Friday, May 18, 2007

Bring Yourself to Work Day

On the fourth Thursday of May, the 24th, we invite you to Bring Yourself To Work Day™. This is an invitation to experience work in a really different way and an opportunity to create with others a workplace that’s engaging, motivating, and maybe even fun!
For more information, including warm-up exercises for everyday practice visit the Bring Yourself to Work Day site.

On Bring Yourself to Work Day, we invite you to set aside the five workplace inhibitions and engage in The Five Freedoms instead.

The five workplace inhibitions are patterns that we pick up early in our work lives. These are the parts of our nature we too often learn to omit from our public selves. What begins as innocent attempts to fit in, repeated over time, can become work life-limiting patterns.

The Five Inhibitions
  1. To see and hear only what should be, was, or will be, instead of what is here now.
  2. To say only what one ought to say instead of what one feels and thinks.
  3. To feel only what one ought to feel instead of what one really feels.
  4. To ask only for what one is supposed to want and then wait for permission to act instead of asking for what one wants.
  5. To choose to be “secure” and not rock the boat instead of taking risks in one’s own behalf.
Bring Yourself To Work Day is intended to disrupt this pattern. We invite you to exercise Virginia Satir’s Five Freedoms for just one day and see what happens:

The Five Freedoms
  1. To see and hear what is here, instead of what should be, was, or will be.
  2. To say what one feels and thinks instead of what one should.
  3. To feel what one feels, instead of what one ought.
  4. To ask for what one wants, instead of always waiting for permission.
  5. To take risks in one's own behalf, instead of choosing only to be “secure” and not rocking the boat.
For Bring Yourself To Work Day, consider adding a sixth freedom:
  1. The freedom to choose when, where, and how to exercise the other five freedoms!
Fully exercising these six freedoms is widely believed to be career limiting. We’re betting that it won’t be.

Visit the site to find warm up exercises, ideas for team and organization wide activities, and links to others' experiences.

Share your Bring Yourself to Work Day with others. View others' ideas, questions, and comments at our Google Group. If you'd like to add your questions or comments, you'll need to navigate a brief registration.

Let's see just what sort of difference one day might make - and whether we might turn Bring Yourself To Work Day into an everyday sort of experience.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Has a date been set for 2008?