What Death Taught Me About Work
There have been three key events that markedly silenced the presence of my working life in the past several years.
The Black Saturday Bushfires where we waited and watched over a two week period to see if the fire would continue towards us until a miracle wind change pushed it back on itself.
COVID 19 where I had to rebalance my role as a single parent to support two teenagers trying to work to a normal school timetable from home; my commute was removed making new space in my day.
The cancer diagnosis and then death of my step-father, with whom I spoke each day and who saw me as my truest self; the good, bad and the ugly.
That last one taught me the most important lessons about living and, as a result, about how important it is to be aware of your work, its impact (good and bad) and its place. Yes, its place. Because if that death taught me anything it was how skewed we get around what our true priorities really are.
I say this often when I work with teams in pressured environments, where people are working days and nights and weekends: “No one ever says they wished they’d worked more on their death bed.”
After his death I thought about many things which I can share another time, but the work ones were interesting to me. They were made life changing by the life-changing event of death.
Before he died, I looked at my time with my teenage children and made a commitment to spend more time with them while they were still in school. I figured I had only a couple of summer school holidays left before they would grow up and be doing their own things. To do this, and yes I have the privilege of managing my own work, I took a couple of summers off. I was still tinkering back in work bits and pieces, but I moved work out of the way and prioritised time with my young family: time I was never going to get back.
Urgency is really never that urgent. The sky will not fall in. Often within a work environment, urgency is a disease of reactive leadership, where the systematic issues which cause it are never dealt with. And the thing which can really look urgency in the face is compassion. If something seems do or die in the office, but someone suffers something that means they can’t be there for whatever reason, the team absorbs on behalf of the missing person. We all just pitch in and it gets done and we carry on. Deadlines, pressure, stress, why do we worship these states so blindly? Why don’t we look at them and change how we do things?
Work is one part of a full life and your work can and should change. You can decide to do something different or better. You can change what your working routine looks like in terms of hours, rhythm, who you will work with and for. You can pick up a long lost ambition and put a fire back in your belly and you can move in another direction. You can. I know you think you cannot, but you are lying to yourself.
Check your golden handcuffs regularly and when you can, make sure you either loosen them or get rid of them entirely. Be aware, at the very least, that your income and then your standard of living could have you caught in a jail of existence where the purpose of earning money is so central to everything else that you aren’t living and being that greatly spirited, amazing human you once were back when you were laughing with your little friends, climbing trees, making a witches’ stew with mud and leaves or just reading a book quietly on your lonesome.
Learn to put work in its place. For this you need to be aware of where you put work in your list of priorities. Then you need to have a deep think about why it’s there and what gave it its status. But perhaps you already have it in that moderately important place and if you do, big gold star. You are probably living, which is what we are meant to be doing.
Sometimes what you’ve ended up doing for a living is less about the tasks and more about your interaction with the other humans who you spend time with everyday. Work this statement out yourself and see what it means for you. Read it again. Your role in the world is larger and more significant than just the job title you have been allocated.
Get perspective on the big game. Look at corporate in the eye and see it for what it really is. Likewise, look at your leadership people in the eye and see them for their human selves and reflect on how their influence either drives you or drains you.
There are lots of things you are good at. And your contribution in terms of work can draw on any number of these things. Try, please, to do something that lights you up. Because when you light up at work, you light up others around you.
And finally, grief is a very, very real thing. When people return to work after the loss of someone, that grief is there, in them, below the surface. Remember this. Check in. See if you can assist in any way, say take on a task, buy a coffee, listen perhaps.
There are more. But you get my drift. And don’t wait for someone to die to wake up that time is your own, and yes, precious. Nothing like the loss of a special person, who retired early, loved life and lived it fully, to become a magical compass for self-reflection and change. I miss him greatly. I am truly blessed for the lessons.