In their book, No Hard Feelings, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy make a suggestion that is somewhat off-putting on the surface: “be less passionate about your job”.
To help clarify where they’re coming from, they emphasize that “be less passionate about work’ doesn’t mean ‘Don’t care about work.’ It means: Care more about yourself. Carve out time for the people you love, for exercise, for guilt-free vacation. Remind yourself that few people look back at their lives and wish they had stayed at the office until 10:00 P.M.”
In other words, you can still care about your work. You can still produce amazing results. You can still achieve important outcomes.
But it’s equally important to make sure that you’re making time to love and nurture other aspects of your life as well.
Remember: you’re not just a project manager, engineer, manager, director, customer support service rep, [insert job title], you’re a human first and foremost with relationships and a wide array of interests that exist beyond your job.
So create boundaries, give yourself permission to check your e-mail a little bit less, block off time — be a little bit less passionate.
You can still do valuable work while shrinking your relationship with it in order to make space for taking care of yourself and being with the people you love.
This shift might be a challenging one to make at first — it might even feel a little awkward.
But you will not regret it.
