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@ YellowSeeds 🌱💛
2025-06-06 13:05:40We are all used to the professional self 💼. The aspect of us who is an expert on a particular technology, process, method or task. It is easy to talk about it at work with our workmates, as a team and with our leaders. Based on it, we have new things to learn and roles to explore. We have a defined career path and responsibilities to take as we advance on it. We define goals for each year related to our roles and review at the end what we have accomplished.
\ But things have changed lately.
In the recent years, new generations came at work with a new view of it and a new set of priorities, along with recent Worldwide events. Both acted as forces that are challenging us to transform everything. I like to call these times, VIOLET times 💜... because Violet is the color of change and transformation.
In my adventure for the corporate world, I was lucky to be exposure to these drivers of change long before most of the worldwide workforce did it.
As a leader, I worked with new generations from different countries. No matter from which part of the world they came, they had some aspects (or missions as I like to say) in common. Astrology has helped me to understand the patterns and archetypes of them.
New generations bring a new way of seeing life style. And this is as equal as important as work is. Work is not on their top priority as previous generations. Because of that reason they come to work bringing some personal aspects into workplaces.
They expect mindful connections at work 🫂, that is why they are willing to explore more personal connections with teams and leaders. They value their time after work, so they more likely work towards objectives than working shifts. They want to understand the bigger and mindful impact of what they do.
The personal self started to appeared at workplaces with these new generations.
How to work from home is something I started learning more than 10 yrs ago when I started working for a worldwide tech company based in Argentina. One of the first things I had to learn was how to connect and engage with people that I only knew by chat or by listening to their voice in a conference call. There wasn't video back then in 2010.
I started to develop a new skill at listening and paying attention to their voice. Most of us were speaking a second language, so by listening carefully I could recognize who was speaking (since there wasn't video). And I also could understand their mood and feeling by the tone of their voice.
I was able to develop another skill, asking questions about their personal life. By doing that our personal self started to emerge and our connections were getting more stronger. By having stronger connections with your team, moments of stress and pressure are easier to navigate.
It was back then when I started to understand the importance of bringing your whole self at work, the professional and the personal one 💼 💚
By the increasing number of teams working from home, we can start seeing a this new self coming out worldwide now. Before these violet times, we barely knew different aspects of the personal self of our workmates. All those aspects of us that we usually don't bring at work.
Some examples of those aspects I refer about are: how your workmate's house looks like, how he/she liked to decor it, what is their favorite color, what their routines are, what they eat and what they cook. What is their family's routine, who they live with (if any), how their family looks like. What time their kids get out of school, what time their wife or husband come back from work, how frequently they see their parents, how much help they need and where they live.
We didn't know much about our colleagues beyond their professional self. We barely knew if our colleagues were going through challenging and difficult times.
That was usually something we used to talk to a friend at work, but not with a workmate or a leader. Neither our team was aware of it.
Even for those a few teams that were used to work from home way before than most of the planet, the challenging times of recent years, brought a different component at work, it invited us to connect emotionally with the people we work with. A lot of new aspects of your personal life started to emerge at work, because people started working unexpectedly from home. Even emotions were emerging since everyone was stressful and emotionally overwhelmed.
As we open up our personal self at work, then it comes with our emotions 💚. We are emotional beings, and although we have removed that aspect of our being at work, it is hard to keep it out when you are coming up at work as a whole self.
I invite you to this CREATIVE COACHING TIME 💛🧡 section, so please take a pen and a paper and start to write your own story of this post:
🌱 How easy is it for you to express and talk about your emotions at work?
🌱 How easy is it to share what is going on in your personal life?
🌱 How ready is your workforce'92s environment to embrace the personal self of your employees?
🌱 How safe is it in your current cultural environment to bring emotions at work?\ \ Wherever you are, that represents how close or how far is your team, organization and company on embracing the whole employee.
The meaning of the colors 🌈 will help us to navigate aspects of your personal and professional life, and it will inspire you to create safe and comfortable spaces to be a whole being at work.
In order to do that I will invite your left and right side of your brain to get integrated. We won't be successful on embracing the whole employee, if you think you are either rational 🧠 or intuitive 💚.
\ All of us has a left and right side of the brain 🧠. As you probably know, our left side of the brain is related to our rational, logic and sequential thinking, it is good at math and facts.
On the other hand, our right side of the brain is related to imagination, intuition, holistic thinking, visualization and rhythm.💚.
We think in words with our left side of the brain, we do with images with our right one.
Although you might feel that you have explored more capabilities of your right or your left side than the other, you have them both. So either if you feel you are more left brained in the way you approach life, you still have your right side and vice versa. The brain is a muscle, it just takes time and practice to create new brain connections and use it as its full potential.
Creating spaces to embrace your whole self at work, will include embracing the capabilities of our left and right side of the brain. And that will ultimate spark one of the most valuable skill of the future, creativity and our capability to adapt to change.
Neuroscience has found recently that creativity is not associated with the right side of the brain only, it uses three networks that require both sides. 🧠🎨💚
If you think about these recent VIOLET times, how frequently did you and your team have to create unprecedented solutions for unprecedented challenges? No one in the future will be able to stay in any profession or role without creativity and our capability to adapt to change, as it is becoming the skill of the future.
I truly believe that the unprecedented challenges we are experiencing will require unprecedented solutions. Rational views only won't be enough. If we really want to find new solutions, we will need both, our rational and intuitive/visual sides of the brain teaming.
Before we end this foundational stone blog, a new CREATIVE COACHING TIME starts, your turn now:
🌱 Can you list the aspect of yourself at work?
🌱 Can you list the aspect of yourself at home?
🌱 What are the differences of both lists? 🌱 Why?
🌱 How whole are you coming to work these days?
🌱 How whole would you like to be at work in the future?
Cultural changes at teams, organizations and companies levels, starts at an individual level.
If you would like to create a culture that embrace a whole self, start with you.
Laus 💛