The Self-Care Mindset

CHAPTER 9It's Who We Are That Makes Us Great

“It's not how hard we work or our titles that makes us great; it's our humanity that makes us great.”

When I was a little girl, my dad told me a story about how he went to the king's castle in Copenhagen to install a new loudspeaker system. After he was done and showed the king how to use it, the king grabbed the microphone and started playing “Choo‐choo‐train.” After a while, he turned to my dad with a big smile and said, “Wow, this makes me so happy, I don't have to wait for the echo to end so I can speak like a normal person now.”

My dad would tell me stories like this to remind me that we are all human on the inside. It's not how hard we work or our titles that make us great; it's who we are that makes us great.

Since the industrial revolution, society as a whole has valued doing as the measure of performance, success, and identity. You see it when people lose a job they love because they lose their identity as well. You see it when people retire as many fall into a crisis of identity and no longer feel useful.

When my dad was dying, we spent five months in deep conversations going back over our lives together, and a pattern became very apparent: he touched people's lives. As word of his condition spread among the people he had worked with over the years as an executive search consultant, his inbox was flooded with messages about how much he had impacted people. But this wasn't because he had done something for them; it was ...