Your Professional vs. Creative Self – WN 017

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 17: Your Professional Vs. Your Creative Self.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And today we’re going to talk about not only work-life balance, but work, life and writing balance. This is one of the reasons that I started this podcast. I wanted to help aspiring writers, yes, but I also wanted to help aspiring writers who were busy doing other things to get the time, energy and courage they needed to work on their writing, their passion project, whatever it was, every day.

So throughout today’s discussion, we’ll be looking at why a balance is important, or for some people, essential, and what we can do to bring a little bit more positivity or energy into each of these realms. Now, when I start talking about energy and positivity and realms, and what have you, I know that I sound a little bit new age-y. I promise I won’t have you placing crystals in rooms or drinking sun tea, or… I don’t even know. But today’s discussion is going to be a practical look at how you’re living your life, and how to find a healthier work, life and writing balance.

Sometimes when I talk about work, life, writing balance, I feel like I’m not talking about one person juggling three different things, but rather, I’m talking about three different people who all have to get along and share the 24 hours that come in each day. So sometimes I feel like there’s work Sarah, life-at-home Sarah and writing Sarah. Each of those three realms: work, life and writing/passion project, has certain expectations that go along with the role. And sometimes each role feels like it needs a completely different person at the helm.

For example, when I’m at work, it’s expected that I act professionally, that I be a knowledgeable and well-spoken expert for our clients, and then I’m happy and smiling and a good and productive member of society. However, creative Sarah is kind of none of those things. Creative Sarah is weird and brooding and moody and cherishes alone time and walks by herself. She says things out loud just to test how they sound, no matter how bizarre they are. And in general, my creative self is more real and more free to be real. So who are your work and life and writing/passion project selves? And are they different from each other?

When I talk about your work self, I’m talking about the you that you have to represent at work. I kind of already described what I have to do, but for your part, if you’re in customer service, you probably have to smile a lot and told back your temper, especially if you’re in retail. Maybe you do data entry, or maybe you make sandwiches, or maybe you teach, or you do science to stuff. Whatever it is you do, this work self is expected to get along with others, to go on team outings, to be pleasant on the phone with customers, to teach math in a certain way, to spend your idle time chit chatting with your other coworkers about Dancing with the Stars, or The Biggest Loser, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, despite whatever interest or lack thereof you may have in these programs.

There’s really no getting around this, we have to have a work self, because unless you’re fantastically wealthy, you have to work. You have to hold down a job and make money. And that’s good, that’s fine. That’s how this economy works. And there are both positive and negative aspects to the working self, because there is a balance in each of these three selves, positive and negative, just as there is a balance among the three selves. So on the positive side of the work self, the work you do may be very fulfilling and meaningful. If you’re a teacher and you love to teach, if you’re a nurse and you know that you do your job well and you help people to get better, that is awesome.

However, the opposite side of that is when you hate your job and you don’t feel like the work you’re doing is meaningful, and it’s certainly not fulfilling. And yeah, you’re getting paid, but maybe you’re not the type of person who finds meaning in money, or maybe you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to find meaning in money. So let’s switch gears and talk about your life self. In the work, life, passion project/writing balance, this life slice, which is hard to say… Life slice is the part of you that hangs out with friends and family, that cooks dinner and washes dishes, and likes to go hiking on the weekends or relax in the evenings with a TV show or a movie. This is the you that eats and sleeps and stays alive. This is a good and important part of yourself, though often, it’s one that gets neglected.

Now, your life self, just like your work self, can have a positive side and a negative side. So it has its own balance to keep. This self can be very positive and fulfilling if you have a rich home life, or if you have a lot of awesome friends that you get to spend time with, or if you are an active volunteer, be it at church with the PTA. The negative side of your life self can get really negative though. This has, I think, some of the highest highs and some of the lowest lows. If you are dealing with a difficult family situation or an illness, if you have money problems, or if you’re unhappy in wherever you are, it can often be the most difficult to strike a balance between the positive and negative of life.

Finally, let’s talk about your writing self, or what I sometimes call your passion project itself. This is a writing podcast, so I’ll talk about writing. But also if you’re, say an architect or an artist or a web developer, you are still deeply creative. And I want to acknowledge that you have a creative side too, so this also applies to you. This creative self is whoever you are when you’re doing what you love the most, when you’re working on that passion project, when you’re working on your novel, when you’re taking pictures, when you’re programming websites. This is you in your element, this is you sitting down and getting to work and being the person that you were made to be, with the gifts and skills you are given.

