A reflective look at returning to our workplaces and ensuring the transition is seamless with Kristin Finkbeiner

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Welcome back to Zevotalks, I’m your host Ashlyn. As a leader in workplace well-being, we want to try exploring new avenues and areas to keep you up to date with all that is going on in the world of wellness.

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I will now hand you over to one of our team of experts to explore all things well-being.

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Hi everyone, it’s Kristen from Zevo Health and I’m back again for a psychological perspective on current times in today’s Zevo Talks. And for today, I am taking you on a deep dive into personal narratives.

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So I’d like to start out by asking you to try a quick visualization exercise. If you can sit of course, but don’t worry it’s easy. So if you’re ready, I would like you to imagine that you are back in your office, your workspace, and you are looking at your environment, your desk, your belongings, and the people that share this space with you.

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Just getting a sense of it. And then ask yourself, what is the first emotion that comes to mind for me? Now I know it’s not always possible to neatly fit our experience into one emotion, but maybe see if you can challenge yourself to identify a primary one as you visualize the scene at work.

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Is the main emotion one that feels comfortable or positive for you? Maybe it’s excitement, joy, or belonging. Or maybe does it feel uncomfortable or one that you might label as negative, like anger, contempt, frustration, worry.

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Whatever emotion crossed your mind is perfectly fine. There isn’t any right or wrong way to feel here. However, this podcast is going to be primarily speaking to those of you that had an uncomfortable emotion pop up just then.

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But you can still stay tuned if you’re feeling positive about returning to work, because chances are there’s somebody in your own social circle that’s feeling uncomfortable about this process. And maybe this podcast might be useful to connect to their perspective or even forward to them if you find it useful.

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So just to bring it back, for those of us that are having these back to work jitters of sorts, we might wonder where is this coming from? Wait, aren’t we currently in the midst of a global pandemic? Maybe our fear is simply rooted in the bubble of safety that we’ve perfected at home, that our health will be at risk, which makes sense because it’s instinctual for us to keep ourselves physically safe.

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So impulsive worries are going to pop up as forms of protection. Yet, safety isn’t our only concern. It’s just one chunk of that collective worry of returning to work. There’s numerous other reasons why feelings of apprehension are popping up for us when we imagine ourselves back in the office.

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Our back to work experience seems complex because there’s many different factors at play. Memories of being there before, our current experience at home, and anticipation of the future situation. They’re all fighting for airtime in our minds to clue us into what the situation at work will be like again.

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And you caught a glimpse of this a few minutes ago when I asked you to imagine yourself back in the office. But your mind is trying to determine what will remain the same as before and what could possibly be new in our work environments bit by bit to make sense of it.

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But even with all of these thoughts, we’re left none the wiser of what the actual future holds. And in fact, we’re often left more overwhelmed and disoriented. And maybe we’re finding it difficult to actually separate what is happening now versus what is actually happening in our minds, like past comparisons or future anticipations happening in our minds.

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Did you catch that? The majority of our experiences happen in our minds, not the physical present. Our minds are these great storytelling machines that create pictures and narrative for nearly every experience, thought or emotion that we encounter, which I’m going to circle back to in a second.

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But just think about what’s happening in your mind right now. You’re preparing for anticipated stress that awaits you at work. You are thinking about the new PPE that you’ll need to wear, or maybe a colleague that doesn’t wash his hands after the loo, or a panic work environment in general.

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But are these thoughts accurately foretelling the future? Frankly, it doesn’t matter. Because regardless, if your prophecy comes true, you’re still experiencing the stress right now. It’s felt in your body in real time, anything from a slight headache to clench, clenching your fists in anger at that careless colleague who refuses to wash his hands.

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But no matter if your thoughts are reality-based. your body is still invested in them. And we see this mind-body interaction all of the time in nearly everything that we do. So when we’re feeling embarrassed, we can feel our cheeks flushing, we can feel cortisol pumping through our hearts when we’re in a fast car, and we can feel butterflies in our stomach when we think about our crush.

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But it’s particularly noticeable when we talk about stress. Why is this? It’s because our body has evolved to quickly respond to stress to keep us safe. And I won’t go into too much detail on the physical mechanisms behind stress because we’ve spoken at length on this topic and the fight, flight, and freeze response.

