Thank you Pontus Staunstrup for the honest and refreshing piece “Don’t Let Your Boss Define You”.
Whilst we get slapped with a ton of motivational memes and articles about believing in oneself, many struggle with simply defining oneself. This is normal because life is a series of choices and incidents. We develop new skills, perspectives and idiosyncrasies as we go through these experiences and so our definition of who we are can change and if we are growing (in that we set out to challenge ourselves or to consistently face our fears) significant change inevitably happens. I don’t know about you, but I’m highly suspicious of people who say “I’m cock sure of who I am; I don’t change no matter what. I’m real“.
Yeah….because anyone who has a reinvigorated thought process as a result of growth is fake.
Pontus gives great advice to the young and not-so-young about the fallacy of allowing bosses to determine for us who we are as professionals. This is not easy; years of exposure to poorly defined KPI followed by illogical performance appraisals, potential assessments that go nowhere, useless training programmes and lengthy motivational chats do nothing but clog your mind with noise. Save for some useful comments, I’m willing to wager that up to 90% of the drivel you hear can be categorised as:
- Assessment based on skills they copied from a generic job description from circa early 90’s with no input whatsoever from you about what the real work requires, which you have been doing for a while now
- Who they want you to be, not how you are contributing to enterprise growth (comply, comply, comply or die)
- Cutting you down to a job role, so they can update that job description from the 90’s to throw at the person after you
This isn’t just limited to work: it happens in your personal relationships too. Ever hear people complain about “wanting to change my spouse because he/she is just so etc.” or “I don’t seem to fit into the group; I feel disengaged” or “I can’t function in this relationship because he/she/they want me to do this/behave this way and it is against my values/ethics/I don’t give tomato’s stem”?
You can comply, comply, comply or die.
Or you can check out, type that goodbye letter with your two middle fingers and go live your best life knowing that you are responsible for who you be and become.
Melcontentious 