Welcome to "Weirdos in the Workplace," the podcast that celebrates authenticity, passion and purpose in today’s world of work. I'm your host, Erin Patchell, and today's episode is "on finding a space where we belong".
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about why I think belonging is the most powerful feeling on earth and why feeling like an outsider might be the worst. We’ll also explore how you can create a community at work where every person feels like they are safe, accepted, included, and can be their full selves.
As you might have guessed about a podcast called Weirdos in the Workplace, I haven't always felt included and like an outsider for a lot of my life. I think that if you were drawn to the title of this podcast, you’d probably feel the same way at some point in your life. The thing is, I was not content being an outsider. I always felt like there was always a force field to keep me out of the communities that I desired to become a part of. You know, the grass is greener on the other side, right?
It always took a tremendous effort to step inside the barrier. I usually found that once I managed to find the courage to engage that I had to focus so much of my energy on whatever the group's interests were that eventually, I found myself bored or I found something else that I was more interested in, or a group that I was more interested in becoming a part of in episode one, we established that I'm a generalist. I like to diversify, and that includes people too.
Figuring that out was a shockwave because I never understood why it wasn't easy for me. As I could see, it was easy for other people, and I literally was trying to diagnose myself like, what is wrong with me? Why don't other people seem to be easy around me like they are with each other sometimes? I definitely had times when I thought it was my fault that something was wrong with me. Something was wrong with my personality, and people could somehow supernaturally sense it. Still, after you know a lot about processing therapy aging, it turns out that it's my personality. There's nothing wrong with me. This isn't a problem to be solved. I'll explain a little bit more about that later in the podcast. But first, I want to talk about belonging in general.
Well, why is belonging so important? It's been researched by numerous organizations, university institutions, Stanford University, Oxford University, Deloitte, Harvard Business Review, and Gallup, to name a few and the findings that they've had included, you know, increased happiness. When we feel like we belong, we're more likely to experience positive emotions, improved mental health, reduced stress and anxiety, and increased motivation and engagement. When we feel like we're part of a group, we're more likely to contribute and feel a sense of purpose in our work and improve performance. It can give us greater confidence and self-esteem and greater resilience as well. All of these things we’ve experienced ourselves.
When I'm part of a community, especially a diverse community of individuals with different skill sets, who can balance me out, I can get more accomplished and become. I'm more resilient. I can. I can get things done.
So, what is belonging really?
Well, I mean, let's go to the experts here. So many folks talk about belonging, but I'm bringing up a couple of interesting quotes from some interesting authors that you'll probably recognize. The first is Simon Sinek, who is a well-known author and speaker. Simon Says belonging needs to fit in, and fitting in is the opposite of belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to become. Accepting the longing, on the other hand, doesn't require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.
The second quote is by the amazing Brené Brown, who said true belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.
These two quotes illustrate so perfectly the point that I have been trying to make much more eloquently than I probably ever could. Which is when you stop becoming yourself, when you are either afraid to be yourself or feel like you need to conform to a pattern of behaviour that is only acceptable to a group.
Then you'll never feel like you belong, even if you're part of the community, right?
So, when I was young, you know, I would try to participate in these communities, but I felt like I was only accepted if I changed myself, and I wasn't capable of doing that. I literally wasn't capable of doing that sustainably, consistently over a longer period of time, and so the quotes highlight the true connection between belonging and authenticity. When we belong to a group, we can share our true selves without fear of judgment or rejection.
This can be a transformative experience that helps us connect more deeply with ourselves and other people. There is something that needs to be said about it. Understanding yourself first, there have definitely been groups I belonged to in the past where I felt like I didn't belong, but that's because I needed to work on myself, I hadn't done the work to understand myself, and I was putting on a mask when the reality was if I had taken off that mask within that community. If I had been courageous enough to be myself and all my sorry, there's a very good chance I would have been accepted for who I was, and I don't think that there is any disrespect I think it was. Honestly, I think it was. It was me. It was me, you know, creating. I was the master of my self-destruction, in a way. So, we've established that creating a community takes more energy than expected.
We've established, through the words of Simon Sinek and Brené Brown, that belonging is really about feeling like we can express ourselves within a group of people and that we have the courage to be authentic. I mentioned that I believe it goes both ways that belonging is partly about being accepted by the group, not feeling judged, and having the courage to take off our mask.
And sometimes, we are the ones preventing ourselves from taking the mask off. It's only sometimes our environment. Sometimes we need to do work on ourselves that we've had, you know, past trauma, history and experiences that have made it unsafe for us to be ourselves and take our masks off.
And that's one of the reasons why organizations aren't just capable of creating inclusion but actually creating belonging. If feeling like we truly belong means being comfortable with taking our masks off for many of us weirdos out there, it's going to take time, consistency, a great deal of trust and for the people around us, our leaders, and our colleagues to lead by example and show us that it's safe to be a little bit weird and a little bit wonderful to be who we really are. We spend more time at work than we do almost anywhere else in our entire lives. So that's why the opportunity is so great to create these environments where people can really be themselves and feel like they have a community and relationships in their lives where they can bond with other people, create ideas, create innovative solutions, do something good, have a stronger, higher purpose.
Then, within that, finding out who they really are, diversity really is the spice of life. It helps us think differently when exposed to a wide range of perspectives. We’re more likely to see things from different angles. Consider different viewpoints. So, it leads to creativity and innovation and problem-solving. It helps us challenge our assumptions, assumptions, and biases. Other people with different perspectives challenge us to help us become better people. They help us understand ourselves at a deeper level.
Appreciating all of the diversity of people, all of the different experiences, all of the different neurotypes and the way that people think and act and behave helps us become better collaborators. It takes work. It's sometimes hard, and trying to understand someone who doesn't believe like you take a lot of energy. Still, if you can get through that and keep working at it, it's amazing what comes out the other side, you know, so if we can creatively collaborate and have creative conflict in the workplace, healthy conflict, healthy communication. We can all understand each other better, and we can create these places where there is belonging and feel people can feel like they can trust themselves to take their masks off and trust that they're not going to be judged because, honestly, in today's world of work, more brains are better. We need every person’s human capacity in order to solve the problems that we have in the world. And I think the first step is to accept people and accept where they're at and create belonging and listen to them and understand.
That's all for now. Thanks for listening.
If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/.
I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble
