Feeling Ourselves with Alla Weinberg
Take a moment to check in with your body—yeah, right now! Do you feel tension in your shoulders? A clench in your jaw? A heaviness in your chest? Those feelings have something to tell us—and it’s time we tuned into them at work, says Alla Weinberg.
Alla Weinberg is a work relationship expert and culture designer who coaches teams and leaders to build relationship intelligence skills, create cultures of safety and trust, and move past toxic work environments. She's also the author of A Culture of Safety: Building Environments Where People Can Think, Collaborate, and Innovate.
What needs to change: we have to shift from this mechanistic mindset around work that people are cogs in a machine, or resources, or capital, and understand that we are biological creatures that get sick, that have chemical hormonal changes in our bodies, that have emotions, that are messy, honestly, in a lot of ways we're very messy, and design around that piece. That we have differences in ability in how we think, in how we function and start from that place. Because everything was designed around the idea that people are machines, and we're not.
—Alla Weinberg, author, A Culture of Safety
We talk about:
- Physical, emotional, and psychological safety at work
- How our feelings manifest in our bodies, and how recognizing these emotions helps us process them
- How to create a true "safe space"
- "Stress" as a euphemism for "fear"
- How the modern workplace was never designed for people who menstruate or get pregnant, and what needs to change to accommodate all bodies at work
- Alla’s personal story of feeling unsafe at work and how the road to healing from trauma led to her finding her life’s work
- Rituals and practices for processing feelings and fostering connectedness
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara walks us through how to do a body scan. For more on using this tool to release tension and feelings in our bodies, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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