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Welcome to episode 180 of the Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Today's episode is based on an article by Susan David, PhD, bringing our whole selves to work. David is the author of Emotional Agility Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life. As I was reading the article, I recalled my time as a co-op worker in college. I was working for an auto manufacturing company, training for a career in production management. This had me working in various parts of a manufacturing facility, culminating with me working as a supervisor on the production floor. As I was approaching graduation, I spent more time in the role of supervisor and found that I didn't fit in with the culture. There was an adversarial relationship between management and union workers, and the management approach was to tell people what they had to do and if they didn't want to do it, to yell and scream. This was not who I was. I found myself either faking it that is, yelling at people who worked for me, then feeling bad about it, or asking people to do things in a respectful way, which was more my style.

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But knowing that I might invoke the wrath of my supervisor, I tended to do more of the latter. But I also realized I didn't fit in in the auto industry. I hated it. When Susan David talks about bringing your whole self to work, she's talking about having a sense of integration. You're able to be who you really are at work and not have to segment your personal life from your professional life. David notes that when there is segmentation between who you really are and your work life, it is associated with lower levels of well being. To clarify this sense of integration, david distinguishes between emotions and values. Emotions are transient, they're fleeting and they come and go. Values are more lasting. They reflect who you are, what you believe, and where you desire to head in your life. They are related in that emotions are a signpost of your values, but they aren't your values. When you feel strong emotions, it's a clue that something may not be consistent with your values. Edwin Friedman defined self-differentiation as the capacity to define your own goals and values in the midst surrounding togetherness pressure. Pressure and there are two things that can happen when you experience togetherness pressure in the workplace and it is in conflict with your goals and values.

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The first is when you just go through the motions. It's what David calls surface acting, and you feel no connection between what you're doing and the values that you care about. The second is when you actually do something that's in conflict with your values. Like when I would yell and scream at an employee, it made me feel awful. And either of these things, either service acting or actually contradicting your own values, are connected to higher levels of burnout because they require so much emotional labor. If you are in a job where you have to segment your values from your actions, this is why you often feel exhausted at the end of the day. It's because of the emotional energy you have to expend to live this segmented life. Integrity is the integration of self between your values and your actions. You act with integrity when what you do is consistent with what you believe. Stephen Covey called this integrity in the moment of choice, and part of what he counseled was to expand that moment of choice so you would not respond automatically, so you wouldn't be reactive or adaptive. This enables you to be more self aware and intentional and requires the ability to self regulate your automatic response.

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When you do, you can really think about your values and then act with integrity as hard as it might be. One question that this raises though, is how authentic can we be? How much can we share our emotions at work? While it's important to strive to be consistent with your values at work, to be a person of integrity, david addresses the question of how much emotion you should show at work. And like everything else that I seem to find in family systems theory, there's this sweet spot between not enough and too much. David says, quote saying don't bring your emotions to work is like saying don't bring your hair to work or don't bring your hands to work. What happens in that case is that people start suppressing their emotions and you wind up with an amplification effect or emotional leakage. This is when we're trying to push aside our emotions and end up blurting something out we didn't mean in a meeting. When you don't bring your emotions to work at all, you end up with a cycle of continual adaptivity that is continually giving in surface acting punctuated by occasional moments of explosive reactivity.

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Not good. At the other extreme, of course, is bringing all of our emotions to work. And as you might expect, David says, this is not going to be healthy either because our emotions are not our values. Our emotions are how we are processing a particular moment, sharing every emotion that we have, especially when they are intense, is not going to be helpful. Nobody wants to be that person. The sweet spot is what David calls using emotions as a guide so that we can be healthy and wholehearted, so that we can bring our whole self. The point here is you want to pay attention to your emotions because they are signposts of your values. When your emotions are getting intense in the workplace, the most important thing you can do is self regulate so you can be more self aware and more intentional and think about how your values are being threatened or how you feel your values are being challenged. David has two suggestions for doing this. The first is to physically feel your feet on the ground, to literally feel grounded. It's a technique that is taught to doctors when they have to give bad news to patients.

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When you do this, along with deep breathing, it enables you to selfregulate and be more self aware and intentional in the moment of choice. The second thing you can do is to name your values. David says, "When we're experiencing difficulty in the workplace, we can ask ourselves, who do I want to be in this moment? Who do I want to be? Even just in the midst of this particular challenge, reminding yourself that there is a you inside of you and asking, what does the child and you need right now are small moments that are profoundly important." It is this type of pause and reflection that is at the heart of self-differentiation. People don't naturally self differentiate. It takes actual thought, it takes actual intentionality. Focusing on your values, your feelings and needs can help you to act with integrity. It can help you to think about what's important to you as well as what's going on inside you. This is the first step to self-differentiation in the workplace. It's the first step to integrity in the moment of choice in your professional life. Now, I will say that there are times when maybe you're just not going to make it in that culture and it might be time to move right around.

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When I was graduating from college, my brother called me and said that he was starting a solar business in Florida with a proprietary product and wanted to know if I would come and set up the production. This was back in the early 1980s, way ahead of its time really. And so I agreed to go. My wife and I went down and we went into business with my brother and I set up the production. I used my production management background and applied it instead of in a large Fortune 500 auto company. Applied it in a very small start up and was able to help influence the culture, able to be myself and to selfdifferentiated and run a company, run an operation the way I felt worked best. That enabled me to have some integrity in the workplace. An important thing that David notes is that when you have integration of self, when you show integrity in the workplace, you give permission to others to do the same thing. This is very similar to what I have said about selfdifferentiation, which is when you are a nonanxious presence and when you say what you believe in healthy ways, you encourage others to do the same.

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Now, if you are in a large corporation. It may be difficult to do this if you are in a church that is really stuck, where nobody is going to step out for fear of triangling the wrath of anxious people down on them. It may be difficult, but if you are in that place where often people are just afraid to speak up and you do it yourself, you can reach a tipping point where your ability to selfdifferentiated becomes the foundation for positive change. Being able to lead positive change is important to me, and I'm guessing it's important to you too. That's it for episode 180. You can find more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com. You can find the transcript at thenonanxiousleader.com/118, and you can email me questions or ideas for future episodes at jack@christian-leaders.com. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.

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