How Are You Wired

The pandemic unlocked something for many of us.
We realized that the way we had been working wasn’t working.
This new way seemed to have a better cadence.
Better energy. Greater efficiency and productivity

But it didn’t have a label. We didn’t know what words to give it.
But we knew, we felt better when we worked from home.
While the isolation was hard, there were positives that weren’t really talked about, but became apparent.
You felt better.
Not about the world. The world was on fire.

But better in your own body.
Lighter, around week three, somewhere between the kitchen table and the second cup of coffee, like something that had been sitting on your chest for twenty years got lifted off without your permission.
But you didn't trust it.
You definitely weren't going to mention it on the team call.
The space . . . it felt good.

So you kept the camera on and faked the right amount of struggle, because everyone was supposed to be struggling. And some part of you was praying it could stay this way.
Here’s the thing nobody EVER told you, and it’s plainer than all the productivity advice you’ve ever been handed.

People are not built to work the same way.

Not “we all have different strengths.

We’re truly wired differently.

Stay with me here.

How you take in energy. How you engage. What makes you come alive and what quietly bleeds you dry.

And the office, the nine-to-five, the open floor plan, the back-to-back calendar, was built around exactly one of those ways. And if you happen to be built that way, work feels easy. But if you aren’t, you spend your whole career translating yourself into a language that was never your first one and calling the tiredness normal. Feeling like there is something inherently wrong with you and then after a number of years you just dismiss it and push and grind to make it all work.

But that was never something that was never talked about or even surfaced.

How we work.

How you’re wired to work.

Was never on the agenda.

And it needed to be.

You probably already have an idea of your preference. And most likely, you’ve just never been allowed to say or even explore it. Here are some examples:

Maybe you’re the one who’s told in every review that you need to be more proactive. More of a self-starter. You’ve nodded along a little ashamed because they’re not wrong that you stall out in the mornings when nothing’s pulling at you. But hand you a real problem and you’ll lose track of time and out-work the entire floor without noticing it got dark. You were never unmotivated. You’re an engine that needs a road, and they kept handing you a blank page and calling the idling a discipline problem.

Maybe you’re the one who’s been called difficult. Too much. A steamroller who doesn’t bring people along. You’ve been coached on it, pulled aside about it, asked to slow down and run things up the chain. And every single time you do, the idea dies in committee and something in you dies with it. You’re not difficult. You’re built to move first, and you’ve spent years apologizing for the one thing you’re actually here to do.

Maybe you’re the one they call brilliant in the room and absent the rest of the week. You see the answer in the first ten minutes and then can’t explain why the other thirty hours feel like drowning. You’ve watched people with half your insight grind past you on the org chart, and somewhere along the way you decided the problem must be you. That you’re lazy. Undisciplined. Quietly defective. You’re not. You were built to be asked, not to churn, so you sat in a job that only rewarded churning and called the burnout a personal failing.

Maybe you’re the one who knows the temperature of a room within a minute of walking in, who feels a team rotting before anyone will have the courage to say it, and who almost never gets asked. You’ve been called moody. Inconsistent. Hard to read, because you genuinely are different depending on who you’re with, and that unsettles people who need you to be one fixed thing. Put you in the same small group doing the same work every day and you go gray. You’re not flaky. You’re a mirror, and they kept asking the mirror to hold still.

None of these is the better one. None of them is the strong one. They’re four different engines, and the office only ever printed the manual for one.

Read that again ⬆️

A woman told me she’d never been more productive than the year she worked from her dining room. She said it the way you’d confess to something. She ran a team of forty, hit every number, and the thing she remembered most was finally being able to hear herself think, and how guilty that made her feel for even saying it. Because the standard had always rewarded something else, and no one ever gave her the latitude to align to the way she was wired. No one ever told her that was a real difference and not a defect.

I spent thirty years on the wrong side of this.

I felt like I was an anomaly. The misfit.

I’m the one who sees what’s wrong in four minutes and can’t grind for eight hours. I never could. I did it anyway, brilliantly, in rooms full of people who never knew what it cost me, and I came home with nothing left for the people I actually loved and called it discipline. I thought that that emptied-out feeling was just what success was supposed to feel like. It got all of me. There was nothing left for anything else.

So. Which one were you?

Not who are you at work.

Who you are underneath the performance and mandates of work?

Which engine were you actually running, before you learned to fake the one the office was designed for?

If you grieved going back and couldn’t explain it, that’s your answer. You felt, for the first time in years, what it was like to work the way you’re actually built. And then you went back to pretending you’re built like everyone else.

You can’t unknow it now.

The only real question left is how long you’re going to keep calling your wiring a character flaw

Knowing which one you are is where this stops being interesting and starts being useful.

That’s the part I take paid subscribers into, and there’s more of it coming.

Carolina Migliaccio is the founder of Soulful Moxie, an executive advisory for high-capacity leaders navigating the distance between who they became and who they actually are.

Your success shouldn’t suffocate you; it should support your design.