I’ve begun working with a new client, John Navin, a financial planner (and, it seems, somewhat of an all-around life-coach). I was delighted to have coffee with him and Erica Cosminsky at e|spaces the other day to discuss helping him with his e-mail marketing. While we sat on the patio, John said, in a rather off-hand manner:
“I used to keep two facebooks, one for personal and one for professional, but I stopped that. It’s all one anyway. The personal is professional.”
I was excited to hear someone else say this, because it reminded me of a trend that I’ve been noticing more and more lately – the personalization of the professional. Seth Godin touched on this a month or so ago in a post about the recession and “the coming revolution.”
The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.
For the first few years of operating BIPI, I was in a headspace that was very dual. I wanted to keep the personal, personal and the professional, professional. I had my facebook on lock-down and two twitter accounts. My corporate logo and color scheme was stuffy and my writing stilted.
Who was I kidding? Myself, mostly.
Because as much as HR-departments-of-my-past (cue scary, Halloween music) may have wanted it to not be true, the personal is professional … and vice-versa. And in this Godin-articulated coming revolution, we are all individuals, looking to connect, hoping to do good work, longing to produce quality products, and maybe, just maybe, dreaming of creating something beautiful.
This afternoon, as I grumpily walked in my bare feet out to my kitchen to stick my leftovers-for-lunch in the microwave, I was kind of mad at myself for needing to stop working to eat. I felt a little headachy and a lot frustrated with my productivity on my current task. It was at that moment that I thought again of John’s words. The personal is professional. There’s no way I’ll be able to give the search engine evaluation folks my best without taking care of myself on a personal level, too… feeding myself lunch and having a little non-work time to think while I do.
It makes me wonder – what kinds of things do you do to take care of you, the professional? Whether you’re lucky like I am (right now) to be working from home on a variety of interesting & engaging projects, or you’re stuck slinging lattes like I will be (in just a few hours), how do you take care of yourself so that you can keep doing work you love?
