AIBU to not discuss my life story at work?

[HangryBerd]

My work is conducting training which tells us that we need to share our life stories, disclose what makes us "us", be vulnerable, share our emotions. If we don't, we are told that we're being anti-inclusion. My colleagues and manager are therefore having a go at me for being too private.

I'm finding this really upsetting as I'll chat to anyone about many things but there are aspects that are very difficult to talk about. They're nothing to do with work and quite frankly nobody else's business.

AIBU to stand my ground?

@ThirtyThreeTrees

We ended saying that the exercise was portrayed as an opportunity to increase team bonding and that it had achieved it's objective given we were absolutely united on this matter and would not be participating.

This is fabulous.

Sounds like someone got a book of initiatives for work at Christmas. They’ve thrown it up in the air and you are going to do the exercise from the open page it landed on. They’ve not read any further.

At work we choose who we talk to socially. Different things to different people. To be obliged to do it is likely to open up all sorts of problems.

Bullying
Sexual harassment
Racism
General all round unpleasantness
Poor working relationships the next day/week/month
Tears

Are they equipped for the fallout, mentally, physically and financially?

Have they got a hidden agenda.

This reminded me of a meeting some years ago. New Headteacher. We all sat in departments and had to publicly state our strengths and weaknesses. I played it honest. Boy did I suffer. I left not long afterwards.

So my approach to this…. ‘I’m a private person, I choose who I speak to, quietly, at a time and place of my choosing’. And leave it at that.

No criticism of the initiative, the workplace, those running the meeting. Just a plain simple statement and leave it at that.

Let us know how it went please. Thanks

I really doubt they want to hear the painful details just a few sanitised bits and bobs. The idea is to connect with your team and be personable.

I agree with the many PPs who say this is wrong and you could challenge it. However, I was that person when I was younger and more naive about corporate culture. And I became that employee who stood up for her rights and was then bullied and sidelined for speaking out. I did have a colleague (older and wiser) who was excellent at avoiding the BS without becoming a target. One example, she ‘revealed’ that in a past life she was a butterfly. Any personal questions she would answer using one of her previous lives. Another smart colleague was ‘boring’ and would share her trauma and distress that she eg was humiliated at a party where someone spilled a drink on her new shoes. In retrospect, these are both safer solutions. Also, suggesting you are under some sort of gagging clause/NDA is a great idea.

This sort of BS time-wasting is why I choose not to work in large corporations now.

Is this actually a thing? So, what if you have never experienced any mental health difficulties and all your relationships have been ‘normal’ and ended amicably. I mean, for many that is the reality.

I literally wouldn’t have anything to share, the juicy bits I wouldn’t want to share with Martin, the office gossip! Work is work, many people compartmentalise their life and prefer to keep things private. If people need to talk about their problems, they need to engage the services of a relevant professional.

Stephanie, the area manager, organising a ‘share your emotional history session’ in the boardroom is bonkers if she thinks it will lead to a better working environment! With the potential of triggering a heap of emotions in an unsafe environment with, I am guessing, no qualified practitioners on hand to offer support and counselling, how does this help? Forcing this on employees is awful, those that want to talk and over share, will always do so. Others will choose to maintain their privacy. Neither is right or wrong, it’s what makes us unique and that should be respected. It would be far better to organise a team night out/away day with food and drinks flowing to get to know your colleagues better (at least those you would naturally gravitate towards).

OP, play the game and keep it low key… and for the purpose of GDPR, change the names, location, profession etc of any individuals mentioned so they can’t be identified in real life 😂

I would most likely be fired if I opened up about my life to a group of wokies at work.

You must only work with lovely people. I imagine if I was to share any part of my terrible life story that one man (the mental health colleague no less) would both share it all around my workplace and use it somehow to get me in bed with him.
I do not know how he became the MH ambassador. He is the creepiest creep ever and wants to shag all the women, young, old, elderly, he doesnt care. I mean kudos to him for being so inclusive eh.

Wow.
So if you haven’t had a mental illness (or don’t talk about one) you are going to be seen as withholding personal information?!

nice!

so what about those that have genuinely never had a mental illness? Are they perceived to be lying?!

it’s all too much!

A friend of mine went for an interview once (also for a bog standard office job) and they asked her what was the hardest time she'd ever been through in her life (can't remember the exact wording but they made it clear they were talking about her personal life, not just professional life). She was so taken aback with the stupidity of the question that she just answered bluntly and honestly that it was the night her 15 year old daughter hanged herself. They were rendered speechless and very embarrassed... it seems they wanted openness... but only as long as you'd led a fairly blessed life. They probably hadn't even considered the potential outcome of such a question.

Absolutely horrific thing to ask people to do... some people's woes will only be as bad as having witnessed their parents rowing a few times and having an unsuitable boyfriend whilst some people will have gone through unimaginable traumas. Some people wouldn't even talk about their private life to their close friends. It's extremely short-sighted.

I think it's worth putting your foot down. As others have said, it's the opposite of "inclusive"... coercing people to reveal potentially traumatic experiences, or even just very private things, when they aren't comfortable doing so. I agree with pps who've said they probably haven't really thought it through at all. It could have serious MH ramifications for some people.

Go back to them using their own language: it's making you "unsafe", you don't give your consent, you find the pressure they are putting you under very triggering, you need to look after your mental health...

Ffs, you don't need to be able to trust Alan from Accounts with your life and your emotional wellbeing, you just need him to pay your wages on time.

This has just reminded me of a staff day out - a day of fun.

But a stressful day of near disaster. Nothing as mad, stressful or worrying as sharing life experiences sitting in a circle.

Just a walk up in gentle hills. No risk assessment as we weren't taking children. No need for a risk assessment as we were all adults.

What they hadn’t done was to think of the group going and their capabilities.

One colleague, who was v overweight and unfit, couldn’t get to the end of the car park and had to sit in the bus for the day. Others were having problems getting up some of the gentle hills.

This proposed day is about inclusion. Our staff bonding walk ended up an excluding event despite its over optimistic intentions. Fortunately there were no accidents - but we never went on another.

If I’d been older and wiser back then I’d have aired my worries before we went.

Just make up some BS- how are they going to know? Don't tell them anything that was traumatic or personal

What a fucked up idea. I would never go for it.

There is always a Martin in every workplace 🤣

I really don't, but I trusted them and as far as I'm aware nothing has ever been shared elsewhere. I don't know why they would as I would equally not share information about someone else. I imagine these sessions are in the same nature as an AA meeting or similar. I find it very sad that so many people work with people who don't have the very basic level of integrity, that's very depressing. Obviously no one should be forced to share anything they're not comfortable with sharing.

I love this!

That's naive. Any workplace will have its share of a cross section of the whole of society. It's why The Office was so popular. Everyone in it reminded us of our similar colleague. So by numbers alone, there will be a talkative one, a shy one, a narcissist, a hugely private one, a sex addict one (that might just be my workplace) a sly one, a bouncy one, a slimy one etc.

And then there's just gossip, although I do my level best to not bitch about people, i do share gossip. My entire workplace runs on gossip, it's how I find out anything before the official email announcement.

You share something private and it's no longer private, people will gossip. And they even take it home as gossip. I'm as guilty as my partner for telling each other stuff. Granted not really personal stuff yet, but still I know an ex colleague of my partner is now a convicted peadophile.

Well, you can always make up some fairly innocuous stuff to share. It doesn't have to be true, and it doesn't have to be very dramatic.

I would absolutely hate this and I wouldn't be sharing no matter what they said. I'd also be keeping an eye open for another job. It's not inclusive forcing people to share things they don't want to.
Being open and giving people an opportunity to talk about issues and share them if they wish is good but it must be only if they actually want to.
I am a very private person and really can't cope when people who I don't know particularly well get really pushy about wanting to know about more private aspects of my life. I taught in a school once where staff were constantly asking very personal questions and getting pissed off when I didn't want to answer. In fact, one of them complained to the head once who sent the deputy round to give me a ticking off and for being rude by not answering questions. The person's question which I really didn't want to answer was "What was your first time like?". FFS. At that point I hadn't even had sex and wouldn't have wanted to answer the question anyway. I told the deputy what the question was and she said "Oh, she was just being friendly, trying to get you to open up".

I remember sharing something in a work situation because I was asked a direct question and so I answered it directly, even though I wasn't comfortable talking about it. . I regretted it and wished I'd had the confidence to say "Sorry. I keep that private."
You really can't trust people to not gossip about stuff and hold it against you. You are best to have a couple of stories prepared - like the spilling drinks at a party, or that time it rained all the fortnight of your holiday and how it made you feel. Get your thinking cap on!

Being too private?

Fuck that. Absolutely fuck that. I'd have to leave. Or start a grievance procedure.

That's horrendous.

Fuck that - more woke bollocks designed to keep HR and diversity czars in a job

The difference with what I was doing was it was a facilitated session, where everyone has agreed its a safe space, and everyone is sharing. It's not just random gossip by the watercooler. Each to their own pf course. Just wanted to share a positive experience, having done it myself with a very positive outcome.

Lol, I got hauled in once for saying I cant wait to retire. Not even kidding. So that could be seen as oversharing. And Michelle if your reading this and recognise yourself, you were a useless and terrible boss.

Yes. And that has a lot of well known, effective paperwork around it, obvious reasons for it's being done proper debriefs built in and is done by professionals who know what it is they are digging into.

Workplace versions sound like nasty titillation and would probably fuck up quite a few people.

I can't even begin to understand the ethos behind it.

I could have fun with this by talking in depth about something that calms my mind and which I find greatly satisfying, which is field walking. That means that you choose a field you think has the possibility of yielding human-made artefacts or fossils, then you walk back and forth across it until you've examined the entire field. Every time there is heavy rain or the field is ploughed you do it again. I could expand on the optimum speed to walk and the best angle of stoop to adopt in order to avoid back ache whilst also achieving the best angle for viewing the soil, plus methods to stop my glasses falling off. I could include an aside into the quality of the soil and difficulties encountered on heavy clay and add in something about my longings for a metal detector. It would be interesting to see how long I was allowed to talk.