coming out at work

Come Out at Work: As Losing Your Eyesight

Haig Chahinian

If you’re reading this, you probably take your eyesight for granted. Imagine what it would be like to lose your vision, after relying on your eyes all your life. It feels nearly impossible to fathom, yet this is what happened several years ago to Ashish Goyal, a trader at JPMorgan in London.

A happy child at age 9, he realized he couldn’t see all the lines in his school notebooks, and he was having difficulty recognizing faces. Afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that leads to blindness, he struggled to deal with this newfound physical challenge. “What was I to tell people? ‘Sometimes I can see you, sometimes not?'”  By the time he was 22, he could make out only light and shadows, which remains true today.

Because of his blindness, as a young adult he considered working for his father, a real estate developer. With encouragement from his mother, however, he pursued formal education in business. After earning his degree, many employers turned him away once they learned he was blind. At one point, frustrated, he told a recruiter “I’m blind. Do you still want to talk to me or not?” Exposing his truth near the beginning of the recruiting process may have been a turning point. “They asked whether I could do the job. I said I think I can, and I was hired.”

While he likely didn’t define himself by his blindness, if others were going to, they would be better off knowing of Goyal’s vision impairment as soon as possible. The freedom to open up about the complexities of his abilities in part led him to JPMorgan, where he helps manage billions of dollars exposed to market risk.

At the financial services firm he uses screen-reading software to read e-mail, reports, and presentations. The audio speed is so fast it would sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. When he needs to read graphs, a regular occurence, Goyal pores over the data and works to imagine the graph — an asset when it comes to analyzing risk. A colleague has said “Ashish looks at where things are now and just follows the news flow. He’s not blinded by the graphs.”

Coming out at work as one who is losing her eyesight takes a significant amount of self-awareness, and strength. The more you’re grounded in the reality of your diminishing vision, the better you can communicate what you’re experiencing, and what sort of accomodation you need to continue doing your work. Your transition from identifying as sighted to your new identity as one who’s blind may be  full of uncertainty, confusion, and fear, and the conversations you have with colleagues on the subject may be awkward, at first. Yet just think: if you can work through this challenge, what obstacle can’t you overcome? Right, we can’t think of any either.

There are other conditions that cause gradual and irreversible loss of eyesight, with many corresponding online resources. The Birdshot Uveitis Society is one such support network for folks with, well, birdshot uveitis.

Beyond his professional work, Goyal takes tango lessons and plays cricket, albeit with a bigger ball that makes sound. We’re reminded of the concept of hedonic adaptation, which postulates that people can return to a stable level of happiness after a setback in their lives. More than stably happy, Goyal seems to be thriving fully.

Have you lost any of your abilities at work? How have you managed?

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Come Out at Work: With Dyslexia

Haig Chahinian

We’re feeling momentum as we continue to feature parts of our selves which at first blush are easy to disparage. Then upon closer examination, we see the value of bringing the full spectrum of who we are to the workplace, with glorious results.  Next up: the senior vice president and chief brand officer for media company The Elle Group.

Robin Domeniconi is a well-regarded executive of ELLE, ELLE Decor and Ellegirl, and oversees content, strategy, sales and marketing for all three publications. She’s held prominent roles in other prestigious organizations, serving as vice president of U.S. advertising at Microsoft, and president of Time Inc. where she launched Real Simple magazine.

And she’s dyslexic. In an interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times, she spoke about being the boss in a corner office, and what she looks for in hiring new employees. Job seekers take note! She described the influence of her dyslexia on building relationships:

I also have dyslexia. A lot of times, people will say things that I don’t understand. I am never embarrassed to ask them to repeat what they’ve said. It’s a vulnerability that you show. I once had an editor say to me, “You’re the best publisher I’ve ever had because you’re not afraid to show your vulnerability.” … I have enough confidence to do that. I would like you to have enough confidence, too.

By exposing her dyslexic self to her employees, she authorizes her staff to bring their whole selves to work, breeding increased self-confidence, and she leads by example.  How invigorating to see a chief executive admit that there are things she doesn’t understand, and freely ask her colleagues to repeat themselves so she’s sure to comprehend everything. This attribute can be rare to find in a manager; must one have a learning disability to be this transparent at work?

In another segment of the interview, she described how she promotes an open work environment, enumerating the qualifications she seeks in interviewees:

I want someone who’s candid, who’s very willing to be open. To me, the willingness to be open takes a lot of courage, because you’re displaying your vulnerability. I find that if you’re willing to be open, to expose your vulnerability, you’re going to succeed with me. Because I don’t have all the answers, and you shouldn’t think that you have all the answers. So we need to be open with each other.

