CHAPTER 4

Make Room in Your Work Life for the Rest of Your Self

by Brianna Caza, Lakshmi Ramarajan, Erin Reid, and Stephanie Creary

Shonda Rhimes, with four television shows simultaneously in production, is an entertainment industry titan. In a recent TED talk, she described her deep passion for her work: “When I’m hard at work, when I’m deep in it, there is no other feeling . . . It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyoncé. And it is all of those things at the same time. I love working . . . A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever.”

Yet, despite Rhimes’s passion and unparalleled success, her deep, single-minded investment in her work drove her to the point of burnout and exhaustion. She had stopped enjoying her life. To heal, she refocused on the parts of her self—a mother, a friend, a sister, and athlete—that had been neglected because of her tunnel vision. She became more outspoken about being a woman, a mother, and an African American in the entertainment industry: “Work’s hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me,” she said.

Rhimes’s story of overinvesting in a single facet of herself—her work identity—and then burning out is unfortunately all too common, and her story of recovering by reviving other identities is all too rare. If the hum of your career has become so deafening that you struggle to hear those other parts of your life, you’re not alone. Crafting and sustaining a multifaceted identity is challenging for today’s workers and their organizations. The greedy nature of our work (asking us to wear more hats, to do more, to be always on), combined with the demands of our personal lives and social pressure to be and focus on just one thing, means we need to learn how to manage our portfolio of different identities and the expectations that come with them.

Through interviews with hundreds of workers—consultants, managers, medical professionals, architects, entrepreneurs, authors, lawyers, knowledge workers, fitness professionals, educators, military officers, and journalists—we have found that the right strategies can help us harness our complex identities to benefit ourselves, our relationships, and our organizations. Our research suggests some simple changes to how you think about yourself can help you successfully manage your multiple identities and thrive as a complex and whole person.

Change How You Think About Yourself

To take command of your own story, you’ll need to abandon zero-sum thinking about who you are and create and leverage connections between your identities.

Resist either/or thinking about your identities

The default tendency for many of us is to parse our “selves” into smaller, easy-to-define pieces that compete for time and attention. We think, “becoming an X takes away from my role as a Y.” But identities cannot be turned on and off, even though the world sometimes seems to prefer we stay in one tidy box. As one Iranian-American woman told us: “I am not 50% Iranian and 50% American, I am 100% of both.” And as biracial duchess, actress, and activist Meghan Markle once told Elle: “Being ‘ethnically ambiguous,’ as I was pegged in the industry, meant I could audition for virtually any role . . . Sadly, it didn’t matter: I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.”

But Markle overcame this, saying, “While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.”

Don’t pressure yourself into picking just one part of who you are. Having one identity does not automatically diminish another, and trying to turn identities on and off can waste time and energy. Embracing this reality can help you identify connections between your identities that you can then leverage.

Create connections between identities

Don’t think about each of your identities as being independent pieces of who you are; think about how they’re connected and how they might affect each other in positive ways. One approach is to use a “holistic” mindset and seek a unifying theme between your identities. For example, in one of our studies we talked to people participating in athletic events that raise money for a charitable cause (for example, a bike ride for a children’s hospital in Israel). One of our participants, an observant Jew and an avid cyclist, told us: “It is the perfect confluence of all my passions—biking, giving, and Israel.” Other participants described coming to view their multiple identities as a “package,” in which one aspect of who they were couldn’t be separated from another.

To create your own connections, ask yourself why your identities are important to you and how they relate to one another. For example, a participant in a different study explained that all of his various jobs—IT engineer, journalist, and entertainer—converged around the skill of writing. To find your unifying theme, take a step back from the day-to-day bustle of your various roles and try to find the common ground—the shared skill, meaning, or purpose of your different roles.

Another approach is to consider how your identities complement each other. For example, one person—a pastor, karate teacher, and yoga instructor—told us about reconciling her jobs into a fulfilling career. “I think Christianity doesn’t really tap into the physical part of life. It does deal with the mind aspect and the spiritual aspect,” she said. “My definition of a yoga teacher is just someone who helps people to develop a full spectrum practice in their life. For me, that includes the spiritual/mental/physical, body/mind/soul, the whole person.” We heard similar stories from professionals in other industries about how having a variety of distinct roles allowed them to be their fuller selves.

