Comparing insides and outsides

Any discussion of how to manage career and life has to start with a basic fact: Comparing our "insides" to other peoples' "outsides" is counterproductive. It's a form of self-sabotage.

Many times have we heard that we shouldn't sweat the small stuff, and the corollary that it's all small stuff. It's almost always delivered by somebody who is sharp in appearance and calm in demeanor. And then we ask ourselves: "What's wrong with me? Why can't I be like him?" Or "Why is she always so serene?".

Since we don't know what's going through that person's brain, we are making assumptions. She's not serene. You don't want to be like him.

Work is a stage and employees are actors. Ah, sometimes we get to see people melt down. Maybe they throw something across the room. Maybe they yell an expletive after a tough phone call or a piece of code doesn't execute for the 100th time. They are poor actors. Then there are the people who always has a pleasant look on their face, walks with confidence but not swagger, and always takes a calm approach to every problem. They are really good actors.

And now that we're working more remotely than ever, the poor actors don't get noticed as much because they can simply turn off video or mute themselves on Zoom calls. And the really good actors shine like movie stars.

I worked for a terrific executive once. High pressure sales environment. No matter what was happening he would always seem calm. One day, the first day of the quarter, one of my colleagues delivered the news that his big deal for the previous quarter did not book because of some technicality that my colleague should have followed up on as a normal course of booking an order. This mishap caused my boss no end of embarrassment (and I'm certain some dressing down by higher-ups) because the number he called on the last hour of the last day of the quarter was grossly inaccurate. But he remained calm on the team call, and never raising his voice, and telling my colleague that this can't happen again. He could have been talking to his pet ferret with the tone of voice he used!

Anyway, I chalked up his disposition to his native Texan upbringing or some sort of neurological phenomenon. Then one day on a team call, he said "I may appear to be calm, but underneath it all I'm paddling like a duck paddling upstream".

The point here is that just because people in the office SEEM well balanced in everything in their lives, that doesn't mean they ARE. And for me to compare what I'm feeling inside to what I see and hear from them is not helpful especially when I'm vulnerable to feeling less-than. And this matters because these feelings, while normal, get acted on differently by different people. And the degree of these feelings varies based on our own internal wiring and the stimulus we live with.

Don't do it. It's a distraction. There are enough distractions to getting our jobs done.