Welcome to Seven Minute Sunday on the Switch Pivator Quit podcast. I'm your host, Ayana Angel, and we are going to spend the next seven minutes together getting you filled up with inspiration and goodness to get your mind primed to achieve greatness as you enter the week ahead. So recently I was chatting with some of you on the Switch Pivator Quit Instagram, which is just at Switch Pivator Quit, and we were talking about showing up as your full self at the office. And I wanted to touch on this a bit more today on our Seven Minute Sunday because I think it's very important and it's something that a lot of people struggle with, but you don't really realize that they're struggling with it and tell someone, start to the dialogue about it.
So I want to start the dialogue about it and I want us to dive into it a bit more. So I shared with a few of you or a bunch of you that say that, on social media, I shared this, that when I was working in my nine to five in the corporate space, I didn't show up as my full self. I didn't, I wasn't operating at my full capacity and at my full potential. Sometimes I felt like I was dumbing it down and dimming my light a little bit so that I could make other people around me feel comfortable and maybe to a degree so that I could fit in and I wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb.
And I also knew that sometimes the way that you are in a corporate space and the way that you are maybe at home, sometimes those things don't always align. So it was going to be more effort on my part to make them align better. To be quite honest, I never actually put in that effort. I never tried.
I never tried to make them align. I didn't. I just showed up at the office as who I needed to be for the professional space and I just let that be that. And I was even sharing that I bet that some of my old coworkers would see me now and observe how I operate and be completely surprised only because the way that I showed up, my corporate job was much more downplayed.
I didn't speak up as much. I would vocalize things when I felt strongly about something. But otherwise, I was pretty passive about everything. And maybe that's because I wasn't passionate about it.
That's something to think about too. When you're thinking about how you show up in the corporate space, could a part of the reason that you show up the way that you do be a result of a lack of passion which can in turn then sort of look like indifference. And when you're working for someone else, indifference is not a good thing. And I speak from personal experience because sometimes I was just indifferent about things.
I didn't feel super passionate one way or another. And when you're working an environment where you have to contribute to brainstorming meetings and things like that, being indifferent is not the best thing. You want to contribute. You want to have ideas.
You want to feel strongly about your ideas. You want to present in a passionate way because that makes people feel like you take your job seriously, you're invested, you want to be here. And even if you think that other people don't notice how you're showing up, believe me, they notice. So when you don't show up as your full self, they may not know who you are as your full self.
They may not know you outside of work. There's aspects to your personality that sure they may not be aware of. But one thing that I can say is you will not get to where you want to be and stay there if you continue to not show up as your full self. And the reason why I say that, let's unpack that a little bit is because you may get to where you want to be in terms of the title.
You may get the promotion that you want. But because you're not operating in your full capacity as to who you are and how you really show up in the world every day and how you want to show up in the world, there will probably come a point where you're no longer satisfied with achieving the goals that you thought you wanted to achieve because something doesn't feel lined up like for you. Something is not in alignment. You have what you thought you wanted, but still there's this nagging feeling that something's missing or you want more.
And it's probably because you had to show up in a certain way to achieve what you achieved and you weren't showing up as your full self. And sometimes we don't show up as our full selves because we think it's going to make other people feel a little uncomfortable, right? I just said that earlier. That's part of the reason why I didn't show up as my full self.
But I want to let you know it's okay for other people to feel a little bit uncomfortable sometimes. It's okay for them to feel uncomfortable with you showing up as your authentic self. Now, of course, you want to be mindful of just certain basic social norms and social standards like, you know, don't walk around the office using crazy profanity because that's who you are and that's you being your authentic self like slow down. Okay, that might be taking it a little bit too far, but you do want to make sure that you're allowing certain aspects of your personality to shine.
You are sharing certain pieces of who you are. Allow people to get to know you in a certain way. And I know a lot of us, our parents trained us to feel as though our coworkers should just be that coworkers and not necessarily friends because when you become too friendly with your people that you work with, it sort of gives them an invitation into your life and things can get messy. Look, there is some truth to that too, but you don't want to make people feel like there's a wall between you and them.
