The Swamp Deer

Today a guy I work with was telling me how frustrated he is with his job. I could see he was bummed out and almost sad.

His complaints will sound familiar to many of us - The boss is a jerk who doesn’t understand the work or the workers. The processes are slow and cumbersome. The people are uncaring and unproductive.

He started telling me how things were better at his last job, which was on a submarine in the Navy.

“When I first got there I was in way over my head. And when I got promoted to supervisor my available time shrank dramatically. The requirements just seemed to grow non-stop. But I really liked it. I felt like we were doing important work and doing it well.”

I asked him how he coped.

He said, “I had to get organized. I started writing everything down.”

He went on to describe an effective system he had developed. At the end of each day he wrote down the things he knew in the evening that he had not known that morning.

 He told me how much it alleviated his nighttime stress to have the days worries tucked away safely in his notebook so he did not have to keep them in his memory overnight. He said it helped him to sleep.

I asked him how he managed the increased workload.

He told me how he kept a journal of the way he and his team had overcome difficulties.

“Every time we did a major job I wrote down what we had learned, what worked and what didn’t.”

 He described how his journal became an indispensable tool that he was even able to share with others.

“When one of my guys got promoted and was ready to leave to take over his own unit, I copied my whole notebook and gave it to him.”

As my friend described this to me his face changed. He smiled and sat up a little straighter. His voice became more animated, less fatigued. He was visibly proud of his accomplishments and that he had been able to share what he had learned with someone who would benefit from it, and who would even carry it forward and pass it along to others.

It became obvious to me that my friend had a real sense of himself, of his identity, tied to his former situation and to his accomplishments there. As our talk returned to our current situation he fell back to his “normal” self and it was almost as if the light behind his eyes dimmed.

“It’s just so damn frustrating here. Nothing gets done because everything seems to be someone else’s job.” he said.

It occurred to me that my friend was suffering from something that may happen to many of us at some point in our lives.

He was having an identity crisis.

He had identified so much with his former job that it became a large measure of what he considered to be himself. He would not say that he “worked at” the Navy, for example. Rather, he would say “I am a sailor.”

The identification was enhanced by his success. The better he became at his job the more he identified with it.

This makes sense because when we give a lot of ourselves to our work, and especially when we apply our creative powers to our job, the job becomes the visible manifestation of our internal nature. It becomes our art.

This can be a good thing. Work is an important creative outlet. For most of us our work takes up the majority of our time and energy. It is the thing we do the most. Many of us spend more time with co-workers than with family. Our work relationships become our primary human interactions.

This is especially powerful when we work in specialized fields like the military or medical or technological communities. These occupational categories are fertile fields for identity attachment because they are somewhat exclusive. They have insider language and insider cultures.

When a person spends many years in an insider organization identification is almost unavoidable.

For insiders work can be a place of meaning and value expression. Many insiders are dedicated professionals who make significant contributions to their organizations and to the larger community.

But what happens when, as with my friend, a person leaves the insider organization?

I asked my friend what he thought was behind his frustration with our current workplace.

“I guess it’s mostly how hard it is to get anything done. It is like they care more about process than product. When I was in the Navy we would just do what needed to be done, and at the end of the day we could see what we had accomplished. Here it is more like everyone just wants to follow the process whether it works or not.”

What my friend was describing was his perception of a cultural difference between his former workplace and our current one.

I was interested in why he was so frustrated with the difference.

The question I asked myself was, “Why doesn’t he see that there is simply a different set of norms and expectations here?”

I asked myself, “Why doesn’t he adapt to the new rules here like he adapted to the new rules in the Navy?”

The answer was identity.

I asked him, “Why does a deer run fast?”

He fumbled around for a second and quickly caught-on that I was not asking him about anatomy but was introducing a concept.

“I give.” he said. “Why does a deer run fast?”

“Because wolves.” I said.

I let it hang in the air for a moment and then explained.

“A deer runs fast because there is a wolf chasing him. Running fast is his adaptive response to the threat named wolf.”

I said, “When you were in the Navy you had an environment that stressed you out the way a deer is stressed by a wolf. You adapted to that stress and were successful in your work. And because you were successful you became attached to the mode of your adaptation. You sort of became a deer. You said to yourself, ‘I can run fast and jump over logs and rivers and I am a strong and clever deer and no wolf can catch me.’ “

“You became a deer.” I said.

This clicked for him and he smiled. He liked the metaphor but he did not yet make the connection.

I said, “But now your environment has changed. The threat isn’t a wolf any more. Now the threat is a swamp. And now when you feel stress you try and run fast and jump high and you find that you don’t get away at all. Instead you sink. And the harder you try to run the faster you sink.”

Now his head was nodding and he was smiling. “I like that.” He said.

I went on, “So your job now is to learn to swim. Perhaps here instead of being a deer you must be a turtle.”

His lips tightened and he narrowed his eyes a bit. I could see he didn’t like the idea of this particular evolutionary leap, so I explained further.

“What is causing you stress now is your identification with being a deer. You have the value system of a deer. You think that running is not only a good way to get away from a wolf, but that running is good for its own sake. You think that going slowly, like when you are swimming or wading through a swamp, is bad.” I said.

I asked him, “What are you? Are you a deer?”

“No.” he said, “I am a man.”

“OK.” I said. “You are a man. A man is different from a deer because he has a choice. A deer can only be a deer but a man can be anything he wants to be.”

I could see him begin to wriggle a little bit. His deer mind was considering what it might be like to be a turtle.

I said, “You are in fact neither a deer nor a turtle nor a man. What you really are is the Light behind your eyes. This is why you can be anything you want to be. You are a Light and not any kind of animal, or even a man.”

“That Light took on the aspects of a deer to escape from the wolf. Now that Light can take on the aspects of a turtle. That you were a successful deer means you can be a successful turtle if only you will allow yourself permission to adapt, to develop the value system of a turtle the way you developed the value system of a deer.”

Now my friend smiled. He liked this way of thinking. He stuck out his hands like flippers and made little swimming motions.

“I am a turtle.” he said, “And after I am done being a turtle I will go on and be something else.”

“And when that Light is done being a man, it will go on and be something else.” I said.

He smiled again.

“And maybe a turtle doesn’t think a swamp is such a bad place.” he said.

We both laughed and went back to our desks in the swamp.