What it’s like to bring your broken self to work

“How many kids do you have?”

It’s an innocent question. I get asked it from time to time—at the birthday parties of my children’s friends, outside the school doors as I wait with other parents for the end-of-day bell to ring, or at work when I’m chatting with a colleague.

It’s also a question I don’t always know how to answer.

I could say “two” and mention the names and ages of my two children the questioner could conceivably meet some day—my two kids who are still alive. I often say “two.” But often this answer feels like a lie, an erasure of my other two kids who are no longer with us, who can’t attend birthday parties, learn more about the world at school, or pop into my home office while I’m on a video call with my team.

I could answer “four” while keeping the details to a minimum and responding vaguely to any probing. I don’t like answering this way, though. It gets awkward fast. It can be difficult to dance around the fact that two of my kids no longer have ages or grade levels. They have the names we gave them, and grave markers we had made for them, and they live now only in memory.

So, unless I want to bow out of the conversation, taking my leave with a fake phone call or some other contrivance, my other option is to answer with the whole story. I’ve got four kids. Two are alive. Two are dead. Sometimes I explain how long each child lived and when they died. Sometimes I don’t. How much detail I give usually depends on my sense of how the person I’m talking with seems to be feeling in that moment.

In many cases, I want to share stories about the children we lost. For me, it’s how they live on. At work however, the person asking me the number of my children often does not expect an emotionally heavy answer—a long train of sad memories that keeps chugging along because I’m in the mood to talk. They don’t need to know about my losses. They don’t need to hear about my trauma, grief, and brokenness. However, I have found that there is a way to bring your broken self to work. Here’s what I have learned: 

Opening up at work is complex

Work presents a unique situation because the people I work with aren’t necessarily all close friends, but they’re not mere acquaintances, either. We’re members of a team, united by a shared mission. We face many of the same risks, feel weighed down by many of the same pressures, experience many of the same achievements, and undergo many of the same hardships. My relationships at work are professional, but also to varying degrees emotional and personal.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Bring your whole self to work.” It’s the aspirational idea that we shouldn’t have to hide or compartmentalize parts of ourselves in the workplace in order to feel like we belong. We should feel safe being who we are. Many people have good cause not to feel safe, of course, and nobody bares every aspect of their soul to everyone at all times. Many of us keep our private lives private and personal matters that aren’t safe for work are often kept in close confidence—if they’re shared at all.

And yet we’re all people, carrying burdens that we can’t store securely in a locker when we enter the workplace. We all have our hurts. We all need healing. Compartmentalizing those parts of ourselves we might like to keep buried deep in our souls usually have a way of encroaching on our life at work, redirecting our mental energy away from the job we have to do. We may want to open up to a teammate or feel compelled to answer someone’s simple question with more solemnity than they were expecting.

The truth is that we bring more than our work selves to our work relationships. The personal connections we form at work strengthen our professional ties, but they also come to exist for their own sake. That’s why people who leave an organization can still feel like they are part of the community. What I have learned is that opening up at work, much like friendship, often happens naturally, messily, and over time. 

How leaders can help others bring their broken selves to work

Those of us in leadership roles have an opportunity—and arguably a responsibility—to foster community, so that those we lead thrive not only as “human resources,” but also and more importantly as human beings. The question is: How do we do this?

First, we can resist the temptation to exercise complete control over how people show up at work. When we unrealistically insist on enforcing an ideal of professionalism that requires others to keep their personal lives private, we marginalize them. When we try to reduce people to their monetary value and financial risk, we don’t give them the space to be human. When we encourage everyone to exhibit a high degree of “authenticity” or openness, we may be putting them in an uncomfortable or dangerous situation. Instead, we should give people the freedom to show up as they see fit and the safety to belong in the way they need.

Second, we can educate ourselves about why people might be disinclined to speak openly about their personal lives while at work. Privacy concerns, expectations of indifference, and fear of being ostracized or punished keep people closed off—especially if they’ve had a bad experience at work previously. Discrimination is all too common. To be sure, the goal isn’t for everyone to share their most closely guarded personal stories. The goal, rather, is to understand and ultimately remove the barriers that obstruct meaningful personal connections at work for those who want them.

Third, we can recognize that people’s lives are messy and that messiness comes to work. Many people feel burdened and broken and therefore their burdens and brokenness come to work. People need healing, and they may need to heal at work. No one knows exactly how they’re going to show up each day. No one has that much control. As leaders, it’s not our job to make our people whole.

Our job is to give them time, space, and resources to tend to their own personal needs, the opportunity to form supportive friendships, and, when needed, the permission to be unproductive. Our job is to live as members of a community ourselves, not merely as overseers of productivity, efficiency, and growth. Not everything at work needs to be monetized to have value.

Finally, we can choose our words carefully and teach others to do the same. As leaders, we should understand how to speak thoughtfully. Educating our teams about the kinds of unspoken burdens people live with and what kinds of statements or questions might be triggering can help everyone approach one another with empathy, kindness, and grace.

When I’m chatting with my teammates, I don’t always know where the conversation will go, what I’ll share, what I’ll save for another time, or what I’ll keep to myself. If I speak of my losses or my pain, I don’t always know how I’ll feel after or whether I’ll need a brief moment, long break, or a day off to compose myself. But I make all those decisions for myself, and for that I’m grateful.

Kyle Cupp, is a manager of content services strategy at Mineral.