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The Personal is Professional, Period
The pandemic forced many workers to work from home. Some welcomed the change, enjoying being at home with their pets or having a chance to sleep in. Others weren’t sure how to balance their family life, having to monitor remote schooling while remote working and juggle other family demands. And many didn’t want to mix up their personal and professional spaces. These are all valid reactions to this unusual predicament.
Pre-pandemic, it was easier to delineate your personal and professional lives. Now sitting in our personal spaces while working a profession is a bit fuzzy. A meeting can be interrupted by a child in need, a cat who decides to snuggle up while you’re writing an important email, or Alexa who decides to respond to something she thinks you told her (I hope this doesn’t just happen to me.) The personal and professional are harder to separate when your kitchen is right next to you and you’re wearing pajama pants.
While I understand that there are certain things we consider personal and certain things we consider professional, I also think that aside from physical location, the personal and professional are way more connected than you think.
I have often heard of people who use the term “professional” to indicate a way of being, as if to say it overrides certain behaviors you’d typically enact in your personal life. However, even if we suppress certain behaviors, that doesn’t erase their existence or their origin. Those emotions are in you; they literally live within your body. So if something feels threatening in the workplace, that means that no matter how you react to it, your body still senses and holds onto it.
Oftentimes the profession we choose is because of our personal skills and interests. So to say that the personal and professional are completely separated doesn’t really make sense to me. And if you do choose a profession that is not based on your interests, that doesn’t mean you left your personal self at home.
Because the personal is professional, period.
While you might have a different demeanor in the workplace, it doesn’t take away who you are at heart. It is just another way of saying that you act differently around certain people. You can say that for family versus friends as well. You might not react to…
