A History of Bad Self-Management
In The 360 Degree Pivot I wrote about how I blamed my burnout on client work. At the beginning of each week I saw all six calendar slots fully booked and it made me claustrophobic. It made me anxious about showing up and performing for these people on those days. It made me feel responsible, like I had to hold and solve all their problems.
The client work wasn’t the problem, it was me.
I never understood people who said they were booked out and they seemed calm. To me, booked out meant that every possible sliver of time you could have a call with someone was booked. It was genuinely two years into my business that I found out that when people said “booked out” they meant that they had filled the small number of spots they decided were available. My reaction to finding that out was “how do they know how many spots they’re allowed to have?”
So much of my early business was me not realising that I was allowed to do things in a way that worked for me. It was work, and therefore it had to be hard and/or miserable, and I had to do whatever anyone else wanted me to, it wasn’t up to me to say no to someone if they wanted to. I always felt on the cusp of getting in trouble, but I didn’t know with whom. Now it feels like I was waiting for, expecting, a manager to step in; I didn’t realise that that manager was me.
I was terrible at managing myself and my work. There was no end point. There was always more to do. The day never truly ended, it petered out and I went to bed thrumming with everything there still was. I thought I couldn’t stop, couldn’t set a limit, couldn’t do something I wanted for too long because no one had told me I was allowed to.
What didn’t help was that I’d always had a tendency to make work my personality. I’d been ambitious and wanted a high status job and chased impressive sounding job titles because that would mean something about me. Being a high achiever was who I was, and I needed success in the way that I actually needed a rest. I thought being self-employed had “cured” me of that now that I wasn’t on a corporate ladder, but really it made it worse.
Just as there was no one to tell what I was allowed to do, there was no one to tell me to stop. There was no leaving the office at the end of the day, no clocking off. Living far away from home there were no friends or family or hobbies to distract me from wrapping my whole self up in work, in an attempt to prove something about myself to the world. In order to believe I had value.
None of that, clearly, was the client work. It was me not managing myself well. Not realising that I was an adult woman who could make her own choices. Not believing that I had more to give than what I imagined people wanted from me.
It has taken me six years to realise this. Which feels crazy when, my God, it is so obvious. I suppose it is easier to believe the problem is a tangible thing you can stop doing, rather than that the problem is a core personality trait. Those things are harder to change and so you just ignore what’s inconvenient.
But in the meantime I have learned to manage myself better. I’ve learned to write a short daily list and have that be it for the work day. I have learned that I can set my own limits of what is too much. I have learned that having a break for a walk around the block is usually the very best thing I can do for my work.
While I usually forget, I am now quicker at reminding myself that I am 32 years old and it is unlikely that anyone is going to tell me off. And most of all, I am continuing to unpick the tight stitches I made to join worth, self, and work. I am remembering to question why I think I want things, I am remembering that none of this makes me, I am figuring out who is just Kayte.
And most of all I’m learning to manage myself – and no, I am not easy to manage. Managing me is toeing a line between aggressive desire to overachieve, and the longing to collapse because the effort is just too uncomfortable. I am learning that I need to do some sprints, ease up on wildly spiralling expectations, have little rewards of choccy, and also that once I get going I sometimes won’t stop unless a hand rests gently on my shoulder. I am learning that that hand should be mine.
