It’s not your job’s job to love you
“It’s a lot to ask of my job to make me feel loved.”
This was a breakthrough of self-awareness from a highly creative Chicago ad exec. Her big ideas for big brands make big money — you’ve seen them on the Super Bowl.
Yet, despite her obvious career success, when she first came to coaching she didn’t feel particularly successful.
She described an emptiness inside.
A void that only temporarily subsided when the stakes were extremely high, when she felt most important vital needed.
To manufacture those feelings she let it be known that she was always on + immediately available to anyone who might need her — nights, weekends, holidays, even leaving her friends on Cabo beach during her first vacation in 14 months to Zoom with the agency CEO.
She hated doing it, so I asked her why she did it.
“I’m passionate, devoted, loyal and committed.”
That was her leadership brand. Did you catch it? Those illustrious attributes make us think we are excellent leaders. But they’re performative dimensions of love.
Yes, love is a basic human need.
But if love is blind then our biggest blindspot is how much we crave it and the subordinated ways we go about trying to get it.
It's not our fault, really.
Women are socialized to believe that what makes us lovable is our ability to do things for others.
That our fulfillment —filling our void—comes from fulfilling all the roles others have assigned to us:
Moms want to feel appreciated. Wives want to feel cherished. Daughters want to feel their parents are proud of them.
And when those roles don't feel fulfilling, we're told to try harder, do more, be better, sacrifice further.
Our mind seeks evidence of love in the words + behaviors of people we've given prominence to.
When we interpret what others say and how they act, then internalize all of it in order to decide how we will feel about ourselves, this results in:
unconsciously curating a career identity based on our lovability by continuously pouring into something that can’t love us back
developing a desperate dependency by outsourcing our emotional equilibrium
relying on external proof points to prove you are loved widens a chasm on the inside that will never be filled from the outside.
We have to take responsibility for the relational imbalance we experience in a transactional marketplace. It starts by remembering that feelings are always an inside job.
Our thoughts create our feelings. We don’t actually feel anything until we think something. How we feel at work is a reflection of our thoughts about ourselves in relation to our work.
We get it wrong when we try to earn love in exchange for our labor. Depleting the best of you doesn't leave anything for the rest of you.
Want to feel truly, deeply loved?
Believe you are
WORTHY, VALUABLE, ADMIRABLE
just as you are, for who you are, independent of your efforts.
Leading yourself with love is your full-time job.
