Let Go and Haul: Advice to my Younger Self
Week 13, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Super excited to announce a new and very much needed addition to the team: Karina Bernacki, our Operations Advisor (aka part-time Head of Ops). Karina and I worked together at Twitter and saw each other through both awesome and difficult moments. Besides being a serious get-it-done ops human, she’s also an executive/team coach and her background is in software engineering. She’s been coaching us intermittently since last year, so we’re super excited to make it official and have her part of the fam now. She’s already been making us more efficient each day!
Journal: what I learned
It’s a good thing one of my sisters called me for work advice this weekend because oh geez it’s been so busy I had no idea what I was going to put in this section! Normally I have an outline written by Friday night but this week was so non-stop so I didn’t 😬
So, based on that conversation, here’s some advice to my younger self on “acquiring corporate polish.” ahhh yes, a phrase I once rolled my eyes at, then learned I really needed, and learned the hard kicking and screaming way lol.
First of all, what does that even mean?
It means learning to carry yourself in an acceptable way on the job. Some jobs are more like big families and need less of this, other jobs are full-on corporate America vibe (and of course there is everything in between), but regardless of the situation, there’s a strong chance, that even though it’s tempting, you don’t really want to behave at work the same way you do with your friends or family.
The first time I was told that I needed to acquire some of this corporate polish, it was my COO at Last.fm who suggested this, and I was in my mid-20s. I had built my reputation on being creative and unique; from the work I did to the clothes I wore. Acquiring corporate polish sounded like being asked to “turn down my personality”. Combined with being an outspoken, ambitious woman, I was deeply skeptical that this was perhaps a way to coerce me into being a pretty smile that works hard and never speaks out for what I need or want at work.
Aha. See that is where I was wrong.
It’s not about dialing down your personality, it’s about modulating your personality.
Let’s imagine your personality is that beautiful beam of white light shooting into the Pink Floyd prism.
Authentic, 100% you, all the colors of the spectrum. Ok great. That's you dancing alone in your bedroom, that’s you hanging out with your friends, that’s you with your partner/pet/bff.
All right, let’s talk about the other side of that prism because that prism is work! Depending on where you work and what your level of seniority is, you might be sharing just one or two colors of your rainbow. This is not dialing down the pure beautiful white light, it’s just sharing one color instead of all of them. And that color, if you’re junior, is one you have to get really good at. At first, it might feel a bit strange, but as you learn to communicate efficiently, control your emotions, consider/navigate what is appropriate at work (and what is not), and take care of yourself so that you can do this, it will happen.
It is HARD. Expect this to be hard work. The people who are really good at this get paid the big bucks for good reason. Developing EQ and AQ (adaptability quotient) is work that never stops, that you do with yourself, your reading list, your therapist, your coach, your boss, your mentor, etc. It’s the growth mindset of dedication and hard work. So you do this, and now you have a nice bright color. You mastered that shit!
Congratulations, you just got a promotion (or leveled up in some way – maybe you started your own company)
Now, in this example, imagine you run a team, time to add new ways of being. The color of the rainbow you are around your team is going to be different than the way you carry yourself in meetings with your boss’s direct reports, for example. So now you’re balancing two colors. Ooo! That just got a lot trickier! These colors might be pretty different.
As you grow and become more senior or are working more cross-functionally, guess what? More colors! Different modes for different people. It becomes a lot of context switching. This is one of the hardest parts of the “polish” part. Just came out of a rough meeting with finance? No time to feel anxious, because you have to walk into a new one with a client in 5 minutes and be your charming self. More importantly, though, the words you use to talk to both those people will be different. I do this all day long. Engineers, designers, investors, etc. they all have different modes of language and modulating what color of the rainbow I’m using is key to effective communication and coming off as… “polished”.
The point is, and this is what I didn’t understand when I was younger, is that you’re never not being yourself. You’re never being inauthentic, you’re not “dialing it down”, you’re just choosing what color of your special white light to share at that moment, and you’re saving the rest of that energy for you – the moments when you’re dancing in your bedroom alone or running an experiment with your bestest, silliest friends to see if Oreo cookies taste better after being in the freezer or the microwave (answer, both are pretty good but I’m partial to 20s in the microwave until the middle gets just a little soft).
And cherish those moments, because the better you get at the thing you do, the fewer the moments that will exist when you can let loose and be your total white light self. As networking, social media and industry friends become your world (if that’s what you want of course), be prepared for only sharing a bit of your rainbow there too. It’s okay, you’re probably getting the thing you worked hard for so the trade-off is worth it. It just makes those intimate moments so much more valuable.
Jams: what I’m into
This radio show via Monika! Tune in to 98.7 on Sundays from 12-2 EST for African Groove with MC Bonde
Two jams via mroth this week! Check these out
SARAM by 아슬
Last, but not least, it’s the end of March and the end of Q1 (omg) so added some more monthly tracks to my playlist! For new friends here, this playlist is mostly new music (released this month), at least half the tracks by people who identify as women.
👉Get my Spotify Playlist 👈