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When people ask “How are you doing?”, sometimes I have to stop and think. The expected response is “great” on a good day or “good, thanks” on others. (Some Brits still prefer the old-fashioned answer, “fair to mediocre” or even “fair to shit” as a useful general summary of life’s vicissitudes.)
But instead of finding the right tone, what gives me pause is figuring out which “I” is being asked the question. Some items whether at work or at home will probably go very well. Others lean more toward the “middle age is a dumpster fire” or “my dreams have turned to ashes in my mouth” end of the scale.
This is partly due to the level of post-pandemic chaos in our lives. But the contemporary trend toward side jobs, as well as multifaceted jobs, means that many of us have multidisciplinary careers: we’re all slashies of some kind. Some wise words from a former high-level athlete that I read the other day raised this question in me: If we all wear so many hats, how will we decide which one is the captain’s hat?
Mike Brearley, who once managed a hugely successful England cricket team, is now a psychoanalyst. He maintains that each of us has a team of inner players, whom we must train so that we can use all their abilities for optimal performance and find the balance between them for a happy existence. “We all have a forgiving side, a playful side, a serious side, a work ethic, a superego or a hard conscience,” he said in a recent interview with the Cambridge University alumni magazine.
Sometimes this becomes an internal competition, a push to be the star player, particularly for people like Brearley, who have scholarly tendencies (in addition to being a top international athlete and his later work as an analyst, he has been a philosophy professor ). Just as athletes roll their eyes at intellectuals, “each side tends to belittle the other and you feel stupid or guilty for having this seemingly foreign thought or attitude.”
Instead of fighting with ourselves and indulging in the equivalent of locker room fights, his advice, in a book published last year, was that “governing ourselves, like captaining a team, requires the willingness to leave space for thoughts and feelings.” He suggests “pushing rather than forcing” these parts of ourselves to make them more effective.
For those of us who will never lead a national team or lead others to victory, these ideas are useful anyway. We can all recognize the feeling of being pulled in different directions, as well as the “stay in your lane” messages that can prevent employees from reaching their potential or developing new talent. Ideally, the Brearley method would mean using all aspects of our personality and all of our abilities to overcome that type of limiting attitude at work.
Although it is a little intimidating. I was never good at games, my idea of sports training is that sadistic PE teachers make us play netball in the freezing cold. When employers say that staff should feel comfortable enough to “be themselves at work” and appear with all themselves, could things get complicated?
But if each of us has the equivalent of a sports team, we can presumably choose who to bench and which to play when various challenges arise. Realistically, when career decisions have to be made, we may have to exclude some of our ambitions and even withdraw others.
A wise friend who was reflecting on an important decision once observed something similar: We are all “a crowd, going around, with different impulses and desires.” Our work and personal ambitions may be hampered by the confusion that may arise, despite Brearley’s advice. Not all our players can aspire to achieve glory or be declared man or woman of the match.
Trade-offs are inevitable. So perhaps, as we learn to manage and motivate our internal team, we should also think slightly differently about what constitutes a “win.”
Adam Phillips, a great writer on psychoanalysis, is another who argues persuasively in his essay. About success that our goals and ambitions are multiple: “Our different selves have different projects,” he writes, but he adds that if you are losing in one area of your life, it is very possible that you are winning in another. That, at least, is a wonderful idea for those trying to play multiple games at once.