove the parts that aren’t serving your career goals?
Type 2: The Emotional Baggage
Unless you are very lucky, most of us will have had negative experiences at work. Sometimes these will be partly caused by our own doings (e.g. the project we really dropped the ball on), but many times it’s due to toxic environments and other people’s biases affecting how we’ve perceived, the levels of recognition we receive and the opportunities we’re given. Over time these can become internalised and triggering. Add into the mix our life experiences and any ongoing personal issues and we’re likely bringing a lot of emotional baggage into our work lives everyday. As are most of the people around you.
This baggage plays out in many ways. It’s choosing not to trust by default, it’s assuming negative intent without clarifying, it’s the impulse to assign blame rather than reflecting, it’s the need to hoard information, it’s the passive-aggressive slack message sent rather than having a direct conversation, it’s the decision not to speak up or apply for that promotion, it’s the always volunteering to do admin/unpromotable work just to seem like a teamplayer. Sometimes we’re aware of it but it can often be a reactive force. Sometimes we hurt others with it and we nearly always hurt ourselves.
There is a quote that’s a particular favourite with productivity/performance podcast bros which is “it may not be your fault but it is your responsibility”. As much as I hate to admit it at times, it is true. A lot of the emotional baggage you’ve acquired is probably not your fault or at least not entirely. That doesn’t matter as ultimately you’re the one left dealing with it. If you feel like your emotional baggage may be impacting your work life, below are some suggestions on how to start working through it:
Write it down: Journaling has a lot of proven benefits, but I have found it particularly beneficial for helping clarify my thoughts and identify patterns. Write down what is annoying you, challenge your assumptions and try to see it from the other person's perspective (even if you don’t agree with it). Reflect and look for any practical changes, no matter how small, that you can experiment with to try to implement to help drive positive results.
Hire a therapist and/or coach: I cannot wait for the day that both of these services are readily available to everyone. We would never expect to recover from physical injuries without a trained professional to help us so there is no reason why we should expect to magically heal our emotional injuries without this type of support. Getting practical advice on how to work through issues is invaluable and can potentially prevent years of wondering “why does this keep happening to me?”.
Find a support group but beware venting: Sometimes it’s helpful to just get things off our chest and vent. It can be reaffirming to hear your teammates agree that your manager is a d*ckhead, but too often this can lead to a negativity death spiral, that can be both disempowering and exhausting. If you find yourself constantly complaining about something (as I have definitely done in the past), you are better off redirecting your venting energy to changing your response or changing the situation.
Type 3: The Gathered Baggage
The last type of baggage is what you've gathered along your working journey that is negatively impacting you. It’s the perception of you that you can’t seem to shake off regardless of how much of an effort you’ve put in to change. Perhaps you’re the EA who got promoted to Chief of Staff but people still view you as the admin-person regardless of the strategic skills you’ve developed. Perhaps you’re the person who used to be prone to over-reacting and still have a reputation for being aggressive despite gaining control of your temper. This type of baggage can be particularly unfair as often it is tied to a former version of ourselves and yet is impacting our careers at this moment in time. Below are some suggestions on how to shed some of this baggage to help change people’s perceptions of you:
Reinvent your personal brand: If you’re like me you might have a strong aversion to the notion of having a brand and the concept of cultivating one. This is an area I still need to work on. The truth is, however, that nobody thinks about you as much as you think about yourself. If you want people to view you in a certain light then you are going to have to help them change their minds by actively telling them who you are and showing them what you can do (either at work or externally). Be patient as this will likely take some time.
Address the issue directly with your manager: Directly and calmly. If you think there is something holding you back at work then discussing it with your manager rather than making a lot of assumptions about what they are thinking is usually the best path forward. Best case scenario they’ll help you rectify the situation. Worst case, they won’t and at least you know where you stand and have a more realistic view as to what you can do next.
Cut your losses and leave: Sometimes people will just be unwilling to change their perceptions of you due to no fault of your own. Sometimes you may have given them a very good reason not to. Sometimes it’s quite simply not worth the effort. Strategic quitting is a useful skill to acquire.
Conclusion
The good news is that very few things in life are permanent, and there are many things that we can choose to improve or control! Making time to reflect on our baggage, while sometimes painful, can ultimately help us get to where we want to go or become who we want to be, a little bit quicker.