Does your job define you? Who are you without your job? It's easy for men to get convoluted on their worthiness outside of their job. But when we're able to separate ourselves and understand that our career is independent from our identity, we're able to approach problems at work with a stoic, clear head. We don't take feedback personally. We don't allow projects to interfere with our family life. And we don't lose sleep due to work stress.
Does your job define you? Who are you without your job? It's easy for men to get convoluted on their worthiness outside of their job. But when we're able to separate ourselves and understand that our career is independent from our identity, we're able to approach problems at work with a stoic, clear head. We don't take feedback personally. We don't allow projects to interfere with our family life. And we don't lose sleep due to work stress.
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, episode number 47.
Speaker 1:
What is happening at Durable Dads? I am recovering from an ear infection. It's been a crazy two weeks for me. A couple antibiotics didn't work and it was like the most pain that I've ever been in and I still can't hear out of my right ear. But that's supposed to heal in the next couple weeks and so I've been down. But I've been sleeping a lot better the last couple nights and I've energized and I got a workout in today.
Speaker 1:
So I'm ready and I'm here and I'm excited to record this podcast, because it's a subject that I've been coaching on a lot recently with some of the guys that I work with, and the subject is our jobs, our careers and how much we attach ourself to our job and by that I mean attaching ourself emotionally to our job and what that looks like is if things are going well at work, then you're in a better mood, you're more upbeat, you're easier to be around, you got a little pep in your step. When work's good, you're feeling good, that's being attached to your job. And on the flip side kind of the darker side is that when work isn't going well, you're bringing it home and complaining about work at the dinner table, or maybe you're laying in bed you're thinking about work, or when you're attached to work, you're checking emails a lot more often. And when you're attached to your job, you're usually feeling more pressure. And when things happen at home, your kids do something stupid, you get frustrated, you yell at them, but you're not really mad at your kids. You're mad about something that happened five hours ago at work. That's being attached to your job and we don't want that and it's not always easy to spot. But I'm going to talk about it today.
Speaker 1:
What we want to do is separate ourself from our job. It doesn't mean that you don't care about your job. You have passion for it, you have drive for it, you get results, you care a lot about it, but it doesn't define who you are as a person. So the goal is to detach who you are from what you do at work. And when you do this, it makes you a better leader, it makes you a better dad, it makes you a better husband. So that's the goal detaching ourselves from what we do. And I'm going to give you this visual Imagine there's a piece of paper in front of you and there's a circle in the middle and that circle says you, that is you.
Speaker 1:
You are that circle, and around your circle, outside of your circle, are a bunch of other circles, and those circles have words in it, like your wife's name, your kids' names, your hobbies, your parents' names, your house projects, your to-do lists and your job. Another one of those circles are your job. So there's all these circles, all these different things happening in our life, and there's us in the middle and we want to keep all of these things in our orbit. We want to care and nurture for all these things, but we don't want to attach to them. And what I've found this has happened to me at times and it's happening to a lot of men out there Men seem to attach to their jobs, women probably due to, but men will let their job circle overlap with the you circle, and that's because we Identify as the provider of our family, it's because we pour a lot of ourselves into work and we spend a lot of time there. So we got it. It can be sneaky and we've been working for a long time in our life, we've been in business or in a certain job or in a certain field for many years and it can become convoluted who we are and what our job is. There's a difference, there's a separation there.
Speaker 1:
I was coaching one guy on this and Something came up at work. A project that was going on took a turn. There were different decisions being made and it was. It was really irking him. He was frustrated, he was Bringing it home to his wife and complaining about different co-workers and how the project was going and it was keeping him up late and he was worrying about it in the morning. And this can happen, this can happen to a lot of us, that something happens at work and it takes up all this mental capacity. And I asked him, as we were talking about it, how much of you is your work? And he said it felt like 90% and that kind of surprised him when he said it. Right, if he, for looking at that piece of paper, his circle was 90% covered by his job and when that happens he brings his work home with him, right? He was complaining about this situation to his wife a lot, and he was shorter tempered at work in meetings he was a little agitated, wasn't the listening, open-minded leader that he usually is? And when we're attached to our job like that, what's happening is that we're tying our emotions to Business decisions. I were taking business decisions personally. Right, he heard about an update on a project and his mind started spinning.
