The post-it note: self-awareness within the workplace

People are at the heart of everything I do. I’ve always been fascinated by their complexity - we all come from such diverse backgrounds with different life and family experiences - and I often wonder what made someone the way they are. What unhealed wound are they enacting within the workplace? Are people aware of how they’re consciously showing up? Or are they comfortable in adhering to a pre-programmed set of beliefs?

Having worked in different environments (from universities, NGOs, and international organisations), I’ve accrued some understanding of working within a diverse workforce. Each experience taught me something not only about myself but people and their trauma. We all bring our personal baggage into the workplace. We can’t help it. To be human is to do so. For example, I once worked with a small team of five on an Education project for a well-reputed and well recognized international organisation. One of my colleagues, a hard-working young woman, came from an unconventional background, not in line with the rest of the teams. I watched her enough times to slowly realise how her belief around being “different” made her feel within the team. This would manifest through short angry outbursts, blaming someone for belittling her knowledge and generally feeling left out. She would oftentimes get upset and wonder why our manager would designate tasks that she was knowledgeable in, to other group members. This resulted in her going behind the teams back to work on said task to highlight her skill and talent to the manager. This did not create a positive ethos of psychological safety between group members and the manager. Looking back on this experience, I believe the manager played a big role in how poorly things played out. In my humble opinion, a lack of conscious leadership and curiosity grossly exacerbated the young woamn’s already crumbling self-worth and the poor team dynamics.

I often wonder what would have happened if the organisation had held workshops on self-awareness, self-love and conscious leadership? Would the dynamics between the team members have been different? Would the young woman have experienced things differently? Would there have been a stronger ethos of psychological safety within the team?

I really believe that instilling a culture of self-awareness within an organisation is key to effective and efficient work outputs, especially within a team. We all come from such diverse backgrounds (with many operating on unhealed trauma - come on, this should not be taboo to talk about) so it makes sense that there will be times when things don’t go smoothly. That’s ok. What’s not ok is feeling like you’re walking on eggshells, unable to be your authentic self or having someone show up passive-aggressively.

A recent exercise I undertook to help myself to embody more self-awareness in my daily tasks (and interactions) involved a post-it note. I found myself regularly triggered by a colleague’s communication style at work (let’s call her Eva for the purpose of this story). Her unique way of berating and belittling my outputs (or need for help) made me feel small. I found myself despairing every time I had to interact with her, flinching anytime my manager told me to revert to her for advice. I dreaded her curt “I guess I’ll spoon feed it to you”. Don’t get me wrong, there were moments of kindness but those were overshadowed by Eva’s tendency to berate. I once found myself in a group call where Eva openly told another team member that she had to actually show me how to (gasp!) use the software I had never used before. The call went silent. Internally, the young unhealed version of me was screaming. To my team members credit, she did not once let on Eva’s social “faux pas”, and, instead gently lead the conversation in a different direction.

After this, I took some time to pause and reflect (after several moments of rage and sadness) to ask myself some questions: where does this stem from? why do I need to take her communication style so personally? what unhealed wound is showing up? I then paused further, dug deeper, prayed for patience, and asked myself to think from her perspective. What might Eva be going through in her life right now to make her communicate like this? Could this be a result of her own life experiences? I mean I know so little about Eva. In trying to meet both myself and Eva with curiosity, something shifted.

So I reached for a yellow post-it note and wrote:

Let it go.
THANK YOU, EVA. I’ve made note of your kind advice.
Don’t respond in anger or anxiety. PAUSE, SUDHA.

I told my friends about this and they started laughing. But this little exercise changed my life because now, charged with my trusty post-it note, anytime I felt triggered I would look at it to remind myself of my own trigger and how I should try to speak to her. Low and behold, although not easy, it helped tremendously. Eva may not have changed but I could pause more often than lean into my pre-programmed desire to snap back.

This was/is the power of a simple post-it note and a desire to accrue more self-awareness.

However, my ease in being able to use a post-it note for help may have been made easier by the journey towards self-awareness I started in 2017. I genuinely believe that it was an amalgamation of the books I’ve read, the meditation habits I’ve attempted to create, journalling and a desire to understand myself that made the post-it note effect so helpful.

That being said, the next time you’re in a challenging situation, I invite you to pause, take a step back, do whatever grounding exercise works for you, and ask yourself: what is happening here? why am I feeling this way? what must my colleague be feeling to behave in this manner?

You won’t always have an answer and your post-it note won’t always be filled with helpful tips but it is a starting point to cultivating more compassion, self-awareness, self-love and conscious behaviour.