Work personality vs home personality

For those who have or have had regular jobs, do you exhibit a different personality at work than at home?  My home personality is pretty Zen and laid back, but on the job I am Type A on Steroids.

Good question.

I think for me it depends on what job I was doing.   I had jobs (like waitressing) that required a 'persona' and some role playing that was unlike my home personality.  

My job now (dog training) has different aspects that capitalize on my personality strengths but require me to modify that and accommodate the other person when I'm doing one-on-one consults or dog owner training lessons.  

My work pace/ethic/methodology doesn't change much regardless.  I tend to be a linear planner that always thinks about efficiency.   I can reorder the plan instantly when called for though.

100% different. Work is like prison rules. Mind your own business. Don't speak unnecessarily, keep your eyes on the ground in front of you. Don't act happy. Don't show emotion in general. It's all about just surviving another day.

Also, at work I want a place for everything and everything in it's place. No exceptions. Same goes for general tidiness. Complete opposite at home.

also, 100% different. I am very much type A, very aggressive, no shit from nobody.
At home, I am all about avoiding conflict, zen, and enjoying life.

It entirely reflects the kind of environment where I work (lots of challenges, swindlers, people who challenge my expertise/legitimacy) versus my home life (good communications, trust, loyalty).

Related to this,  the DISC workplace profiling is pretty interesting in that it gives both a "natural" and "adaptive" personality profiling.   Sometimes it's really similar and sometimes it can be very different.  Adapted profile is how we change our natural tendencies to accomodate a workplace (especially, but can be school, family, etc).    I did this one year for all my staff and myself, and then aftewards started using an abbreviated profile during hiring.   It's a good way for someone to tell you about themselves without it being colored with appearance and mannerisms (well, good for me anyway).  

My natural and adaptive scores almost always come out identical.   In a positive light,  that could mean I chose environments for myself that suit my natural tendencies and supports my personal needs.  In a negative light,  it could say that I am too rigid and not able to adapt or deal with adversity.  

I really like this question.

For me, this has varied significantly based on my years of experience.  Like John, I am pretty zen-like at home, with bursts of furious energy and drive (that sometimes hurts me!).  

As an early teacher, I had to be all business in the classroom just to prove that I was a serious teacher.  I felt the need to prove this to my administration and to show my students that I meant business.  This kept classroom behavior problems to a minimum.

But as time went on and after I had established my reputation, I could loosen up—significantly.  It helped to have a degree of informal control over the classroom, one where I could stop misbehavior simply by stopping what I was doing and making direct eye contact with the offender (known in education as the pregnant pause),  nothing else needed to be done.  Eye contact alone corrected whatever misbehavior was taking place.

25+ years later and now things are so much different from my early years.  By now my work life and home life are very similar and that is much healthier for me.  I had such a furious work schedule my early years that I just could not sustain that level of energy for an entire career.  I used to get to school by 5:00 am.  I was the very first person at school and stars were still out in the pitch black sky.  That gave me 3-3.5 uninterrupted hours of fresh, productive time to get work done.  I stayed after school till 4:00, usually grading something at which point I went home.  I gave myself a mandatory 2-hour break for dinner and a walk for exercise, but I would be back at work (at home) planning for my next day.  I required myself to quit and go to bed by 9:00.  I also did about 10 hours of work on the weekends.

Add this altogether and my day looked like this:

5:00am-4:00pm= 11 hours per day

6:00pm-9:00pm=3 hours per evening

Total daily hours =14 hours
14 x5=70 hours per 5 day week

Weekend time=10 hours

Total work hours per week=80 hours


I could only keep this schedule up for so long.  When summer break came and I was visiting a friend, I found myself (about 48 hours into summer) feeling slightly guilty for not thinking about what I had to do for the next day or what pile of paperwork was waiting for me.

Today I have a much better work-life balance and I try to leave work at work and have a home life at home.

But circling back to the original question. I have a blend of home and work “lives”. At school, I have to be “Mr, Hanson”, but outside of school I really prefer to be called “Eric.”  More confounding, my daughter is now in high school (we ride to school together) and I have several of her friends in class.  I have to treat those students differently in class than I do when they visit my home to visit my daughter.

So very, very long story short, I guess that I do have different home and work personalities, but this is not as dramatic as when I was an early teacher.


I hope I didn’t just confuse the thread too much.

Eric

Very interesting question! I've enjoyed reading all the replies.

I think that being self-employed, and working from home, one might think I'd have more similarities between my work self and home self, but there are differences.

When I work with a client, I am focused, I have lists, we stay on the client's needs as the topics, I/we (we being myself and my bookkeeping staff, and/or myself in collaboration with the client) organize data and documents for our clients, and I/we get things done in an orderly fashion.

When I am in my home life, I am often less focused, and while I try to make lists, I don't always follow them, and the corners of my place are stacked up with things to organize "some day." But this sounds almost normal from the replies here.

I think we sometimes give our all on the job and are tired and need to recover at home, so that's why we might be less tidy or organized than our "personality" might wish.

In both places I am certainly a big time caretaker in a lot of ways, and it makes me happiest when I can make a difference and collaborate with others.