Leverage these connections

Embracing your multiple identities can improve your ability to take others’ perspectives and engage in creative and innovative behavior. Can you find ways to repurpose skills learned from one identity to another? Ask yourself: “Becoming an X allows me to be a better Y because . . .”

For example, the nurse-midwives we interviewed talked about blending their midwifery and medicalized nursing backgrounds to find innovative solutions for their patients. And a chief of radiology, charged with integrating radiology departments in two merging hospitals, found important synergies between his role identities: “From a managerial standpoint, my role is change management and navigating the hospitals through complex changes. But my clinical background and particularly experience in my area of emergency radiology has been invaluable . . . . The relationships that I developed and working with them in the ER [as a radiologist] were useful in implementing the changes that we’re making here.”

Connections between work and home can also be influential. We interviewed a designer who was part Mexican and part Anglo and worked on social impact projects. She described being raised in a family that was “incredibly diverse in every single way, socioeconomically, ethnically, educationally”—an experience that helped her “understand people for who they are and not any sort of label which might precede them.” She brought this mindset to her work, creating a unique organizational culture at her firm that de-emphasized the role of the designer as the sole authority, and instead put decision-making power into the hands of her clients.

Change How You Relate to Others

To manage how others see and relate to us, we also need to change how we act out our identities. Sometimes relationships in one part of our lives can exert a pull that makes us ignore other aspects of who we are, or they can create challenges that make us feel like it’s easier to just be unidimensional. For example, when a working father is asked by his boss to entertain visiting clients last minute, he may reluctantly agree, feeling as though he has to suppress his parental identity and commitment in order to be a good employee. Manage how others see you by finding a balance between your identities, managing your role boundaries, and establishing your authenticity.

Find your balance

You may or may not have chosen the various identities that you hold, but what you do control is how you live these identities. How you structure your time and surroundings will impact your ability to establish and maintain a sense of equilibrium. This balance will look different for everyone.

For some, this might mean devoting yourself completely to one role for a certain period of time and then later turning to your other roles to recharge. Or it can mean spending just enough time on one role to feel nourished, while mostly focusing on other roles. For instance, sometimes it may just take an hour of focused writing in the early morning for a budding entrepreneur to feel as though she is moving her side-gig forward, and then she can leave for her day job energized and inspired.

For others, balance may mean carefully planning their weeks to ensure they have dedicated time to fulfill each of their roles regularly. A management consultant told us about learning to treat his family as being as important as a client, in order to help him ensure he was able to carve out time for them during his workweek.

Manage your boundaries

Another important step is to manage boundaries in ways that protect each identity while enabling synergy between them. To do this, you need to be socially savvy and flexible. For example, some management consultants developed relationships with colleagues with whom they could be honest about their devotions to both work and family commitments. These colleagues provided emotional and practical support (such as helping them say no to additional work requests), so that they could better maintain boundaries between work and home.

Some people are increasingly using social media to control the boundaries between their identities. For example, one multiple job holder uses some outlets (Twitter, LinkedIn) for professional endeavors, and others (Facebook) for personal matters.

Present yourself authentically but thoughtfully

We all face social pressure to “be authentic.” But that does not mean we have to be unfiltered and forthcoming with everything, to everyone, all of the time. We can share different aspects of who we are depending on our preferences and the circumstances.

In one of our studies, multiple jobholders slowly revealed parts of themselves when relevant to their client interactions. For instance, a childcare worker who also ran a nutrition shop only talked about her shop with parents when she felt they could benefit from some nutritional advice for their children.

Bicultural people are often adept at “code-switching,” or shifting which aspect of themselves comes to the fore depending on the culture they’re in. And people code-switch even within professional contexts. One Wall Street professional told us that she connects different parts of herself with different clients—she could authentically be her Southern “lite” self when she was meeting her clients in Birmingham and authentically be her New York “full-frontal self” when negotiating in Manhattan.

To be effective in today’s workplace, we need to shift our mindset and actions from managing ourselves to managing our portfolio of selves. Doing so may initially increase the chaos, but once we fully embrace our complexity, we’ll feel more fulfilled and contribute more to all of our identities.

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Brianna Caza is an associate professor at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Lakshmi Ramarajan is an associate professor at Harvard Business School. Erin Reid is an associate professor at Mc Master University’s DeGroote School of Business. Stephanie Creary is an assistant professor at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Excerpted from “How to Make Room in Your Work Life for the Rest of Your Self” on hbr.org, May 30, 2018 (product #H04CW0).