"I wish you were more of your work self at home."
This or some version of this is something my wife says to me often.
My friends and colleague at work see and know and a very different version of me.
Is this true for you?
In my case at least, I tend to save the seemingly worst version of myself for the ones I love the most.
Sure you could argue that it's because I feel safest around them, but that seems like a bad bargain doesn't it? Be the best version of yourself for those you'll only know for a few years and be the worst version of yourself for those you want to spend the rest of your life with?
I'm being a bit extreme of course, and I'm trying to illustrate the point.
I'd like to offer a recent insight I had about this dilemma.
As with many dilemmas like this, there was some gold to be found in going back to my values.
Two of the values I keep coming back to are discipline and kindness.
It seems, my work self leads with kindness and my home self leads with discipline.
The insight I had recently is that it only seems this way from the outside looking in.
In other words, if you were to ask which value is more central to my being, the average person I work with would likely answer kindness and my family would likely answer discipline—To be fair, our kids might first need to learn what that word means, and once they do, I still think this would be their answer.
What's strange about this, is that the feeling I have on the inside is very different.
In both cases—home and work—I default to leading with discipline.
This means in some cases, my core value of discipline can manifest as different behaviours depending on the situation.
This might seem obvious when you read it, but what I find surprising is how stark that difference can be when you experience it.
It can literally seem like two different people.
I invite you to explore this for yourself.
Point to a core value you hold and ask does it manifest as different behaviours depending on the situation?
If so, what is the value, what are the situations, and what are the behaviours?
To go back to the thing that my wife calls me out on from time to time, "I wish you were more of your work self at home," I don't necessarily have answers on how to do this, but I feel I now have a better question to ask myself.
How can my value of discipline manifest as behaving with more kindness, at home?
p.s. This is another addition to a series of posts on values. You can find the other parts here: Part One (2 min read), Part Two (2 min read), Part Three (2 min read), Part Four (2 min read), and Part Five (4 min read).
