Writer, comedian and all-round human firecracker Catherine Deveny urges every aspiring writer: “Don’t die with your music inside you.” This was brought home hard when a friend and colleague ended his life three years ago.

David was a deeply empathic, big-hearted human with a brilliant mind and a radiant smile. He saw the gifts in others and let them know with a poetry and sincerity that was hard to deflect. The difference he made was profound and he had so much more to share but it was not to be. And it’s not for me to say how it should have been.

But you. You’re here. You’ve worked so hard to know what you know, to be able to do what you do. You have so much music inside of you too. Yes, the deepest learning is gained from experience that no one can shortcut for us and some of that experience downright sucks. That doesn’t mean the learning needs to happen in isolation.

We can still leave a trail of small step ups, handrails and ropes, never knowing who will discover them in a time of need. We can carve footholds and arrows in rocks, without seeing the greatness they maybe helped someone else to achieve. After all, we are the product of others’ generosity, from both those who know us well and from total strangers. So if you haven’t already, please, do come and join the symphony.

‘Enough’ can be a loaded word, associated with fears of not doing enough or being enough, a striving to cross a mystical benchmark of acceptability that is hard to pin down and seems to continually drift beyond reach no matter what we do. Even the affirming mantra of ‘I am enough’ seems a bit… well… stingy. Like we just scraped it in.

If I said “just give it seventy percent, that’ll be enough” it sounds like I’m asking you to lower your standards, take short cuts or compromise. And it sounds underwhelming in a society full of messages to be our best and maximise our potential.

But we can look at it a different way. What if we worked on lifting our seventy percent performance rather try to push ourselves to hit peak performance as often as possible? We can intentionally improve our skills and processes so they’re still solid when we don’t have our ideal level of energy or focus available.

When our seventy percent performance is genuinely, absolutely, good enough we have more room for the messiness of reality on the OK-ish days and the for-whatever-reason not good days. We can burn less energy on self-criticism or self-doubt. We might leave more in the tank for other parts of our lives and loves. And anything above seventy percent can become a source of satisfaction or delight, a delicious moment to savour rather than relentlessly pursue.

Even if we work one-to-one with people, there are many voices in the room, for both the client, and for us.

The person we are supporting may be mindful of the input of family members, friends, colleagues. Perhaps they have legal advice or fears of what might be said about them.

They might be hearing the voices of systems or social pressures. Or memories of that mean teacher in the third grade, bullies or abusers. Or the arguments of strangers on social media or people they admire.

And so are we. The voices we hear aren’t confined to our teachers, supervisors and managers. We don’t just take our professional self into the room.

We can be curious where our voices come from and what they’re really saying. We can wonder how valid they are for the other person or even ourselves. We can also choose voices of peers and supervisors to help share the load and the messy reality of the work.

And we want to amplify the voices that lift us up while making sure we still have kind voices that show us how to do better, be better, and be a positive voice in the rooms we are not in.

Many of us will be familiar with the phrase ‘the elephant in the room’ – the obvious problem or issue we know is there but aren’t willing to acknowledge, let alone discuss.

To discuss the elephant enters uncharted territory. There may be a risk of vulnerability, loss of control or retaliation. But avoiding the elephant risks superficial conversations that go nowhere, go in the wrong direction or make things worse. And the longer we ignore the elephant, the bigger he tends to get.

I feel for the elephant. We’ve all been in group conversations where we’ve felt ignored or someone makes eye contact with others but not us. We’ve all made contributions only to have them overlooked or forgotten. We’ve expended precious time and energy on things only to feel like it was for nothing.

So how can we normalise our elephants so they don’t cause such shock or surprise when they turn up? How can we make room for them so they don’t create so much havoc as they squeeze in beside the crystal cabinet because we’ve given them nowhere else to sit? And how can we talk about them with kindness so they don’t feel the need to defend themselves or fight back?

The problem isn’t so much the elephant, it’s the challenge of finding words for the unspoken. It’s sitting with discomfort and uncertainty. It’s staying curious and open to feedback. Because sometimes the real elephant in the room is us.

The phrase ‘work-life balance’ suggests that work isn’t a part of life and that perhaps an essential part of who we are is somewhere else, waiting for us to clock off. And yet so many of us find ourselves here, at work, feeling all the feelings and trying to juggle this bit with the other meaningful parts of our lives.

Like any balancing act, we are rarely in a state of harmony for long – it’s an active process of constant adjustment, overcorrection, ebb and flow. And it’s easy for the work part to get stuck in overdrive, sometimes from sheer necessity, sometimes driven by cultural expectations.

The benefits are easy to focus on and easy to desire. Income to pay bills and solve problems. A sense of meaning, of contribution. Perhaps status or security. A gift to our future self in career capital or savings. An answer to the question “So what do you do?”, which is all too often shorthand for “Who are you?”

When we slice work off from the rest of our existence, we risk creating unnecessary barriers and masks that are exhausting to uphold. It can become harder to access our full self, our full range of resources and insights.

Yet how we show up at work is how we show up to our life. It’s one more place where we learn a great deal about ourselves, about others, about how to navigate the space between. It can top up or deplete our sense of connection, competence or control. It can be a vehicle for pain and compassion, for resentment and love. Like the rest of life, work throws us challenges and opportunities, the unexpected and the utterly mundane. And perhaps these are the things we really want to keep in balance.