So you have to play this game in a sense where you do allow them to know certain parts of you. Maybe you don't tell them your coworkers your deep, darkest secrets, but you let them in on little things that you don't mind sharing that won't make a break. The relationship or your standing at the company or how people view you or treat you. You know, if you do drugs on the weekend, definitely don't share that, you know, but maybe you share that you like that you coach your kids soccer team or maybe you share that shopping is your favorite past time or maybe you share about an upcoming trip that you have with your girlfriends.
Just share something that maybe allows them to see more of who you are and helps to shape their perception of you and not only a professional capacity, but in a personal capacity. So they can just feel a bit more comfortable with you and then in turn you can feel more comfortable with them. So if you want to start talking about how can I do this, this feels completely foreign to me. I'm not comfortable with it.
I show up one way at work and I'm comfortable with that so far. How do I start showing up as more of my authentic self? First, I'm glad that you asked that question because to me, when you start asking that type of question, how do I show up as my authentic self and you have a yearning to do that, there's growth there and that lets me know that you're fully aware of the concept of switch pivotal quick, your relationship to making a switch pivotal quick because it's all about change and it's all about doing things different from how you were doing them before. So if you want to embark on being a bit more authentic at work because you're working on maybe a side project and you feel like you're torn between two different worlds when you show up to work, you're one person and when you're at home or outside of working on your side project, you're a whole other person and you want to start finding some ways to marry the two so that you can feel more comfortable at work and you can feel more productive maybe even and connected.
So some of the ways that you can do that is initially it's going to sound very simple and you're going to be like what? Start small, start with little things like sharing some of the things that you do outside of work with your coworkers so that they can get a feel for you. Start by easing yourself into it, easing them into it. Maybe there's a lovely piece of jewelry that you have that you never wear to work because you don't want to get any questions about it or it's just something that you tend to more so wear on the weekends, wear it to work, incorporate that in your wardrobe and see if you get any questions or any comments and if you do share with the person, where did you buy this piece of jewelry, why do you like it so much?
If it's a conversation piece, let them know. Yeah, when I go to different events and things, this is typically a conversation piece and I love it. That's why it's one of my favorite pieces of jewelry and that'll spark their interest a bit more like oh, so what else do you do outside of work? So what are these events that you go to?
It'll just give you more of a way to share a bit more about yourself. So just start small, don't overthink it, you don't have to go crazy but let's say when you go to work, you don't use the type of language that you would normally use with your friends and family. Start incorporating some of that vernacular in a little bit so that they understand and realize you're human. This is who you are, this is how you talk, this is how you operate.
This is what's comfortable for you now. If you are a person that uses a lot of slang and colloquialisms at home, then maybe you don't go in on Monday and just start ripping the joint up with all your hey girl, hey's and everything else, you don't have to do that but you can incorporate some things because you'll be surprised how many people actually that will endear them to you a bit more because you'll sound more real to them, more authentic to them and not because they expected you to talk like that but because the way you deliver it is going to sound and feel authentic and real and true to you. That will be, that will be felt by people. So the main thing that I want to do is just encourage you to start trying to incorporate how to be a bit more authentic in your corporate workspace if you feel like you're not already doing that.
And when you look around and you see that person who's just genuinely being themselves and they're winning, a part of the reason that they're winning is because they have tapped into a way to be authentically and genuinely themselves yet still play the game. And when I say play the game, I think you all know what I mean because there is always a game to be played in the corporate space. That's just facts. So I hope that this helped for number one, you don't understand that you are not alone in feeling like you don't always show up as you're full and authentic self at work.
You don't always allow yourself to fully shine at work and you're not always feeling like you're complete 100% representation of yourself at work. I've been there. There's other people that are going through this at the same time that you're going through it. So you are absolutely not alone in it.
But the second thing that I hope you take away from listening to this is that there are ways to start approaching this topic so that you can make all of this feel good for you. So at the end of the day, the name of the game is you being comfortable and operating in alignment with what feels good to you. So I hope that you enjoyed this seven minute Sunday. Thank you once again for hanging out with me and spending time.
I hope you have a bang up knockout amazing week next week. And as always, keep killing it.