Hats in a Head

Everybody have more than one role in life. But most of the time we are just performing one of those roles, and change the hat we are using several times along the day.

If we are lucky we sleep being just ourselves, resting, without dreaming about anything strange – sometimes one or more of our roles manages to get into our dreams and we end having a night that is not restful or fun.

Then we wake up and start juggling hats. We may put the professional hat and remind ourselves that we need to wake up and go to work, or we may turn to the person we slept with us to say good morning with our partner/lover hats on, or we may remember – with our caretaker hat on – that someone else needs to get up because they are the one who need to get somewhere.

And we keep changing those hats all day long. Some of our hats are made of several little hats, several smaller and more specific parts of our role that need to be done, and then even while we are using the same big hat we still keep changing the small one.

But, to me the questions are:

– How many hats can a single person have and still manage to perform each of those roles as expected?

– How do you choose when you start to have too many rules, and some of them start to be neglected in favor of some other role? How do you prioritize those you try harder and those you will neglect?

– How do you handle the guilt or the frustration of not giving as much attention to some of the things you would like to work more in?