Your Lifestyle's Workstyle

White desk with keyboard, mouse, and coffee cup.

You’ve heard of the increasingly popular “Lifestyle Brand” concept. You know, those folks blogging and vlogging on family, home, parents, and travel. Well, I just realized that I have a “Workstyle Brand”—blogging and vlogging on work climate, working conditions/supervisors/managers/leaders, and work life! Kind of catchy, isn’t it? This amusing concept-realization came to me while researching mobile app software and translating my design into reality.

My “Workstyle Brand” is all about the essential ingredient for all transformation adventures: attitude. It doesn’t matter where you live or work, what you wear or win, your position, industry, or organization size/configuration. It’s all YOU! How you think and feel about what you see and what you do with that insight and information is all shaped by your attitude.

Attitude—how you think and feel—is what actually drives the nature of your actions. No matter how far out of your comfort zone such responding actions may take you, the end result is healing peace—of mind, body, and spirit. When you think about a work-style, it’s not too far afield from your life-style because your work consumes the majority of your life.

A transformation adventure is about reintegration, owning, and healing your fractured self which has lost the cohesive surety of a clear and magnetizing center. (Or is that just me!) This is most powerfully achieved at work. Not the sole province of “extra curricular” endeavors, transformation adventures await us everywhere and in each interaction.

We are each insightful by nature. And at our core, we are wired to be useful and compassionate. We just may not naturally use these elements in optimal order and combinations. (Or is that just me ;-)?)

We all have insights at work from our particular job function and level within the organization. We strangely keep much of this to ourselves. We try our best to put on a strong poker face in meetings and then sigh a burst of emotion (and insight) once the meeting is over and we’ve left the room. We may complain to or with our colleagues, but continue to keep our emotion and information (insight) under wraps.

In most cases, the sign we look for to confirm our value at work is being useful—serving a recognized/important role/function. Part of our concept of being useful is to also be successful and do our best to please those in charge with our efforts. We are often zealous with this endeavor in one way or another. Our best intended efforts, however, often allow our compassion for others and/or the organizational mission to morph into a misplaced passion—a sacrifice of what needs to be said instead of sacrificing the discomfort and perceived risk involved in saying what must be said.

In a workstyle, as in a lifestyle, it’s about aligning what we actually see with what serves a useful functional purpose and contributes to a greater good for the team unit and the organizational community, society, and world. Think of it as “emotional feng shui”, where true insight, usefulness, and compassion serve long-term health over the short-term discomfort of having to rearrange your perceptions of form and function. This is how transformation happens in your workstyle!