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But the point is that our bodies will always react to stress. That is simply the reality. It’s a primordial protection function that can’t be turned off, but it can be observed, slowed down, and managed, which is really the place we want to get to, managing our stress, even if the stress is directed towards something in the future, like returning to work.

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And then moderating the way that we respond to this future stress, mentally, physically, and behaviorally. So at this point, you might be asking, how do we do this? Or how do we at least try to conceptualize it in our minds?

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So now let’s come back to this idea that our minds create pictures and stories that help us understand the interactions between our emotions, thoughts, body, and the situations we find ourselves in. We are storytelling machines, but is our mind a perfect storytelling machine?

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Absolutely not. The mind makes many errors all of the time. It can make wild over generalizations. It can put on blinders and ignore evidence against our firmly held beliefs. And it’ll always be heavily swayed by personal bias.

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We are human after all. We can’t always get it right. But even despite all of the potential errors in the storylines we create, our interaction with the story remains vivid and it activates our emotions and our senses.

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So then this prospect of returning to work becomes a prophesized future reality, whether it’s accurate or inaccurate, but we actively experience it in the present moment. So to say that all simply, playing stressful stories on repeat in our minds makes us feel stressed right now.

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Sounds reasonable, right? The truth is there is no one reality, just different perspectives or stories that arise to help us make sense of life events. The brain often writes these narratives automatically as you experience life.

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So I like to think of it like a voice commentary on our favorite films or sporting events. This is how the brain is adding narrative to what we experience. And this just helps give structure and greater understanding to anything we do experience.

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This is a meaning making mechanism of the mind. And it isn’t just something that is seen in the minority of people. Everybody creates their own stories all of the time. We just usually aren’t consciously aware of it when it’s happening.

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We just accept it as the current reality, when in fact, it’s just an interpretation of the current reality. And for now, I won’t get caught up in the philosophical underpinnings of all of it, but it might just help for you to note the distinction there.

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Our inner narrative is an interpretation of reality, not reality itself. The narrative is the overlay to the experience, a filter, so to speak, an additional layer that adds more dimensions to make our stories more interesting or colorful.

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And whether these dimensions appear good or bad, remember, it’s just an appearance. Maybe it’s good for us to use an example to better connect to this idea. So imagine that you’ve just smiled to somebody you’ve passed on the street but they did not smile back.

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So that was the reality experienced. Now your mind could take thousands of possible interpretations to run with, but for the sake of time, let’s just focus on a possible three. So possible story number one.

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Oh, I smiled but that guy turned away. He must think I’m a weirdo or maybe I have something on my face. Oh my goodness, I’m so embarrassed. Okay, possible story number two. Oh, I smiled but that dude just flat out ignored me to my face and here I was just trying to be nice, a nerve of some people.

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And possible story number three. Oh, I smiled but that guy didn’t see me I don’t think. No worries, it still felt good to smile and I have plenty more to go around. Now even though the situation stayed the same exactly, the stories created around the experience were drastically different from one another.

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So much that they were actually likely distinct emotional reactions that resulted in each of the scenarios. Which of those stories seem the most plausible to you as you’re listening to it? Well, you could say maybe story number three sounded the most realistic.

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He didn’t see me, so that’s cool. And you might feel this as you’re listening to this podcast calmly from the comfort of your home. But think about how might that opinion change if it was you in the middle of that situation when you personally felt socially connected or a lack thereof.

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Our moods influence our story creation and our stories influence our moods. So it’s this vicious cycle and this is the power as well as the complexity of our narratives. They become a mash-up of our moods, our attention, our interpretations, and our comparisons to other life events.

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And all of these elements interact with each other and it can make the storyline feel incoherent sometimes. And when something becomes incoherent it also becomes more confusing, overwhelming, and worrisome.

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So simply speaking again, having narratives that are unpredictable or hard to follow can make us feel anxious. Makes sense. I like to think of this process in the analogy of a college assignment. And at least for me, whenever I had to complete an assignment for college I’d often first just brain dump in quotes or just put all my random thoughts and ideas about the subject onto the paper.

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And then it would be my second focus to cast just a general eye over the assignment and weed through the ideas and pull out what didn’t belong there. And then by the third go-round it was time to dive deeper and be more critical and deliberate in my edits.

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Now I know this process is probably a little bit different for everybody, but if you expect to pass an assignment you know that there has to be some sort of effort put into creating a coherent version, which is only really possible through a refinement process.

