Moving through discomfort in The Imaginable Workplace

Sharing the meta journey of creating a podcast about making workplaces better, while creating happier, healthier, more productive work environments with our clients and with the Haraya team

Feb 26, 2023

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
- Susan David1

Any courageous endeavor involves uncertainty. And if you’re like me, uncertainty is not a place I feel comfortable sitting in.

I used to think of myself as a free-spirited person. And maybe to a certain extent, that was true in my younger, “nomadic” years — literally to different places (without having travel plans all laid out), or metaphorically through different interests in my life (just trying things out, with no certainty where they will lead).
Lately though, I’m realizing that even in the seeming free-spiritedness (e.g. moving to Dumaguete last year for no particular reason), I like knowing things. My friend Aimee, who helped acclimate me to Dumaguete, pointed out in one (or several) of our car rides together, “You really like being in control, don’t you?”. She totally called me out. Lol.

I realized that I liked being able to manage risks by knowing more details about what I’m getting myself into, so that if anything should go wrong, I would know what the risk areas were, how I might adjust or improve the situation, or whether I would avoid getting myself into a high risk situation altogether.

I. Enter The Imaginable Workplace

When I first decided to pursue coaching in 2020, I recognized the uncertainty of the outcome, and chose to lean in with curiosity in the process.

This eventually led to my first port of entry to “the imaginable workplace”.

February 2021. The stars aligned on my birthday that year. It had just been a few days since I completed my core training for transformational coaching, and that morning, I found myself in conversation with Jackie Caniza, Haraya Coaching’s chief instigator and managing partner.
She was telling me that Haraya had just created Balay Haraya — a space for freelance certified coaches to work with Haraya on coaching programs for different tracks of individual and organizational transformation. I remember getting goosebumps and teary eyes during that call because of the feeling of connection and alignment in that conversation.

In several ways, Haraya had become an imaginable workplace for me.

I found job engagement, and organization engagement. It allowed me to utilize my existing strengths, and pushed me to explore unrecognized capabilities. The organization's values also resonated with me, and I found the work culture to be nurturing, accepting of differences, and also challenging (in the good sense). I found a sense of purpose and meaning in the work, with my initial projects being: a leadership program for women social entrepreneurs with Ashoka South East Asia, the development of a coaching program for companies wanting to pursue sustainability intentionally, and the conceptualization of a podcast on Filipino leadership.2

After months of trying to hash out a Haraya podcast we would produce on our own, we consulted Carl Javier, CEO of PumaPodcast, about our podcast concept. After another couple of months or so of discussion, we were realizing that the conversation that we collectively wanted to spark wasn’t just about Filipino leadership, but also about Filipino teams and workplaces.

This led to my second port of entry to “The Imaginable Workplace”.

February 2022. We finalized a partnership with PumaPodcast to begin pre-production for The Imaginable Workplace.3 And with Carl and I both being inspired by veteran podcast producer and founder of Gimlet Media, Alex Blumberg, we wanted to make the podcast (and essentially our entire partnership) to be…kinda meta. We wanted to talk about our imaginable workplace while also working to create it...with PumaPodcast themselves, with other clients, and with our own team at Haraya.

II. Birth Pains

Aligning on voice

This was the first time I would be co-producing a podcast that required me to align with more people4 — on both the Haraya and PumaPodcast side — to make sure we got our narratives and research right, and put out a podcast that we could collectively be proud of. PumaPodcast had a particular approach to journalistic storytelling, while Haraya also had a particular approach to learning, which was more generative rather than instructive (creating reflection and conversation vs. giving advice).

The road to finding that common language we could share had some detours and rerouting, even when we had aligned on the bigger picture. There simply are some things we just had to figure out along the way.

Navigating culture

This was also the time that I would first dig my toes into Haraya’s Ka-Linangan (culture-building) program.

Researching for my Master’s dissertation may have given me a deeper theoretical understanding about some aspects of leadership, but I still felt a strong lack in theoretical knowledge and practical experience in culture-building in Filipino organizations.
So when Jackie had asked me just over a year ago if I wanted to champion Haraya’s existing culture program, I thought it was both exciting and scary — I didn’t know what it ultimately meant or the details of what it would entail — and this was another thing we would have to figure out along the way.

