I've always been an anthropologist of sorts. Moving thirteen times before you graduate high school will do that to a kid. I learned very quickly how to observe the people. To figure out what was different, what was the same, and how to communicate in their way. How to adapt and change to fit in, too.
This life education translates easily into my business. I speak with people from every kind of background and every corner of the world. During hiring manager intake meetings, I’m trying to go from stranger to someone who understands. In just 30 minutes, I try to fundamentally understand what they do. But even more so, I try to understand their culture and what matters most.
As a natural observer of people and cultures, these last few weeks traveling Europe have been fascinating. We've traveled to Latvia, Italy, and this week to northern England and Scotland. To say each of these places is different is a wild understatement. One big surprise? I had a much more difficult time understanding accents in Scotland than in Latvia.
The other? I enjoyed a completely different work schedule. What was unique about this trip is that because of time zones for my pronoun training sessions, my work day began most evenings as many others began dinner. I had the chance to experience the city by day. It was so different than the US.
What I observed in Latvia and Italy was a culture more focused on what they experienced outside of the office. Their after hours weren’t spent checking emails or following up long after leaving the office. In fact, in Italy I watched waiters shoo away a person that tried to fill out forms at their restaurant. Take that, work/life balance. This is life, period.
The second we entered England, a culture centered around work started to appear again. Even after midnight on Saturday after we arrived, I saw people in the hotel lobby working away at their spreadsheets with a glass of wine as if they were perfecting balance at it’s best. You’d think the deadline looming was life or death. Maybe it was, but that's not the point here.
I left these places realizing that I want to fundamentally change the way I work. My life isn’t full of deadlines that are life or death. I prefer to work with less urgency, more intention. Less speed, more breaks. A life where love is at the center, not work. To my surprise, working in this way made me more productive - not less. I got a lot more done with this more casual approach to working than I ever did forcing myself to open my laptop from sunrise until bed time.
I was working hard. I did a pronoun session and calls almost every day - but it didn’t feel as exhausting as my mobile office usually does. I didn’t dream about work and the next thing I needed to do. I let my body follow a more natural order of things. I let myself wake up without an alarm, stay up until I was tired, and work on things when I felt the right creative energy for getting the thing done.
It's clear to me after this trip that working relentlessly will never make me happy the way a latte macchiato break at 3 pm will. It'll never make me feel as free as a truly flexible schedule. It won't make me more present for the people I love, either. It made me realize I have to change the way I work to change how it feels.
As so many people argue remote vs going back to the office and the value of one method over another, I have seen first hand that everyone operates on a different plan. One size fits all doesn’t work, unless it’s Italian coffee in the afternoon. In that case, I think it equally brings joy to us all.
