These are the tips for staying professional when your personal life is falling apart

It happens to all of us. At some point in your career, inevitably, your personal life will suddenly, messily, spill into your work life. A relationship ends. A parent’s diagnosis arrives on a random Tuesday. A protracted custody battle, a miscarriage, a house fire, a child on the cusp of expulsion. Something happens that has nothing to do with your job and everything to do with your ability to do it. This is not a rare, unlucky exception to professional life. It is professional life. Three in four U.S. workers carry caregiving responsibilities, and the vast majority say it affects their productivity. Roughly two in five marriages end in divorce. And nine in 10 people going through a divorce report that it visibly changed how they performed at work. If you haven’t had a stretch where your personal world was falling apart while your job expected business as usual, you will. I see it around me. I went through it during my divorce and again during a recent breakup, both of which left me bereft and gasping for air. Almost everything written (and put on TikTok) on this topic gives the same advice: Hide it, hold it together, keep the mask on until you’re off the clock. It’s well-meaning.…