Source: Radio New Zealand
Who are you outside of your work?
Does the answer come quickly — amateur pickleball player, community choir leader, model train enthusiast?
Or are you struggling to come up with something that feels as substantial as what you do for a living?
If it’s the latter, how about another question? How do you nurture your non-work self?
Unsplash / Curated Lifestyle
When I asked ABC Radio Life Matters listeners that question, their responses were varied.
One caller reflected on the different reactions he gets depending on whether he introduces himself as a gardener (his day job) or as a musician (his passion).
Another said her professional identities as a high school teacher and touring musician felt at odds with each other.
And one caller told me he hadn’t realised how central work was to his identity until the pandemic hit, and things fell apart.
As for me, I’ve realised that when faced with a simple — “how are you?” — my default response has been to answer based on how things are going at work.
It seems our efforts to nurture our non-work selves could use some work.
The centrality of work in our lives can’t be denied, especially when Australians are working longer hours than ever before. But short of quitting our jobs, how do we shift the balance?
Nasalifya Namwinga, a clinical psychologist and co-founder of Pola Practice in Melbourne/Naarm, is conducting PhD research on professional burnout.
“For those of us that are privileged enough to do a job that we are passionate about … the reasons we get there are not just about the job, they’re about who we are as people,” she says.
Simone Stolzoff is a labour reporter whose years of covering the world of work led him to investigate how we got to this point — and also to some personal realisations.
“Like many people in my generation, I am a millennial, and I was raised with this idea that I could do whatever I wanted when I grew up. And that if I hadn’t found my dream job, I should just keep searching, keep looking,” he told me on Life Matters.
Stolzoff’s book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, examines how identity and self-worth became entangled with what we do for a living, and how we can change that.
He uses the term workism — coined by journalist Derek Thompson — to describe a phenomenon of “looking to work not just for a pay cheque, but also a means of transcendence, self-actualisation, community belonging, identity”.
And while this rings true at a gut level, there are many downsides to being a workist, he says.
First, “Your job might not always be there, so if you are attaching your identity solely to your job title, it might be a risky proposition.”
Second, “When we’re always expecting our job to be perfect or our job to be a dream, it creates a lot of room for potential disappointment underneath it.”
“And third, which is the … angle that I’m most passionate about, is that we’re all more than just workers. We are neighbours and friends and citizens.”
There are risks in revolving your identity solely around work. (file image)
Unsplash / Fellipe Ditadi
With that in mind, Stolzoff advises keeping things light.
“Say you want to invest in your relationships. Can you carve out time to go on a weekly walk with your best friend?” he asks.
“Say that you want to learn a new instrument. Maybe it’s just 10 minutes practising the piano after dinner.
“They don’t have to be these grand gestures. I think they’re just these little ways in which we can … treat these identities sort of like plants, give them all a little water, give them all a little sunlight, a little energy to grow.”
In my personal quest to develop my non-work self, I’ve picked up — and dropped — a few hobby attempts.
I feel apologetic to the crochet set gathering dust in my bedroom, the boxing gloves in the spare room cupboard, and the neglected bits of broken crockery I collected, telling myself how satisfying it would be to patch them back together — eventually.
But I just wasn’t able to “hobby” myself into a more well-rounded, less work-focused new version of myself. Why?
Namwinga says it’s about figuring out your values and being guided by them.
“There are a couple of questions that I’d ask. One would be, why did you choose to do the role, the job, that you do? Because the things that drew you to that work exist outside of the work,” she says.
“And then the second is, what do you enjoy? When you’re outside of the workplace, what do you do?”
Whether it’s watching your favourite TV show or playing sports, Namwinga says thinking about the recurring themes and appeal of existing interests can help light the way to filling out your non-work identity.
“The process of finding yourself is that there’s a journey — we’re constantly curating who we are, and it’s not really that there’s an end product that we’re trying to get to. It’s figuring out who we become along the way,” she says.
Instead of grand gestures, think of little ways to nurture your non-work self. (File image)
Unsplash / Elena Helade
When at last you find yourself, resist the impulse to turn your passion into another job or side-hustle, she says.
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” Namwinga says.
Instead, surrender to “the joy element of the thing that you do”.
“It’s in the doing rather than the outcome itself,” she says.
“I see this happen really well when … clients that I work with play sport, but play it badly, but love the process of playing the sport.”
Life Matters listener Brad says a major depressive episode during the pandemic eventually made him quit work.
“In working with my psychologist, I realised that I placed so much value on work and status that it was unhealthy,” he says.
Part of his recovery included “doing little things” like taking an art class with his wife.
“I went into that art class saying I couldn’t draw a circle.”
He says he’s enjoyed “starting to explore a bit more of the creative side of things that [I’ve] got an interest in”.
Another piece of the puzzle is reframing the place of work in our lives.
I asked Stolzoff for his take on calling out the transactional nature of paid work. Is that a good thing?
His answer? Yes.
“It might sound a bit crass because we’re so often told that work should be a calling or a vocation, but I actually think that framing it as an economic contract can be incredibly empowering both for employers and employees,” Stolzoff says.
But he’s quick to point out that doesn’t mean coasting or putting less effort into our jobs.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with identifying with what you do for work, so long as it’s not the sole identity in your life,” he says.
“I see a ‘good enough’ job as a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be in the world.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand