Achieving Career Empowerment Is As Tasty As Becoming A SNACK

Dear Friend,

I’ve had a pretty major development in my life.

I’ll share more about it over the next few editions of Waking Up, but I’ll provide a hint in today’s issue.

Several issues ago, I presented the idea that in order to live a life filled with inner peace, we should become “A SNACK.”

As tasty as I’m sure we’d all be with (vegan) chocolate syrup poured all over us, I’m not talking about the snack you eat literally. 

I’m talking about A SNACK that lives from Awareness and embraces Self-love, Non-Attachment, Compassion, and Kindness.

We can and should incorporate these extremely important concepts into our everyday lives. But we can get even more granular in a role most of us live in at least a third of the time (during the working week).

Our careers.

I’m sure most of us don’t think about things like self-love or compassion at work.

I know I’ve fired off a few angry emails to leaders I used to work with. 

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thrown something at a wall after someone didn’t listen to my expertise and went around my recommendation.

I also did a terrible job of setting boundaries in my old career. I found myself burning the midnight oil all too often. 

Had I known then what I know now, I probably would’ve been a better manager, a more pleasant co-worker, and a less stressed person. 

Today, I’m going to share how you can become A SNACK in your career, so you can live with more peace and contentment in your daily life.

You’ll see that you can love yourself at all times, even while you’re at work.

It all starts with awareness

It’s hard to know what triggers us at work if we don’t have awareness. 

And, as I’ve mentioned a few times, the best way we can gain awareness in our daily life is to build a mental fitness (meditation) habit.

But I’m not talking about a McMindfulness habit that promotes increased work productivity at the expense of our own mental sanity.

We should build a mindfulness habit so we can exhibit love to ourselves and radiate that love and compassion for all beings.

When you apply the principles of mindfulness to daily life, the hustle and bustle of Corporate America slows down.

Instead of blowing up at every minor task that comes your way, you can recognize how your body feels as more and more gets piled on your plate. 

Yes, it sucks.

But more specifically than sucking, you can feel the flush in your chest, the pulsing of your temples, the gritting of your teeth. 

You’ll realize that this is your body’s natural fight-or-flight response to what you perceive as a threat.

Your body doesn’t know the difference between the litany of work emails coming faster than a speeding bullet train and the appearance of a saber-tooth tiger. 

But when you recognize how your body and mind react as work stress piles up, you can choose your response.

Awareness lets you step back from the noise and feel empowered in your reaction.

Maybe that means you step away from your desk and walk for 15 minutes before responding to a snarky email from your co-worker.

Perhaps you ask if you can push a meeting back so you can get some heads-down work done.

Gaining awareness of how your body and mind feels in the moment is the only way to respond in a way you’re proud of.

And in a way that maintains your professional reputation to boot.

Don’t please your boss, please yourself 

My mom taught me a valuable first lesson before I started my very first job as a grocery store clerk at age 15:

Do what the boss says.

After straightening the shelves, I’d ask one of the Assistant Managers if they had more work for me to do. 

Do you need me to stock the pop coolers, sir?

Do you need someone to bring in more carts, ma’am?

I was always happy to take orders and had no problem working hard for the boss.

Even at that age, I could see most people wanted to get by with doing as little work as possible. 

I got the idea that other people were lazy, and this definitely impacted the professional, polished, “good boy” persona I developed. 

I carried these habits from my part-time job to my full-time career in HR. I frequently was rewarded with promotions every other year and regular pay raises of over 10%.

I was doing what the boss wanted and then some, and I developed a sense of pride in my work and financial security.

Life seemed pretty good on the surface. 

Except, by focusing so much of my energy on what my bosses wanted, I completely neglected my own needs.

I never set boundaries, took on way too much work, and let my employees off the hook as a manager by taking on their workload instead of holding them accountable for it.

No 10%+ salary increase was worth the mental and physical strain this lack of boundaries and absorption of extra work had on me. 

I was a jerk to be around when I hung out with my friends.

I spent all my free time pursuing things that made me happy (like writing novels) because I didn’t have time to find happiness in anything that was going on at work. 

Even though I was confused about my sexuality, I knew I wanted a relationship. But I found it much easier to get ahead on the next major project at work because I felt more in control.

But as the Buddhists so wisely taught us, we’re never truly in control of anything. 

Favoring work over my personal life and my relationships was yet another way I wasn’t loving myself at work.

But to become a SNACK and achieve career empowerment, we need to adopt self-love in the workplace.

This means setting boundaries around when you’re working and when you’re “offline.” This means being upfront about how much work you can actually take on at once. It’s not only unfair to you by taking on more work than one person can handle, but it can also become a bottleneck for your team.

You won’t be able to truly please the boss if you don’t take time out for your physical and mental health.

