Here’s a little insight that came to me today, as I was talking with a friend. My friend told me that what I’d said was so juicy, I just had to share it.

“Work works best when you get to be yourself on the job. To do otherwise is to split your precious self into pieces, and you are worth so much more as the whole than the sum of the parts. So please, do what it takes to keep yourself together. Craft your work so it truly fits you.”

How does that sound to you?

By the way, if you’re struggling to keep it together, wishing you had work that fit, you owe it to yourself to check out the “Crafting Careers That Truly Fit” workshop I’m teaching the last weekend of this month. You’ve still got a few days to get the bonus free coaching session with me, too.

Stay whole!

Last night, at a women’s networking event, a very bubbly woman came up to me and said she’d heard of my company, Work from Within. Practically brimming over with energy, she looked me in the eye and said, “Oh! You’re the person who works with career change. You’re the lady who helps people find their passion!”

“Um, no,” I replied. “Two things. First, I’m moving out of helping people in career reinvention. I’m reinventing myself, empowering professional women to build deep-rooted confidence, make richly rewarding decisions, and ultimately do work that matters to themselves & others, by connecting them to their instincts & impulses.”

“Wow!” she exclaimed, “I like that…but I’m considering a career change. Your old work. Will you still tell me…how do I find my passion?”

My reply: “Well, my second point is this: I don’t believe in “finding” your passion. First, you have multiple passions. Second, your passions are never lost. They’re always inside you, waiting to be awakened. What you want to find are the places where your passions resonate.”

I went on to say “You awaken your passions by knowing the people, places, and situations that give you energy. Passion isn’t just one thing. Believing you have to find the “one thing” can drive you batty! Your passion is formed by a constellation of experiences that make you feel alive. Make a list of what energizes you. Carry it around. Feel that energy. And start to notice where you have more energy, and where you have less. As you spend more and more time in that positive energy, you’ll discover the work (and the people, places, and situations that resonate for you.”

This woman’s eyes lit up. She knows what energizes her. She started the list. And she promised to stay in touch to let me know what she discovered. Her passions are doing their magic on her, because their within her.

So tell me, please:

Now that you know that your passions are within you, always, what will you do to honor your passions?

Passionately yours,

This summer, I grew sugar snap peas in my garden. It seems like a Nature has become a sweet, patient teacher for me, including what she’s taught me about laboring close to the earth and who I think I am, but am surprised not be.

In this video, you’ll find three other “natural” lessons.

Let me hear from you. How do these lessons help YOU in your own life?

Most mornings, I wake up and journal. This morning, I was moved to write poetry. And then I was moved to share my tender words with you. It’s a long poem, so click “Keep reading” to read it all.

You think you know who you are…

You think
You know
Who you are
You identify yourself
In certain ways
Thinking you’re the expert on
Who you are
Until you encounter
Something
Unexpected

I thought
“I don’t handle a crisis well”
“I am very squeamish about hospitals”
“I can’t handle adversity”
And then
My dad
Unexpectedly
Fell. Knocked unconscious.
For 18 hours.
I got the call at hour three
Was at his bedside at hour seven
Just left my husband five days before
Moved into an apartment two days earlier
Was totally disoriented
Lost
Somehow I stayed
By Dad’s bedside
In the ICU
For days
Somehow I knew
The questions to ask the nurses
Somehow I helped
My mom to manage
Somehow I coordinated
All the different doctors
Dad survived
Somehow I thrived
“I handle a crisis pretty well”
“I’m only a little squeamish about hospitals”
“I can handle adversity”

(Keep reading….)

What did YOU do this summer?

Me, I went to a kind of “adult summer camp” on the Pacific Ocean at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California for 28 days to escape the confines of the virtual life. Living and working alone was killing my inspiration for Work from Within, and sapping my energy.

I opened my heart. I fed my body a dose of hard labor. And I was transformed.

Now, I am evolving a new, more vital and engaging vision for Work from Within.

Flash back to May, 2011. I was feeling extremely lonely and depressed. A dear friend pointed out something I really didn’t want to hear. He said, “I don’t know how you do it. I don’t think it’s healthy to live alone and work alone. That combination will sap your soul.”

Then he asked me an important question:  “What can you do to get a dose of community?”

He knew the answer I would give him. Immediately, I thought about the Esalen Institute, where he works. Sitting right on the Pacific Ocean, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Esalen is sited on intensely rugged, gorgeous land, where the mountains practically kiss the ocean. For nearly 50 years, the Esalen Institute has been a hot spot for personal growth. Famous philosophers, psychotherapists, and teacher like Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Ida Rolf, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts all lived, studied, and taught at Esalen. They ushered in an era where personal growth was encouraged and supported.

Amazingly, I have been blessed to have taught at Esalen (and I’ll be teaching a career transformation workshop there September 30 to October 2. You’re invited!) I love being a workshop leader at Esalen.

But from July 31 to August 28, I had a much, much tougher role. I decided to be a work scholar.

I agreed to work 32 hours a week. I was assigned to the kitchen. Not as a chef. Not even a sous chef. Nope. It was not glamorous work. I cut cucumbers and carrots. Sliced bread. Wiped down tables. Refilled coffee urns. And washed a ton of dishes, by hand. I mean a ton. Giant soup pots and massive bowls, all used to prepare 300 to 370 meals a seating. It wound up being the most physically demanding work I’ve ever done.

Additionally, I was mixing it up for 28 days with 23 other work scholars, ages 22 to 78, who like to dive deep in understanding themselves and others. After living alone for the past decade, I had three roommates in bunk bed space. I was worried about how I’d deal with others. Fortunately, no one snored. Everyone was friendly. And we didn’t have to cook our own food, so there were no sinks with dirty dishes to create frustrations. Mostly, we worked from 7 am until the early afternoon, took workshops, and arrived home around 10 pm to sleep and repeat the cycle again, with two days off per week.

When I wasn’t working, eating, or sleeping, I could take movement classes, soak in the hot tubs, take hikes, get a massage, take a nap on the lawn, volunteer on the garden, sit on the deck and talk to interesting people from all over the world, or find a spot and write in my journal. Interestingly, I had almost no interest in getting on my computer, even though the lodge has wi-fi 20 hours a day. No, I was much, much more interested in talking than typing. Why? I was in cultural heaven. Our group of 24 included men and women from Israel, Germany, Spain, Australia, and France. And in the extended staff, I met people from Canada, Japan, Korea, Argentina, England, Ireland, and Turkey. I love the multiculturalism of Esalen.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the lessons that I learned. But let me start with the lesson that touches my heart most deeply in this moment:  To create truly meaningful community, I had to unplug and reach out to people, face-to-face, heart-to-heart.

Virtual connection just doesn’t fill me. Sure, it’s information, and it’s nice to visit Facebook and read my friends’ updates. But consuming too much Facebook, Twitter, and email forms an incomplete diet for me. No, I wasn’t a monk before being a work scholar. I did have a social life, but it was insufficient. And difficult to put together. It took a lot of effort to get friends together, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where everyone seems to be so darned busy. Bottom line:  I was simply spending too much time alone, plugged in to a virtual world on my computer, staring at the screen instead of looking into someone’s eyes.

Before my Esalen experience, I was starting to question whether I was actually an introvert, not the extrovert I sensed myself to be at heart. I now know — from all the conversations, all the times I easily created a bridge and introduced two people, all the times I practically ran across the lodge at meal time to listen to a friend describe the massage she’d just had — that I’m an extrovert, for sure.  The contact with other human beings has just got to be real. I need my daily quotient of hugs. I need to be able to see other people’s 3D facial expression. I need to be able to take a walk with a person, or touch their hand when they’re having a hard moment. Or give them a “high five” when they’re celebrating a victory.

I’m a touchy-feely kind of gal. I confess it. (That confession is especially for myself.)

And I’m a social, connection-loving, community-building kind of woman.

So, instead of doing my most of my work of helping people bring out their best at work via the all-too-impersonal telephone, I am hatching a plan to create in-person, super yummy, highly experiential, community-generating, personal growth events related to work. I envision salons. Not the kind where you get your hair and nails done. Salons where people gather under the roof of an inspiring host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of one another through conversation. The intention is to educate and enrich like-minded, like-hearted people. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to host a salon, contact me and let me know.

