What is Cognitive Restructuring?

Cognitive restructuring is a useful technique for understanding unhappy feelings and moods, and for challenging the sometimes-wrong “automatic beliefs” that can lie behind them. As such, you can use it to reframe the unnecessary negative thinking that we all experience from time to time.

Bad moods are unpleasant, they can reduce the quality of your performance, and they undermine your relationships with others. Cognitive restructuring helps you to change the negative or distorted thinking that often lies behind these moods. As such, it helps you approach situations in a more positive frame of mind.

Cognitive restructuring was developed by psychologist Albert Ellis in the mid-1950s, based on the earlier work of others, and it’s a core component in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). You can use CBT to control and change negative thoughts, which are sometimes linked with damaging behaviors.

Applications

Cognitive restructuring has been used successfully to treat a wide variety of conditions, including depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), addictions, anxiety, social phobias, relationship issues, and stress.

For example, a 2007 study found that cognitive restructuring helped participants who experienced severe grief, while a 2003 study discovered that it reduced the symptoms and effects of PTSD.

These uses are beyond the scope of this article, and you should consult a qualified medical practitioner if you are experiencing issues like these. However, you can use the technique yourself to reframe less serious, day-to-day negative thoughts.

For example, you can use it to overcome negative thinking before you speak in public , or to improve your mood when you have a bad day. You can also use it to think positively before you go into a performance review or a job interview, or before you engage in a difficult conversation. It’s also helpful for overcoming fear of failure and fear of success , and for beating self-sabotage .

How to use Cognitive Restructuring

Download our free worksheet, and follow the steps below to use the cognitive restructuring technique.

This framework is based on the steps in Drs Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky’s book, “Mind Over Mood,” which is well worth reading for a deeper understanding of this technique.

Step 1: Calm Yourself

If you’re still upset or stressed by the thoughts you want to explore, you may find it hard to concentrate on using the tool. Use meditation or deep breathing to calm yourself down if you feel particularly stressed or upset.

Step 2: Identify the Situation

Start by describing the situation that triggered your negative mood, and write this into the appropriate box on the worksheet.

Step 3: Analyze Your Mood

Next, write down the mood, or moods, that you felt during the situation.

Here, moods are the fundamental feelings that we have, but they are not thoughts about the situation. Drs Greenberger and Padesky suggest an easy way to distinguish moods from thoughts: you can usually describe moods in one word, while thoughts are more complex.

For example, “He trashed my suggestion in front of my co-workers” would be a thought, while the associated moods might be humiliation, frustration, anger, or insecurity.

Step 4: Identify Automatic Thoughts

Now, write down the natural reactions, or “automatic thoughts,” you experienced when you felt the mood. In the example above, your thoughts might be:

“Maybe my analysis skills aren’t good enough.”

“Have I failed to consider these things?”

“He hasn’t liked me since…”

“He’s so rude and arrogant!”

“No one likes me.”

“But my argument is sound.”

“This undermines my future with this company.”

In this example, the most distressing thoughts (the “hot thoughts”) are likely to be “Maybe my analysis skills aren’t good enough,” and, “No one likes me.”

Step 5: Find Objective Supportive Evidence

Identify the evidence that objectively supports your automatic thoughts. In our example, you might write the following:

“The meeting moved on and decisions were made, but my suggestion was ignored.”

“He identified a flaw in one of my arguments.”

Your goal is to look objectively at what happened, and then to write down specific events or comments that led to your automatic thoughts.

Step 6: Find Objective Contradictory Evidence

Next, identify and write down evidence that contradicts the automatic thought. In our example, this might be:

“The flaw was minor and did not alter the conclusions.”

“The analysis was objectively sound, and my suggestion was realistic and well-founded.”

“I was top of my class when I trained in the analysis method.”

“My clients respect my analysis, and my opinion.”

As you can see, these statements are fairer and more rational than the reactive thoughts.

Step 7: Identify Fair and Balanced Thoughts

By this stage, you’ve looked at both sides of the situation. You should now have the information you need to take a fair, balanced view of what happened.

If you still feel uncertain, discuss the situation with other people, or test the question in some other way.

