Imagine the following story.
A creative young person is hired straight out of school by an advertising agency. (If you work in a bank, a hospital, or a school, feel free to adapt the story.) After working there for a year, he invites all his colleagues to an internal meeting. He tells them, “Please show up. This is really important to me.”
At the meeting, he thanks them for being there and says, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I wonder: what are we doing? I’ve come to see that we mostly create false needs, telling people they will be happy and whole only if they buy a product they don’t really need. To create that false need, we tell them they are not OK the way they are, that they should look like the photoshopped, impossibly perfect women and men from our ads. All this to sell a product made in China, that uses up natural resources and pollutes the planet. And that will end up in a landfill a few weeks or months later. I really wonder: is this what we are meant to do with our lives?”
That would be a courageous conversation to initiate! But I suspect this young person wouldn’t have a long career with that advertising firm. Speaking our truth, giving voice to our deepest hopes and longings feels risky … because in many work places, it is risky. And so we don’t speak our truth. Worse: it’s not just that we don’t talk about it – believe we often put a lid on our inner voice; we silence it even to ourselves.
If, in so many work places, we play petty ego games, I don’t believe it is because we are somehow fundamentally flawed as a species. Simply, the ego is what we are left with when we cut ourselves off from deeper parts of ourselves.