This is, for me at least, where I find my most deeply true self. When I’m writing, when I’m processing my emotions through a story, when I’m creating, I feel the most myself. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t positive and negative elements that go along with this one too. In episode 10 of the Right Now Podcast, I talked about the difference between obsessive and harmonious passion. And I think that illustrates very nicely, the positives and negatives of your writing self. So the positive, or the harmonious, is for example, when you’re writing and you’re in that wonderful place where everything is coming together, and what you’re creating is in harmony with who you are and what you believe, and it’s something that can be used to help others.

An obsessive passion, or the negative side is when a passion or your writing is taken too far and it begins to hurt yourself or others. If you, as the word implies, obsess over it, that can be very deeply unhealthy, and it can lead to very negative consequences for your other two parts of yourself. So that’s sort of a brief definition of each, so work, life and writing selves. And then positive and negative balances within each of those. And if you’d like an illustration of what this can look like and how these selves are different, I have three different social media profiles that I use every day. I use Twitter professionally. And so I’ll tweet about content strategy or information architecture or leadership in the office. This is also where I leave inspirational quotes for writers, updates on my podcast, and sort of other industry related articles and such. No, it’s not a hundred percent work-related. Sometimes I’ll post an update like, “Oh, I’m so angry,” or a picture of one of my cats. But for the most part, my Twitter account is a reflection of my professional work self.

My life self is best represented by my Facebook account. And again, this is my personal Facebook account, not The Write Now Podcast Facebook account. My personal Facebook accounts, I have pictures of my friends and family, I have personal updates, vacation pictures; all that junk that you put on Facebook, because Facebook is there and you have all that junk. This is where I’ll post things that I’m proud of or interested in. This’ll be articles on TV shows that I’m interested in, or how a certain new superhero movie either does or does not portray women realistically. That kind of stuff. I very rarely post about work on Facebook.

Likewise, this is also not where I post about creative stuff. Ello is where I post my creative stuff. And I know that hardly anyone is on Ello, and nobody I know really uses it, which is why it’s a great place to be experimental and creative, and to be my truest self without worrying that anybody is going to really read it or look at it or judge me by it. And as my creative self is one of those things that’s difficult to explain, I will simply link to it in today’s show notes. And if you want, you can peruse it, and if not, maybe you’re better off.

So what I want to ask you is, can you identify your work self, your life self, and your writing self, or your creative self? Think about that for a second. And then when you do, I want you to write three words on a sheet of paper: work, life, and either writing or creative. Next to each one, I want you to put a number, and I want that number to be a percent that represents how much energy you put toward each one. Now, when I say energy, I’m not talking about time. Time and energy are very different things. So I might be spending time at work, but if I have a loved one with an illness, I might be spending my energy worrying about them, or I might be at home, hanging out on the couch with my family and my pets watching a movie, but I’m not watching the movie, I’m checking my work email on my phone. In that case, my energy would be going toward work, even though my time would be spent at home with my family.

So out of a hundred percent, how much energy do you put into each of these realms? Now, I’m bad at math, and so I had to go through and double check that everything added up to a hundred. But for me, after I took some time to think about it honestly, I realized that I expend 70% of my energy on work. I spend 25% of my energy living my life. Oh, and you’re going to judge me for this, but I spend 5% of my energy on creative writing. Not great for someone who finds joy and satisfaction in writing. This can be per day, per week, per hour, per year, however you want to break it up. I looked at mine by the day.

But what I’m curious to know is if, when you sit down and honestly think about this, if it surprises you at all, or if it simply confirms something that you already knew. I think that for me, it’s bothered me, but it didn’t necessarily surprise me. You can probably tell from my accent that I am an American. And I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere else, but I know that Americans are singularly obsessed with work. I always said that I would never let myself become one of those workaholics. I have a lot of workaholics in my family, people for whom work is all-consuming, and I don’t want to become that. And so let’s just say I have some work to do.

Okay. I’m going to have you write down three more numbers. Next to your work, life and writing percentages of how you’re expending your energy today, I want you to write down a more ideal breakdown, a breakdown that represents a more satisfactory balance for you. What would make your life more satisfying? What kind of balance do you need? I want to point out that in order to find balance, these three realms don’t have to be 33%, 33%, 33%. When I talk about a healthy balance, what I’m talking about is finding a mixture that works the best for you and that is the most healthy for you.

I know a lot of people who would like to focus on being a better parent or a better sister or a better daughter or a better son. And so for them, a healthy balance might be 50% energy expended in the life category. So I thought about it for myself, and I think for me, what it would take is 30% for work, 35% for life and 35% for writing. And yes, I checked and it adds up to a hundred. And again, this is not time. There are only 24 hours in a day. And if you were to split the 24 hours out mathematically, then all eight of your life hours would be spent sleeping, if you sleep eight hours a night. So that’s why I’m talking about the energy that you’re expending while you’re awake.

