Part 1: How do our past experiences affect how we make space for love in work
In this post Tessa Cooper, our founder, shares her experiences of reconciling her past to make space for more love in her work as part of our series on “Love in the workplace”.
Artwork by our young Nottingham talent, Chantelle Fagan - Clarke
I’ve always been a relatively open person. But throughout my teenage years and my early career there were times that I laid myself bare, making myself vulnerable to others, and was met with rejection, anger and at times violence. In turn I closed parts of myself off, and held my true feelings and needs more tightly below the surface. This is not unique to me. We all have these experiences that tell us it is not safe to be entirely ourselves even with the people we believe love and care for us, let alone in a professional setting.
When I began to unpack my rape last year I started to see the ways that neural pathways had been formed to tell me what spaces weren’t safe for me to let my guard down - even when there was no real threat to me at all. For example, I realised I’d closed myself off to working with men, and even small signs of aggression from any man would send me into fight or flight mode. This made it very difficult for me to do our work around Equity & Inclusion, because it requires me to come face to face with masculinity in the workplace and to see those painful conversations through. Or I would avoid sharing my own needs and emotions around difficult situations like this because I had been met with judgement or dismissiveness in my past.
Everyone’s work is affected and shaped in unseen ways by our childhoods and our formative years and it dominates the way we interact with each other in the workplace. And no matter how big or small the trauma is, we can all create potentially unhealthy patterns in how we work with others. There could be three CEOs - one that grew up in foster care, one that went to boarding school, and one who was simply the eldest child whose parents worked full-time - who might all have developed a fierce self-reliance in reaction to their situations that manifests later in the inability to share power and responsibility with their team. Or there could be both someone that grew up in a home full of conflict, and someone who grew up in one that was full of silence, and they might both end up having a form of people-pleasing to attract positive attention to themselves which manifests in the workplace as overpromising and tendencies to burnout.
And these seemingly innate responses that might cause tension and harm to ourselves or others in the workplace keep repeating themselves until we learn to look at our own triggers and behaviours deeply, make space to heal and see our true selves clearly, while simultaneously making space for others to go on that journey with us. In my MindBody therapy course the other day we talked about the “skillful acceptance of regression to traumatic developmental phases where something needed for growth was missing” and how together we can create “mutual reenactments” to unlock new beginnings and create “corrective emotional experiences”. And I realised that this has been continuously at the heart of all aspects of our work at Collaborative Future.
When Prisca and Sonia from Collaborative Future first made space for me to open up and to be held by them without judgement, it healed a million wounds for me. When Nick from Shift told me in a client meeting that he saw what I was carrying and that I needn’t carry it alone, or when James from William Joseph Design repeatedly reached out to offer support without expectation of anything in return, it corrected my patterns of relating to men. When multiple participants from our youth programmes shared stories that made me feel seen, when they told me they were here for the journey even when things were a bit of a mess, it made me love the parts of me that I’d previously seen as broken. Each of these people repeated these experiences with me multiple times over and in many ways my brain rewired. I had a multitude of corrective emotional experiences in my work that told me there were people I needn’t hide from. That these were people that held me with love and I didn’t need to run away from that. And in turn that has enabled me to be a million times better at my work. Because I can exist as me in that work, I’m not in conflict with myself or others, and I can bring all the parts of me that are needed to spark a transformational experience for others through Collaborative Future.
Dr Chris Walling says that in families there is a collective nervous system. And that when one person heals the whole family reorganises, our cells reorganise, and make space for growth and warmth and love and joy. While I don’t believe that teams should be going around calling themselves “families” I do believe the same concept can be used for a good working team. When we treat our team as one nervous system, and we make space for one person to heal and to be seen, that has a knock on effect to the whole system.
And this is why at Collaborative Future we try to lead and facilitate with compassion in all our work. Where possible we flex and adapt our work placement programmes around the unique individuals in front of us and their unique histories and experiences. We hold whatever spaces need to be held, we delve mutually into places of healing, we create new experiences where they might previously have been told or felt they were wrong or not good enough and provide them with a different narrative. And we do the same in our work with organisations around equity and belonging. We meet people where they are and we go with them on the journey to rebuild their love for themselves and in turn their love for others.
If you want to learn how to lead with love, or explore your’s or your team’s patterns of behaviour, get in touch for ideas and opportunities to collaborate together at hello@collaborativefuture.co.uk
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Our Love in the Workplace blog series:
In this post Tessa Cooper, our founder, shares her experiences of reconciling her past to make space for more love in her work as part of our series on “Love in the workplace”.