It’s easy to get overwhelmed with (or just over) LinkedIn and social media. Not every day is a positive, amazing, great milestone day, although your feed can seem that way. What do you post then? 🤔 The answer: Something authentic. Our successes are not black and white. For each achievement and each win, there are struggles and challenges not spoken about enough. Sharing these doesn’t diminish your expertise or professionalism–it humanises it, and makes you a nicer, more interesting, more capable person to follow. David Walsh’s post here is a great example to remember when you’re feeling trapped in the pressures of maintaining a “perfect” professional image. After all, humans follow humans. Don’t be afraid to be one.
*Trigger warning* These two pictures are taken just a few weeks apart. The first is me celebrating after completing a 10k run at the Dramathon in Scotland in October, the second in Lisbon on stage moderating a panel representing my company and team at Web Summit last week. From the outset, this may look like the kind of LinkedIn post where you’d expect to see me celebrating my achievements, personal and professional. What’s not obvious is what’s going on behind this mirage of an outwardly successful person. Anyone who knows me well or has worked alongside me knows that I do not flinch when it comes to speaking about mental health, and as it’s November and a month now dedicated to raising awareness of male health, including mental health, what better time for some confronting honesty? In the period between these pictures being taken, I had a panic attack at my desk. I work remotely and have done so for more than seven years, three of which managing a team spread across Europe and beyond. Alone in my house, I started hyperventilating and crying, all the while notifications from Slack/Teams messages and emails popping loudly on my laptop. I was momentarily paralysed. I voicenoted my brother and the attack thankfully eased. It is the first time in more than a decade this has happened, the last being a time when I went through a bad period of depression. What I learned then - and having identified the trigger, has gotten me through dips in my mental well-being in the succeeding years - is that I have hitched my self-worth and self-esteem to the health of my career. I have always felt things deeply: the positives but particularly the negatives. I guess why I feel the need to share this now and so publically is a reminder to be kind to myself. And also that I’m more resilient than I think to go from the depths of hopelessness to finding the mental reserves to sit on a stage in front of hundreds of people. And that this period too shall pass, as it has always done. And that I’m probably not alone in ever feeling this way. How often do we feel the need to present a polished veneer of ourselves and our successes on sites like LinkedIn or with our colleagues, but neglect to also show some fragility and reflect on the times when we’re at our lowest? Or tell ourselves that we are not successful unless we’re achieving something worth signalling to our peers? Or pushing ourselves to the point of burnout to try to convince ourselves and others that we are doing fine and things are still on track? The bottom line is this and it’s for those who are silently dealing with their own issues too: Be kind to yourself.
Managing Editor at Euronews Next and Euronews Health
1wThanks for sharing and for the kind words of support Maneuvre!