Finding Peace: 4 Ways to Practice Detachment in the Workplace
This article is a follow-up to “Things I Wish I’d Known After I Got the Job: Advice for Recent Grads and Early Career Professionals,” written by CWIB’s Marissa Vonesh. Learning from Marissa’s experience as a first-year professional in the midst of a pandemic, we can also learn how to build our identity outside the merits of our work.
This May, I celebrated five years with my company. In these last five years, I’ve grown from a recent-graduate intern with no experience in information technology and cybersecurity to a senior engineer with a cybersecurity and project management certification under my belt. I have also had amazing leaders who invested in my success and intentionally created a relationship with not just myself but my family.
Our company runs “lean” in many of its responsibilities, especially in our information security department. In a company that owns around 100 hospitals and clinics and has just over 12,000 employees, there are only two team members solely devoted to my specific work. During my time here, I’ve had three co-workers move on to other opportunities. In these three instances, I have learned to adapt to a heavy workload.
Although losing a teammate, and taking on the burden of their work, can be stressful, it is helpful to understand the culture that fostered these burdensome feelings of pressure. Our American culture of consumerism, paired with little opportunities or incentives for rest, creates a love child of stress and dependence on the merits of our work, whatever that work may be.
The hardest lesson to learn is the virtue of detachment, found when we can step back from the little fires at hand and see a tangible and loving God who knows our beginning and end. It is this understanding of our littleness and dependence on God that helps lift our eyes from our work and see a world that will keep spinning with or without the measurement of our merits.
It was St. Thomas Acquinas who told us in the Summa Theologica, “The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being detached from care, for the sake of God.” Without focusing our heart on the will of God, we will inevitably feel the weight of unrest that comes with earthly attachment.
Here are some achievable steps to practicing detachment in the workforce, even under stress:
1. Make a List
Be reasonable with yourself. If there is a lot of work to do, separate your tasks into easily achievable spurts of productivity. Prioritize the most pressing items first, followed by tasks that you don’t need to complete today.
In my own job, I have three separate task lists. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I work only on my security assessments: initiating an assessment, reviewing an assessment, or working with business partners to complete their assessment. I do not check my email until I find a suitable stopping point. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I work through the security contracts that I negotiate. On Fridays, I spend the day tying up the week’s loose ends. I finish the week by creating next week’s list of tasks.
People who work closely with me know this schedule and reach out on the applicable days. I created the boundary and have received respect in return.
2. Delegate Responsibilities, if Possible
If your work allows, delegate communication and other tasks to people who have the bandwidth to complete them. Delegation requires a special form of detachment, because it gives responsibilities — and, by extension, power — to someone else. It may mean that you will lose credit for that work.
In many cases, delegation requires trust that when you ask for help, you will not be forgotten. I have found that by risking my pride and status to ask for help, and by delegating tasks to people with more bandwidth, I am no worse off.
The Litany of Humility also helps.
3. Say “No,” Admit Mistakes, and Embrace Chaos
My next trick is that I never pretend to know it all. I am good at my job, but I am not perfect. I don’t have all the time in the world; some projects will inevitably fall through the cracks, and the amount of work coming across my desk may continue to pile up. I will not make it look easy, especially in this season of working without the appropriate number of personnel.
However, I will say “no” to tasks that I don’t need to perform. I will thank others for their patience with me and my turnaround time. I will laugh at the chaos. This chapter of work does not define me, nor is it my identity.
4. Stay Hopeful
My last tip for detachment is to keep hoping in the radical peace of Jesus. When I smile more often, I feel happier. When I eliminate negative language and behavior from my work, it is contagious. When I answer the day with peace and patience, rather than stress, it creates ripples of peace and patience throughout my co-workers and business partners.
In the work that you love, there will be seasons of strain, but they won’t last forever. A practice of detachment teaches us that we are not defined by our productivity and merits. Our world will turn with or without our drowning in work. God is still sovereign.
When we define these boundaries, stay consistent in our expectations, and exude a contagious Christ-like hope, we will transform our workplace for our neighbors and ourselves. Our identity is not in what we produce but in our inherent worth, created by our Father in Heaven.
Mindy Edgington is a fiery, Midwestern Catholic convert from St. Louis, Missouri. She currently lives in Omaha, NE with her husband and their hound dog while he pursues law school at Creighton University. By day, Mindy works as a senior security engineer in third party risk management for a Fortune 300 health care system. She also regularly volunteers with the Catholic Charities Immigration Office in town. Her hobbies include: "strong drinks and hard conversations,” writing, hiking, and reading in her local coffee shops and bars (in typical extrovert fashion). You can follow her on Instagram @mindy.edgington.