The Loneliness of Corporate Work
And how we all just want to be seen and heard
On day one of my three-year shamanic practitioner program, our instructor Julie stood in the middle of the circle, in a large open air room, at the YMCA in Estes Park.
“This will be a lonely journey,” she started. “As a healer, you’ll walk this journey alone. You’ll go through training, but no one will ever know what this is really like. Even your loved ones, friends, and family — they’ll be on the sidelines of this journey.”
Our best work, whether its healing or art or creativity, is made on our own. Friends and family can support us, love us, talk to us, and hold us — but they cannot be us. The work is up to us. And us alone.
This kind of singular experience exists in the workplace, too. You’re the only one who does the job you do. You’re the only one with the lived history of the place. Your colleagues, if you’re lucky, may deepen into friends, but they will still only ever know a certain version of you. This version is usually a heightened version of our real selves; at our best we are chirpy — at worst, we are sullen. Either way, it’s an iteration, a slice. It’s not the whole self. So we exist in a kind of lonely interior landscape — straddling this island, with one leg submerged in work, the other dangling into personal, and never the two shall meet.
That is why, when things get challenging (you’re not given the raise you deserve, you don’t feel heard or seen, a colleague gets a promotion and you don’t), it feels strangely intense. Heightened. On edge. You can’t talk to you co-workers about it, that would be gauche. You’ve already talked your partner’s ear off about it, I’m sure they’re sick of hearing about it by now. So you sit, legs in between worlds, wondering what to do. “Is there something wrong with me,” you ask yourself. But there’s no one to answer that question.
As a coach, at first, I was shocked by the intimacy of my conversations with clients. Thoughts and feelings seemed to come spilling out. Knots of emotions, wrapped up tight from years past. I’ve had to build up my capacity as a coach over the years, the ability to hold space for other people’s emotional processing. (In truth, I don’t mind it now — it energizes me, makes me feel needed). So go ahead, I say, let it out. If not now, then when? Tears are good, they are emotion moving through the body. Let it go or else it gets stuck.
The challenge is that we’re taught that we shouldn’t “make such a big deal” about things or that we shouldn’t “be so emotional.” But when so much is on the line: your identity, your paycheck, your sense of purpose, of course we take it seriously. Plus, we all deep down have some encoded ancestral fear of being ostracized from the group (and therefore left to die), so knowing if you’re well liked or secretly hated is kind of key to survival.
So we are tortured: on one hand, we just want to be professional. Mask our emotions. Just play it cool. On the other, this IS a big deal! We want to be good! We want what we’re doing to be valued. Is it too much to say we want to be loved? But we do. We want to be a part of something important, and we want our contributions to matter.
No one was ever successful by burying their emotions. I know we don’t want to make a fuss, but to be honest sometimes there’s no way around it. Recently, I was coaching someone in the C-suite who was thinking of leaving, even after a meteoric rise in the company. Why go, I asked. It was the same thing that most people feel when they leave: they no longer felt seen or heard. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “even at that level, huh.” Yes, especially at that level.
So say the thing. Make the fuss. Express your feelings. Get it out. Because it’s better to spew the mess on the outside than keep it all bottled up, inside you forever. You can’t move on, or move up, without letting the world know how you feel. Even at the highest levels, the rules apply.
Here’s to saying your truth,
xo
Mandy aka Career Coach Mandy
PS. if you’re on the fence about whether you should stay or go, I recently created a 28-page workbook called the “Should I Quit” journal. It is a physical journal that you write in, and it includes guided prompts, self-reflection questions, and is designed to help you through challenging lines of inquiry. It’s $28 and available on my website to be shipped to your home here. If you have TikTok and want to buy it through my TikTok shop, they are offering free shipping (for first time customers, I think), which you can find here.