There was a lot of trust that was evidently present there:

Being trusted to take on the role, and…
Being able to trust the team, particularly Jackie & Mia (the people I worked the most with on designing and refining our culture-building programs in 2022) to provide support and guidance as we charted the path together.

Braving the unknown

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown.
- Rachel Botsman5

I still am unnerved when I’m not able to think through and plan out certain things that I want to get right (especially with clients / an audience). But my work with Haraya so far has taught me to more confidently step into the unknown bit by bit. And I’m still learning more about this whole trust thing…with myself and with others.

Even when we had designed some plans, there were adjustments we would have to make along the way. Such is the nature of coaching and of culture-building…it is very much led by the client or the teams that we work with, and we are never 100% sure of where the work will take us.

And somehow…leaving space for uncertainty (magic) has resulted in some pleasantly surprising breakthroughs. We had some organizational clients that had expressed having challenging dynamics, and I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to deliver on what was needed in those particular contexts.

But more and more, I’ve come to realize, that if we stay true to our values, process and practice as a company — that if we’ve come in with good intentions, put in the research and the work, and lived what we believed — it would yield some desired results that the client (and sometimes I) did not expect possible or fixable.

Learning in the meta work

There is so much I also didn’t know (and still don’t know) coming into the work with PumaPodcast, be it for The Imaginable Workplace podcast, or our parallel culture coaching program with their team.

Would we be able to ROI associated costs with the podcast? What is a decent enough reach of the right kind of listeners to make this endeavor worthwhile? How would people feel about maybe being left with more questions to ask themselves after listening to our episodes?
Would we be able to support the client as they truly needed? What needs to be clear from the beginning, and what can we leave yet to be determined? Are we doing enough? What is enough?

Many questions. Many moments of doubt. But we had a lot going for us that helped us move through the uncertainty and discomfort more easily.

Humility is a confident relationship with what we don’t know.
- Rachel Botsman6

Here’s what I’m learning in the meta journey of creating a podcast about making workplaces better, while working with PumaPodcast on theirs.

It’s okay for us to make mistakes, and challenge things that need calling out. Birthing pains of a new project, and a collaboration at that, include a lot of back and forth to get things right. I'd like to think that in our process, we practiced a lot of the psychological safety that we talked about in episode 3: Imagine a safe space to grow.7
Different ideas and emotions help create better, more nuanced output. A mindset that recognized all emotions as valid, and adhered to a “Yes, and…” brainstorming process allowed us craft something more inclusive and collaborative, and allowed people to show up with all of who they are…in all the weird, wonderful, flawed and beautiful ways we might show up.8
We can make space for humanness and ask for the support we need, while delivering good and timely work. It is a kindness to do one’s part in something that is a shared responsibility. At the same time, it’s been a kindness to be given some leeway and support when struggling with a new task, or sickness. I don't have a clear, single answer on how to balance this tightrope perfectly, but I do believe that open and likely somewhat uncomfortable two-way conversations on what support looks like for each party helps.9

III. Discomfort is the space of growth.

In one of our check-in meetings or surveys about Haraya’s coaching program with PumaPodcast, we asked Carl if he enjoyed being coached. And he’s probably expressed a few times since…that the coaching process is not necessarily enjoyable, because it is not necessarily comfortable.

In the coaching process, we might realize things we previously were unaware of, ignored or disregarded, and recognize the capacity we have to stretch in ways we didn’t think we could. That awareness can be a place of discomfort because we also become aware that we can begin a process of growth and change, if we choose to.

As we move into season 2 of The Imaginable Workplace podcast, and year 3 of my time with Haraya Coaching, I don’t have certainty of what lies ahead. But I have enough trust in these relationships, and enough hope that the work we’re doing will contribute to creating happier, healthier, more humane and more productive workplaces across the Philippines and the globe.

Muni-muni:

What has your relationship with uncertainty, change and discomfort been in your life? How do you see those three things in relationship with one another?
What are things you’d be willing to sit in discomfort for?
What would you aspire to do, even if you’re uncertain about the outcome?