The Love We Need Right Now
Have you experienced this: You are moving along through your day. And one moment you are fine, but the next you are not?
I’ve experienced this many times this year. It sneaks up on me and suddenly I am confronted with sorrow, anger or frustration for example. It is in these times that we need love from each other.
That love can take many different forms in the work context - compassion, kindness, listening, appreciation, belonging, and more. For our individual and collective well-being, we must be ready to respond to each other with that love.
Before COVID, my research interviews about love at work showed this to be true. This research showed that when we face a personal crisis we need support which we experience as a form of love. Well, we are all there now; we are all facing various personal crises, sometimes several at once. And we need loving support from each other now more than ever before.
The love we can bring to each other right now is very practical and completely within our means to give. Here’s what it looks like…
This love can take the form of acceptance when your colleague has to pause to answer their child’s question again. Your reassurance can ease the stress, normalize this new integrated work-life, and help that parent to be the kind of parent AND colleague they want to be.
This love that looks like kindness when your co-worker is stressed about the well-being of their family or friend who is a first responder, or their adult child who lost their job, or their loved one’s positive COVID test response.
This love looks like White colleagues educating themselves on systemic racism, that yes, is a real and endemic part of our society.
This love looks like flexibility about when the work gets done, not demanding “butts in seats” or being logged on from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. when that has nothing to do with doing the work and only with fear and control.
This love looks like compassion when your colleague is uncharacteristically tense or quiet. We may not know the relationship struggle or financial hardship or health concern, but we offer patience and support.
This love looks like working to be aware of our implicit biases that we all have and working to manage and minimize them.
This love looks like time and support to process the impact of the pandemic on your clients, your industry, your town.
This love looks like listening to and believing the stories of implicit bias or micro-aggression experienced by a colleague who is a person of color.
We are all a part of each other’s emotional ecosystems now. (We always were.)
But now we all need love for our survival and well-being. And we all need to be ready to give that love.
This is the time to step up at work with love.
