There is a tribal culture in every company.  Some companies create hierarchical kingdoms with sovereign leaders, some are more like families with leaders acting in parental roles to take care of everyone. Still others create clubs or innovative frameworks that invite creativity but not sustainability.  Many companies are very political with leaders enjoying levels of power with internal competitors trying to figure out how to play the right game. It is easy for everyone, at every level, to get sucked into the dynamics and lose voice.

It doesn’t matter if you are happy at work or if you are disengaged and miserable, there is ongoing movement between what others need and want from you, and what you most want.  We see this play out in ways that keep people in an “us,” the workers, versus “them,” the leaders or corporate executives.  Being a victim and feeling powerless at work every day is not healthy.  I often question clients to consider how they got to a place where they don’t feel fulfilled. More often than not, it is how the individual client holds their position or fails to use their voice for change that is disempowering.

Working with Jim Curtan, a member of our faculty at the Pyramid Coaching Institute, provides this simple tool to better understand and achieve our own awakening.  Jim has worked for many years with renowned author and anthropologist, Dr. Carolyn Myss, who refers to this movement in three columns of consciousness which is illustrated in the following table:

Tribal is your family of origin, your community or your company where a focus is clearly on who has the power, what is right and wrong and what is needed for the greater good.

Individual is the column that represents how we form our personality, our ego and how those needs are best illustrated.  We often start with what no longer works for us – what we don’t want – to get clear about what we do want.

Symbolic is the column of fulfillment and authenticity.  We can include everything that exists, happens to us, and we call to us. We move into more meaningful existence as we grow beyond old paradigms, particularly around power and realize we are here in service to something, living from faith in that service.

So how do you declare your independence to become more satisfied and fully alive at work?

Coaches work in the spaces between these columns.  We seek to understand what you really want.  So consider this blog post a personal coaching session as you enter this season of summer and reflection, a time of declarations and celebrations.  Here are five ways you might free yourself during the next few weeks and set a new course for happiness:

Free Yourself:

1. Free your mind: Give yourself a time out to gain perspective, to consider what you are doing from a whole new place of possibility.  Ask yourself what you are holding in your mind that is no longer serving you and let it go so you create a new space for growth.
2. Free your spirit: Give yourself time to explore that creative aspect of you that is most in touch with what is right and true for you, so that you can live as happily as possible.  Happiness is best measure of success!
3. Free your body: Give yourself a break from your addictions and feed your body with local grown fresh foods.  Bless the food that you eat silently, asking that it ignite your energy.  Move your body in ways that free your joints from pain and energize you.  Go play!
4. Free your actions: Let go the nostalgia over how things were back in the day and take new and better actions aligned with what you most desire to do with your precious time.
5. Free your work: How would you spend your days if you knew they were numbered and short?  When you take the first step to your personal, executive, most creative level of service and independence, you create the space for others to take their first step.

In the end only you can free you.

So one question to contemplate as you enter the summer season, “Is it time to declare your independence in order to achieve your most symbolic and meaningful work?”