Who do you work for

It's such a common question that we hardly notice its meaning. 'Who do you work for?' We barely notice it even when we talk about someone - as I did yesterday - who 'works for me' or 'used to work for me'. Yes, mostly we take it to mean 'who do you report to?', or 'who pays your wages?'. Let's be clear though, its implications are quite different. The real answer may be that you are working _for_ yourself and your family, you are saving for a house or for retirement, you are making your contribution to society. In a few cases this might be entirely consistent with the answer you actually give when someone asks you the question. For many of us though, I suspect the answer we give is 'I work for Derek / Sheila / your boss or company's name here': and that just isn't true.

NLP people will tell you that our brain believes what we say out loud. Even if it's not true, even if that's not what we really think.

So when someone asks 'who you work for', think about your answer, and say out loud something that you want your brain to believe. And when you start to talk about an ex-colleague as 'someone who used to work for me', then maybe we could think of a fairer way of saying that too.