Hello fellow seekers and explorers! 👋🏻👋🏻

I hope that you’ve had an incredible week. My luck turned when I realized I’d caught COVID for the third time. Sigh. It’s feeling like an annual tradition!

The good news is that I’m doing okay; each bout seems to be less damaging than the one before it. This is the only area where my wife and I are out of synch; we never get it at the same time. Each time she’s had it, I’ve been fine – and vice versa. 🤷🏼

Anyway, I went for a walk down our quiet private road yesterday, as I often do after eating lunch. It’s both a movement opportunity and a chance to be outside. It also allows me to connect with the natural world, which is important to me. However, I think the greatest benefit of those walks is the insights I get. Something about walking out in nature lights my brain on fire 🔥🔥🔥 (in a good way!).

I had a personal revelation while I was walking, something that surprised me. It seemed like such a minor, random thought – but something about it caught my attention. I’ve learned that ideas that grip you usually do so for a reason; there is usually a deeper truth to discover. The insight that came to me while on my walk inspired this week’s article.

Hope you enjoy the read and have a fantastic week!!

As always, hit me up by email at tim@timparkins.com if you’ve got comments, questions, or topics you’d love for me to explore.

Suits, Ties, And Lies: The Myth Of The Serious Professional

My ‘Serious Professional’ Persona

For years, I donned the uniform of the “serious professional”—a suit, a dress shirt, and sometimes a tie. It was an aesthetic decision that I explained away as a preference I had. The story I told myself was that dressing this way made me feel successful, and that I enjoyed dressing that way.

During my walk yesterday, the realization that I hadn’t warn a suit or tie in years struck me. While this seems like such an inconsequential detail, I was quite astounded by this insight. This led to me questioning my previous belief that I enjoyed dressing in a suit and tie. Maybe I wasn’t being honest with people that had questioned why I dressed so professionally? Maybe I’d not been honest with myself? After all, if my preference was to dress that way, why was I no longer doing so?

To be fair, we all know that the world changed in 2020, as we stopped working in offices and we isolated ourselves. People wouldn’t even know if you had pants on while you were working! (Assuming you paid enough attention to where you were pointing your webcam. 🤣)

Of course, I also changed along with the sweeping changes that gripped the world during that period. But it puzzled me; if I had truly preferred to dress that way, regardless of what people said or thought about it (which was what I told myself), then why had I stopped dressing that way?

I stewed on that idea as I walked and realized that I’d been wearing a “metaphorical mask”. Rather than being true to myself, I’d been “acting”. I realized that my choice of attire at the time served two distinct purposes:

Elevating myself in front of my peers. Dressing “better” than them made me feel a sense of superiority.
Allowed me to blend in with senior executives.

At that point in my career, I interacted regularly with people from the “c-suite”, and I now realize that I was seeking to blend in, to look like “one of them”. I wanted to be accepted.

That realization stung; for a long time, I’ve thought of myself as someone that likes to be unique and stand out. Yet I’d caught myself in a lie to myself. Ouch.

The Psychology of the Dress Code

Clothing isn’t just fabric; it’s a powerful signifier of where we fit into hierarchies. According to Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory, we’re all actors on life’s stage, adopting roles and costumes to fit the part. My suit was more than just a suit—it was a prop in my professional performance. I was unknowingly trying to insert myself into a different level of the organizational hierarchy.

According to Goffman, people perform to make others have certain impressions of them. This process is sometimes “impression management”, and I’d been doing exactly that. I’d been acting like a peacock, flashing his multi-coloured tail feathers in a big show.

Goffman talks about a ‘backstage’ where actors remove their costumes and become themselves. This is what we usually mean by the phrase “being authentic”; not having a mask on. Knowing that I’d been fooling myself about my preferences for so long, I can’t help but wonder if this is ever truly possible. Maybe our wiring is such that we can’t help but try to fit in. After all, it wasn’t long ago that being shunned by your community meant likely death.

Self-Awareness and Authenticity

The good news is that this moment of clarity allowed me to learn something about myself, and to share this observation with you. The more deeply you can know yourself, the better positioned you’ll be to live an incredible life. It all starts with knowing who you truly are and what you want.

Understanding the various roles you play in your life can open up possibilities for you. You can strategically choose when a mask might be most appropriate, or when you’d prefer to be your authentic self. The masks do come with some advantages, but they also come with downsides. You need to remember that you can only hide who you really are for so long.

I invite you to consider where might you be wearing a mask? What are the various roles that you play on the stage of your life? Are you happy with your acting, or should you let more of authentic self shine through?

These are things worth considering.

Quotation that I have been pondering

There’s a popular sentiment in today’s society that we shouldn’t have to work so hard. We’ve now got access to these tools that we designed to empower us to work less:

machines and robots for doing repetitive, physical tasks
incredibly powerful computers that are all interconnected
phones providing us instant access to any piece of information we desire
AI to help us make sense of the glut of data that surrounds us

So it’s no wonder that there’s resistance to the idea that we still need to work hard. The whole point of inventing all that stuff was to free us up, to unshackle us from the burden of work, wasn’t it?

The truth is – we need to work, but not just for money.

We need to work to feel that we are being useful in the world, that we are contributing, that our existence matters.

The trick is to find ways where you can enjoy your work. You need to have fun!

Sound crazy? Maybe. But it is possible. 🚀

The famous mountaineer Alex Lowe had this amazing quote that is so relevant to this idea;

“The best climber in the world is the one who’s having the most fun.”

That idea is bang on, and we can extend this principle to include work; the people that have the most fun at work are the ones producing the highest quality work. They are also the ones that drive the world forward.

What might you consider doing to bring back some fun into your work? How might you reconnect with it? 🤔

Journal Prompt

Gratitude is one of the best medicines for anything that ails you. If you are alive and able to breathe, you have something to be grateful for. We easily fall into the trap of noticing what is missing, of where our life is not enough.

Remember that somewhere, someone would love to be in your shoes, no matter how tough you think you’ve got it.

Feel a lot of resentment towards your job? Someone in the world is praying that they could have that job. Perspective is everything.

Take a few moments to reflect on the following journal prompt:

“What can I feel deep gratitude for right now, despite the challenges I face?”

Gratitude shifts your attention away from what’s missing and impacts how you show up for others in the world.

Choose gratitude.🙏