Soul Work

Our labor is a large part of our lives, and the more it can feed the body and soul, the stronger and better we will become.

But how can your soul grow and thrive at work? Where projects and deadlines take first priority, and additionally people worry about status and authority?

Making a bit of your work a second home for your soul

Take something at work, and take care of it. Something your manager isn’t watching over your shoulder about. Something no one else cares much about and isn’t handled consistently. This could be a certain bit of polish you add to documents or presentations that your boss and coworkers couldn’t be cared to do. This could be a report you post regularly that was only previously asked for infrequently. It could be a bit of extra care taken during presentations or client meetings. For lower level service workers, could be an extra care you give to regular customers. For executives it could be regular industry research, reading papers and articles as much as you can manage. But it has to be regular, something you do every day.

What this does, is it binds you to you work, and your work to you. Effort does not go unseen by your own body or soul, any habitual effort you put in strengthens the habit and makes it easier for the will to repeat the activity. It not only makes you more reliable at this one thing, additionally it makes the upstream tasks become more urgent: you need to get to work on time so you can do this thing. You need to communicate your needs to your boss clearly so you can complete this thing. You stop procrastinating with these personal difficulties, and start focusing on getting the basics out of the way.

This effort is also not unseen by others. This one thing you pick up and do reliably becomes the biggest mark of your identity at work: more important than your pay, more important than job description, more important than overall performance. Only formal hierarchical authority is more important in how people see you. You become the thing you do reliably that no one asks you to do. Some success cases include:

• The high school teacher who patrols the hallway becomes the de-factor disciplinary officer.
• The software engineer who picks up operational tasks becomes defacto dev-ops
• The team member who organizes any team celebrations or fun meetings becomes the celebrations person.

Going extra on an individual project, or going above and beyond for a single sales opportunity is not what I’m talking about here. These might bring the company lasting benefit, but not your soul. Even if you get that promotion, this sense of going extra will wear down on your soul instead of support it and build it up. I’ve met many people who have tried to tie their identity to their will to go above and beyond, and yet to meet anyone who has succeeded. They either destroy themselves or their relationship with their employer. These failure cases include:

• The Self Leveler: Some people grow strong and obedient by doing what they are told needs to be done, even if that goes beyond their job description. But once they try to obey their own ambition, and drive their own determinations of what need to be done to succeed, and simultaneously level-up their own effort levels to match the up-leveling of their ambition, they start to drift into burnout and failure.
• The Information Octopus: Some people grow knowledgeable by reading about others in their same situation and what they did to work their way out. But once they try to reach every possible information channel and do too much of their own analysis to reach determinations of what to do, they often go into analysis paralysis and suffer from anxiety.
• The Project Slave: Some people gain skills by throwing themselves into a project, and diving again and again into the details, only leaving when it is truly great. However, this is unlikely to result in something needed by the company—most projects like this are treated as employee training at best, and of bad project management in typical case, and as hour theft at worst. Its not a sustainable relationship with your employer, and will not create a home.
• The Risk Seeker: Some people gain valuable experience by taking bit risks at work frequently. However, big risks mean big failures, again breaking down their relationship with their employer over time.

Home is a comforting, supportive relationship between you and your surrounding. Building this home for your soul requires daily effort, and certain types of time-micromanaging managers will see effort this as wasted time, and will squeeze out most of the opportunities for this work. If you are stuck in such a tyrannical place, building a home can be much harder, as you will suffer abuse and criticism for your efforts. But uphill battles can sometime crest the hill, as success in putting a soul into your soulless environment may be celebrated by coworkers who will value and imitate your actions. And the tyrannical element may be rooted out by wiser superiors up the chain. But there are more dangers than opportunities: even temporary successes can be squashed brutally by envy and pride, and this miserable experience can teach us wrong lessons about life. Much better to help build up an organization that is struggling with issues like incompetence and neglect than one struggling with tyrannical micromanagement.

Bring a bit of your work home

Modern work can be very alienating, and one of the most alienating moments is when you return home after a long day of problems and difficulties at work, and no one cares, or even understands those difficulties.

