Avoiding sharing, thinking about or connecting with feelings was normal operating procedure when I started work many years ago. After all we were there to do a job not be waste time considering feelings. This was particularly true being a woman and even more so as a woman working in the IT industry.
There appear to be an unspoken concern that females were prone to being not just emotional but over emotional. A phrase which normally translated to hard to manage, distracted and distracting. All in all not able to focus on the task at hand.
Feelings then were supposed to be pushed down and ignored. They were not needed or useful and what’s more they were unprofessional. Measurements of success were numbers not feelings.
This approach certainly made sense from a management perspective if we workers can just do as they are told without stopping to “feel” anything about the instructions they were receiving the life of managers was a great deal easier.
Co-Creative projects make space for feelings, not so we can all experience work as if were therapy but so feelings can help navigate the project. A feeling can help us pause and consider what next steps are needed more organically and powerfully than an standard SWOT analysis. Inorder to add an item to a quadrant in a SWOT chart we need to be able to articulate the risk, opportunity etc. Sometimes we don’t have a full enough grasp of the situation to formulate it. This is where making space for feelings can help. A feeling can be explored and shared with the group. The group can then bring the feeling into focus and often discover the key that it points to.
In one of our meetings, making space for feelings started organically. …