Intuitive Working
How would you work if you could work the way you want?
Kids and dogs like to have a job. I give my granddaughter a rag and a spray bottle full of water and she will clean the bathroom with me. She wields her child size rake with focus, picking up the leaves and putting them into her kid sized bin. She even has toddler gardening gloves. It’s serious to her, not play.
She and I work together. We don our gardening gloves, get our rakes, and work. We use our bodies, we are outside, and when we are done we have a snack.
I’ve had a number of conversations recently with friends and clients about working less. Sometimes it’s for health reasons, sometimes because of pressing family obligations, sometimes it’s a transition out of a position. One friend in her twenties told me this week that she and most of her friends are rethinking how they work after the long pandemic.
Many of these people are driven. They are used to working very long hours in stressful high-powered positions. Others, like my young friend in her twenties, are working a day job and doing art in the evenings. A forty-hour work week would probably feel like a vacation for this group.
What if you tried intuitive working, I said to a client. Have you ever heard of intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating, as I understand it, is a response to the depredations of diet culture and – for the purposes my analogy – comprises these steps.
1. See and reframe the unhealthy narratives around food. What if there are no “off limits” or “bad” foods. What if you saw how pervasive diet culture is and intentionally stepped away from it?
2. Eat what you want. Which means paying attention to what your body is telling you.
What’s the analogy to work? What is intuitive work?
1. See and reframe our culture’s unhealthy narratives around work. Hustle culture, workaholism – let’s name it. Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry is a good place to start. She wrote a book called Rest is Resistance.
Capitalism is meant to suck us dry. The podcast Eugene and I did this week was about Addicted Bosses. In our discussion about addiction at work, he told a chilling story. Someone who worked with him developed an addiction to meth. This addiction allowed him to work 23 hours a day. When this man finally went to his boss to tell him he had a problem with meth, the boss asked if he needed more money. To buy the meth. That kept him working 23 hours a day.
That’s the system. With the raft of layoffs, some handled with brutal disregard for the dignity and well-being of the people that were laid off, plenty of people are looking around and wondering why they are putting in all the extra, usually uncompensated, hours working for corporations that treat them and others this way.
Which is a good question to ask yourself.
I get it. I’m second-generation Italian. My father was all about education and work. His identity was rooted in his job. When, in his 40s, he got sick with the heart disease that would take his life at 46, he had to cut back on his work. I remember how bored he was. I was still a teenager, and learned about work from my father. Work was lots of travel, and presentations, and crafting big deals. He traveled quite a bit. He worked hard. And he was proud of what he did.
Until he couldn’t do it in the same way. He seemed lost without his work, grieving that his illness had pushed him off his meteoric career path into a backwater of what seemed to him like make-work.
I don’t want to be so identified with a particular job that losing it excises a critical part of my identity. And yet I have worked sixty plus hour weeks for extended periods of time, travelled extensively, sometimes working through the night. Because I got caught up in the narrative that work led to financial security and that financial security would protect me and my family.
That didn’t turn out to be true for me.
2. Imagine how you would work if you could work how and when you wanted. I understand that for most of us this isn’t something we have the luxury to actually do. But I think it’s useful to ask ourselves the question. Because we might see ways to work more intuitively.
Parents of young children do this all the time. They arrange their schedules so they can have dinner and bedtime with their kids, and then work in the evenings. It’s a start. Then maybe they can evaluate if they want to work in the evenings. Some might – the quiet and opportunity to focus may really help them. For others, evening work may interrupt sleep and rest or time to connect with a spouse or partner.
How can we learn to pay attention to what we want? Really want? Too many of us end up in jobs or careers we didn’t really choose. Expediency, opportunity or need drove most of my job choices. I certainly never woke up and said, gee, I want to sell TV airtime when I grow up. I wanted to be a writer. At least I know that. At least I’ve been able to hold onto what I actually wanted and keep working towards that – even after such a long time that some people would think I’m crazy to not have given up yet.
How many people have just shut down that part of their souls that longs for a particular kind of work? To me, it’s sadder to have lost the dream than to have had the dream not come true yet, or in the ideal way.
When people first hear about intuitive eating, they often say but all I’d eat is ice cream! That can’t possibly work. And yet after the ice cream and the cookies and the chips, they gravitate back to healthier options.
Does intuitive work mean that we stop working? I think not. Most of us have something that could become intuitive work for us.
I write this every week and I don’t, as yet, make a penny off of it. Plenty of artists create for the joy of it and because creating is its own imperative. People work like that, too. Left to create our own rhythms, we can lean into times of the day or seasons of our life when we’ve got energy, ideas, momentum. And then rest when we don’t, let the fallow times deepen us.
Maybe we can’t achieve intuitive work in the capitalist system. One of the reasons intuitive eating is difficult is that companies have reengineered food so that it’s more compelling. Corporations make money designing food that will override our bodies’ natural signals and rhythms. Work has been reengineered in ways that make it almost impossible to honor our most basic physical needs like rest and time off for illness or childbirth.
Or maybe intuitive work is a privilege in the way intuitive eating is – not something that is attainable in food deserts or with low-income jobs, but something for people with enough money to have the choice between whole grains or kale.
But I like the idea. And I believe there’s power in holding onto an idea.
Work in community, mostly outside, using our bodies. Make art. Craft. And when we are done, let’s have a snack and rest.
“ Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman