2- Saying what I think and feel.

This post is the third of a series of preparation exercises for Bring Yourself To Work Day. The purpose of this exercise is to improve your ability say what you actually feel and think, instead of what you should. This post is about feeling and thinking.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend a function for a State board. I found myself seated next to an exuberant attorney who, I learned over dinner, is a member of the Board of Directors for Seattle's Discovery Institute, the organization promoting the Intelligent Design "controversy." I heard myself saying, "Does this mean that you're a right-wing nut case?" before my usual internal censor could silence me.

"No," he emphatically responded, "It means that I have real questions about how humans could have resulted from random dice tosses."

We had a more interesting conversation over the following few minutes than we'd had over the previous hour. Furthermore, when he found that I wasn't buying into his random arguments, he discretely changed seats, leaving me next to a man who, as a sixteen year-old Congressional page, had once T-Boned Barry Goldwater's pride-and-joy 1957 T-Bird in front of the sidewalk where Barry was waiting for him to bring him his ride.

Priceless.

Fact is, until that attorney mentioned the Discovery Institute, nothing we'd discussed had really sparked a feeling response in me. Once my feelings were aroused, it seemed my thinking kicked in, too.

Perhaps the key inhibitor to saying what I feel and think is that so little of what I talk about ever kicks me into feeling anything very deeply. Start feeling, though, and thinking seems to follow. So does speaking what I feel and think.

I know the popular myth says that should you commit a truth and actually say what you feel and think, bad things will happen. Has this really been your experience? It's too often my story, too, but try as I might, I can't validate this story with my personal experience.

Our workplaces today seem to be organized to inhibit feeling, which quite naturally inhibits thinking. No one can say what they feel and think if they aren't feeling anything. So today, in preparation for Bring Yourself To Work Day, conspire with yourself to feel something! Take offense! Or feel an appreciation! Lose control of your precious blood pressure! Step out of the feelingless trance your workplace induces in you and listen to what your mouth has to say about it.

If you can't feel, you can't think. And if you can't think, it probably doesn't matter what comes out of your mouth.

Bring the 'F' word (feeling) to work with you today and experience the difference a little feeling can make.