When you come to a balanced view, write these thoughts down. The balanced thoughts in this example might now include:

“I am good at this sort of analysis. Other people respect my abilities.”

“My analysis was reasonable, but not perfect.”

“There was an error, but it didn’t affect the validity of the conclusions.”

“The way he handled the situation was not appropriate.”

“People were surprised and a little shocked by the way he handled my suggestion.” (This comment would have followed an informal conversation with other people at the meeting.)

Step 8: Monitor Your Present Mood

You should now have a clearer view of the situation, and you’re likely to find that your mood has improved. Write down how you feel.

Next, reflect on what you could do about the situation. (By taking a balanced view, the situation may cease to be important, and you might decide that you don’t need to take action.)

Finally, create some positive affirmations that you can use to counter any similar automatic thoughts in the future.

 

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_81.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=23Feb16#np

 

According to legend, Thomas Edison made thousands of prototypes of the incandescent light bulb before he finally got it right. And, since the prolific inventor was awarded more than 1,000 patents, it’s easy to imagine him failing on a daily basis in his lab at Menlo Park.

In spite of struggling with “failure” throughout his entire working life, Edison never let it get the best of him. All of these “failures,” which are reported to be in the tens of thousands, simply showed him how not to invent something. His resilience gave the world some of the most amazing inventions of the early 20th century, such as the phonograph, the telegraph, and the motion picture.

It’s hard to imagine what our world would be like if Edison had given up after his first few failures. His inspiring story forces us to look at our own lives – do we have the resilience that we need to overcome our challenges? Or do we let our failures derail our dreams? And what could we accomplish if we had the strength not to give up?

In this article, we’ll examine resilience: what it is, why we need it, and how to develop it; so that we have the strength and fortitude to overcome adversity, and to keep on moving forward towards our dreams and our goals.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/resilience.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=23Feb16#np

A computer simulation model is now available, designed to help commissioners and providers to predict the impacts of service changes before they are made.

The tool – called the Commissioning Simulation Model – has been launched by NHS England’s Long Term Conditions Year of Care Commissioning Programme, together with Simul8 Corporation, following testing with care economies around the country.

Powered by real-life data gathered from the programme, the tool calculates the health and social care costs for different groups of patients as they receive services.

Using the tool, you can model changes to the services patients receive, for instance to assess planned delivery with the way they are actually delivered in their locality, or to match the way they plan to change local services. This allows you to test the impact of current or planned services on resources including capacity – for example how many community beds or GP practices nurses are needed for a particular service change as well as finances.

The tool is available to download for free from the NHS IQ website (visit http://bit.ly/1vOtEF3), while there is also an option to gain access to a more complex, chargeable version online via Simul8. On the website you can also find some user guides and a video guide to get you started.

http://www.fabnhsstuff.net/2016/02/21/using-computer-simulation-test-impact-commissioning-decisions/

How many hours do you spend communicating by email every day? Most of us would answer, “Too many!”

According to a study by McKinsey® & Company, people spend 28 percent of their working week reading and replying to emails. However, despite the risk of becoming overloaded with messages, it remains one of the most powerful and efficient communication tools.

Using email is a quick and easy way to stay connected with your team members, customers and stakeholders, particularly those who are geographically dispersed . However, it can be very easy to send ineffective emails, create the wrong impression, or even damage your reputation with sloppy practices.

In this article, we’ll look at 10 common mistakes that people make when they send emails, and explore what you can do to avoid these.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/10-common-email-mistakes.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=16Feb16#np

 

Report published February 2016

http://www.theworkfoundation.com/DownloadPublication/Report/397_The%20impact%20of%20long%20term%20conditions%20on%20the%20economy.pdf

This Future Hospital case study comes from Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH). It describes a new cardiac adolescent and transition service to help increase young people’s understanding of the issues attributed with cardiac conditions.

http://www.fabnhsstuff.net/2016/02/15/nurse-led-cardiac-adolescent-and-transition-service/

When it comes to writing clear, attention-grabbing messages, less is more. Your message appeals more to your reader, and there’s little room for confusion, if you can get your point across succinctly. Our article, Inverted Pyramid Writing, explores how you can make your business writing more accessible by using this traditional news journalism technique.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/inverted-pyramid-writing.htm?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=16Feb16#np

We all have too much to do and too little time to do it. As a boss, you may have already learned how to plan, prioritize, and streamline your work. But how can you help your team members do the same? Should you dictate the processes and tools they use? How do you keep people from taking on too much and burning out or continuously spinning their wheels?

