Bring your whole self to work?
Reflections from the Practical Self Management Intensive, on Deliberate Development.
In the last few months, I have been reading and learning a lot about the impact of individual and collective trauma on our lives, and how we deal with it as a society. In these explorations, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying diving into books from great thinkers and practitioners such as Gabor Maté (When The Body Says No, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts), Tyson Yunkaporta (Sandtalk), and Esther Perel, who recently launched a second podcast about how we bring our relational habits to work. These topics sprang from my personal interest and did not seem highly connected to my work of helping teams and organizations transition to self-management and collective leadership. But it has quickly become apparent that they are!
It then so happened that thanks to my colleague Ria Baeck, a trained clinical psychologist and Art of Hosting trainer and facilitator, I’ve been able to join the first prototype of a new course she is developing (along side Lucia Die Gil) on Trauma-Informed Facilitation. Ria was also a guest on Practical Self Management this week, to discuss one of the most important and often underestimated topics when it comes to Self Management: how to create workplaces that foster our personal and collective development, through an approach called Deliberate Development. Though personal behavior change has always been an important element of my organizational change work, joining these two courses is helping me connect the dots between these subjects in new ways.
This work at the intersection of personal and organizational development is often described as ‘Bringing your whole self to work’. Thanks to Frédéric Laloux and the Teal movement that has sprung up around his book Reinventing Organizations, the concept of “Wholeness” and taking off our professional masks at work is becoming increasingly widespread. Part of me is very thrilled to see organizations embracing this idea. Another part feels slightly concerned that the delicateness with which an invitation to bring your whole self to work needs to be approached, might be overlooked.
When you ask people to bring their whole selves and to let down their guard, you never know what you might bring to the surface. An exercise called “Immunity to Change Map” that we did in Practical Self Management this week illustrates this very well. What at first seemed like a simple canvas with a few questions quickly became a profound self-development exercise, if you were willing to go there. The canvas consists of a few tasks: defining an improvement goal, identifying behaviors that work against this goal, to articulating ones fears, hidden commitments and big assumptions about oneself. These prompts can quickly reveal deep truths about ones behaviors and beliefs that we are not consciously aware of and have become an expert at not seeing. Exercises such as this are powerful tools for creating change, but need to be used with care. As facilitators, coaches and colleagues, it is our responsibility to be mindful of how, when and under what conditions we invite others into a space of self exploration and vulnerability. We don’t need to become psychologists, but we need to create the conditions to run a session well, and develop our awareness for trauma reactions when they may be occurring and create a supporting environment.
I’m excited about more humanness being invited into workplaces and them becoming places for self development, even healing. That makes it all the more important that we increase our awareness of and invest more in learning how to be ‘trauma-informed’in our work. This will hopefully also help us create more spaces for the individual and collective healing we know is needed more than ever in these times.