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It’s a logical route from disorder to order. Now let me ask you this. Why do we not put our own mental stories through the same type of refinement process? Instead of rigorously editing our own mental stories, we typically take them at face value and weave them into our realities.

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Yet, as we’ve said, there’s definitely some irrational and simply incorrect material that we’re incorporating into our narratives, which of course is going to affect the rest of the process. Just like when you start out an assignment with incorrect information, you can assume that the rest will be slightly off in accuracy.

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We need to find a way to treat this automatic narrative process as the quote-unquote brain dump rather than the finished product, because that’s what it is. A random collection of thoughts, impulses, contexts, and symbols that we give meaning to.

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If we continue to draw meaning from incoherent, incomplete interpretations, we’re likely always going to find ourselves on the uncomfortable side of uncertainty. So how can we learn to look on the advance of the mind as an unfolding process rather than the end result?

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Helping us not only as we return to work, but also in every other area of our lives. Well, great question! There’s actually a form of psychotherapy called narrative therapy. which was developed by two psychotherapists from New Zealand, Michael White and David Epson, to help individuals reauthor their realities.

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So White and Epson believe that the construction of our stories are primarily given meaning through the context we find ourselves in. And this might be our social or cultural standings. And it’s through reorienting our focus to be objective that we can separate ourselves from our problems and craft new narratives that feel more personally fitting and meaningful.

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So based on their model of personal narration, I wanted to communicate three concepts that can be really important for us to remember about our own stories, especially in current times. So the first concept is that our narratives activate our emotions.

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Yes, we caught a glimpse of this in the exercise we did at the beginning, as well as the example of the pedestrian that didn’t smile back. Stories pull on our heartstrings. The interpretation of events is what makes us feel things that basic logically strong words cannot.

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And historically speaking, we’ve cherished good storytellers in society. Think about movie makers, authors, teachers, religious leaders and gurus to name a few. Oral storytelling is at the bedrock of Irish culture and many other cultures for good reason.

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It’s a form of currency. It’s how we connect with anyone we cross paths with, helping us not only to relay information, but to encourage emotion so that we can connect to the human parts and others. This ability to activate emotions through stories can be such a gift.

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And in fact, it’s a gift that we’re constantly engaged in. A lot of the time internally and some of the times verbally through social interactions. Remember, you were telling yourself stories throughout every waking moment and perhaps synthesizing these stories in our sleeping moments.

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The double-edged sword though then becomes that our stories feel uncomfortable or when they do feel uncomfortable, they can transfer similar emotions to others that might be listening to our stories as well.

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So this could be our partners, our colleagues, our family. And of course the same goes the opposite way. Others might communicate their painful stories to us so frequently that we might feel exhausted after having a conversation with them.

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There can be an element of boundaries required to manage how the stories of others influence the stories of our own. Connecting back to ourselves as the protagonist of our story can help us manage how far we’re getting pulled into others’ interpretations.

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And this can be particularly helpful when we’re re-entering the workspace that has the potential to be filled with a collective panic. We must listen to the stories of others to build communication and connection.

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So please do ask your colleagues what was good and bad in quarantine. But when we focus on witnessing rather than integrating another story into our own, we can help negate emotional contagiousness to some degree.

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So that was the first concept. And the second concept of narrative therapy that I would like to shine a light on is our emotions activate our sense of meeting. Yes, stories make us feel things, but it’s important for us to remember that they don’t have any inherent meaning, just as there isn’t any inherent meaning in anything.

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It’s our job to find and in many ways create the meaning in our stories. In a practical sense, the stories that we create about the future are expectations or anticipations, and the stories that we create around the past are judgments or reflections.

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And again, it’s not that judgments or expectations are bad because they can be necessary. For instance, expectations about what returning to the office will be like, it’s helping you to repair. It’s just that expectations and judgments simply exist as frameworks for how we see the world and make things as simple and as predictable as possible.

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But we’re not always going to be simple and predictable if our current situation is anything to go by. We must be open to the reality that our frameworks will change as we change as people, and of course, how the world changes around us.

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The thing is, our systems register a change of any kind. A return to work can be sometimes just as disruptive to the system as getting a promotion, because it’s new and therefore unpredictable. Change knocks us off of that sense of stability and normality, which is why it can be such a tough thing to manage, no matter if we interpret the changes positive or negative.

