Apologies in advance for the length of this post: I’m beginning a new writing habit thanks to the wonderful Deborah of Radiant Media Labs, and I naturally tend to be wordy. And I use a ton of jargon while speaking. I’ll learn to be more concise as I write more. (Side note: I designed the brand identity for Radiant Media Labs and built the website! Woot.)
I’ve been trying out a new way to approach my work habits, based on my latest thought crush: Reversal Theory.
Reversal Theory is a theory of motivation
A brief overview: Reversal Theory rebels against the idea that we have a static set of traits. Instead, the idea is that we naturally and continuously “reverse” between opposing motivations, and, while we have dominant tendencies, we’re not really characterized by any one way of being. This means that our life, and our work, needs to allow us to be quite different people throughout a day. We need different environments, mindsets, and tasks available to us, many of which will be polar opposites of one another.
For example, in the mainstream approach, some people may advise you to consider whether you’re more extroverted or introverted, and choose either a) work that involves being around many people on a frequent basis (for extroverts), or b) work that gives you solitude and time to recharge (for introverts). Reversal Theory suggests that your work needs to allow you both. You may naturally switch between the states, perhaps many times a day. It also suggests that depending on which environment you’re currently in, you could manipulate your inner state to match the environment.
As someone who’s self-employed and has total control over my work habits (at least in theory), I’ve spent a lot of energy on finding “hacks” to get myself to do things and be productive. I never quite arrived at a system that works. Playing with applying Reversal Theory, however, is giving me hope.
I’ll be writing about this more as time goes on, but today I’d like to introduce one concept from Reversal Theory that’s currently on my mind. It’s called alloic sympathy.
Working as a way to address the need to care for people
Alloic Sympathy is the motivational state in which you derive pleasure from taking care of others and nurturing them. Alloic can be shorthand for “other”, and is contrasted with autic, which refers to the self. Autic sympathy, for example, is the state in which you derive pleasure from other people flattering you and caring for you; it’s the state in which you want to feel attractive and overall awesome in others’ eyes. Reversal Theory suggests that we’re regularly switching between the two states, and fundamentally need both. There aren’t “Mother Teresas” who are “good” and just love taking care of people all the time, and there aren’t “Donald Trumps” who are “bad” only love attention and flattery. The most natural way of being is to regularly switch between the two modes, and to both get and receive care and attention.
I’ve been applying this concept to client work. Whenever I begin working on a project, the first thing I do is write about it on this little worksheet I designed, which asks several questions for each of the eight primary motivational states described in Reversal Theory. For the alloic sympathy state, I ask the following questions:
- What is this client (or audience) currently worried about?
- How will this project address these concerns?
- How can I create relief for this client (or audience)?
Answering these questions works so far—it focuses me on my natural inclination to be good to people, and motivates me to prioritize ways of making other people feel cared for. It has a side effect of focusing my mind on the big picture of each project. Instead of drowning in the details, I focus only on those that will make clients feel most cared for.
An example might be helpful here.
Tonight I am working on five projects: three of them involve actual development work on WordPress sites, one involves detailed planning of future work on a WordPress site, and one involves mocking up store interiors with branded elements I designed. I’ll be honest—the last thing I want to be doing right now is doing this work. I’m tired, a lot of the work is ambiguous and complicated, my neck hurts, and I was up until 3am yesterday, so I have major eye strain. I really, really don’t want to be working on these. But they’re due painfully soon, and I feel like I must get it all done.
I answered the questions before opening my laptop. And now energy is brewing.
Answering the questions helped me realize that:
- All three website development clients are most worried about getting sales. The website is a key vehicle for their marketing efforts, and it needs to serve as proof of their professionalism. This added context: I don’t need to do everything, or do it all perfectly. I can focus on only the features that are directly related to sales.
- For the planning project, the biggest worry is that they have never worked with me before, so they don’t know what to expect. Ambiguity is stressful. This gave me performance criteria: I know that I need to mention specific details to demonstrate that I’m conscientious.
- For the branding project, they’re not worried about sales, but are very worried about timelines. They’re opening up many stores, and finishing store interiors frees up resources for further investment. This lowered the deliverables barrier: instead of waiting to finish everything and send out one big batch of files, I need to send out small things as soon as they’re done.
- For three of the clients, the biggest relief I can provide them is removing “check in with developer/designer to see how she’s doing” from their to-do lists. This realization kicked me right in the gut, because it’s the thing I struggle with most right now—I’ve recently burned out and kind of disappeared from some projects, getting caught in that loop where you avoid updating someone on the status until you have an impressive amount of work done. Since I was burned out, I wasn’t doing impressive amounts of work, so I wasn’t communicating, which is a terrible, TERRIBLE thing to do. I can empathize with how stressful that is on the receiving side. So the biggest gift I can give people is communication—to check myself in, so to speak, so they always know what’s going on, even if they don’t think to ask. I really, really need to work on this.
Taking the time to do this may seem like it just adds to my workload, but the reverse is true: this actually decreased how much I feel like I need to do tonight. I can articulate it down to a few bullet points.
- Schedule communication. I need to schedule out morning updates for all five projects, even if I don’t make a lot of progress. This is pretty much the most important and only thing I need to do. Perhaps I’ll write the drafts now with some version that says “I didn’t get it done!”, and update them with accomplishments as I go along.
- Allow myself to do non-sales-related development tasks later. If it doesn’t impact sales directly, I don’t need to stress myself about it tonight. There’s time.
- For the website planning project, make the minimum deliverable have ten details dispersed through four stages. They won’t have time to process more information than that anyway, and that’s a very easy thing for me to do.
Bam. I can do this.
Again, focusing on caring for people is a great way to motivate yourself to work
Answer these questions for whatever you’re working on:
- What is this client (or audience) currently worried about?
- How will this project address these concerns?
- How can I create relief for this client (or audience)?