DailyJim: “I might be too honest to work there”

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym this is the episode for tuesday april 16th i am quite late on this one i want to talk about this quote that someone said to me a couple weeks ago that she thought she were too honest to work in a place like that.

Okay maybe i'll change the title a little bit but that's the concept being too honest or too too open to work in a particular place. And I remembered this because earlier today I went to the store and I was talking with one of the sales representatives and I just ended up talking with the guy and we talked and we talked and we talked and we were talking about, I was looking at computers and so we talked about, you know, whether the computer could handle video processing and things like this and he said well you know if you're not doing uh really intense video editing with multiple layers or multiple quick cuts or audio processing with lots of different tracks on it and so we just went into it we started talking about music we started talking about life we started talking about like emotions communication i showed on the podcast website and the the community forum and all these different things and he's like oh wow and so we just kept talking and a few times as the manager would kind of come over and look at him and like hey man you're not really selling him the computer and i find this happens to me so much i mean this has happened to me as a customer so as a customer i think it's somewhat okay right we say it's not Not really the customer's fault. The customer's always right, quote unquote. But I could see that he was a similar guy. He may be on the podcast one day, so we'll see. But he seemed really open to communication, really open to connection.

And I think sometimes that doesn't work well for most workplaces.

People are like, well, why don't you just go get a job at an organization? I'm like, man, because I talk too much. I'm curious about what's going on about the people. And they say, well, it's none of your business. We're just here for work. I'm like, no, but how you are as a human being matters to me because I don't think there's a huge division between our emotions and our work, our personal emotions at home versus our emotions at work versus our emotions in politics versus I think all these emotions blend together whether we want them to or not and so i'm curious to talk with people and find out what's going on with them and sometimes work is okay stop talking about that just get focused on the stuff you're supposed to be doing i'm like ah but i think what i'm supposed to be doing is talking to people about this stuff and man i i used to do this in consulting firms gosh like like 10 years ago, I remember talking with the administrative assistant just a lot and getting kind of those looks from the boss of, hey, you should get back to work. Or even when I would do training projects. And the whole point of being a trainer was to help the participants get better communication, dealing with conflict. And I remember this one time I was sitting talking with this girl and we were having a good conversation and I was leaning away from her. And she said, why are you like, do you want to leave the conversation or something? And I said, oh, did you notice that I was leaning away? She said, yeah. I said, oh, no, no, no. I was leaning away because I think the manager of the project is going to walk in and be like, hey, why are you talking so much? You need to get back to work.

So yeah, I think one thing I've worried about in doing some of this work and helping people open up. Communicate more openly is how it may be harder for them to go into a workplace or to go into a culture where most of the people don't express how they're feeling as much and if they get really good at it like being in a culture that is vastly different and vastly trying to pull them back back to kind of the level of comfort of expression that they're at. And so when this person a couple weeks or months ago told me that, you know, I want to get a job in one of these government agencies or one of these non-profits, but I think I'm too honest to work there. Oh yeah, that really hit a nerve with me thinking just about how sometimes these these larger organizations especially, can become really bureaucratic and therefore really suppressed organizations.

And some people seem to want this.

I want people to want it less.

Some people say, you know, work is work and home is home and work is just about money. And then I come home and I'm thinking, but it's not really that cleanly divided. You might want to think it's that cleanly divided. But I remember staying with a friend once, and he came home from work, and he was frustrated slash angry from work. And I saw him take it out on the kids, not physically, but you could just see how his anger permeated the room and how it cascaded into these kids.

So yeah i just think.

Sometimes and maybe it's just that we i want to have a different conversation than work wants me to have maybe they'd be like hey i want you to talk about the computer i'm like i don't want to talk about the computer i want to talk about the application of the computer like you're not hired to talk about the application of the computer so i don't know i think one of the challenges in this conversation with the guy earlier talked about this, it's that.

Sometimes doing things really different than how other people do them or even just exploring things that other people wouldn't explore intellectually, emotionally, whatnot, can really be a challenging life it can cause us, a lot of a lot of inability to speak because it's so late but it can cause a lot of stress and strife and confusion and fear and and disappointment and frustration and people being like why aren't you just normal why don't you just do what everyone else does i'm like well if i do what everyone else does then who's gonna pull us towards doing something new so i'm gonna end this tonight i will talk to you all tomorrow hopefully with a little more sleep and take care.