Transcript
Hello everyone welcome to another DailyJim it is thursday june 30th 2022 and I didn't have to look and What is it? 30 days have September April June and November. I still use that little device to know that today is the last day of June and today I want to talk about how.
Ah how I can, I can feel frustrated and almost plagued two in so much stress when I think about communicating openly in the professional space. Now this is something that A friend helped me remember today was one of the main reasons I think I started working on emotions way back 10 years ago which seems like a long time. Um that's officially working on it. I also wrote papers in college and stuff but um what I realized is that one of the reasons that I did start working on this is that I was working in consulting firms, and I got the impression that people weren't being very honest about what they wanted and how they were feeling in terms of where they wanted the company to go, in terms of what they thought the company was in terms of decisions that they wanted to make etcetera etcetera, in terms of even personality types or behavioral types based on some of those, different frameworks for analyzing people's behavioral types and such, and so I I was getting more and more frustrated yes, on a personal level, trying to get better at connecting with people after having lived in Tanzania for a year and a half and having lived in Illinois and and been around lived in Costa rica for a couple of months, so kind of re acclimating, trying to reconnect with people on a personal level, but there was also the element of the professional level in wanting to have deeper conversations. I remember we did this one project, innovation project and. We're talking about art museums. As one woman stood up, somebody said art museums are elitist and this woman stood up. Art museums are not elitist. And I felt the anger and the energy in the room and I thought this is the conflict, this is the conversation we need to have. And my friend steered the conversation in a different direction. I thought, no, no, this is the real conversation. So for many years now there's been this driving force in me to get better at communicating openly how I feel to myself first, which was a lot of the work with. I feel leo um to a romantic partner very often in emotional self defense. And now I'm kind of at this point where I'm going well how do I do it in the professional or the more public space? Okay. You know, I've experimented with with it throughout the years, but I think in many ways I've kind of avoided going back into companies or going back into the corporate world to the corporate culture. I haven't really updated my linkedin profile in years maybe. I don't think I've posted a single thing on there to the feed and really just understanding and trying to comprehend why. And I think one big component of it is that.
Corporate culture can often demand a level of certainty or expect or desire a level of certainty in how we speak. Um what other displays.
There's a phrase called display rules. It's kind of like the the emotions that were allowed to display in certain cultures. And I'd say yes, certainty. We can express certainty in the corporate environment and we can also express confidence. We can also express.
Uh huh frankly, maybe not too much. Maybe some excitement, may some joy, maybe some pride depending on the organization, but I think a lot of what the least corporate culture in general can be about is paying attention to the other person and not expressing too much emotion. And so I think I've had a tendency to hesitate a little bit going into because it seems to be so, other oriented or other focused instead of I don't know self focus, straight word, but self emergent, self expressive. And so I've just I felt a lot of struggle thinking about whether to.
How to go back into that environment and not just adapt to it, but try to change it necessarily or basically try to express myself without trying to adapt too much to the cultural rules.
And just extrapolate. I think many of us are in this situation where, you know, we go to work or we um either we're starting our own company, even starting your own company, you're interacting with clients and interacting with investors maybe and, fear in the work place, then interacting with coworkers and bosses and managers and employees and all these different things. And there's so many rules that we often follow and I just can feel so dehumanized at times. We're not allowed to cry, we're not allowed to laugh too much. We're not allowed to show too much affection to each other. We're not allowed to really sometimes talk about too much that's not happening in the workplace. We have to be productive. That's a that's a good uh state of being that is promoted in the work list cannot be productive, can't be can't be tired. Being tired is bad, but it's kind of seen as a good thing being busy. It's kind of seen as a good thing in kind of the american corporate environment. I don't know, I think part of me feels so distant from it because like I said, I think.
I think I wanted to get really good at this stuff before I came back in because I know coming back in, there's a lot of cultural pressure to not necessarily.
Change the behaviors, not necessarily go against the grain. So I don't know, I feel a lot more confident in my ability to communicate, to communicate how I'm feeling and to do so in environments where people don't necessarily want me to communicate how I'm feeling or they may feel uncomfortable and uncertain when they when they see it happening because they're a little confused. So I don't know today was about that. I'm curious how, your communication is in the workplace and whether you feel somewhat free to express yourself or whether you feel somewhat closed in, whether it's a mix, whether it depends on the day, depends on the environment or workplace. I mean, I'd love to hear. So if you want to pick that up with me, please send me a note. Would love to hear your perspective and frankly how you're feeling when you think about feeling in the workplace. Sounds good actually.
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