Speaker 1:
If you notice yourself getting pissed off when someone comments about a project that you're working on, you start taking other people's comments or feedback personally. That's when we're too attached to our job. We're not seeing business as business and us as us. There's confusion there. So where we wanna get to in that visual is that there's space between the you circle and our job. You still want to be close to your job. You want it in your orbit. It's still important, but you're not associating your self-worth, you're not associating your identity with things that are happening professionally.
Speaker 1:
So I have a buddy that recently lost his job and he had a really tough couple weeks right after he lost his job. From the outside, I can look in and be like he's the same guy. He's still an awesome guy. He's gonna find another job. There's nothing wrong with him. But that first week of losing his job. When he was at home and his kids were waking up and he wasn't going out and working during the day, he was beating himself up. He felt like he wasn't doing enough, that his kids were seeing him as weak and lazy, and that's a tough place to be in and that's an extreme example. Right, he lost his job. There's that sudden change in life, but we can take that extreme case of seeing that all of a sudden he loses his job and he starts to think that he's not good enough for his family. That's attaching who he is to the work that he was doing, cause then when we take that work away, he doesn't feel like he's good enough. That's what we're trying to avoid. So now, while you're in your job, you can actually take stock in how attached you are, and that's what I wanna kind of talk about.
Speaker 1:
Next is how do you become aware of your attachment to your job? And the first thing you do is you just take a shot at it. Ask yourself how much of you is your job? How much do you think about work when you're not at work? Or a great indicator is how often do you get frustrated or triggered over business stuff? If that happens to you. We wanna separate it out. We wanna not take business stuff personally, wanna get aware of it.
Speaker 1:
So if you're asking yourself these questions and you're noticing you're more attached to your job than you wanna be to start to detach, you can just think about a time when it wasn't like this, when you did feel more separation from your job. One guy I was talking to said it was when his kid was sick in the hospital. Like, think of a time where you felt a healthy attachment to your job and what did you believe differently about work that allowed you to detach? And this is a perspective change, right? Like this one guy had his kid sick in the hospital. We don't wanna wait for some big circumstance to change like that, but it is a perspective shift. I talked about Memento Mori, remembering death in episode 43.
Speaker 1:
That's a practice you can do to see how much you're currently attached to your job and how much you actually want to be. When you think about what's important at the end of life, it's your family, it's the relationships you have, it's the experiences that you've had in life. It's probably not your job. So we want to find that healthy balance of working hard, of getting after our job, making a ton of money, having a bunch of success at work, but not tricking ourselves into thinking that if that success isn't there, that we're not good enough. This is the external versus internal validation. Money, big business deals, sales goals, compliments from coworkers, employees, clients those are all external and they're outside of our you circle. The more that we can realize that, then life gets easier, then success comes easier.
Speaker 1:
We start to enjoy our job more. We don't take it as seriously. We take more risks. We work on the parts of our job that we like. We prioritize the things that we enjoy doing. And when we're leading other people, we're open, we're curious to their opinions and what they're working on. We're not taking work decisions and other people's thoughts and comments personally anymore.
Speaker 1:
That's when we're not attached to our job. That's when there's a lot of freedom and power and we don't just find more success at work. We're more available for our family. When we're not attached to our job we have more energy, more time to focus on what our family needs. We can look at our job from a bird's eye view. We can assess what is our job need from us. We can look at our family. What do our kids need right now? What does our wife need right now? And then we become not just the financial provider for our family, but we become that provider of care and nurturing and love.
Speaker 1:
And then we actually start thinking really great about ourselves. Life is going to be so much more enjoyable when we're balanced and taking on all these different areas. We find a sense of accomplishment and pride in that and life gets more enjoyable. And that's the goal. That's becoming a durable dad. When you're taking care of yourself because you know you're good, and then you can take care of everything else around you. So explore your relationship to your job. You get to decide how attached you want to be to it. You get to decide how late you want to work, how often you're checking emails, the mental capacity you want to give to your job. I think the less attached we are to our job, the less we identify our worthiness to our job, the healthier and more effective we're going to be as a man. So that's what I got for this week. Have an awesome one and I'll catch you next time.