What the Experts Say
In today’s complex and collaborative workplace, the real challenge is to manage not just your personal workload but the collective one, says Jordan Cohen, a productivity expert and the Senior Director of Organizational Effectiveness, Learning & Development at Weight Watchers. “Helping your team manage its time well is a critical factor for its success.” Elizabeth Grace Saunders, author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money and the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training, agrees. As a manager, your role is to both “set the strategic vision” and serve as “the buffer for unreasonable expectations” from the rest of the organization. Here are some tips to ensure that your team works productively.

Set the example
The first step is to get your own house in order (if it’s not already) and exhibit good time management practices yourself, says Saunders. Be smart about how you allocate the hours of your own workday—the meetings you attend, the emails you respond to, and the projects you sign on for—so your team can follow your lead. “If you’re stretched and overloaded, you can’t think strategically about your own time let alone anyone else’s,” she says. Adds Cohen: “Model the behavior” and show them that you make time for work that matters.

Set goals
To get a handle on how everyone on your team should be spending their time, you have to “step back” and “think about what exactly you want your team to be working on,” says Saunders. Outline key goals and analyze your team’s capacity to execute on them. This will help you decide what people should be working on and what they shouldn’t and accomplish more by committing to less. It’s your job “to set boundaries.”

Clarify expectations
The next step, according to Saunders, is meet with your team members one-on-one to communicate the priorities and expectations for their respective roles. “Tell them the top two or three areas where you want them to focus,” she says. Be specific. “The last thing you want is for someone to begin his day thinking, ‘I have seven projects to work on, where do I start?’” Also be explicit about how much time you expect people to devote to tasks that crop up from time to time. Does an unexpected client pitch meeting require a day, half-day or a few hours of prep? To prepare for an upcoming brainstorming meeting, should someone spend an hour or just a few minutes jotting down ideas? “Help him understand the quality of the work you’re expecting,” she says. But don’t micromanage, Cohen warns. “Describe the outcome you are trying to achieve and then get out of the way—let them determine on their own how best to get there,” he says. “Telling them how to do their jobs every step of the way creates bottlenecks.” Remember, adds Saunders, there isn’t one “right” approach to time management.

Encourage open communication
Conversations with team members about time management should be ongoing, according to Saunders. “Encourage an honest dialogue,” she says. She suggests asking reports about the challenges they face, how you can help them allocate their time more effectively, and whether they need more resources. “It’s when people don’t tell you that they’re overstretched and then don’t follow through at the last moment that leads to problems.” Cohen suggests holding a quarterly team powwow for colleagues to discuss priorities. “Look at the objectives you set back in January and ask, ‘Are these still relevant? Are we on the right track? What has changed?’” he says. If you have a direct report who still isn’t making progress on his work despite ostensible effort, do “some digging” to uncover the root of the problem, suggests Cohen. “Is it the workload? Is it the way the job is structured? Or is it the person? You need to peel it back,” he says.

Give team members autonomy
The key to improving individual productivity is to eliminate or delegate unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones, says Cohen. So “give your employees permission to make decisions” on which meetings they attend (or skip), which email lists they are party to, and which responsibilities they hand off.  Saunders recommends encouraging them to block out large chunks of time on their calendars to get their day-to-day work done, as well as smaller chunks for “fixed expenses” like daily planning, email, and other “maintenance” chores.

Rethink meetings
Meetings: the worst office time-suck. And yet, you need them to share information, solicit ideas, and make decisions. You can’t get rid of them, but you can surely eliminate some and study up on techniques to make the ones that remain on the calendar more effective and efficient. (Read: shorter.) The Golden Rule of meetings, says Cohen, is to “make sure you have a clearly defined purpose for each one.” He also recommends “sending out meeting material beforehand” because “it takes the reading part out of the meeting and puts the collaboration part in.” Also consider other ways to keep people in the loop, says Saunders. You could, for instance, ask each team member to create and circulate “a list or report of what he or she accomplished last week and priorities for the week ahead. This keeps the team on track and keeps everyone aligned,” she says.

Reserve downtime
If your organization has a hard driving, 24/7 work culture, you should also consider mandating breaks for your team. Research shows that predictable time off improves productivity and morale. “The manager has to be deliberate about scheduling [downtime],” says Cohen. Even if your company’s culture is more relaxed, it’s still important to communicate when you expect your reports to work and when you don’t, Saunders adds. For example, “if you send [someone] an assignment on Friday afternoon, be clear whether you want him to be working on it over the weekend or if it can wait till Monday. People are often willing to give the extra push, but if they push only to discover that it wasn’t necessary, they end up feeling resentful and burnt out.”

Seek help
Staying on top of the overflowing inboxes and ever-expanding to-do lists of an entire group of people is a challenge even for the most efficient among us.  So you may want to enlist “outside help in the form of a coach or an HR manager” to assist you, says Saunders. If an employee is really struggling, “there are things you can do—meet with him regularly, come up with daily plans, give him more feedback—but he probably needs a lot more help than you, the lone manager, can provide.”

 Principles to Remember

 Do:

Make smart use of shared calendars by blocking off hours for focused work and evening downtime

Apprise your direct reports of the team’s progress in meeting its goals; this holds people accountable and lets them know what others are doing

Communicate when you expect your reports to put in extra hours and when you don’t—failure to do so builds resentment

Don’t:

Micromanage. Ask your reports about the challenges they face and how you can help them allocate their time more effectively

Overcommit your team to too many projects and initiatives. You should be a  buffer for unreasonable expectations from the rest of the organization

Discount the idea of enlisting the help of a management coach to assist you

Case Study #1: Create open lines of communication and respect your team’s downtime
David Miller, executive vice president of the Columbus, Ohio-based Cameron Mitchell Restaurants—which owns an assortment of high-end eateries across the United States—says he had trouble managing his time when he transitioned from his former job as vice-president of operations to his current role, where he oversees a nine-member executive team.

Then, one day, in an operations meeting, he had an epiphany. “I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be in this meeting.’” He realized he needed to let go of his former responsibilities and consider strategic priorities for himself, his team, and the organization. Once those were clear in his own mind, David scheduled one-on-one conversations with his team members, including the heads of finance, marketing, and HR. He talked about his vision for each of their departments, but he also encouraged feedback. “I explained to them that this was a new role for me and that I was trying to learn and be as effective as I could be,” he says. “I asked them, ‘How can you and I best work together? And, ‘what do you need from me?’”

He also avoided telling them how to handle their individual work schedules, focusing on results not process. “Everybody’s different—from how they manage their to-do lists to the books read—I don’t want to micromanage them; I want to support them.”

This includes making sure his team isn’t “always on.” A few years ago, for instance, he heard complaints about the weekly project and status updates he’d asked his executive team and senior managers to send out every Sunday. “I was hearing that this was not necessarily something they wanted to be spending their Sundays writing, so now I ask them to do it only every other week anytime between Friday [morning] and Sunday [evening], which gives people more leeway,” he says. And “I want to make sure that my team members have personal time to recharge and to be with their families and friends.”

Case Study #2: Communicate expectations and track progress
Jim Keane, the president and CEO of Steelcase, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based manufacturer of office furniture, says there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to time management. “When you’re a new manager, you try to help your team get better by telling them what you’ve figured out,” he says. “But one of the humbling things you come to learn is that what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.”

He’s learned that frequent one-on-one conversations are the best way to make sure that individual team members are managing their time in ways that works for them. If people are feeling overloaded, stressed about “stuff going on at home” or “pushed in ten different directions,” that tension will come through. He says he approaches these meetings from “a point of empathy.” Sometimes he needs to extend a deadline or ask the stretched employee to recommend a colleague who might help with a particular task. “The job of senior leadership is to align resources around priorities,” he says.

Last fall at a management off-site, Jim and his team of 12 senior leaders decided to enter a new line of business. “We got everyone involved to create the objectives, the strategic initiative, and the timeframe, and soon realized that all of the people that needed to execute—that is, most of the executives in the room—were already very busy with their day jobs.”

So Jim enlisted the help of his chief-of-staff to block off time in the managers’ calendars for work and regular check-ins on the project. “In order for an enterprise initiative to be successful, you have to force it into people’s schedules,” he explains. He also asked the chief-of-staff to provide regular updates on everyone’s overall progress and continues to meet with the team to review expectations and priorities. “It’s essential for everyone to be on the same page,” he says.

https://hbr.org/2016/01/how-to-boost-your-teams-productivity

 

It can be tough enough to manage your own stress. But how can you, as a manager, help the members of your team handle their feelings of stress, burnout, or disengagement?

Because work is getting more demanding and complex, and because many of us now work in 24/7 environments, anxiety and burnout are not uncommon. In our high-pressure workplaces, staying productive and engaged can be challenging.

Although it’s unlikely that the pace or intensity of work will change much anytime soon, there’s a growing body of research that suggests certain types of development activities can effectively build the capacity for resilience.

One approach is to focus on employees’ personal growth and development. When I was working at Google as the director of executive development, for example, we focused on helping managers create the “happiest, healthiest, and most productive workforce on the planet.” Investing in employee personal growth and development from this perspective is the first step in unleashing creativity, enabling potential, and supporting sustainable productivity.

The good news is that there are some very practical and easy-to-implement approaches to personal development that managers and team members can adopt — and they aren’t time-, budget-, or resource-intensive. Here are some approaches to consider, based on the two decades I’ve spent working with managers to enhance team resilience and effectiveness.

Model and encourage well-being practices.  Worker stress levels are rising, with over half of the global workforce (53%) reporting that they are closer to burnout than they were just five years ago, according to a Regus Group survey of over 22,000 business people across 100 countries. And while stress can be contagious, the converse is also true: when any member of a team experiences well-being, the effect seems to spread across the entire team. According to a recent Gallup research report that surveyed 105 teams over six three-month periods, individual team members who reported experiencing well-being were 20% more likely to have other team members who also reported thriving six months later. Takeaway: understand and prioritize activities that promote well-being for yourself and your team. They could include such things as offering personal development tools, like mindfulness and resilience training; explicitly encouraging people to take time for exercise or other renewal activities, such as walking meetings; or building buffer time into deliverables calendars so that people can work flexibly and at a manageable pace.

Allow time to disconnect outside of work. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, workers around the world spend 34 to 48 hours at work each week on average, and many engage in work or related activities after business hours. McKinsey Quarterly suggests that “always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy.” And one of the most significant findings in employee pulse surveys that I’ve seen in companies large and small is that employees have an exceptionally hard time disconnecting from work.

While the rigors of a high-performance culture may require consistent focus, “always on” is a dangerous and unproductive mindset because it fails to take recovery time into account. Even the best athletes on the best teams require time to rest and recover. So be intentional about when you expect team members (and yourself) to engage in the office or digitally, and be intentional and explicit about when not to engage. No emails after 8 PM or on weekends, for example.

Train the brain to deal with chaos. Neuroscience research shows that the practice of mindfulness can systematically train the brain and create useful mental habits that promote resilience and productivity at work (and in life). At Wisdom Labs, we notice that leaders and teams who train their brains to develop mindfulness collaborate better, navigate stress more effectively, and sustain high performance. You don’t have be an expert in mindfulness to help yourself and team members develop this innate human capacity. Technology can be helpful, too: Try out a few mindfulness apps or devices yourself, and pass them on. Good apps include Calm, Headspace, and the Muse.

Emphasize “monotasking” for better focus. Multitasking is a myth. Humans are not effective or efficient parallel processors (computers are). Neuroscientist, educational researcher, and author JoAnn Deak, Ph.D., notes that multitasking typically “doubles the amount of time it takes to do a task, and it usually at least doubles the number of mistakes.” People are best at “serial monotasking.” Managers can encourage monotasking by helping team members with clear, one-at-a-time task prioritization for deliverables, defining milestones that don’t overlap, and generally avoiding the trap of mistaking the urgent for the important.

