A tale of two personalities: Who you are at work is not necessarily who you are in life

In my former career, I had two personalities.  My professional work persona, which was probably about 50% of me most of the time, and my normal home persona that my close friends and family saw.  I believe that most people in the HR field have this dysfunction because it’s difficult to strike the right balance of remaining professional and living the part of "company role model" while also keeping some semblance of yourself so people don’t see you as fake.

While keeping these two personas somewhat separate, somewhere in between the people we support and work with have caught on and now have the perspective that people in HR are the worst offenders when it comes to professional work behavior.  When our home personas snuck through during the day during a weak or stressful moment, this became true in some sense.

Truth is, working in the HR field is probably the most difficult career I worked in when it came to being who I really was.  Since leaving the field, friends that I worked with and have remained in contact with probably have gotten more insight into who I really am as a person.  In my last career, I tried very hard to uphold that line by using LinkedIn for my work friends and Facebook for my non-work friends.  With LinkedIn, I could still be connected to people and remain professional.  With Facebook, I wanted to still be myself and not worry about offending people I worked with.  It worked...sort of.  People at work began friending me and I found it hard to keep that line tightly strung up, so of course I hit "accept" and began to filter the one place I vowed to remain myself.

If you're having trouble relating because you're one of the lucky ones that gets to be yourself at work, then here's a visual to put it into perspective.  Enjoy this side-by-side comparison of the real me vs. the work “HR” me.

HR Megan	Real Megan
Extroverted most of the time.	Introvert
Professional jokes, humor.	The most inappropriate humor there is.
Able and engaging presenter.	I would rather die than stand up in front of a group of people I don’t know.
Not supposed to use foul language.	I swear like a sailor!
Not supposed to be close to people I support because of perceived favoritism.	Introverts have few, but important people in their lives as friends.  I made some of these connections at work, a natural place to make friends as we spend most of our lives there.  I had deeper conversations with these people versus the usual small talk or work talk we were supposed to have.
Neutral when it came to hard decisions, such as firing someone.	I don’t care who you are, this is hard to do and I often felt empathy for the person on the other side of the table.  This is especially true when I knew the person.
Expected to network and be a part of company functions.	This was the most uncomfortable part of work for me.  I don’t do small talk (again, I’m a major introvert) and I prefer to just kick back at home rather than “work a room.”

I’m sure there’s more, but this gives you the gist.  In the long-run, the type of work I did in the HR field was going to kill me…literally.  Well, maybe not literally, but it would have either killed off my real personality or I would have gone crazy dealing with split personalities.   As many of you know, I couldn’t have stayed in the HR field because my true passion is writing.  Not only did I have to be true to my personality, but I had to be true to myself and what I really wanted to be doing for a career.