Do you have an indoor and outdoor personality? Ways you show up at work that are different from how you are in your personal life? Of course you do. We all do. We are a curated blend of our instinctual and cultivated selves, and because we spend so many hours at work, we can sometimes let our instinctual self-override our cultivated self — and that is when HR gets involved. 

At Geigsen we understand that there are three layers to showing up at work. The first layer is the Transaction, doing the job you were hired to do. The second layer is your Emotion & Psychology, the programs running underneath you that determine how you relate to others, manage stress, and show up under pressure. The third layer is your Awareness of how your emotions and psychology are enabling or hindering your success at work. 

We call the programs that make up your emotion and psychology the Human Operating System (learn more here), which basically determines whether you can get along with others, whether you can manage your emotions under stress, and whether you can think for yourself so you can bring your creativity and discernment to everything you do. When the programs in your Human Operating System are working well together, you feel calm, cool, and collected and can be the cultivated self you want to be. But as soon as one of the programs gets thrown off, either by someone, or something, or even your own thoughts, all bets are off, and you become your more instinctual self. 

Managing your Human Operating System is, in our opinion, the most important thing you can do for yourself and for the people around you. The tricky thing about your operating system is that if you do not understand it, you may feel like you are being your authentic self when you are actually having an operating system malfunction. 

Let us say you are a person who uses humor in your life. You might make funny observations that make people laugh, and that is a great quality to have in the workplace. But now let us see what happens to that humor when you are feeling relationally dismissive of a colleague. You may use the same humor to embarrass or humiliate them, and suddenly that thing about you that is fun has turned dangerous and mean. That is a good example of when your cultivated self, being funny and using humor to connect with people, becomes hijacked by your instinctual self, your tendency toward being dismissive, and now the humor is not so funny and the people who felt connected to you now feel uncomfortable around you. 

By really getting to know the programs in your operating system and your unique way of behaving when they are triggered, you can not only manage them, but bring even more of yourself to work, because you can trust that your cultivated self-will reliably show up. 

In our next post we will talk about body battery and how to make sure you are taking care of yourself so you have the energy and resilience to show up as the cultivated self you want to be.