If you’ve ever been to any of my workshops focusing on work relationships you’ll likely have heard me talk about the sack of stuff we each bring with us into every interaction or relationship (not just the work ones)
All of us carry a big invisible sack of stuff with us everywhere we go. In it are all the experiences we’ve ever had – positive, negative and meh – which inform how we respond or react to people and situations we encounter, because they form our frame of reference.
If I’ve only ever negative experiences of dogs for example, maybe I was scared by one, or scratched by one as a child, I might form an opinion that all dogs (or all dogs who are a certain size or breed) are to be feared. This is down to heuristics – the short cuts our brain takes to cut down on that hard drive space that’s in limited supply!
I thought it might be useful for me to share some of the experiences from my sack to help you think about your own:
I could reach into my sack and find:
- That restructure from 2009 where I felt the rug being pulled from under my feet, my boss went from supportive to suspicious overnight.
- Times tables tests, timed 😱 age 9. Meant once a week I went into school a hot mess.
- Music exams and learning to treat them as an opportunity to show the examiner what I could do. Learning to perform!
- The comments I received from one line manager about wearing the wrong kind of knitwear (I’m still not entirely sure what this was about. Is there a wrong kind of knitwear? Answers on a postcard)
These could have created some shortcuts or learnt behaviours for me, like:
- I might feel flustered if asked to work out sums on the spot, even though my mental arithmetic is pretty ok.
- I might be wary of bosses having private meetings and assume something restructure-y is on the cards and become stressed.
- As long as I remember my musical roots, I can perform on demand. I learnt early how to harness nerves and bring them to the audience as excitement and creativity.
- I might overthink my outfit for work events, trying to find things that feel professional but also in which I can feel like myself.
Here’s the thing. I don’t go around sharing what’s in my sack. Folk don’t tend to ask me. It’s not always appropriate to share. And that’s OK. The learning from this is the reminder that even when we can’t see the contents of the sack, we acknowledge that each of our colleagues has one. And we can’t know exactly what’s in there. So maybe we will touch a nerve, or be bewildered by their behaviour. But that will have come from somewhere.
What we see is behaviour. What we don’t see are the feelings: hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations, behind the behaviour.
Keeping a coaching mindset of curiosity and non-judgement REALLY helps when we are taken off guard by a colleague’s reaction. Maybe we’ll never know what it’s about but thinking ‘I wonder what’s going on for them right now?’ is a useful mindset to adopt. It might not feel appropriate to ask, but it supports us to find a way through.
