I am in an intensely introspective period at present. There is a great deal rattling around in my head these days and it would most likely help a bit to get some of it out.
As I was explaining to a good friend earlier today, I find myself mulling over perception, that is, specifically how I am perceived. Some may ask “why do you care what people think of you?” but from my vantage point, perception is a bit of a different beast and it is especially important in my professional world where in any case it actually does matter what people think of you. I explained to my friend that I am often perceived as intimidating, which he disavowed vehemently even as he admitted that we’d never actually worked in a professional setting together. I explained further.
You know how we are together, especially as fellow musicians? Rapid fire, always on, so much to say our mouths can barely keep up? Laughing, loud and randomly libertine? No holds barred, put everything on the table? Boundless energy trumped only by equally insatiable curiosity? “Ohhhh,” he says. “Right.” At my workplace, I’m an effusive talking thinker surrounded by introverted policy wonks and similarly situated academics. I am the person who will stop a room by simply asking “Well, why?” When asked the classic interview question “are you a big picture person or task oriented” I will respond that I can’t be task-oriented unless I know what the big picture is. I can’t satisfactorily put together a piece of a project unless I have the big picture inspiration for it. And that desire to know can apparently often manifest itself in such a way as to be intimidating. My friend agreed, saying that he could recall my fact finding mode as tinged with annoyance.
I pounced on this. Yes! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! The Man Unit even went so far as to describe it as “dripping with disdain for those less intelligent than you.” But when I’m in that moment, there is no disdain, there is no annoyance unless it is with myself for being in a place of ignorance. There is not one iota of my being when I’m learning that should be putting out that sort of negative feeling, so what is it? Is it an absence of self? Because I have the switch set to ‘off’, does that mean I am the Inquisition when I have stripped me of what makes me myself? This is where I struggle.
But my friend brought up another point of view that I had yet to consider or introduce to the matter: the point of race. Consider how black women function in the workplace, he posited. Consider how they are treated and…perceived. Consider what they have been forced to give up. I sat back and considered this. I don’t have any immediate role models of black women in business from my youth. My mother was mostly a SAHM, save for a few stints volunteering on military bases where we lived and time with the local United Way info hotline until they moved from the Rolodex to computers and she refused to learn to type. We didn’t live close enough to anyone else in the family who might have set useful examples, nor was I that familiar with the women at my parents’ church to learn. Funny, if I’d known how shark infested the uncharted waters I was about to navigate actually were, I’d probably have been terrified. Ah, the confidence of youth and ignorance.
I’m still no closer to figuring this out, how to serve myself to the world, but this adds a dimension that I need to mull at length. I do have a mentor at work, a black woman who happens to be the deputy of my division and I’m considering having this discussion with her. That will be somewhat difficult as her schedule is a nightmare and I also have been pulling back on the time I spend in other people’s faces running my mouth either about project development or the latest injustice visited upon my branch mates by our brilliant micromanaging supervisor with the marked lack of emotional intelligence. Mainly because I abhor being that person that people try to hide from when they see you coming because all you do is bitch. I try not to, I really try to see all sides of things, but when I pop my head into the deputy’s office only to say hello and she opens with an intense “How are things over there?’, it’s hard to hold back. I managed to keep my yap shut in an emergency meeting last month that I truncated an annual leave day to attend and by the end of the topic discussion, the division director stared at me and said “What are your thoughts? You’ve been unusually quiet.” Which I saw as something of a personal victory, even as it was somewhat bewildering to the tiny me inside that’s still 12 as in “someone smarter and more experienced than me actually wants to hear what I think about something?”
What does this all boil down to? In short, I want to develop a reputation where colleagues are delighted to work with me, not frightened or annoyed. How can get what I need and be productive/successful in collaborative professional non-music settings without sacrificing who I am? I suppose that I’ve gotten some of the hard work out of the way because I know who I am and what I want.
Ahead lies the path. Read more. Write more. Speak less.
