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Quick Thought
By Corvus | August 8, 2007
Any philosophy worth living by ought to apply to every single aspect of your life, from your public life to your private life. Not, obviously, that your behavior ought to be the same in every situation, but your belief structure should be.
Yes I know a great deal of people who draw a line between their “professional self” and their “real self.”
Why is that? Do you make a distinction between who you are in the workplace and who you are around your friends?
August 8th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
That’s actually something I’m teaching others as part of my success mentor coaching.
Successful people are successful because they devote themselves to their work. The work because they need money to support themselves and their families. They work so hard that they actually put more attention towards supporting their work than they do themselves and their families, which is of course the whole reason they’re working to begin with.
I know people who treat their subordinates at work with more respect than the loved ones they sleep next to at night, and they do so not because they have some double standard, but because they have failed to prioritize their relationships with themselves and their loved ones over their work.
It’s a very easy trap to fall into too. If you don’t work hard at work, the work won’t be there. But you have a lasting commitment to people. You don’t have to worry about looking for a new relationship if you mess up (assuming you have a good relationship and your messing up in a forgivable way), and you’ll get by for a while with out doing those critical maintenance things, but without money stuff starts to fall apart fast.
It would seem in light of these realizations that such behavior might seem excusable, but that’s a suckers choice. Working on your relationship with people actually makes your work easier to accomplish, and the net effect is an all around win. So if you’ve never gotten into a screaming argument with your boss, but you’ve yelled at your significant other and they forgave you, stop this selfish act of reading blogs and go give them some love. Chances are they deserve it, and you’ll benefit more from it too.
And next time you find yourself getting angry, ask yourself how you would act if your job depended on you saying the right thing next.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Unless you have a pluralist philosophy
September 6th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
This is something that, tangentially, I’ve actually been discussing on Facebook with people.
The question is really how you divide your professional and your personal life when your job requires that you engage in social platforms like Facebook.
A lot of people are leery of sharing parts of their personal life on FB, because it might reflect on them “unprofessionally.” I’m a member of a new style of thought, which is that you’ll do well to show the people you’re working with that you’re human, and you have a personality – which means being more than simply “professional.”