Baggage at work

If we really thought about the self we bring to work.....

People talk a lot about baggage in relationships. Well, they do now. When I was dating quite a few years back... it was still a dirty word - baggage!  The assumption seemed to be that you shouldn't bring any baggage from a previous relationship into a new one.  I wondered how that was in fact possible, as we are an amalgam of all our previous experiences.  The ultimate survival skill is adaptability which implies - how well do we learn from previous experiences - thus, baggage is actually fundamental to how well we learn in life.

It got me to thinking about baggage at work. In many ways, we bring so many past experiences to our workplaces that they infect the new workplace, however hard we may try.   Where we 'on the outer' of the social group at a previous workplace?  Did we, instead, organise much of the activity at work and perhaps also get-togethers outside of work, so we felt always at the centre of activity, perhaps keeping busy was out thing.  If our status as the 'loner' was an unwanted one we may not have been aware of how our body language encourages people to treat us in that way.   If we move into a new workplace and those identities are challenged, we may feel uncomfortable and want to leave.

Now that we are talking much more about psychosocial hazards  (combined impact of psychological and social factors on our behaviour and health), perhaps it's time to consider what baggage you're bringing into work everyday.  Sometimes we have the sense that our full mind is taken up with worrying about what happened at home just before we got to work, or what happened in the car with the kids.  And this is where the invention of the professional mask has been useful along with the idea of compartmentalising our thinking.  As someone who feels that experiences permeate right throughout my mind and body (which the latest research on Polyvagel Theory endorses i.e. the 'felt' experience of the world) I have always struggled to comprehend compartmentalising.  Either I'm 'all in' or 'I'm out' is part of my philosophy of life which includes the world of work and relationships.  But for some people compartmentalising is part of their professional persona, and they stop themselves thinking about anything but the task at hand.

How to deal with baggage at work.

A systematic process is needed for all of us as individuals to recognise how our past work experiences influence our presence in our current workplace.  Do we have a way of acknowledging this and what do we do with it?  Also how much of this do we actually communicate with others.  This may be part of the process of sharing the common culture of the workplace, which can often be communicated to us non verbally i.e. by tradition or unspoken expectations.   I think it's important without creating a whole set of policies and procedures around this topic, for us as individual workers to start to acknowledge, yes, actually I'm superimposing my ideas about my previous boss onto this current boss and that is harming my trust in this person. 

How much energy you are investing in maintaining your professional mask at work may create a lot of fatigue for you - and this is where the 'third space' discussions are proving positive for many - identifying the transition between home and work, to allow us to consciously 'drop' our work mask.

Emotional baggage is the unresolved emotional experiences and the unexamined assumptions we bring with us to a new experience.  Is yours preventing you from making more sound choices at work?  In fact, your whole team may be doing this and inadvertently impacting the productivity of work goals.  It's a topic worth exploring to help your team start to take more emotional responsibility.