Professionally Prioritizing Thriving

We’re Tara, a Sociotechnologist defined by our dedication to saving the world through the development of empathetic relationships and systemic improvements supportive of human wellness through critical considerations, empowering advocacy, relationship anarchy, equitable engagement and effective resource investment. This presentation was originally given to Barcamp Philly '19 and it's entire contents, along with the slide deck are provided here. The full content of all images is represented in plain text as to be included in text reader content by default.

Regardless of our education, experience level, or our available resources you are capable of thriving. We’ll discuss methodologies for finding and creating environments that offer prime conditions in which to thrive as humans first, creative and intellectual beings second and, finally, as professionals.

We'll walk through methodologies for identifying what resources you or your team need in order to be able to thrive. Finally, we'll discuss choosing or creating environments that meet those needs with the resources we have available to us.

Thriving

So what do we mean by “thriving” in the first place? We’re using the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving as the framework for the goal of this process. While Thriving is a comprehensive, multidimensional construct of wellbeing, in short we mean feeling happy, healthy, and whole in our professional environments. The Brief Inventory of Thriving offers us some guidance on conceptualizing the basic elements of thriving:

• Sense of purpose
• Optimism in future
• Positive feelings of progress
• Predominantly positive feelings
• Sense of valuable and worthwhile engagements
• Belief in one’s capacity for success
• Sense of accomplishment
• Feeling energized by engagements
• Feeling appreciated as a person
• Sense of belonging

What happiness looks like, requires, and how accessible it is varies for each person. While this is only one element of thriving, the capacity to experience emotional and cognitive happiness is generally seen as universal. If you can’t describe an environment in which you’ve experienced these things, we’re very sorry that you have been disadvantaged or deprived in such a way. We encourage you to engage with mental wellness resources to help support you in minimizing physiological or cognitive barriers to those experiences before engaging in this process of assessing and influencing environmental barriers. 

Our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self

Now that we have some definitions to work with, we’ll need to identify what it looks like when we are Thriving, so we know how to prioritize it’s manifestation in our professional environments. This is a self-guided methodology that we can complete alone, with trusted confidantes if we struggle with self examination, perfect strangers if we prefer anonymity to facilitate radical honesty, or with a mental health professional we trust, if we are fortunate enough to have access to one. You are also welcome to contact Us if you’d like help going through this; We charge one shared meal and friendly conversation. The steps are:

• Build our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self
• Describe life outside of work for our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self
• Write our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self a journal

Describe our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self

This first step is about describing the version of ourself we would be if everything in our current life was being optimized to help us be and live our best, just the way we are. This isn’t an exercise in imaging ourselves better people, or different people, but rather our most well cared for self. We can’t have our dream jobs, titles, salaries, teams, or accolades if we are unwell, unengaged, unbalanced, or unappreciated. While describing it from a first person perspective is a helpful start, it is important to focus on contributing elements and the evidence of their impact, so we can prioritize these optimizations later. 

We can ask what evidence is there that our Sim :

• engages in activities that energize them?
• is developing new skills or developing mastery with old ones?
• feels accomplished in their progress of pursuing ambitions?
• feels confidence and self worth in their pursuits and contributions?
• Has a sense of autonomous control over their life and optimism for the future?
• has a sense of satisfaction in the perceived meaning of their life?
• feel happy, healthy, and whole?

Describe life outside of work for our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self

This next step is about further describing our experiences in this optimized state in terms of the social and environmental elements that we can attempt to observe in our work environments later on.

We can ask what evidence there is that our Sim’s life:

• has a Support system who appreciate and encourage them?
• Involves a Community that provides them a sense of belonging, trust, and mutual respect?
• Involves routine experience that offer value and fulfillment?
• Offers a sense of security?
• Provides conditions that help them stay happy, healthy, and whole?

Write our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self a journal

This step is about evaluating the resiliency of our simulation by pressure testing our Sim(ulated) Thriving Self. We can use journal entries to provide emotionally contextualized scenarios describing anticipated challenges and proposed implications. We can ask:

• What does their worst day look like, and what helps them get through it?
• What does their best day look like, and how do they appreciate or celebrate it?
• What does an average day look like, and how do they spend most of their time feeling?

Design an ideal work environment

Now we have a clear and vivid image of what life looks and feels like when we are thriving. Now it’s time to design the kind of environment that would be most conducive to supporting the thriving life outside of work that we want to be leading. This process includes identifying things that would be in conflict with those goals also. While income and benefits are important elements of this, intangible elements of our environments often have drastic impacts on the day to day experience of those environments. This ties back to our evaluations of organizational health: authentic self representation, feelings of positivity, and a sense of security. 

Be as detailed and specific as possible. For everything we write down, we can ask “what do I really mean by that?” and challenge ourselves to be even more specific. 

• What kind of environmental features would produce the evidence you cited in our Sim’s life?
• What environmental features would be in direct conflict with that evidence?
• What environmental elements would support our Sim’s qualities and experiences?
• What environmental elements would be in conflict with our Sim’s qualities and experiences?
• How would we prioritize these features and elements if we had to develop them in stages?

Evaluate a work environment

Now that we have a clear, granular understanding of what elements of a work environment will contribute to or conflict with our ability to thrive, we can make informed and honest evaluations of a work environment’s impact on our ability to thrive. We do so by surveying our environment with focused questioning. If we lack the information to answer these kinds of questions, we can utilize our available resources and good questions to gather more.

• How does this environment compare and contrast to our Sim’s ideal environment?
• What are the qualities and characteristics of other people who share this environment?
• What is our relationship with them like?
• Does this environment value and prioritize the elements that support our ability to thrive?

Improve a work environment

Now we have a clear understanding of what thriving looks and feels like, what is required to prioritize and support it, and what challenges a current or potential work environment faces in doing so. The next step is to improve our work environment or to seek out a new one using the same evaluation process we just completed. 

There are several methodologies we can utilize to improve a work environment:

• We can ask important and focused questions about toxic environmental elements of those who can speak to them with knowledge, rather than authority.
• We can make critical inquiries into why improvements haven’t already occurred to uncover previous attempts at improvements, identified barriers or challenges, and mutual value in the improvements being sought.
• We can inventory resources and design solutions that are accessible within them. If necessary, we can seek alternative environments that offer more benefits than barriers, acknowledging the impact that work environments have on our thriving sim’s life.

If you are looking to make improvements for those beyond ourself, you need to improve our organizational cultural competency, engage members in the process of designing an ideal work environment as a collective and then employ these methods of improvement at the systems and operations levels. We are happy to help develop bespoke solutions for your organization and it’s members. Our contact information is available at. the beginning and end of this article.

In conclusion

Professionally prioritizing thriving means knowing that life outside of our professions come first and that our workplace is powerful in impacting our ability to thrive within it. Some important pieces of contextual information to note:

Unions are a mechanism of engaging in this process at the group level in environments that are hostile towards prioritizing thriving. They can be invaluable resources to develop if leaving a workplace isn't an easily accessible method of improvement.

Worker Cooperatives are environments that engage in this process inherently as a development of environmental systems and processes. There are many available resources to help develop them if you are unable to locate an environment conducive to your ability to thrive.

 All our contact information and other community presentations are available on our Linkedin profile, as well as here.