Be purposeful about “gap” time during the work day, or slow periods over the course of the working year. Be deliberate about helping people pause and recharge during down cycles or lulls in work activity. If there are no down cycles, work hard as a manager to create some. According to Linda Stone, former head of Microsoft University, there is a tendency for people to be pulled toward always being a live node at work, an “always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior” that results in suboptimal and dissatisfying state of “continuous partial attention.” Give people buffer time to recharge and refocus.

Author and management consultant Tony Schwartz suggests that managers understand work is not a marathon but a series of sprints that requires recovery and renewal time in between (say, 90 minutes of focused work followed by a 10-minute break). It’s not the number of hours people work that matters, it’s the value they produce during the hours they work. So stop worrying about how many hours someone spends at his desk, and start figuring out “What can I do to help this person design his schedule so that when he’s working, he’s really working?”

Exercise empathy and compassion. It doesn’t cost anything to be kind, and the benefits for managers are great. Empathy and compassion significantly improve employee performance, engagement, and profitability. A seminal research project at the University of New South Wales, which looked at 5,600 people across 77 organizations, found that “the single greatest influence on profitability and productivity within an organization…is the ability of leaders to spend more time and effort developing and recognizing their people, welcoming feedback, including criticism, and fostering co-operation among staff.” Additionally, the research found that the ability of a leader to be compassionate – “to understand people’s motivators, hopes, and difficulties and to create the right support mechanism to allow people to be as good as they can be” – has the greatest correlation with profitability and productivity. Empathy and compassion are good for people and good for business.

What kind of return on investment can managers expect for these efforts? At Aetna Insurance, more than 12,000 employees participating in mindfulness programs offered by the company showed an average of 62 minutes per week of enhanced productivity, saving the company $3,000 per employee annually. More generally, an iOpener Institute study found that in mid-sized companies, happy workplaces had a 46% reduction in turnover, 19% reduction in the cost of sick leave, and 12% increase in performance and productivity. The happiest employees spent 46% more of their time focused on work tasks and felt 65% more energized than their colleagues. Finally, at a macro level, research by HR consultancy Towers Watson found that companies in which employees experienced sustainable engagement, defined as emotional engagement as well as a sense of being enabled and energized by work, had twice the earnings and nearly three times the gross profit of companies that had average to low levels of engagement.

You may be asking yourself, “Is it really my job as a manager to focus on people’s resilience? To encourage them to practice mindfulness?” According to recent research published by Gallup, the view that employees should leave their personal lives at home “might sound sensible, but it’s totally unrealistic.” Gallup analysis shows that “our well-being has an impact on the people we work with, and on the people who work for us.” Managers, therefore, really do need to focus on what Monika Broecker, founder of the Center for Personal Growth, describes as “upgrading mental and emotional capabilities.”

The bottom line for managers is that personal development makes each person, and the entire team, better, enabling higher performance and engagement over time. Doing well at work and encouraging people to feel well isn’t just possible — it’s the foundation of a high-performance team.

 

https://hbr.org/2016/01/help-your-team-manage-stress-anxiety-and-burnout

Sometimes the corporate culture in which we find ourselves doesn’t match our personality. Occasionally, that can lead to healthy creative friction; other times it creates painful pressure to conform. That was the situation facing one of my executive MBA students. “I’m having a problem at work,” she told me. “I keep getting feedback that I’m distant, and I think it’s harming my career.” The reason she was getting that response, she admitted, is that she was acting aloof. “I’m not sure how to be my real self at work,” she said.

Many of us face similar problems. In her case, she was a free-spirited Burning Man devotee who found herself working for a buttoned-down corporation. The pressure runs the other way, too: in a recent episode of the podcast Startup, a Gimlet Media staffer admitted that he felt out of place as a regular churchgoer amid his liberal, secular colleagues in Brooklyn.

