“It’s all very ordinary once you get past the shiny suits and gruff exteriors”.
I read that somewhere recently, though I can’t remember where. It was about celebrities (or maybe organised criminals 🤔😆). But the line stuck with me because it applies just as much to the workplace.
It made me think about two groups of people at work: executives on the one hand and frontline workers on the other.
Both can come across to the other as being from another planet who wear different uniforms (sometimes literal shiny suits and other times shiny DayGlo) and can be more than a little gruff.
But the thing is, once you get past that – once you choose to look past it and see the human behind any shiny or gruff exterior – you discover it’s all very ordinary.
It’s tempting to assume that just because an executive earns a lot of money, life must be easy. But money doesn’t shield anyone from things that often make life hard – heartbreak, insecurity, relationship struggles, health scares, family worries, ageing, fear of failure, the nagging sense that you’re not enough and more.
It’s also tempting to assume that just because frontline workers don’t carry the weight of the organisation home with them, life must be simpler. But they too deal with the same struggles – heartbreak, insecurity, relationship struggles, health scares, family worries, ageing, fear of failure, the nagging sense that they’re not enough and more.
When you strip away the job titles, what’s left is the same set of deeply human experiences – while we’re each beautifully unique and therefore extraordinary in our own way, our inner and outer worlds are still pretty ordinary in ways that would be familiar to anyone else.
Executives and frontline workers aren’t from different worlds. They’re just people, living different versions of the same struggles.
There’s infinitely more that connects us than divides us.
But to see that, we have to make the choice to look past the shiny suits and gruff exteriors – and recognise the human underneath.
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