Make Room in Your Work Life for the Rest of Your Self
by Brianna Barker Caza, Lakshmi Ramarajan, Erin Reid, and Stephanie Creary
Shonda Rhimes, the television producer and creator of shows including Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, is an entertainment industry titan. In a 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.”1
Yet, despite Rhimes’s passion and success, her 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 herself—a mother, a friend, a sister, an 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 employees and their organizations. The greedy nature of our work (asking us to wear more hats, to do more, to always be 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 identities and the expectations that come with them.2
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 that making some simple changes to how you think about yourself, how you act out your identities, and how you make space for others’ identities can help you successfully manage your multiple identities, and thrive as a complex and whole person.
Change How You Think About Yourself
First, you must take command of your own story. Doing so requires reflecting on your complexity, moving away from zero-sum thinking about who you are, and creating and leveraging connections between your identities.
Reflect on your complexity
How do you currently think about who you are and the things you are doing? Do you feel as though you are a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none? Do others think of you this way? We all have different identities, but sometimes being at the margins of multiple groups can make us feel as though we are perpetual outsiders. A nurse-midwife we interviewed told us, “Sometimes I feel that being both a nurse and a midwife exposes me to the critiques people have about both professions, and at the same time, being both means that I am not sheltered by either because I am always an ‘other’ inside those groups. So I often find myself taking the safe route and sticking to practices generally accepted by both.”
Left untackled, this fear can limit us: It led the nurse-midwife to temper her professional actions. Resolving this fear requires acknowledging it and diagnosing its cause. Do your multiple identities make you feel vulnerable? Do you worry that one identity may invalidate the other? Do you feel constantly marginal, belonging nowhere rather than everywhere?
Once you have identified the source of your fear, you can begin to contextualize it. When and where does it come up? How is it triggered? How does your fear relate to the relationships between the different groups or roles you belong to? For example, by tracking her own reactions, the nurse-midwife realized that her insecurities came to the fore most often during her shifts with a doctor she perceived as conventional and hierarchical. After further reflection, she realized that the problem wasn’t the doctor—who had never actually criticized any of her midwifery-oriented practices—but instead with her fear of being seen as “other.” By getting the fear out and understanding it, we can get ahead of it.
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 an Iranian-American woman told us: “I am not 50% Iranian and 50% American, I am 100% of both.” And as Meghan Markle, the biracial Duchess of Sussex, actress, and activist, 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.”3
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 instance, a bike ride for a children’s hospital in Israel. One of our participants, an observant Jew and 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” where 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 roles and find the common ground—their shared skill, meaning, or purpose.
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 find creative links between them.4 Can you take skills learned in one identity and repurpose them in another? Try this framing: “Becoming an X allows me to be a better Y because … ”
For example, the nurse-midwives we interviewed talked about blending their midwifery and nursing backgrounds to find innovative solutions for their patients. And a chief of radiology, charged with integrating the radiology departments of 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 white 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 by creating a unique organizational culture at her firm, one that deemphasized the role of the designer as the sole authority and put decision-making power into the hands of her clients.
Change How You Relate to Others
While changing how we see ourselves is a necessary first step, in order 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 that it’s easier to just be unidimensional. For example, when a working father is asked by his boss to entertain visiting clients at the 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. You can 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 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 consider his family members as being as important as clients, in order to help him carve out time for them during his workweek.
Once you establish practices like these, it is critical to communicate them clearly to others, in order to shape their expectations of you, avoid interpersonal conflicts, and get their help in maintaining your priorities. You can also check in with yourself. An individual with four jobs explained to us that rather than measure her “balance” at the end of each day or each week, she took time at the end of each month to assess whether she felt good about how she was allocating her time and energy, and what changes she needed to make for the next month.
