Don’t Bring It to Work

The book Don’t Bring it to Work sheds light into the relation between private and professional life. Why is it important to explore those relationships? According to Sylvia Lafair and others there is no separating private and professional life. We all learned certain behavioral patterns when we were young to survive, be it crying to get that candy we desired or just becoming very quiet to avoid confrontation with our parents. All this patterns that became so crucial for our survival in our family life also show themselves in our professional life.

The problem with those patterns is often that they do not help and trap us in fixed roles that determine our every action. The underlying issue we are facing is that those pattern we developed helped us to survive as children or adolescence and not in an adult world. Moreover, those patterns are often so internalized that we barely recognize them, which is apparently the key to break free of them. Recognizing them is merly the first step, to overcome them we need to know why and how we learned them and why they were triggered to gradually retrain ourselves and let go of our past. In some ways the saying “Those who don’t now once history are condemned to repeat it” holds true for our own lives.

Sylvia Lafair Talks about 13 roles that people can take on and explores why people take on those roles and also how to spot and break free of it. For example I tend to avoid confrontations as often as possible just to guarantee a smooth process even if it means going a less “optimal” way (at least in my opinion). And yes I after thinking about this behavior I realized that I did that ever since I can think. But to elaborating why I think that is would be to much for this post.

If you take five minutes to think on how you behave everyday or especially in stressful situations or in conflicts can you spot any behavioral patterns you fall into?