Wholeness at Work

Stephen Walker
1 day ago
2 min read

Wholeness at Work

Hi, it's Steve.

Last week I gave a webinar for the Global Finance Services group at AstraZeneca on something I've always cared a lot about: wholeness at work.

Here's the short version of what I told them: most of us were taught to sever our work self from our real self — leave the personal at the door, be professional, keep the rest of you for evenings and weekends. It sounds responsible and safe.

Sure enough, when I asked, most people in the chat indicated that their work and personal selves barely resembled each other.

If you've ever watched the Apple TV show Severance, you know where that split leads. In real life, the severing has a cost too. When who you are and what you do all day drift far enough apart, the gap can become a chasm. We sometimes call the chasm burnout, but we usually blame the hours. But burnout isn't only about too much work. Often, it's about too little of you in the work.

Misalignment is exhausting in a way overwork alone rarely is. It takes a lot of energy to compartmentalize, to wear a mask or play a role all day at work that really isn't the real you. It's tiring and demoralizing to feel disconnected while at work or, worse, to feel like a hypocrite.

And the opposite is also true: when people bring more of their actual selves to work, they feel more aligned, they act with greater confidence and consistency. As a result, trust grows and teams get stronger.

Midway through, a message appeared in the chat. Someone wrote that the connection between misalignment and burnout really hit home.

I keep thinking about that message. About what it takes to type that where your colleagues can see it. And about how many people watching felt the same thing and didn't type anything at all. There's a quiet epidemic of people who are tired or stuck in a way that rest alone doesn't fix — because the tiredness or "stuckness" isn't coming from the hours. It's coming from the gap.

I've written to you about burnout before — about rest you don't have to earn. This is the other half of it: some exhaustion you can't rest your way out of.

You have to close the gap instead.

A question to sit with this week: Where is the widest gap between who you are and how you spend your days (or nights) at work? And what's one small way you could close it an inch this week — one honest sentence, one moment of vulnerability, one piece of yourself brought into the room?

One thing: Wholeness at work sometimes means the comfortable kind — bringing more of your personality, your humor, your story into the room. But sometimes it means the harder kind: saying the true thing when it's not the popular thing. I made a video about that I published in July — The Courage to Disagree: https://youtu.be/vo7JLO_-mVQ

And if something in this letter landed and you want to talk it through, my calendar is always open for a conversation:

Schedule a Call

Sending lots of good energy your way,

Steve

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