Hi worklifers,
They say that sometimes you find a book, and other times, the book finds you.
Over my spring vacation, I traveled to Hawaii, where I happened to pick up the book Bittersweet by Susan Cain. The book found me at the exact right moment. I was about to board the flight, but I managed to download it to my Kindle app in between boarding the plane and take-off. I savored it throughout my vacation. Bittersweet is a masterpiece, and it spoke to me on many levels. It deepened my understanding of sorrow, as well as my understanding of what to do with the longing that accompanies sorrow. I thought I would share my reflections with you here.
Why is dealing with sorrow and longing uncomfortable in the workplace?
You may have heard the term "toxic positivity." There is an excellent book Toxic Positivity by Whitney Goodman in which she discusses how we feel bombarded at work by the pressure to always be cheerful. We’re encouraged to always stay positive and always offer our very best selves to create winning strategies and drive successful results.
As managers and leaders, we must tread carefully, because we are often the ones guilty of perpetuating this toxic positivity culture. Certain kinds of sorrow and longing are more socially acceptable, such as death, accidents, natural calamities, social and racial injustice, and war. These forms of sorrow are well-understood and broadly documented. In these situations, our colleagues typically acknowledge our pain. However, we also face other, more common forms of “sorrow” resulting from non-life-threatening afflictions. These include poor management, friction with colleagues or partner teams, re-orgs that impact you and/or the scope of your work, low rewards, critical feedback that is delivered or received without compassion, or other stressful situations. We all suffer from these things, yet this kind of sorrow and longing is largely suppressed. According to Cain’s research in Bittersweet, much of this sorrow goes undisclosed at work. It is this kind of non-life-threatening sorrow that can be fuel for you to change your life and the lives of others. When we stay long enough and allow ourselves to feel that sorrow, it helps us understand our “longing”: our true desires, for ourselves and the people around us.
Understanding sorrow, using it to understand your longing, and channeling it to improve yourself and your work culture
I am a bittersweet type of person, and I score moderately high on Cain’s Bittersweet quiz. I didn't know I was a true connoisseur of bittersweetness, the place where light and dark meet. In hindsight, however, it makes sense. It is hard for me to pretend to be happy at work when I am suffering, or when I see my colleagues suffering, even from non-life-threatening afflictions. My need to make sense of that suffering heightens, and so does my urgency to solve it, for myself and others. Yet I have discovered, having tried, and failed at this many times, that often the most courageous deed is to acknowledge the suffering, learn to sit with it, and allow it to process, instead of searching for a quick fix. The way to do this is by learning how to feel, which I talk about in my previous article, Humaning Workday Evenings.
There have been various moments in my life and career when reflecting on my sorrow has given me a better understanding of my longing. For example, when one of my team members moved on to join another team, I felt the sorrow and longing that came from seeing them move on. I also struggled to see them suffer from the pain of burnout, just like I had done a few years back. Just because you have experienced something and overcome it does not mean you can prevent that for other people. Seeing that play out for someone else can be extremely sorrowful. However, I knew I needed to learn to feel those difficult emotions. This meant experiencing the sorrow that came from not being able to retain the high performing employee. It meant experiencing the sorrow that our workplaces and managers are still not equipped to with the tools to catch and prevent it before it reaches the point of no return.
When I allowed my sorrow to stay, it pointed me yet again toward what I long for, solidifying my resolve to continue the work I started 15 months ago. Worklifeunstuck was fueled by my longing to figure out how to pursue one’s true desires while avoiding burnout, to coach others to do so. I long for a workplace where burnout is normalized like the common flu, a workplace that allows employees to discuss burnout openly and without shame. I long for managers to pair high-performing employees with mentors who specialize in helping them overcome it and learn to prevent it in the future.
One of the deepest longings that comes out of burnout for individuals is learning how to set and create boundaries from a place of love for themselves. We experience so much rage when we or others break our boundaries, and how to effectively set them or think about them in the workplace. It is a tough skill to learn and put into practice but understanding that need allows us to take steps to set boundaries with courage and self-compassion. This is the power of identifying the longing behind our sorrow: it allows us to understand the source of our emotions and take action to address it.
Re-orgs are another source of suffering in the workplace. Re-orgs are common in the tech industry, and over time you build resilience to them and learn to adapt to them. However, they can be extremely painful, and they bring many moments of bittersweetness for individuals and teams. Often the most poignant stories emerge from re-orgs, such as a colleague of mine who had to let go of the work, he had put in to start up an initiative and see it grow. He had invested so much time in his work, only to learn that he could no longer lead it or take it to the next level. Another time, on one of my earlier teams, our mission changed from being primary custodians of running a charter to playing a supporting role. It was truly bittersweet, because we knew what we had started was about to get much bigger, but we also knew that we would not be the ones representing it or getting any credit for it. This was extremely sorrowful. We are all called upon as leaders to deliver the act of selflessness, but this still creates a lot of sorrow to parse and can result in suffering.
People who stay with the sorrow originating from re-orgs often end up with an opportunity to learn about their longing: What is it that they want for themselves next? What is it that they truly desire? For me, that longing helped me decide that it was time to switch the problem space I was working on. I had this deep desire to build empathy for users I didn't know anything about. I felt satisfied with the work I had done in that area, and my sorrow pointed me to a new longing: to learn something new. Some of my other colleagues also took the time to venture into new jobs. Those who stayed and played the supporting role rose back up, and over the years they turned their mission around and created new purpose. Reflecting on it now, I was fortunate to be part of a team where people were able to be vulnerable and speak about their sorrow, lean on each other, and support each other through transitions. Ironically, in my next job, I found myself in a situation where the opposite happened, and a partner team had to move into a supporting role. Having been through that suffering, I had deep empathy for my partners, and that pushed me to be a more compassionate leader. As Brene Brown beautifully puts it, Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
At the heart of these examples is compassion, empathy and human connection, as these are the true antidotes of human suffering. When we can sit with our sorrow and listen to our longing, it can move us to a state of compassion, empathy, and more meaningful connection, for ourselves and for others. I have often seen individuals and leaders selflessly give their personal time to the betterment of their workplace or invest in selfless diversity and inclusion work carving out personal time. This is so because they crave to foster a culture where people can belong, thrive, bring their whole selves to work, and enable others to do the same.
The key to unlocking these true desires for you and your workplace comes by leaning first into the sorrow of your experience. Embracing this sorrow comes from learning to feel and process all your emotions, the positive and the negative. Susan David, who teaches clients at United Nations, Google, and other large companies, is mentioned in the book Bittersweet. She defines the process of dealing with sorrow and longing at the workplace as "emotional agility": holding difficult emotions and thoughts loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to ignite change in your life". At worklifeunstuck, I call this ability “emotional resilience,” which comes from learning how to feel all emotions at work. It boils down to a similar process of not buffering your difficult emotions, such as stress, anxiety, failure, and self-doubt, and instead allowing them to stay. Practicing this discomfort, as difficult and painful as it can be, is where true growth originates.
Thanks,
Maithili Vijay Dandige