Unbox Yourself and Stretch to Your Full Potential
I have spent most of my adult life feeling as though I’m standing on the outside looking in. Never quite fitting in, never quite feeling part of the crowd, and never quite sure of my place. It’s a strange feeling. Often lonely, always puzzling. I could never quite put my finger on what it was that made me feel so ‘alien’ a lot of the time; like everyone else had been given the key or the secret code to successful adulting but for some reason they had skipped past me in the queue.
However, in recent years, I have come to the conclusion that it’s not that I’ve missed a memo or that I didn’t get the key, or that I just don’t fit in. It’s that somehow the world has fashioned itself into a place where so many people are expected to contort themselves into a box that is entirely the wrong shape for
them. And by the time they’ve reached mid-life, it starts to bloody hurt.
The traditional 9-5 has never worked for me. Oh, I gave it my best shot and spent 6 (mostly) miserable years working in creative agencies, trying to get used to the office-shaped box. I hated it. And to this day it baffles me that people are expected to show up to a place of work at 9am, take their lunch at 1pm, and stay in their box until 5 or 6pm at the earliest, when the powers that be have decided that the working day is over.
Who does this work for? Certainly not the human who struggles to drag their brain into operation before midday. Certainly not the human who prefers to rise with the birds at 5 or 6 am and is pretty much out of juice by 2pm. Certainly not the human who does their best work at night time when the hum of activity
around them begins to die down and they find they can think more clearly and problem-solve without distractions.
From our late teens we are told to pick a career, pick a niche, pick a lane and stay in it, do one thing and do it really well. We seem to have become obsessed with categorising people and things. The first thing we ask someone upon meeting them for the first time is ‘What do you do?’ – in other words, how do you categorise yourself? What box have you put yourself in?
In truth, none of us are box-shaped; we each have our own unique shape, our own unique way of viewing and engaging with the world, and our own unique way of working. Many of us struggle to identify as just one thing. Many of us are interested in and passionate about a whole range of different things and find the idea of doing the same thing every day for the rest of our lives quite painful to contemplate.
If the Pandemic taught us anything it taught us that the way things have always been done is not the way they have to continue being done. We found solutions and ways of doing things that would have been dismissed outright just a few years before. Necessity made us creative. It also gave us the opportunity to re-evaluate our lives and think deeply about what was truly important to us.
As I find myself saying on an almost daily basis, we are living in the strangest of times. We are experiencing what I would call existential fatigue. We are tired to the bone. We are soul-weary. And, I suspect, many of us are tired of trying to fold ourselves into that damn box. To fit in. To squash ourselves into a shape that is palatable to other people and to follow the rules that were written for an entirely
different age.
You are not box-shaped. You get to decide what shape your container is. At Ärtful we decided to build what we call an amoeba-shaped container that allows us to be creative and curious, messy and defiant. We experiment, we embrace a ‘what if’ mentality and, we encourage our clients to do the same.
Smash that box. Unfold and stretch yourself out in every direction. Take up space. Try different shapes for size and see how they fit. You might just find yourself heading down a path you never imagined taking and growing into a person you never knew you could be.
