#587 The Emotional Journey at Work: Why "Bring Your Full Self to Work" Rarely Holds True | Niels Brabandt
"Bring your full self to work." Few corporate slogans are repeated as often, and few produce as many rolled eyes. The promise sounds generous. The reality, in most organisations, is different. Leadership expert Niels Brabandt argues that this is not a scandal, but it is a fact that leaders need to address honestly, because ignoring it carries a real cost in performance, retention and wellbeing.
What the emotional journey actually is
Niels Brabandt does not mean the commute. The emotional journey is the distance between who people are in their private lives and who they are expected to be at work. It starts the moment someone gets dressed in the morning. Ask professionals in London whether they wear shirts to the local pub and most will say no: they own shirts only for work. The full self, in other words, ends at the wardrobe.
Most people bring perhaps 80 or 90 per cent of themselves to work. In some industries the figure is far lower. Banking illustrates the range: the high-street branch, a global institution such as Barclays or HSBC, and a private client bank in Zurich each expect different language, appearance and behaviour. Clients expect it too. Research on emotional labour, a concept introduced by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, has long shown that organisations routinely require employees to display emotions and behaviours that differ from what they actually feel.
Why the gap is not automatically a problem
A distance between private self and professional role is not a failure. Sales research shows that learned behaviours produce different outcomes, and many professionals deliberately adopt behaviours that are not their natural ones because the role demands it. The issue is not the existence of the gap. The issue is pretending it does not exist. Organisations that claim everyone can be entirely themselves at work, while expecting a dress code, a tone and a set of behaviours, are, in Niels Brabandt's words, "living in cookie land".
Visibility is a useful test. Niels Brabandt wears a small rainbow wristband when he leads seminars, as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, and not a single client has taken offence. Colleagues routinely display photographs of their partners and children or the badge of their football club. Nobody calls that bringing heterosexuality into the workplace. Consistency in what an organisation tolerates says more about its culture than any slogan.
The trade-off every professional makes
Every job involves a trade-off between what it demands and what it gives back. Pay is part of that equation, and anyone who claims money is irrelevant is rarely believed. But intellectual challenge, purpose, autonomy and the chance to see the world matter too. Niels Brabandt describes his own choice openly: self-employment, income only for days delivered, no guaranteed salary and a three-digit number of travel days per year. Many people would never accept that. For him, the trade-off is worth it.
The trade-off can also be sequenced. One German board member of an owner-led manufacturer stepped down in his early fifties to become a bus driver, working nights and weekends, once his children were financially independent. Another leader became a train conductor after retiring. Both had fulfilled one life goal before pursuing another, and both report being happier.
When the journey becomes too long
The higher the congruence between private and professional life, the shorter the emotional journey. When the journey becomes too long, it does not stay bearable indefinitely. People sleep worse, wait until the last minute to get up and eventually leave. Motivational speakers who insist that people should only ever do work that fully expresses who they are offer advice that rarely survives contact with next month's rent. Equally, chasing more money alone is seldom the right answer.
Studies on emotional labour support this: the strain of sustained "surface acting", displaying emotions one does not feel, is consistently associated with exhaustion and burnout. The cost lands on the individual first and on the organisation shortly afterwards.
What leaders should do now
First, acknowledge the emotional journey instead of denying it. Honest conversations about expectations, dress, behaviour and tone reduce the psychological load. Second, assess the trade-off with each team member. A developer Niels Brabandt knows moved from a well-paid fintech role to a gaming company with longer hours and more travel, and calls it the best decision of his career. Third, when someone's journey has clearly become too long, act early. Hardly anyone can tolerate a role they dislike every single day for decades. The sustainable solution is a conscious compromise between what the role demands and who the person is, followed by clear decisions.
Excellent leaders do not promise that people can be entirely themselves at work. They make the distance visible, keep it reasonable and help people decide what they are willing to carry.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielsbrabandt
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Podcast and Videocast Transcript
"Bring your full self to work." Have you heard that phrase? And when you're now only sitting there and your eyes are rolling back as far that they almost fall out of the back of your head, then you probably are exactly right here.
We are going to talk about the emotional journey at work. Often corporations and companies claim you can bring your full self to work. Well, can you? Sometimes you can. In the vast majority of cases you can't, you cannot, and that is not always a bad thing.
The fact that you can't bring your full self to work has a reason. However, up to a certain point you can manage. From a certain point, you need to say, "I think this is probably not what I want to do in the future."