I will also be speaking, in really dynamic ways, using theatrical, improvisational approaches, partly inspired by the performances some of my fellow work scholars created under the direction of the ever-humorous writer and performer, Ann Randolph.

Hey, if you’re outside the San Francisco Bay Area, no worries! I will still do teleclasses and create eBooks and eCourses for you. But, more ideally, you’ll contact me and invite me to teach a workshop or offer a salon in your area. Then, I can meet you in person and shake your hand.

No, scratch that. I will meet you, but I’ll give you a hug. I need to be touched. And I bet you do, too…

QUESTION FOR YOU:  Am I right? Do you need to be touched? Let me know how you feel about living in a world that’s going more and more virtual…

Sending you a big hug,

PS – If you want a real, in-person hug from me, and tons of support for answering the question, “What’s next?” in your career, it’s time to get your butt (and the rest of you, especially your heart and guts) to the Esalen Institute retreat center in Big Sur, California, September 30 to October 2, 2011, for my workshop, “Crafting Careers That Truly Fit.” Will I see you there…?

I’ve been going through some changes in how I see my work. So I got curious about how you see your work. And so I asked the readers of my newsletter a few questions about work in a survey that I sent out a few weeks ago. I thought you’d like to see what I heard from you…

People really impact your work. 56% of you said, “I have at least a few difficult co-workers to deal with in my job.” That’s more than half of you who deal with difficult people. But, interestingly,  29% of you said, “I feel very connected to my co-workers – I genuinely like most of the people I work with.” It’s kind of sad that so many of you have to deal with difficult co-workers. They sap energy.

And that energy drain takes a toll, leading to 47% of you saying, “I might start off the working week feeling upbeat, but by the end of the week, I feel emotionally and/or physically fried.” And, 38% of you reported that, “In my current work, there’s a lot of drama, and sometimes I don’t know how to deal with it.”

How sensitive are you as a group? As a whole, 27% of you agreed that, “I feel more emotionally sensitiive than many of my co-workers, and I wonder how they can be so unemotional, while 33% of you admit, “I pay attention to my body’s signals at work, and use these impulses & instincts for making good decisions.” Unfortunately, that leaves 67% of you who do not listen to your body at work, and that concerns me. And only 29% of you said, “I practice good self-care at work, regularly doing things to feel good in body, mind and spirit while I’m working.”

What about the positive content of your work? I would love to see this number be higher, but 27% of you say that “I feel like my work allows me to be a force for good in the world.” And 24% of you say that “I love the freedom that my work gives me to be creative.”

And what about getting ahead? While 33% of you state that “I would like to advance or get promoted in my current work” only 22% of you say “I have a mentor or other supportive people who are helping me to grow professionally.”

So, as a group, you want great work, but it looks like you need the support to make it happen. That’s a role I want to play for you, more and more, especially through in-person contact, when I can, and through digital resources like eBooks that I plan to write for you. (By the way, I have some digital programs to share with you now, if you’re contemplating a career change).

So, how could I be helpful, I wondered? So I asked you the question, “How much would you like to develop or enhance each of the following skills?” And here are the skills you told me you would have a lot of interest in learning, followed by the percentage of you who said you would have a lot of interest in building this skill.

Feeling good in mind, body, and spirit while at work 88%
Transforming my work into a force for good in the world  77%
Having lots of positive energy at work 77%
Being more creative and innovative at work  71%
Making better work-related decisions  71%
Experiencing greater resiliency at work (the ability to bounce back from difficult situations) 63%
Finding positive ways to deal with my work colleagues 58%
Trusting my instincts and intuition at work 63%
Dealing with my emotions in the workplace 42%

So here’s what warms my heart. I love that you want to feel good in mind, body, and spirit while you work. And you care about transforming your work into a force for good in the world, so that you can have lots of positive energy.

And in the coming weeks, I’ll tell you how I intend to meet your needs. I do know it’s possible to feel really alive in your work, while making what you do truly matter.