So you’ve written down the energy that you’re expending toward each of these three realms, and then you’ve written down a more satisfactory balance. Or maybe it’s exactly the same as what you’re doing now, in which case that’s awesome. You’ve achieved something that very few people have been able to do. What I want you to do right now is to take a look at the one that is most dominantly using up your energy. So for me, that would be work at 70%. Because when one of these three items is really severely dominant over the others, or at least dominant in a way that is not aligned with your satisfaction percentages…

So if you want one to be dominant and it’s dominant, that’s awesome. But if one is dominant that you don’t want to be dominant, that can have a huge effect on your life. If your writing is disproportionately dominant, I guess, first of all, that’s awesome, and I kind of wish that I was in your boat. But what that might look like from the positive side is that you’re living life as a writer and you’re expending all of your energy toward that thing that you love to do. On the negative side, maybe you’re the quintessential starving artist, suffering for your craft.

Similarly, if your life slice is dominant, the positive side of that is you might lead a very rich and fulfilling home life. But on the downside, you might be perceived as a slacker at work, or you might not get as much writing done as you want to. For that example, I always think of Jerry Gergich from Parks and Rec, who is… And I’m not saying you’re Jerry Gergich, if this is you. I’m going to dig my hole a little deeper here. He’s kind of this, I don’t know, mediocre doofus at work. And then he goes home and he has this beautiful wife and these beautiful daughters in this cordless house, and he’s so happy, alive, and grateful to be with them. He is a very rich and interesting character.

Anyway. I’ve never been in either of those cases, where creativity or life is the dominant energy sucker in my life. For me, that’s always been work for different reasons. Have you had a job that you’ve hated before? I have. Whether it’s because of that one coworker whom you just can’t get along with and who makes your working life hell, or whether you simply hate the work and find it mind-numbing or frustrating or angering. If you’re stuck in a cubicle, listening to music, piped in overhead, that you have no control over, if you’re seemingly miles away from a window in your office space, if you have to wear cramping, uncomfortable suit, coats and ties and high heels every day. You can maybe tell I haven’t had the greatest time in corporate work environments.

Sometimes things fit you in, sometimes they don’t. It was actually in a situation very similar to this in which I first came up with my idea for doing a podcast. It was called The Outlaw Novelist Project. And you can actually still find it. The website is still live at outlawnovelist.com. And I started The Outlaw Novelist, or at least I dreamed about starting it. I never actually did, but I was so angry. I was so angry at being a square peg in a round hole. And I was so frustrated dealing with that coworker who I could never please, or that manager who always gave me snide looks.

I know that a lot of creative things are born out of struggle and strife, and this would have been one of those things. So if you’re in a job that you dislike, you can see that rebelling against it, or finding ways to be less angry at it, or daydreaming ways to get even with that coworker, you can see that that can take up a lot of your energy. Now, if you’re in a job that you love, like I am right now, this can also be a positive thing. I’m in a position of leadership, I get to do public speaking gigs, which I love, I get to work on websites and do cool strategy stuff that I love doing, and I work with some just amazing and smart people, whom I am glad to count among my friends. Also, I get to wear jeans to work.

So what I’d like you to do is think about this two-part question. What can you do to A, improve the positive-negative balance of each of the three realms of work, life and writing/creative/passion project? What can you do to improve the positive or negative balance of each of those? And part two of that question, what can you do to balance out the amount of energy that you’re spending in each of these realms? Again, not necessarily equal them out, and not necessarily balance out the time. But now that you’ve illustrated what your satisfactory or healthiest balance would be between those three, how do you start working toward that?

For me, I want to lower my work energy output and increase my creative writing. And so some things I could do there would be, while I’m walking to work or riding the bus to work, I can scribble down notes for my novel, I can use my lunch break to write a couple hundred words a day, I can cancel some of my volunteer obligations in the evenings and make sure I have a dedicated writing night at least once a week, I can keep my little idea journal at my desk at work, and whenever I have an idea, I can quickly jot it down so I don’t forget it.

At the end of the day, what I want this podcast to do for you is to help you find that healthy work, life and writing balance. I would also love to hear where you are right now in your journey. If you’d like to let me know, you can go ahead and email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Alternately, you can leave a comment in the show notes for episode 17, or get in touch with me using my handy dandy contact form on sarahwerner.com. What do you plan to do for a healthier balance?

This week’s book of the week is something I never thought I would read in a million years. So let me do a little explaining on the backstory here. Back in high school and then in college, I spent a lot of time, both hanging out in and working at libraries. I spent a lot of time shelving books and just seeing what people checked out, and I noticed something that was just more popular than I could understand. There were these mystery series, and there were maybe like three or four different ones, but they were mystery series that were either starring or coauthored by a cat. Series such as The Cat Who… by Lilly and Jackson Braun, or the series that’s coauthored by Rita Mae Brown and her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown.

