Jessica feels “desperate” at the thought of going back to the office. Like the majority of Americans working from home (WFH), she wants to keep WFH going. Maybe not 100% of the time, but certainly more of the time than before Covid. So now what?
Truth is Jessica was already thinking about her next move when I met her. Most of my clients are. The tree wants to grow. The bird wants to fly. And so do they. That’s why they come to me. To climb out of the “soul sucking” hole they are in, and go forward into the sun.
It’s okay. Everything is going to be alright. Jessica has choices. All of them designed to create the world you want to live in, one way or another. The secret to happy, healthy, productive lives—in my opinion. The person-environment fit.
So again, she has choices. Among them: Fight, Flight, Submit.
- Fight: She can negotiate with the powers that be about continuing some % of WFH hours. But they are in the middle of layoffs, so much will depend on how valued she is.
- Flight: She can look elsewhere for an environment that fits better with her needs and interests. Or she can start her own business to make it happen for her. Here again, much will depend on the current market value of her contribution in her field.
- Submit: She can decide that now is a good time to sit tight, go with the status quo, appreciate her paycheck, and the time to work on increasing her value (high visibility projects, training…). The idea here is to grow the kind of leverage and positioning to support the work-life arrangement she wants.
In biology, it’s called Resource Holding Potential (RHP), which is a calculation of ability to succeed based on resource advantage. In the dung beetle world, the beetle with the biggest ball of dung (resource) gets the girl.
Happens in our world too. The employee with the most resource (e.g., competence, connection, confidence, courage, commitment…) wins.
RHP is a useful estimation of your ability to get what you want, based on what resource leverage you do or don’t have working for you. There is ability and there is motivation. Resource Value (V) is your motivation, what you are willing to invest of yourself to get from here to there. V matters a lot too.
Back in the day, people used to take a job with a company and, happy or not, stay for a long time, if not forever. But now more than ever, it seems people are grappling in their work lives with whether to fight, flee, or submit.
To be clear, I know people who love their work and are itching to get back to the office.
But because I also know that so many out there are thinking about career alternatives and possibilities right now, I just put an RHP exercise on the pulldown in the “Complimentary…” box at https://madelaineweiss.com
Practice, practice, practice, see what happens, and please let me know what you think.
Warm wishes,
Madelaine
Professional services providers, their clientele with whom they may work and lay public in common discourse will find Resource Holding Potential (RHP) and Resource Value (RV) to be versatile constructs for purposes of use in descriptive and explanatory dialogue both in application and in common discourse. It has seemed to me advisable to create a mutual bank of such descriptors and labels rather than be bogged down in what I consider to have been the faux scientific but overly broad metaphorical terms introduced in Strachey’s translation of Sigmund Freud and also in several popular contemporary approaches to individuals and systems as clinical interventions, such as in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EDMR). Thank you for your creative suggestions. S.N., Psychiatry Department, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Dr. Nisenbaum, I am honored by your reply. Thank you!!
Sir Ernest Shackleton famously inspired and led to safety his hopelessly trapped expedition crew after the British Antarctic exploration ship Endurance became an icelocked frozen wreck for months in 1915, and he is studied at Harvard Business School and worldwide for his principles of resourceful leadership under crisis. In my Co-Solutions clinical practice partnership with his descendant Dr. Bruce Shackleton, I like to allude to your formulation of Competition, Connection, Confidence, Courage and Commitment as the “Five Co-‘s” of Every Adventure in Life and Learning. Thank you for your neat capsulation of Claude Bernard’s advice to search our “milieu interieur” to restore balance and resilience by taking note of Resource Holding Potential and Value.
Great input and example. Thank you so much for weighing in!