Dear HRart Worker, 

 

Consider this letter an entrepreneurial confession. Since starting my business in 2014, I’ve struggled to scroll through LinkedIn. For me, LinkedIn has always been the master of what-if triggers.

 

What if I could have let things go?
What if I had stayed a little longer?
What if I made a mistake?

 

This what-if pathway quickly evolves in a manner of minutes from wonder to regret. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the regret I am referencing are the ghosts of my workplaces past that still haunt me. I have been blessed in my professional life to have worked at organizations that I loved and still love to this day. Before social media, my only way to meander down memory lane in an immersive fashion was to visit those workplaces. However, LinkedIn now has created a perfect platform for me to witness on a regular basis what I left behind. 

 

Regret is a dangerous emotion for me, since I heavily rely on trusting that the past happened for a reason to lead me to my current moment. It is also when we have an inability to release the past or become paralyzed obsessing about the future, that we are unable to be present in the here and now. This lack of presence often causes us to miss opportunities and limits our capacity to step into our power of potential. 

 

For me, the greatest source of the what-if trigger is the celebratory and team bonding events, essentially it is the posts that highlight the cultural energy of the organization. I miss being a true part of that collective energy. 

 

I think it’s important to say out loud that no organizational culture is perfect and perfection is never the goal. The beauty of the internal communities within our culture is in their imperfections; it is this adversity that often generates growth and evolution for the business. My what-ifs obviously stem from a place of questioning if I merely left during a moment of adversity when I should’ve pushed through. 

 

I think to expose the true lesson of this letter, I need to engage in a game that was taught at our last HRCC session by Jessica Brustad. Let’s play – Yes, And…

 

This game invites us to playfully shift to an attitude of gratitude, which is the perfect cure when we find ourselves unable to release the past in a what-if spiral. To play, we simply start where we are in the moment and “yes, and…” ourselves to transform it.

 

So, here I go:

 

What if I left my last job too soon? If I could have let certain things go, I’d still be there. 

Yes, and… I wouldn’t be here now. The HRart Center wouldn’t exist. 
Yes, and… because I left I found Qigong and began healing myself.
Yes, and… I am for once in my life genuinely happy as my authentic whole self. 

It doesn’t take too many “yes, and…” statements for me to quickly remember why my past occurred exactly as intended. I am grateful for every opportunity from my past knowing that it is the people within these organizations that showed me what the workplace could be. 

 

Yes, and… while I’m not currently a part of a big cultural energy within an organization, I am actively working to create that energy here at the HRart Center. 

 

Yes, and… our work goes far beyond the four walls of our center.

 

Yes, and… thank you to those I have worked with in the past for inspiring me to dream bigger.

 

Yes, and… thank you for your LinkedIn posts that instill in me an undeniable hope of what’s possible.