Should you hide your limp from 9 to 5?
Executive coach Allison K. Williams joins the Mode/Switch Pod to help you discern how much of your private stuff it's okay to disclose at work.
Welcome to the Mode/Switch—especially you new subscribers! This is your Tuesday work-culture post with some small but strong moves to help you and your team thrive.
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May I start with a slightly boozy story?
Yesterday I skipped lunch for a day too full of meetings to stick a fork in a salad. And then, at the day’s end, I joined my wife and a couple of friends for Detroit-styled cocktails. I can’t hold much liquor on a good day. Those drinks hit yesterday’s stomach so hard I had to hide a stagger on the way out to the car.
Now that I think about it, hard liquor on an empty stomach is a pretty good metaphor for swallowing what your job pushes at you everyday—and pretending you’re good to go.
Most days, you’ve got what it takes to toss the job back. But there are other days, too.
For me, the question is, how much do you let your manager know when your gut’s as empty as a drum? Do you tell your coworkers about the test results you’re waiting on? Do you talk about your quarrel with your teenager? Do you explain the plantar fasciitis that makes it hard to get up from your office chair?
Or do you just hide your limp between 9 and 5?
It’s just the kind of subtly complex question this intergenerational roundtable loves to take on as we seek shifts in mindset or behavior that makes a difference. This week, Ken our Boomer, Emily our Xennial, LaShone our Millennial, and yours truly the Gen Xer engage our guest Allison K. Williams to better sort out all the selves we are in work and life.
Allison pulls up a chair to our podcast table with a pretty wild story about what she learned on the hardest night of her life. That night launched her on a career of executive coaching, where she helps people understand more fully what it actually means to “bring your full self to work.”
Before you bring your self to work, Allison says, make sure you actually know that self. Doing that, on an empty stomach, may take more grace than you think.
Glad you’re here! Would you hit reply and let us know about at time when you felt like you wondered if you should hide your stagger at work? Did you disclose what was going on? Keep it to yourself? Let the Mode/Switchers know!
Want to take this farther? Check out this Mode/Switch review of a Severance episode—or this TMI-verging conversation about bringing your sh#t to work or this post about sadness on the job.
In any case, Allison’s repeated Socrates-like injunction to know thyself reminds me to close with a Walker Percy line from his “last self-help book,” Lost in the Cosmos:
“One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.”
It’s something to think about next time you, like me, hide a stagger.
Last week, just as my lunch break was ending, I got a heartbreaking text from my mom from half way across the globe that our family dog of nearly nine years had gone missing after contractors accidentally left the door open. I was devastated in that moment. But six minutes later, I had to pull myself together and join a serious meeting with my supervisor and a colleague. It reminded me how often we’re expected to show up to work composed and focused, even when our personal world is cracking. It also reminded me how important it is to create environments where people feel safe bringing their full selves, emotions and all, to work but also, maybe not? Maybe we should keep our personal lives and emotions out of our jobs. I’m honestly not sure where the line is drawn.