Why I Get Naked at Work to Improve Our Customer Focussed Culture

I have just read an interesting article from a contributor on LinkedIn that I love. Her name is Liz Ryan. She writes with such inspiration from the heart and her illustrations are great too!  I hope you will read her latest blog in which she discusses; ‘How to get naked, win friends and influence people’. It certainly gives us food for thought!

We all have personal branding – with our current job title or our industry designation and put on huge overcoats and batten down the hatches of our inner self, losing all our fun, creativity, and often all our innovation. We all have the ability to come up with creative ideas which can help us each and every day in the workplace, if only we scratched beneath the surface to discover what is actually underneath.

Being creative can involve cooking a meal from scratch, creating a novel, doing some DIY, making up a bedtime story for your child, finding ways to cut costs, or even developing a creative solution to a negotiation impasse. Whatever you do, creativity helps you do it better.

Many business people will admit to saying, “I have no creativity at all!” You may well believe that your job has no requirement for creativity, or perhaps you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that you are just not the outgoing fun type. But having a creative mindset and being intrinsically you is not the sole domain of being arty – whether it’s painting, theatre, music, architecture, dancing, literature, and so on-but is important in any field, from medicine to business, and from engineering to economics.

Embrace Creativity

Embracing ALL OF YOUR creativity is essential for fulfilling your potential, at work and in life. So why with all the liberalization around our everyday lives do we still prefer to hide layers to the nakedness of ourselves behind our laptops and working uniforms? You are the same person that goes to work and when you arrive it is as if your ‘Heart and Sole’ dies….you become subdued, risk- aversed and oh so serious…

So, keep looking around in your organization.

• Do you see fun and creativity at work?
• Do you see joy?
• Do you see love?
• Or do you see fear, and inauthenticity, and mediocrity?

If the latter, you may be witnessing the wall of the mind at work.  At a basic and human level, this may be the single most dangerous stumbling block between your organization and long-term success!