So hello and welcome to this week's episode. We are going to talk about the relevance of the emotional journey at work. The emotional journey means every time you go to work, at least for most people in the world, you have to go a certain you have to go on a certain journey. I don't mean the commute. I don't mean the travel you're doing. I mean the following: that you in the morning say, "I'm wearing something. I'm doing something in a way I would usually not do."
So when people claim, "Bring your full self to work," I give you a very simple example. People say, "Hey, in our company you can bring your full self to work." Okay. So let's say you get up in the morning. What do you wear? In the UK, probably now people say, "Well, to work I wear a shirt." And then I ask, "So do you wear shirts when you go out, go to a local pub?" And they say, "No, I only have shirts for work."
So there we are. Bring your full self to work, except you already have to dress completely differently, and this is where your full self already ends. You probably can bring 80% of you to work, or 90%. In some industries, 50, 30, 20, 10, or 5% of yourself.
It's extremely important that you stop pretending that every job can bring your full self to work. I'll give you a very simple example: banking. And even there, people will say, "Well, there's a massive difference between the bank around the corner when you're probably Metro Bank, or when you're Barclays, or HSBC, or you're a private investment bank, or a private client bank somewhere in Zurich, Switzerland." Exactly. That's exactly what we're talking about. There is a different emotion connected with that.
And that's the first thing we have to address. As soon as you say there is a certain emotion connected with your workplace, this emotion needs to be addressed. If you do not address this emotion, you're living in cookie land.
Because the reality simply says, when you think you bring your full self to work, while you dress differently, act differently, behave differently, talk differently, there's not much left of you. And by the way, this doesn't necessarily need to be bad. Maybe the trade-off is great. Maybe your employer offers so much that you say, "It is worth the emotional journey."
I'll give you a very simple example. When I, for example, lead a seminar or workshop, I usually wear a wristband, and some people see you have to look quite closely because it is quite small. On this bracelet is a tiny, tiny rainbow flag. And the rainbow flag is there for a reason. I'm a part of the LGBTQIA+ community, and especially today, visibility is important. And not a single client took offense with that.
So by the way, when you are now one of the people saying, "Do you have to bring your sexuality to the workplace in public?" when you're one of these people, maybe you know people who bring a piece of their football club to work, or they have a picture of their family. So maybe some boss, "Mr. So-and-so or Mrs. So-and-so has a picture of their partner, husband, wife, and children." No one would say, "Oh, do you have to put your heterosexuality and your straightness into the workplace? Unbearable." No one would say that. So maybe you rethink this. Because I can already anticipate how some people, of course, in silence, try to send me messages on that point. Please don't do that.
So as soon as you address the emotions, you arrive in reality. And there is a very important point here. There is a need from certain workplaces for certain jobs that you behave differently compared to what you usually do. And this need needs to be served.
There is scientific evidence that different behaviors, especially, for example, in sales positions, lead to different outcomes. And you learn these behaviors. Maybe not your natural behavior, but it is a behavior that you learned. You adapted to the situation where the need was.
And very important now is, where are you really? Who is the real you, and what's your behavior? The difference between the real you and your behavior, that's the emotional journey, which, by the way, most people do at work. It's not necessarily bad. However, the more alignment people ask from you, the more challenging it will get.
I'll give you a very simple example, and I think today it is less of an issue. But if someone would tell me, "Oh, by the way, the job you have, you must wear suit and tie every day," the answer would be a no for me. Or the trade-off, there basically are two. Either I say, "No, it's not me," or someone needs to pay me so royally that I say, "That amount of money is a trade-off where I can make suit and tie work for me." So be aware there's often the trade-off.
So now we have to see what is the situation. Because you wonder, "Why don't all the people go to a job they actually love?" Well, I'll give you a very simple reason. Let's say you chose a certain job. And of course, people often say, "I love the job. I love what I do. I love this. I love that."
On the other side, people often say, "There is a certain trade-off that I say, let's say, the payment is good enough to do this here." And that's exactly the point here again. So when you say the work life and then the personal life have a certain gap, that's not necessarily bad.
When any one of these motivational, inspirational speakers tells you, "Oh, you can only do a job that is fully yourself because anything else is not worth your time and effort," nonsense. Straightforward nonsense. There's always a trade-off between the work you do and then the personal life that you actually have.
So it's extremely important that you are fully aware of that. And as soon as you do that, as soon as you do that, things will become better from there. Except that there's a certain difference between the work and your personal life. And then you have to decide, is the emotional journey too far, or is it not? Because now the question is, why we're talking about this is, when the emotional journey is too long, things will not work out in the long run.