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. 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 person with multiple jobs uses some outlets (Twitter, LinkedIn) for professional endeavors, and others (Facebook) for personal matters. A journalist we interviewed talked about her complete online separation between personal and professional selves: “Women I’ve spoken with, we deal with a lot of creepy people … so much so that I have changed my Facebook [and made] myself as elusive as possible. You cannot find my name, even though [at] every journalism conference I go to, they say [to] have a public Facebook profile so you can interact with people. I cannot. I’ve got to protect myself.”
Present yourself authentically, but thoughtfully
We all face social pressure to “be authentic.” But that does not mean you have to be unfiltered and forthcoming with everything, to everyone, all the time. You can share different aspects of who you are depending on your preferences and the circumstances.
In one of our studies, people with multiple jobs slowly revealed parts of their selves when relevant to their client interactions.5 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.
Biculturals are often adept at “code-switching,” or shifting which aspects of themselves come to the fore according to the culture they are in.6 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 down in Birmingham, Alabama, and authentically be her New York “full-frontal self” when negotiating in Manhattan.
Create Space for Others’ Complexity Too
Thinking about ourselves and our relationships is a crucial first step to thriving with complexity, but to truly change we must also acknowledge others’ complexity. To do this, we have to rethink our role models and encourage others to embrace complexity.
Rethinking our role models
Collectively, we need to broaden our narratives about what constitutes success. Our work is governed in many ways by the role models we look up to. Often we portray work heroes as unidimensional, focusing on just one part of their identities and ignoring how other aspects of their selves may have influenced their success.
In her television shows, Rhimes has deliberately built complex and multifaceted characters, with the aim of normalizing all backgrounds and helping our social consciousness move away from the notion of one “right” way to live.
Similarly, we can all work to destabilize the shared narratives we have about what it takes to get ahead. In her book, Expect to Win, Carla Harris provides examples of times that mentors helped her to showcase her multifaceted self, such as when one invited her to sing at a work party. Doing so let her connect in meaningful ways with other colleagues and ultimately made her feel like her authentic self at work.
Leaders and managers have an important role to play here in thinking carefully about who is showcased among the team and who is praised. One entrepreneur told us that when introducing guest speakers at the conferences she hosts, she makes sure to weave in interesting facts about the speaker’s background and other roles in order to emphasize the person’s complexity.
Organizations also share the responsibility of normalizing complexity in the workplace. Leaders can do this by overtly acknowledging individuals as being more than one thing and rewarding different types of performance. For example, one microfinance organization that is dually devoted to advancing a social mission and being commercially viable says employees are both “social workers” and “bankers.” To ensure both roles are pursued jointly, it rewards loan officers for commercial success as well as advancing the social mission.
Encourage others to expand themselves
The next step is helping others embrace multiple identities. Leaders and managers should recognize their power in crafting norms and policies that allow (or inhibit) workers’ complexity. For example, emerging data from a study we are conducting with elite army officers suggests that most consider “broadening experiences,” defined as assignments that force soldiers to engage in roles outside their current functional expertise, to be an essential part of leadership training. In fact, some of the army leaders we spoke with even specify broadening their subordinates’ identities as an explicit goal in their leadership philosophies.
In a different context, individuals working at a design firm were told by their supervisors not to work overly long hours, and instead to go out into the world and tap into their other identities. This firm recognized that helping workers to expand their identities enabled them to bring more creative and unique insights to their work.
Most importantly, leaders must embrace their own complexity to ensure others in their organizations will feel it is valuable and safe to do so themselves. Elena Donio, former CEO of Axiom, embraces and openly discusses how she blends her professional and mothering roles in both public and private forums. Our data suggests such displays of complexity matter. For instance, a journalist in one of our studies, after being inspired by another journalist who had revealed his undocumented status, started writing influential articles about immigration issues.
To be effective in today’s workplace, we need to shift our mindset and actions from managing oneself to managing one’s portfolio of selves. Doing so may initially increase the chaos, but once we fully embrace our complexity, we can feel more fulfilled and create more sustainable and agile organizations and communities.
Adapted from “How to Make Room in Your Work Life for the Rest of Your Self,” on hbr.org, May 30, 2018 (product #H04CW0).