Last week, I was reading a blog post on Fistful of Talent entitled, “Don’t Be an HR Stealth Ninja” and couldn’t help commenting. The author, Paul Hebert of i2i advises human resources professionals on creating incentives gifts for employees, as a form of recognition. He wrote about how a particular HR manager was seeking a reward for a team that had put in a huge amount of work. In addition to offering travel bonuses, Hebert suggested that team members receive a commemorative item (you know, something they could display on their desk or in their cubicle) to let others know about their extra efforts.

However, the HR manager exclaimed to Hebert, “We don’t want anyone to know we’re doing this. We are going to tell the recipients not to talk about it. They aren’t allowed to tell ANYONE. We don’t want other employees knowing that we did this. Think about it. If this got out, everyone would expect to be recognized and get a reward. Everyone. I can’t handle that. I don’t have a way to do that – nor do I have the budget. We’re just going to keep this very quiet.”

Hmm. A bit strong. Then Hebert suggested, in his blog post, that this is an example of where Human Resources professionals need to get louder and prouder. I got so emotionally worked up (express your emotions, it’s good…) that I wrote a reply. And I thought I’d share my reply with you, to get YOUR reactions thoughts.

I wish HR folks would be loud and proud! If only it were easier. The problem I see is an inherent conflict in the HR role.

The conflict is this: While HR professionals want to represent the employees and their needs, they also need to support the company mission. And sometimes, employee needs and the company mission are at odds. For example, one of my former clients was an HR director at a large energy company. An employee came to her, reluctantly, because she loved her work but found her manager’s angry tirades and constant criticism too harsh to take. She wanted some counseling. The manager was seen as a rising star in the company, and when my HR director client tactfully discussed with C-level executives in the company the possibility of counseling for my client, or coaching for her manager, the top brass defended the manager — and demoted the employee for complaining. This rightfully irked my client, and was one more straw in the camel’s back that got her to make a career change.

I spent a decade coaching high achievers & fast trackers who were weighing the decision of whether to remain in their companies or leave. In that time, I sadly heard too much grousing that “you can’t trust HR.” Too often, HR is in a bind, feeling at the mercy of entrenched corporate cultures and policies that dictate fairness and equity.

While I totally agree with you that HR ought to go to bat for employees, especially for giving them thoughtful recognition and incentives, until the incentives for HR professionals become aligned, I think these kinds of situations will repeat themselves.

I do see hope, however, among HR professionals who are proud, loud, and armed with good data about why they ought to be able to go to bat for their employees. It takes foresight to envision a new strategic HR role. And courage to stand up and create it, despite the entrenched cultures and policies. And the change is likely to be noisy — getting the masses to speak up, rather than keeping quiet.

So, what do YOU think of this reply?
What would help HR to be loud and proud?
How can we overcome entrenched corporate cultures and policies and say what we really need to say?
How can HR play a more strategic role in organizations?

I’m listening…

When I gave up watching television over 10 years ago, I was delighted to delve into books. Now, I generally read one or two books a week. Recently, I positively devoured Anne Kreamer’s “It’s Always Personal: Emotions in the New Workplace,” and I contacted Anne via Twitter to see if she would share a bit about her findings with you. And sure enough, she did, in this 15-minute video from our Skype call.

Personally, discussing emotions in the workplace is a joy for me, partly because I felt so inhibited from expressing mine early in my career. When I worked as a strategy consultant at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), it seemed as thought I was expected to be poker-faced, or to be polite and neutral about virtually everything our clients expressed to me. Sometimes, as a result of being so robotic, we were known as “androids.” Interestingly, Anne uses that very term, android, in our interview, as she describes the hyper-rational, hyper-professional face that many people have been acculturated to display at work.