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Instead of fighting against this natural impulse to predict and prepare, we can lean into this process and observe it with curiosity so that we’re noticing both the positive and the negative stories that form, like for instance, yes, I feel that the office might be panicky when I get there, but it might also be calm and it might also be filled with people that are really wanting good conversation and meaningful interaction.

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When we observe and predict and balance, we’re opening ourselves up for experiencing any type of change in a more objective, inclusive way. And speaking of opening up to change, I think it’s important for us to find a way to let go of the notion that we’re eventually going to return to normal.

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Because once again, the experience we remember of normality was always going to evolve whether we had this pandemic or not. So the future that exists ahead of us now, however similar it might be to a few months ago, is still completely new terrain that nobody has traveled yet.

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So we are all venturing into an unknown that will likely continue to stir uncomfortable feelings. And that is life. But this uncomfortable feeling will change too. That’s something to think about. It’s not just an ongoing experience set in stone.

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And although some of our stories might seem set in stone or leather bound, just like the past normal, felt set in stone, or even that future that we’re convinced awaits us, our stories are actually a little bit more fluid.

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Kind of like a Google Doc, one that’s open for constant revision and commentary that brings new light and ultimately new life into our stories. So yes, our stories are living documents that are dynamic.

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And you have the permission to change as you see fit. It’s typically those stories that remain rigid or static that become problematic for us. If we can make peace with the fact that change will always happen, our stories instantly become more empowering.

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Yes, change can happen to us and around us in ways we can’t control, because getting back to normal isn’t fully possible. And, not but, and change can simultaneously happen through us while we’re in the driver’s seat.

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Particularly when we give ourselves permissions to feel the feels of the moment and accept the comfortable and uncomfortable parts of the unfolding story that we can choose to incorporate into our plot line.

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This will not only help make returning to work easier, but it’ll also help us build that flexible storytelling muscle that’s needed for resilience and growth. And finally, the third concept to bring us home.

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We remain constant in our ever-changing stories. So we’ve just made peace with the fact that change will be inevitable. And if this current pandemic is anything to go by, the rest of our lives will be filled with countless moments where we’re left speechless and scratching our heads saying, wow, I did not see that coming.

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If we can learn to identify within ourselves a central self that can travel from place to place, a core person that can seamlessly transition into different life scenarios, it helps us to knit the changes together into one coherent story.

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And as we discovered, having a coherent story helps us feel grounded no matter where we find ourselves in the next year, in the next pandemic, or the move to Mars. Now let’s be real, the central character doesn’t always move gracefully through life’s changes.

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And if you haven’t caught on, that central character is you. So yes, you’re going to stumble through learning curves and you’re gonna experience growing pains, but no matter how much the plot may change, you always remain the protagonist of your story.

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And that’s like an instant source of stability. You remain you despite outer change and even interchange, because of course, characters develop throughout the story as well. And that might sound like a little bit of a contradiction.

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You are a different person now than you were three months ago in the office. So of course this experience returning, even if familiar, is gonna be a little different. But that different version of you is simply just an extra layer of experience, knowledge, and growth, which has been layered upon the core person underneath.

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So that core of you is never going anywhere. It’s just gonna continue enhancing as you move through life. See if you can focus on the central you that is going back into the office. And hold consistent self-dialogue to stay grounded in the ever-changing reality.

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Because simply asking ourselves perceptive questions can bring more perspective to our unfolding narratives. And this could help us to identify what context might be influencing our stories. Try asking yourself the following questions about returning to work.

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What is the story I’m telling myself here? What is the story that I’ve been told? How do I piece this conclusion together? How did I piece this conclusion together? Can I challenge myself to be open to any other possibilities?

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And in what ways can I make my return to work as seamless or as gradual as possible? Curiosity and compassion are your best friends here through this reflective practice. Because when you can soothe and connect to your core self, managing and crafting your story becomes much easier.

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We all have the power to shift the stories we create. And when we bring awareness into our ever-changing emotions, our constant search for meaning, and our strong central self, we will be able to find stability in this ever-changing life.

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This has been Kristen with Zevo Talks. I look forward to our next space together.

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Thank you for listening to another episode of Zevo Talks, our team of health coaches are expertly trained to enable you to manage your own well-being. Tune in next time to listen to influential people making positive change in Ireland.