From the course: Skills to Build Stronger Work Relationships

Who you are anywhere is who you are everywhere

From the course: Skills to Build Stronger Work Relationships

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Who you are anywhere is who you are everywhere

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- I'm sure you've heard the term work-life balance, but what does that even mean these days? Our work and our personal lives are overlapping more than ever. Many of us work from home, we answer emails until midnight, our colleagues are our friends, and we're doing work that we love, which means some of our identity and life is being defined by the work that we do. While the culture of some organizations is to favor the analytic and rational over the emotional, the truth is keeping our emotions out of the workplace is a fantasy. Which brings me to a psychological phenomenon that I'm seeing a lot of right now. It's called institutional transference. Institutional transference happens when we put feelings about something other than work onto our place of work or vice versa. For example, if you're feeling unsupported by leadership at your company, you might start to feel that your spouse is unsupportive. Institutional transference happens all the time, but especially when we have a lot of emotions and not a lot of control. In these cases, our feelings can get disguised as other, more acceptable issues. Here's an example. I was speaking with someone recently who said that a new CEO was appointed at her company and she seemed to be the only person who was worried about their ability to lead. When I asked her to check in with herself about where else in her life this feeling might belong or where else it might be showing up, she said that her son, who has unique learning needs, just got a new teacher who is not as caring or competent as his last teacher, and she's feeling worried about that too. I asked her to reflect on why it might be easier to be more upset or worried about one of these things than the other, and she told me in her case, it's less scary to think the CEO will be bad, because worst case scenario, she can switch companies, whereas this school is the only viable option for her son right now, so it feels very high stakes. As she realized this though, it helped her contextualize her worry. So whenever a new or worse than usual issue pops up at work for you, it's important to take a step back and think about what else might be at play. Try going through this exercise with one thing that's been frustrating for you at work lately. By examining who you are, what you feel, and what you need in one part of your life, you'll better understand all parts of your life.

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