Is her openness a function of being a woman in the executive suite? It’s hard to know for sure. What is certain is the amount of love she has within her. Love for herself, in the most productive way, and love for the world around her.

Her invisible disability translates to amazing ability, wouldn’t you say? In the comments below:

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Come Out at Work: With Lyme Disease

Haig Chahinian

Debbi Morgan is one of those actors who seems to be in every show you watch, from “What’s Happening!!” back in the 70s to “All My Children” today. While she spends most of her energy acting as someone else, the Emmy Award-winner revealed a personal attribute on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show.” She opened up about battling Lyme Disease, and said:

It’s nothing fatal. Lyme disease is an infection caused by the borrelia bacteria from a tick. It’s a chronic condition, and I’ve had it in my system for over 15 years.

In divulging this aspect of herself, she helped fans understand why she’s been absent from “All My Children” since December, helped us see more of who she is, and educated those who may not be familiar with the nature of Lyme Disease.

Along with other public figures who’ve come out with the disease, she implicitly gave Lyme sufferers permission to be candid with coworkers on the subject. To be sure, if you have Lyme Disease, taking care of yourself typically involves taking time off of work. 

As a bonus, of late her name and image have been featured in numerous media outlets, helping increase her popularity. In fact, IMDB lists her STARmeter as up 18% this week. It feels callous to mention this fact, yet her profession is show business, where publicity matters.

We expect that number to keep rising.

If you live with Lyme, what has your experience been at work?

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Come Out at Work: With Depression

Haig Chahinian

With depression? It might seem totally natural to hide this aspect of your internal world from coworkers.  That is, until The New York Times Magazine featured the complexities of depression in a cover story early in 2010 and called it “Depression’s Upside.” Yes, there are positive aspects to depression, including how it can affect your work.

According to the story, “every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by [depression].” Moreover, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins found that “successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.”

So if you look around at work, there’s a certain probability that someone is depressed, regardless of their level of success. And it’s not impossible for that somebody to be you. How’re you feeling today? We ask so as to stir some self-reflection on the matter.

What’s so great about being depressed? To be sure, to live with depression is to suffer, badly. Still, when you accept this state of being, and work with it rather than fight it, the few bright spots become increasingly visible. Let’s look at 6 perks of being depressed at work, directly from the Times article:

1. You’re able to concentrate entirely on your work as you withdraw from the world. We’ve experienced this first-hand during these dark days of winter, and so did Charles Darwin. We’re in pretty good company, right?

2. You may understand interpersonal relationships better. Ruminating as a function of being depressed can help you realize you need to be more gentle with people around you, for example, or that listening more attentively to friends helps everyone involved feel better. You’re also less likely to stereotype strangers.

3. You’re not so sidetracked by irrelevant stimuli around you. Being pinged by colleagues throughout the day, terrible news headlines flashing across screens everywhere, and even the pressure to multi-task won’t distract you from what you’re intent on doing. This type of zen energy is otherwise very difficult to come by.

4. An extremely analytical style of thinking can result from increased activity in a certain part of the brain of depressed patients.  The tendency for the depressed is to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down a complex problem into its simpler parts. The bad news is that this thought process is really slow.

5. You have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. As well, you’re better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events. So if you feel up to attending that meeting, you’re primed to make significant contributions.

6. Your writing may improve.  According to a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia:

Negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

Detractors of the upside of depression argue that people with significant depression usually ignore daily hygiene and can neglect giving people around them immediate attention. True, this may be a recipe for greater hardships at work, and which increased ability to focus and problem-solving skills won’t necessarily help.

Ultimately, knowing the benefits of your depressed episodes at work can help you embrace these natural occurences, and even open up to your workmates about them. In turn, you may find yourself more relaxed in the workplace, and more productive. Now why would you want to hide that?

Yes, to be depressed at work may be a messy experience, and yet  upon closer inspection, what part of being human in the workplace isn’t? It’s a rhetorical question; still, if you’d like to answer it in the comments below, we welcome it.

Come Out at Work: With Two Jobs

Haig Chahinian

The New York Times recently missed an opportunity to talk about bringing your whole self to work, as writer Michael R. Gordon wrote a piece about the work life of David Richardson, yet didn’t challenge the subject’s assertions that his two professions are mutually exclusive. Here’s the story.