So why did Anne write a book about emotions in the workplace? Partially because she met with other women who described crying at work, and then feeling ashamed of their tears. While crying can display empathy, compassion, and connectedness, it can also be seen negatively at work. She had also had a pivotal experience of holding back her tears at work, and wondered why she felt so emotionally constrained. Previously the Senior VP for Consumer Products at Nickelodeon, Anne was celebrating the conclusion of the largest-ever video deal with her colleagues, when the phone rang. Her assistant told Anne that Sumner Redstone, the owner of Viacom, her parent company, was on the line. Anne thought he was going to congratulate her. Instead, he berated her for not making the stock price go up. Although her ability to impact the share price seemed ludicrous, given the tiny size of her division within the multi-billion dollar company, Anne didn’t feel she could get angry at Mr. Redstone. Tears welled up at the injustice, but she felt she had to show her team a positive face, so she wiped off her tears before returning to celebrate with them. Curiosity about this and other emotional incidents lead Anne on a multi-year journey of exploring the role of emotions in the workplace.

Additionally, in partnership with J Walter Thompson, Anne created a national study on emotions at work, in order to ask people about their everyday lives and the emotions they bring to work. In contrast, virtually all studies on emotions are done in the laboratory, in contrived experimental conditions, and Anne was curious about people’s actual lived experience. For example, she wanted to know if there are there gender differences behind how we process our emotions? We are fortunate to live in a time when fMRI technology has let us look at real brains in working environments. That data complemented what Anne found in her surveys. For example, when asked about whether they had cried in the previous year, 41% of women said that they had, and only 9% of men said that they had (a number which Anne speculates is probably higher). So something was going on.

One of the emotional dynamics that women face is the social pressure to suppress anger. While 60% of women reported having felt angry at work in the past year, many feel ashamed to express that emotion, due to social conditioning. But that anger needs to be dissipated, so women cry. And yet some workplace norms make crying a sign of weakness and failure. So there comes the double-whammy for us women. We are ashamed to get angry. And then we cry, and we’re ashamed of that. And all of that shame comes from social conditioning, not from the raw emotion.

Interestingly, Anne found that when we see a CEO crying, their employees tend to perceive that CEO as more empathic and more human than CEOs who don’t cry. And men who viewed women crying did judge that crying as bad, nor did they make the tears a big deal. However, women who saw other women crying had negative perceptions of those tears. Anne indicates that this dynamic may have to do with women having to fight so hard to be perceived positively in the workplace for the last 40+ years. However, that fight is over, and now, women comprise roughly 50% of the American workforce.

Anne raises an especially important issue:  Women are going to shape the service jobs that can reshape the economy: Health care, elder care, green jobs, and education. These are the types of jobs where we need empathy and caring. So especially in these kinds of jobs, she asserts that women ought to step back and be less critical of each other.

I asked Anne about her fondest hopes for the impact her book, “It’s Always Personal: Emotions in the New Workplace,” might have. First, she would like to see people become more aware of the importance of emotions for good decision making. And secondly, she wants to see us be more of ourselves at work. It used to be that you didn’t make personal calls during work, or receive business calls at home. Now, we get texts from family and friends while we’re working, and at home, we check email and find business messages. Work and our personal lives are intermingled. So, the more we can be ourselves across the board, the more we can reduce our need for emotional labor — that is, we can stop trying present a professional persona that has nothing to do with how we view our essential self. Anne and I both firmly believe that when we present more of who we are essentially at work, the less we feel the distress of a false self. We both hope that people (you, too, dear reader), will take the message of this book as permission to feel and regulate your emotions, thus contributing to wellness (physical and mental) in the workplace.

Immerse Yourself: Share your response here on the blog…
How much do you feel the need to hide your emotions at work?
What might happen if you allowed more of your true self to show at work?
And how can we create workplaces where people feel freer to be themselves?

With no anger, all joy,

About two weeks ago, I asked a provocative question of my newsletter readers:

What is the most important change
your company or organization could make
that would cause you to feel
intensely engaged and excited
about working for them?

