I like working. Quit taking it personally.

For our five year wedding anniversary my husband I treated ourselves to a week long vacation in Turks & Caicos. It was an honest to goodness do nothing vacation that I had only dreamed about — a full week of lying on the beach, ignoring emails, spending uninterrupted time with my plus one for life, and reading as many books as possible. Being mildly obsessed with Mindy Kaling, I added her two books to my beach reading list.

I was one hundred percent burnt out, and stretched thin. Something I had convinced myself was okay, because I was truly working in a job I had worked hard to get, and that checked all the boxes of what I considered a rewarding career. So imagine my surprise when reading “Why Not Me?” and I get to a section on working, and how “we do a thing in America, which is to label people ‘workaholics’ and tell them that work is ruining their lives.” Naturally I thought this part of the book was speaking to me.

I continued reading the book, and shot upright in my beach-side lounge chair when I read what Mindy Kaling wrote next, “It probably resonates because most people in this country hate their jobs. The economies of entire countries like Turks & Caicos are banking on US citizens hating their jobs and wanting to get away from it all.” And there it was.

The kicker is that, to this day, I thrive on being a so-called “workaholic.” You see, I like working, and (gasp) I like what I do. I often joke that I am one of three people using all of my degrees (yes, even a liberal arts degree!) and have made a career of it. Yet, somewhere a group of people got together and decided for the rest of us that working hard and working long hours was a bad thing.

Which is why it has always bothered me endlessly when people remark to “quit taking it personally” when it comes to work. And here’s why. I went to school for a decent amount of time, I worked full time while going to school full time, I studied hard (err, in grad school), I worked entry-level jobs making next to nothing, and I paid my dues in order to get to where I am, and I take a great deal of pride in being fairly good at what I do.

When I work on a project, and something goes sideways, or something unexpected happens, I absolutely will take it personally. However, what I have learned is that it matters the extent to which you are taking it personally. I had a career coach who approached this phenomenon with the Q-tip method: quit taking it personally. Her advice was to imagine a box of Q-tips on your desk, and to remove one anytime something happened at work that you took personally, and if and when there were no more Q-tips left, it was time to go.

This Q-tip approach fascinated me. Mostly because work is so personal to me, because so much of who I am is based on what I do. But this method also opened me up to the way in which I took things personally. I discovered I was taking things personally for which I had no control over, mainly, how other people did their jobs and how it was affecting mine. I decided to change who I let work impact me personally, and to focus on taking the good things personally.

So, for all you so-called workaholics out there, take note of what you are taking personally when it comes to work and your career, and whether it’s time to book a trip to Turks & Caicos.

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