Lt. Col. David Richardson in his own words is a “painter who fights.”  He’s an artist showing his colorful Expressionist paintings in a Georgetown gallery through the end of January, and in February he’ll be deployed to work with Afghan security forces. Unfortunately, he doesn’t view his disparate occupations–artist and Marine–as integrable, even though they’re both extensions of himself.

Directly from “Faithful to Two Worlds: The Marines and the Artistic Life”:

Colonel Richardson does acknowledge the considerable influence of his tours of duty in Asia on his painting. During a tour in South Korea, for example, he had small canvases made for him by a local carpenter, hauled them back to his studio on his bicycle, painted symbols on the individual squares and then clamped them together to form larger works, which comprise part of his “R Series” on display in Washington DC. The faint arrows, similar to the directional markings on a tactical map, are one of the rare carry-overs from his military world.

Interestingly, his mother is an artist who paints landscapes and flowers, and his father had been a Navy diver in World War II.

Now, the catalog for the show mentions his travels to Japan and Korea, but at his request never suggests that his military service took him there. As well, during the long lulls between patrols when he and his Marines were holed up with Iraqi troops in a dilapidated soap factory in Fallujah, he never hinted that he had a passion for art.

By his own account he has long led a double existence. “It’s been pretty compartmentalized,” he said about his two lives.”  “My father taught me to talk the talk. You don’t talk about art with the Marines, and you don’t talk about the Marines with artists.”

So it sure would be tidy to blame his father for limiting his worldview. Yet as an adult, he bears some responsibility to challenge what he’s been taught. At the same time, his gestalt smacks of the restrictions imposed by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Clearly, these two distinct areas of work are related — within Colonel Richardson. Yet it’s difficult for him to work openly as a Marine and a painter. While we acknowledge that the stress of war impacts each troops’ state of mind in complicated ways, we have a hypothesis that if Col. Richardson were to come out in both worlds, his openness and mindfulness would make him a better artist and a better Marine.

Do you lead two or more distinct professional lives? What are the challenges you face in integrating them?

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Craig Ferguson Fully Revealed! [video]

Haig Chahinian

We wanted to call this “Coming Out at Work: as an Alcoholic,” but which headline are you more likely to click among the Internet hoards?  Exactly.

Back in February 2007 the host of The Late Late Show came out as an alcoholic. In a heartfelt monologue, he described the plan he had to end his life by jumping off the Tower Bridge after a night of binge-drinking in London. A few months later, he entered rehab and at this point has been sober for nearly 19 years.

We love that Ferguson accesses a part of him self that could seem irrelevant to late night television, and uses it to comedic and humanitarian effect. He no longer wants to make fun of celebrities and others having a tough time in life.

For example, early in 2007 Britney Spears made big news by shaving her head, and he vows not to poke fun at her circumstances because he’s been there himself. He candidly explores the way his alcoholism informs how he relates to people, a significant component of his work as a talk show host.

His revelation brings him out as strong, grounded and more handsome.

Do you identify as an alcoholic? How does this part of you influence your work?

Come Out at Work: As HIV+ [video]

Haig Chahinian

Gretchen Jones won Season 8 of “Project Runway,” and still Mondo Guerra came out on top.

Heidi Klum looked ravishing wearing his “bubble” dress at a recent screening of “Black Swan,” and Mondo collaborated with Piperlime in designing a t-shirt for World AIDS Day. How could he be so successful so soon after the season finale?

Guerra left an indelible mark on the judges, his fellow designers, and perhaps on the “Project Runway” franchise itself when he came out as HIV+ near the tear-filled end of episode 10.

The project that week was to incorporate something about one’s past into the design of a textile pattern. Guerra used positive and negative space to vibrant effect:  he designed a pattern with purple, gold and black geometric shapes, and with inspired subtlety, the black negative space was in the shape of “+” signs.

During the judging, he revealed that the plus signs represented his HIV+ status. Tears ensued, naturally. Take a look:

Mondo displayed real courage in revealing a part of himself that others could readily disparage, sometimes with painful consequences.

Through his confident proclamation, he demonstrated that other people’s reactions are less relevant than one’s own sense of self. Upon divulging his HIV status, he said “I feel alot better. I feel free.”

To which one of his fellow competitors responded “We love you.”

Our friends at Gawker have additional video on this heart-wrenching story.

What would it take for you to let free a part of your self you’ve been hiding at work?

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