In some instances, it pays to keep your opinions to yourself; it’s probably best not to engage a coworker whom you know to be your ideological opposite in a conversation about a presidential election. But when it comes to your fundamental identity, rather than your opinions, hiding or downplaying things can actually be detrimental to your career in the long run. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Karen Sumberg have shown, out LGBT workers are more successful than their closeted counterparts, likely because they don’t have the added stress of “managing their identity” on top of the work they’re expected to perform. And Deloitte research shows that “covering,” or playing down differences at work, also has deleterious psychological consequences.

So how do you know when it’s safe to be your authentic self at work? As an openly gay consultant who has worked with more than 100 clients over the past decade, from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and international NGOs, here are four questions I’ve learned that it’s useful to ask yourself.

What’s your evidence for believing you’ll be penalized? Have you actually seen others receive professional punishment for being themselves? We might believe we know how a certain action or disclosure would be received, but it’s important to remember that unless you’ve seen direct evidence, it’s only conjecture. That grizzled, macho supervisor maybe actually be a PFLAG member with a gay brother. And even if you’ve heard about negative consequences in the past, it’s also possible that circumstances have changed. For example, with nearly 40% of 18-to-29-year-olds sporting tattoos, employers — even if they dislike tattoos personally — may have realized they can’t afford to rule out nearly half their applicants.

What’s the worst that could happen? It’s also important to understand the ramifications if you do decide to show your authentic self at work. For some categories, the consequences are serious and should be evaluated carefully. (Thirty-one U.S. states still lack explicit antidiscrimination protection for LGBT workers.) For others, the implications may loom larger in your imagination. Would they fire you if they knew you enjoyed attending Burning Man? Probably not. Would it cause them to think you “weren’t a cultural fit” and slow down your career progress? Possibly, but you also have the opportunity to demonstrate in other ways, such as excellence in your job and building good relationships with colleagues, that you actually do gel with the corporate culture (provided it’s one that you’d like to stay with).

What exactly would you do differently if you were acting like your real self? “I can’t be my real self” is a painful yet amorphous feeling. Pinning down the specifics is useful, however, because certain elements of self-expression may be easier to attain than you think. Think about how you would dress, speak, and act differently at work if you were being your real self. How does that compare to your behavior today? You may still need to wear a suit to work, for instance, but there’s likely room to showcase your creative flair with colorful socks or interesting neckties.

It’s also quite possible that your coworkers will respond positively to seeing more of your genuine interests and personality. As I describe in my book Reinventing You, former Vice President Al Gore was lambasted in the press during the 2000 presidential race for his campaign’s decision to position him as a podium-banging populist crusader rather than his naturally wonky self. He was derided as wooden and inauthentic, and it was only when he returned to his love of environmental policy with the release of An Inconvenient Truth that he again found his stride.

Is there a way to conduct a pilot? Finally, if it feels risky to go “all in” on being yourself at work, think about a small experiment you could try to test the waters. For instance, if you’re naturally funny but tamp down your humor at work because “it’s not done” at your company, try cracking a few (carefully chosen) jokes one day. See what sort of response you receive. Did others seem to notice? Did you receive any feedback, positive or negative? Turn to a trusted colleague to ask her opinion.

If the response was negative, you’ve gotten useful information. Fortunately, a small trial balloon almost certainly won’t hurt your long-term career prospects; you can go back to showcasing your more serious side. But if the response was positive or neutral (i.e., no one really cared), then you can continue your experiment for a week and keep monitoring the reaction. You may, in fact, inspire others and lighten up the entire office with your behavior; it’s possible that the somber demeanor wasn’t a requirement, but merely a habit that everyone followed in lockstep.

I know that as an independent consultant I’ve created a situation where I have the luxury of telling clients who don’t like the “real me” to find another adviser. But over the course of my career, I’ve also worked in enough jobs and industries to know that, unfortunately, circumstance and economic necessity sometimes dictate that we stay in a job that requires hiding our true selves. That’s a damaging situation that should be the exception rather than the rule. If you feel you can’t be yourself at work, sometimes that may really be true. But it’s important to question our assumptions because we may discover there’s more leeway for self-expression than we had previously imagined.

https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-to-do-when-you-dont-feel-comfortable-being-yourself-at-work