This alienation can hurt home life. You bring home a little bit of your work every day, and when all you bring is money and stress, then your family starts seeing you as what you bring: money and stress. Some simple habits such as not returning home in a stressed state, and building out of office relationships with co-workers to vent on work issues can do a lot for your family. But this is just a mitigation of the problem. Even if you hide problems at work, that doesn’t mean they don’t impact your family. When you call home and say you will be late, or won’t be able to pick up the kids, or announce an emergency trip, or any other issue that creeps into your home life, there won’t be a way to cover it up. Even worse, the simple daily absence of your presence puts a strain. And if you arrive home drained or angry, it doubles the void when you are gone, as there is no redemption in awaiting your return during the time you are gone.

So its often good to bring the best part of your work home. Almost every job has its good days, its fun or interesting events. Even prison guards and garbage collectors have a story to tell. So tell it, and make it prominent. Feature your job as not only your personal endeavor, but a part of the family project.

Only once work is a family matter, not just a matter of money will this alienation start to change. When you call to say you are busy, you can explain what work of importance you have and can negotiate with your spouse. When your children notice that you are visibly stressed and hole up in your office again after dinner, you can tell them a story.

Spend time curating this story. Make it attractive. Make it beautiful. Make it adorn the home and enlarge its purpose. Otherwise it will decay and become a stink in your home, and no one in your family will be able to escape it.

Resonating your work with your passion

People in most career paths, if they are in the right workplace, can build a home for their soul, and bring their work home. A lucky few can do more. A lucky few can work in such a way that they engage a strong passion within themselves while doing the primary part of their work. These lucky few can not only engage in passionate work on occasion, but they can grow their passion into the shape of their job, and grow their job to fit their passion.

When we first encounter a strong passion, it seems like a wind, blowing unpredictably and in which way it will. It can bowl us over. It can rip us away from important work. It can blow us into conflict with coworkers. It can blow us away from our family and friends and into workaholism. It should be treated with care, and we should never confuse our passion with our identity, lest we become a leaf blown around randomly through life without any solid judgement regulating it.

On the other hand, if we protect ourselves from this strong wind, it weakens rapidly, and we lose a source of energy for our soul. This energy does not come back easily when squashed. If we habitually resist all of such winds, in all aspects of our lives, we can become dry, sterile, and lifeless. If we care about our soul, we need to be blown around some of the time, and be rejuvenated in this movement.

Our goal is to develop our passion into something that makes sense in our lives. As our passion develops, and our understanding of it deepens, then we can partially direct its course, selectively encouraging it in some directions, growing it in those areas, discouraging it in others, and tolerating incomplete or new dimensions to the passion it until it can find a productive outlet in our lives and careers. Some specific ideas to encourage your passion to meet your needs includes:

1. Build available space in your schedule for your passions to breathe and grow. This is hard to do in active work environments, so most people engage with passions after normal hours or at home. If no passion comes along by itself then there is no reason to force it, and you can simply find something unimportant to do during this time. But having a habit of regularly being in a place where passions can thrive is important for passions to be encouraged and grow in confidence.
2. Increase the endurance of passions by moving forward passion projects after the passion dissipates. If, with effort, we flesh out what starts with passion, and make it into something satisfying to ourselves or others, then the passion will learn about other aspects of the work, and will stick with us a little longer next time.
3. Tolerate directionless passions, letting them build in us, and let the passion find a productive outlet naturally in the ordinary course of our life. When we tolerate a passion, neither distracting ourselves from it, nor crushing it, nor acquiescing to the pathetic gasps of an directionless passion and letting it have its way, but simply acknowledge it, and let it build, then it will become stronger, more elaborate, more complete. And once a proper outlet is found, it will benefit us all the more thanks to our patience.
4. Distract yourself from passions which are distinctly harmful to you. It will kill part of you, but that is often the price to be paid for living a decent life. If you find a good outlet later in life, then usually the passion can be coaxed back to life.

This is not fun or easy. Putting aside the time and space for passions to eventually fill can be a strain on other relationships either at work or at home. Tolerating the empty feeling of an incomplete, directionless passion can be difficult emotionally and be difficult to balance against letting other passions move forward. But if we develop our passions into something strong and reliable, then we are able to make use of it during our day to day work, and the passion will shine on our work, on ourselves, on our workplace, and on our part of the world.