Wow! I was inundated with answers! I heard back from a very diverse group of Work from Within newsletter readers, especially from teachers, adults who have recently been laid off, and people working in the healthcare field. I heard from readers across the world, primarily in the United States and Canada, but also in Sweden, Germany, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Here’s what I learned from YOU…

1. Overall, you want to be appreciated. You wish that your employers really understood how much care you pour into your work, and you want more than a pat on the back. It’s not that you are screaming for more money. In fact, you said that was not your primary motivator. You would feel most alive and engaged if your managers and co-workers noticed the effort you put into projects, the skills you learned, and the ways you make a difference. You crave positive feedback, the chance to know what’s working. Teachers are having an especially hard time, with school districts, governments, and parents criticizing them as they strive to do more on their shoestring salaries. (So if you know a teacher, send a word of encouragement, would you, please?)
2. You want your company to be upfront with you about what’s happening. You want to feel connected to the organization’s mission. You want to be told — frequently — how your work relates to the strategic direction, so that you don’t feel left in the dark. And you especially want to be kept in the light when it comes to any threats to your job. As a whole, you’d rather know early on that your job is in danger, and you really despise management when they tell you that your job is safe, only to turn around and lay you off soon afterwards. You want transparency from management, and you wish to be trusted with the truth, especially when it involves your future.
3. You want to learn and grow in your role and your life. And you wish that your company would pay for time for you to take classes or read or otherwise enrich yourself. You want time to digest and discuss what you learn with colleagues, too. And you want to be asked how you, personally, want to grow, and you’d like as much support from your organization as possible to grow in the ways you’d like, assuming they fit at least some of the company’s needs. You’ve said you’re open to different types of growth, not just “moving up the ladder,” but doing rotations, learning overseas, and taking on special projects.
4. You want to be immersed in a positive environment. Negativity, rubbing your nose in past mistakes, and anger all rob you of your energy. You yearn to contribute in meaningful, easeful ways, free from demoralizing people and processes. Said another way: You want to let your talents flow and be magnified.

A big huge thank you to everyone who took the time to reply. I’m really touched.

So, what am I going to do with what you’ve shared with me?

Well, first, if you’ve been reading about my personal journey, you may already know that I’m moving away from individual coaching (I’ll still do a bit of that one-on-one work, because I love connecting so personally with people like you). I’m moving towards sharing what I’ve learned over the past ten from high-energy company super-stars about why they leave, in order to help companies retain their best people and teach their employees to take more responsibility for their professional development. To that end, I’ll be teaching about maximizing your ROLE, your Return On Life Energy within companies.

I also plan to meet with HR people and senior managers to discuss your desires, and work collaboratively to see what we can do to change the shape of the workplace.

I’m very appreciative that my friend — the gifted author and speaker Simon T. Bailey — shared with over 2,000 HR professionals at the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) conference this week some of my findings about why talented people leave their companies, and what HR professionals can do to turn things around.

I’m doing my best to convey your DESIRES about work…to the people who can DO something to make your work more EXCITING and ENGAGING.

I promise to keep you updated.

And please, will you keep me posted about what you want?

Will you tell me what will get you to bring the best of you to the work that you do? I really care about listening and translating your deepest desires, so you can give your best at work. Drop me a line at info@WorkFromWithin.com

I’m listening…

Have you ever had a goal in mind and just wished and prayed and hoped that you could attain it?

I have.

I remember how shocked an honored I was to have been chosen as a Hay House Mover & Shaker back in May, 2010. Hay House ran a contest, asking participants who had been through the Movers & Shaker’s Program, now called the Speak, Write & Promote program, to submit a video with your important message. I spent a lot of time with my friend, Robert Ellis of Futurosity, getting my video submission just right. Still, I wondered if I had a chance to win with my core message about maximizing your ROLE, your Return On Life Energy, as a way to create work that fits.

Lucky for me, I won! Initially, the prize was a one-month radio show, essentially four episodes. I’m very honored to have had the initial run be three months, with many extensions. All in all, I will have been sharing my wisdom on careers on Hay House for nine magical months.

I hope that you’ll tune in to internet radio’s www.HayHouseRadio.com at 8 am Pacific (11 am Eastern) on Thursday, June 30, when I broadcast the Work from Within show for the final time on Hay House Radio. Of course, I would love to take your calls with questions about any career related issues. You can get free guidance from me by calling 866-254-1579 in the US and Canada, and 760-918-4300 internationally.

It’s been very meaningful to host the Work from Within show, and to have guests like Pamela Slim, Shakti Gawain, Marc Allen, and Joan Borysenko to share their wisdom. I feel both sad and proud for the show to be ending. Sigh…