Okay. Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head, but I think there are more. But I always thought as I was shelving those, who are these written for? Who reads these? Will I look like a giant weirdo if I check one out from the library? And since I was working in the library and I knew everyone there, I didn’t want them to know that I was checking out a crazy cat mystery. But you know what? I’m an adult now. And I buy books without worrying what other people will think of me, hence like half my collection.

So this week, I indulged my curiosity and read The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lillian Jackson Braun. I was both pleased and somewhat disappointed that this was not as weird as I expected it to be. In fact, it was kind of a run-of-the-mill mystery. It’s very much what mystery readers and writers call a cozy. So it’s not super terrifying when a dead body is found, it’s usually just like, “Oh my, a body. Let’s figure out who did it.” Think Miss Marple, who is the quintessential cozy mystery heroin. This book is about a news reporter named Jim, who has a last name that I cannot and will not attempt to pronounce, it begins of the Q. So we have Jim Q., who is a reporter, and, may I add, much to my surprise/chagrin, not a cat.

I was actually really surprised. I thought that the main character is actually going to be a cat. And in fact, aside from having a cat character and speaking very highly of how wonderful cats are, this really didn’t deviate much from your standard cozy mystery. So in the plot of this mystery, there is an art critic who is found dead, and Jim Q. and the art critic’s cat, whose name is Coco, have to solve the mystery. I think it must be hard to write a novel like this, because you have to balance having the cat matter with having the cat be a deus ex machina, or just give everything away.

And so throughout the story, as Jim Q., the reporter finds clues and investigate secret passageways, the cat is always like surreptitiously, like pointing to things and accidentally scratching at walls, behind which there are secret corridors and such. So props to Ms. Braun for, I think, really balancing that out well. Overall, it was an enjoyable read if you like cozy mysteries and cats. If you want to keep up with what I’m reading, you can friend me on Goodreads or keep listening to this podcast.

I had mentioned earlier while I was talking about having to work in a job that you just really hated that I had contemplated starting a podcast called The Outlaw Novelist. And I am realizing just now that I didn’t really explain what that meant or where I got that from. There’s a quote by Nelson Mandela that says, “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” And you can tell maybe that I was a little younger and a little bit more over-dramatic or passionate when I first had this idea, because I said, “Oh, I can’t talk about truth and beauty and things that I love and things that matter in the workplace. I can only talk about spreadsheets and numbers, and if I’m wearing the right type of khakis.”

I said, “I’m going to become a novel-writing outlaw, and I’m going to do my assigned work as quickly as I can so that any free time, I can use to work on being a little rebellious writer.” Because at that time, I was in a job that just had a lot of downtime, a lot of sitting around and kind of waiting for customers. So I wrote a lot. But since my anger and hatred at work were dominating my energy, my writing was very much affected by it, and it was angry and vengeful and not healthy. Maybe resentful is the word that I’m looking for. Either way. Sometimes I go back and look at the stuff that I wrote back then, and I’m like yeesh, drama.

So I’m glad I waited a few years. And by a few years, I mean many years, to start the Right Now Podcast instead of The Outlaw Novelist. I would like to thank my Patreon supporters, Sean Locke, official rad dude, Rebecca Werner, official podcast caffeinator, and all of you other wonderful, lovely people who contribute financially to help keep this podcast afloat. Thank you so much. I would also like to thank you for listening today. I encourage you to email or contact me about where you are in your writing journey and how you’re doing with your work, life and writing balance. You can also sign up for the Right Now Podcast official email/newsletter list, it’s free. I send you email newsletters, and you can sign up on my website.

Finally, if you find that you enjoyed listening to the Right Now Podcast and you are an iTunes user/account holder, I would ask that you consider leaving me a review on iTunes for The Right Now Podcast. Those reviews go a super long way in helping get the word out about this podcast and to help keep my listener base growing. User, Squid Eyes said, “Listen now. Five stars. Sarah’s podcast offers everything an aspiring writer needs: useful and relevant advice, encouragement, and validation. When I’m struggling with my writing, I just listen to an episode of Write Now, which leaves me feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and part of a larger community of writers. Sarah’s passion is evident and infectious. This is a must-listen-to for all writers.” Thank you so much for your kind review, Squid Eyes, whoever you are, with that awesome name. Once again, those reviews are immensely, immensely wonderful and useful in helping my podcast to grow.

And with that, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I want to remind you that no matter how you’re spending your energy right now, be it work, life or writing, no matter what, you are still a writer, and I encourage you to keep writing.