Yesterday, I wrote about why I rub my hands in glee at the stuff at work that used to drive me round the bend.

Turns out it’s much harder to get wound up when you’re thinking “oooh yeh, there’s a tasty daily email in this shit show of a conference call”.

It’s almost like I’ve trained my mind to see work and the world at large as material for my daily newsletters.

I don’t think I’m the only one who does this by the way.

Take my beloved life partner, Lauren. She’s a teacher by trade. And now that Toddler Grundy is 18 months old, there’s many a day where Lauren will clock Toddler Grundy putting two new words together or holding her cup differently vs a month ago. So Lauren “has eyes” for the signs of learning. Whereas if Lauren was a lawyer, no doubt she’d be wondering who’s liable when Toddler Grundy pushes another toddler off her trike. And there I am, watching the exact same toddler and wondering if there’s an email in whatever she’s up to.

Our work really does shape how we see the world.

The French maestro Claude Monet is another example. According to the legend of the arts, he’d literally see colour and light differently to us mere mortals as he went about his day. So where most people saw a tree, Monet saw dozens of shades of green, light dancing through the leaves and shadows dotted on the ground.

It was Warren Buffett’s right hand man Charlie Munger who coined the “man with hammer” syndrome. It’s the idea that we see problems through the lens of whatever we happen to know best.

Only I’d go one step further and say this is how we see life.

Say you’re queueing for a cappuccino in your local coffee shop. Well, I'd bet your chocolate sprinkles that a project manager in the queue just ahead is thinking about how there’s a bottleneck in the queuing process. The therapist behind you is noticing the project manager getting more agitated. And the salesperson in the queue sees someone add a muffin to their order and admires the coffee shop’s upsell.

And so on.

What we see depends an awful lot on what we’ve learned to look for.

And what we do for a living plays a huge part in that.

Truth is, I’m not so sure any of us can escape this phenomenon. I actually think seeing the world through the lens of our careers is inevitable in lots of ways.

But what isn’t inevitable is thinking that the way we see life is the way life actually is. Because once we cotton on to the fact that we see life through the lens of our jobs, we’re not trapped by that lens any more.

We know we’re seeing the world one way, not the way.

Funnily enough, the place that “man with hammer” syndrome is most common is when we’re looking at our jobs themselves.

We’re not exactly neutral observers and we almost certainly don’t see our jobs as clearly as we could.

Which is why it can help to have another pair of eyes looking too.

If you’re facing a dilemma at work which you’d like to see more clearly, my Career Clarity Coaching might be just what you’re after.

These are short, sharp, one off sessions designed to help you see your career dilemma from a different angle and figure out what you want to do next.

You can find out more and book a session here:

https://tomgrundy.coach/career-clarity-coaching/

To fulfilment,

Tom