There will be the point, and maybe we have people sitting here listening right now saying, "I had one of these jobs where I thought I'm going to make it," or "I can make it bearable," or "It's okay-ish for me." But at a certain point, simply, people say, "Look, I really want to do something else in life, and I actually have to leave here and do something else." And some people do it up to a certain point. For example, when the house is paid off to a certain extent, or when they have a certain amount of savings together. Often people have a certain point where they say, "When I reach this, then I will say, 'Hey, now I'm cool with doing something else.'"
We had reports in Germany of a former leader in a company who suddenly, in his beginning 50s, said he's leaving his position on a local board of a local manufacturing company, and he became, drum roll, a bus driver. And now people wonder, "What had happened there? Did he do something wrong? Did he get sued? Did he lose his...?" No, no, he didn't. He said his lifelong wish was to be a bus driver. But he said his lifelong wish also was to have a family with children and offer them way more than he had when he was young with his parents.
So what he did was, he did this corporate - well, corporate, it was an owner-led business - SME career up to a leadership level. And as soon as the children had done everything, were out of the house, living their own life, paying their own bills, he said, "And now I do what I really want because I have enough savings, enough money is coming from there. Now I can do the bus driver's thing." And by the way, I'm talking about bus driver job, night shifts, weekends, whatnot else. And he said he's way happier with that than he was before.
We had another leader who retired from his position and then became a train conductor, which also was his lifelong wish to do that. So you really see the work and the personal life. You need to see, is there any kind of congruence between the two? Is there something where you say they exist basically separate from each other, or are there certain things that weave into each other? Or is it actually that you say, "No, it's perfect. They actually add up to each other, and that's perfect."
So the higher the congruence is, the less of an emotional journey you have. Certain jobs have very high emotional journeys, long emotional journeys. Other jobs have less of that. You have to decide what is bearable for you as soon as you feel bad with something. Because some people say, "Oh, you just have to quit your job and live your full self." Yeah, and you probably will not be able to pay the rent by next month when you do that. Always check the full situation reality. But I can tell from my experience, simply going for only more money is usually not the best pick.
So the question is now, how do you implement that in your life? Let's talk about implementation. Implementation is, you have to make a decision how much emotional journey is bearable for you. When you say, "I need something which is..." So for example, one of my friends was working in a well-paid job. He was a developer there, and he worked for a fintech company, and he's now working for a gaming company. And he says that was the best pick he ever did.
So it's very important to do that because usually in a fintech, you usually make more money than in a gaming company. Also in a gaming company, more travel, longer hours. And here's the point, by the way. I made a decision as well. When I tell people, "Hey, I have this job. I'm self-employed, and I only get paid for the days I deliver, and there's no saved income. I run my own business at all risk. And by the way, I travel a three-digit amount of days per year." Most people will say, "Three-digit amount of travel where you're away from home and friends? No chance I'm going to do that."
And that's the decision you have to make. The decision you have to make is, are you willing to do certain things for a trade-off? So for example, if someone would say, "Hey, you do all this, but the job is really bad pay," then I probably would not do it. Is it only about the pay? No, it's not. But payment is part of it. So if anyone claims, "Oh, payment is never important," come on. No one believes that. Because usually, often people on a very high pay range say that their, "Oh, money is not that important." It's always part.
However, fun is also part. Having an intellectual challenge, solving complex issues, seeing the world, all of that, seeing the world, everything is a decision I consciously made, and this is why I left employment going into self-employment. And of course, other people would say, "I couldn't handle that." And this is the conflict. You have a certain conflict, and many people have that where you say, "This is what I want. That's what I have." And the emotional journey between the two is a decision you have to make.
When you, for example, say, "Hey, I really want to go for this position," but they expect a bachelor's degree, then you have to make the decision, are you willing, besides full-time or part-time work to make ends meet, to sit there for a couple of years and get that bachelor's degree because it's a formal requirement in public service somewhere, for example? And after that, you have 30 years of better life, or at least more fulfilled life.
You have to address the conflict. If you try to sit around the conflict, it's going to escalate sooner or later. And if you now, as a leader, say, "Hey, I think I have people in my team who have a way too long emotional journey," or you sit there by yourself and say, "I have friends," or by myself, "You have a way too long emotional journey," act as quickly as possible. No one is able, or hardly anyone is able, to bear a job where you say, "This is something which I actually hate from start to finish every single day, but the next 37 years are going to be okay somehow."
No, they will not. It's always important that you find a compromise. And the compromise is where you say, "That's what they demand. That's who I am. And this emotional journey is..." And then you adjust. "This emotional journey is okay for me." And if you do it the way as we just discussed, everything will get better from here.
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