You can’t perform at work if you aren’t making enough time for the important people in your life. 

Self-love in your career is about recognizing that you are worthy of career happiness, growth, and development, just for being you. 

You are worthy of all those things, even if you aren’t working 60 hours a week. 

By setting boundaries, taking on a reasonable workload, and standing up for your needs, you’ll find it easier to work harder when the situation calls for it. Because you won’t resent yourself.

Keep your job close, but your self-worth closer 

For years, I assigned a lot of my self-worth to my job.

I was making good money, demonstrating my expertise, and helping leaders at my company achieve their goals thanks to my contribution. 

Even though I didn’t love everything about my job, I felt like I was making an impact. 

And making an impact as a strategic advisor to the business felt meaningful to me. 

But too much of this spilled over into my personal life. I would justify skipping out on events with friends or sacrificing sleep because I wanted to be an excellent performer at work. 

I wanted that reward of being seen as a competent, valued advisor to continue. The people-pleasing tendencies I’ve spoken about in many other newsletters reared their ugly head yet again.

In order to achieve true career empowerment, we must embrace non-attachment.

This means defining our overall self-worth with aspects of life that we can’t achieve in our career.

We must see that we’re amazing people not just for what we do at work, but for the kindness we show to others.

We can be a loyal friend, a devoted partner, or give back to our community. These identities make up who we are. 

Just like we shouldn’t attach to any single identity, we shouldn’t attach too strongly to our jobs. 

Yes, our jobs often provide our livelihood, but we shouldn’t cling too tightly to the job title, salary, or bonuses we earn each year. 

As the Buddhist concept of impermanence teaches us, life is always changing.

This means we could get promoted, fired, laid off, or even not get a bonus at any time.

When we place most of our self-worth in our jobs or careers, these events can be crushing blows. 

Even the promotions are fleeting bouts of happiness, because at some point that elation will dissipate. 

Non-attachment lets us enjoy the highs of our career journey without getting out of control.

Similarly, non-attachment helps us avoid being destroyed by setbacks in our career. 

Not being fazed by anything that happens at work is a sign of true career empowerment. This will let you focus on doing your life’s work, regardless of what comes up.

Ditch the stress for kindness 

Now that we see how important it is to embrace self-love and non-attachment in our careers, we can come full circle to becoming a SNACK at work by living with compassion and kindness.

I’ll admit, I’ve really struggled to embody these qualities at work.

While I think I’ve been a kind and compassionate manager, I've snapped more often than not at partners I worked with when I felt the pressure from an increasing workload.

Instead of seeing these co-workers as human beings with their own stress and mounting workloads, my anger drove me to assume that these people were out to get me. They made me feel miserable and caused me to feel like I was under attack. 

The “ASAP” deadlines. The questioning of my judgment. All of this felt like criticism and made me feel like I was doing a bad job if I couldn’t handle it all.

But instead of getting caught up in all the stress, we should ditch it for kindness.

See our coworkers not as evil bosses or managers that are only out for achieving their own goals (though you do have those people), but as humans who are also worthy of love.

When we look at our coworkers with a more compassionate lens, some of the stress we feel can slowly melt away. 

Our worries don’t seem so big when compared to other people’s worries. 

We can feel grateful for how much we make compared to another hard worker in the company that’s been underpaid for years. We can appreciate how healthy we are compared to another employee who is battling cancer. 

Realizing that our jobs aren’t life or death (well, unless you’re in healthcare) can make us lighten up a bit. 

We’ll see that the trivial minutiae of our work days aren’t the mountains of chaos we make them out to be. 

Being able to go to work and embody the principles of compassion and kindness in our careers lets us taste career empowerment that no one can take away from us.

Career empowerment is yours for the taking

For the first time, I can see how becoming A SNACK is the best way to feel empowered in my career and to feel inner peace at work.

Even though we can’t control what shows up at work, we can control how we show up.

Embracing self-love will allow us to set boundaries, keep our mental and physical health a priority, and open us up to do truly great work. All because we realize we are worthy of love and happiness.

Non-attachment can teach us to let go of our clinging to our job title, salary, and the sense that our self-worth is driven by our career accomplishments. There’s so much more to our lives than just our careers.

When we achieve self-love and approach work with non-attachment, we can treat our coworkers with more kindness and feel compassion instead of stress.

Career empowerment isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something that you build. 

Much love,

Spenser

P.S. I hinted at it earlier, but I’ve finally embraced what the universe is telling me and am becoming a Career Coach. Lots of friends have asked for job advice over the years. Given that I’ve spent 10 years in HR and have changed careers myself, I figured what better way to give back to those struggling with job and career decisions? 

If you’re looking to reinvent your career or are struggling with anything at work, just reply to this email. I’d love to chat more about how I can help you.