None of the above has anything to do with who you are on the inside. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. Instead, you are—from school on into the world of work—assessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models. So, in truth, you won’t just get lost. You’ll get hidden—and by the very institutions that are supposed to reveal you. Little wonder we’re facing such an epidemic of lost people.

As I described at the beginning of the book, many organizations impose on you processes and tools that appear to have been designed to deliberately distance you from who you really are. Your unique loves, your uniqueness in general, runs counter to the organization’s need for uniformity—of products, services, even values—and so the goal of work is experienced by you as an ongoing effort to make you as much as possible like every other salesperson, housekeeper, teacher, manager, nurse, machinist, or whatever your role might be.

Wrongheaded though this is, you’re not going to be able to recreate your organization’s talent management practices all by yourself. Yes, folks like me and others are trying to influence your leaders to throw out these uniformity-focused talent practices in favor of more individualized ones, but this will take a few years. What can you do in the meanwhile? You want to find love in your work, you want to be seen for your whole, authentic self at work, and for the very best of you. How can you pull this off, when so many of the tools and technologies and processes at work are trying—well intendedly—to smother you?

The pain of hating our own creation is a consequence of our investing too much of our sense of being into the company, the product, the creation. When we hang our sense of self on the whisper of an idea; when we unwittingly insist that our love, safety, and belonging depend on what we do and, most important, how others feel about our feelings, our actions, and our work; then we leave little space for anything other than bitter, existential suffering.

A person, because of their own stupid behavior, has broken a marriage, been fired from a job, lost a friend, hurt their children, suffered a public humiliation. Their world has crumbled. In theory, it should be possible to repair yourself alone. In theory, it should be possible to understand yourself, especially the deep broken parts of yourself, through

introspection. But the research clearly shows that introspection is overrated. That’s in part because what’s going on in your mind is not only more complicated than you understand, it is more complicated than you can understand. Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the

models you use to perceive the world because you’re seeing with them. Finally, when people are trying to see themselves by themselves, they tend to bend off in one of two unhelpful directions. Sometimes they settle for the easy insight. They tell themselves they’ve just had a great epiphany. In actuality, they’ve done nothing more than come up with a make-believe story that will help them feel good about themselves. Or else they spiral into rumination. They revisit the same flaws and traumatic experiences over and over again, reinforcing their bad mental habits, making themselves miserable. Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People trying to grapple with the adult legacies of their childhood wounds need friends who will prod them to see their situation accurately. They need friends who can provide the outside view of them, the one they can’t see from within. They need friends who will remind them, “The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you. I’m proud to know you and proud of everything you’ve accomplished and will accomplish.” They need people who will practice empathy.

If we are free to try out any identity we like, it is also true that we must rely on others to complete the picture of which we are only allowed to paint certain parts. The desired identity remains incomplete and tentative without the stamp of approval of a new peer group, mentor, or community. It is important to conduct our “role rehearsals” outside our usual circles because the old audience tends to narrowly typecast us.