People are falling out of love with their workplace because they feel pushed over creatively. Has work ever been a supportive relationship? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on your ethnicity, race, gender identity, and other ways we separate into groups. Instead of drinking Love Potion #9 to help romance blossom, people turn to their social media accounts, pointing the finger through online temper tantrums. They dig into the paranormal issues of others — ghosting, trolling, and other forms of online unrequited love. Others relate to it and clap their hands or give it a thumbs up. They are expressing who they are but with frustration and unforgiveness. But the chiller of our existence online right now is the word ‘toxic,’ turning our love potion into a menacing experience. This description is mostly pointed at people.

Social media is a marker of time. We like to go online and see what our friends are doing — or not doing — and report on our lives, too. Our likes and dislikes are marked in time by the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons and then we move on to something else. We can backtrack in time and see what we posted in years past or feel like it’s too much and shut it down like closing a book on its last chapter. I fall into the latter category. When social media started as a thing you do, I dismissed it as something that would take up our time for a while and then fall away to nothing. Boy, was I wrong! Though some social media platforms have not survived, others have thrived and done well by ever-evolving into a new soup mix.

Persuading people to break up with their social media accounts is hard to do, despite all the documentation about FOMO, digital addiction, and increased depression. Social media puts me in overwhelm. It has always made my head feel swirly, like too many people are in my business and I have to keep cover or else they will all stop me from being me. This is my issue, of course, but the reports that have come out about the negative lasting effects of social media — especially for younger people — have proven my point, I believe. It’s a toxic mix of being seen, but not being heard. That people are allowed to be themselves is good, but when we use the platform to denigrate others, we have to stop and ask why.

Are people toxic or is it a toxic workplace environment? In my opinion, people can be toxic through their behaviors, but it is often filtered through the behaviors of other people pushing them down. Like the domino effect, when one person gets pushed, others fall down, too. Toxicity in the environment is real through our felt experience and it often comes from the leaders or people who are supposed to be guiding us, mentoring us, helping us feel like we belong. Instead, they throw a royal pitch fit when you don’t do something right (as if they are not human themselves) or set you up to fail by excluding you from conversations, emails, and other forms of communication that keep you from your ‘optimal performance’ creatively.

Creativity depends on three things: sovereignty, independence, and freedom and we often don’t get them at work. We might be venerated as super creative, but then we’re told to “just do it that way” instead of finding our own creative path. Creative juices are turned into a toxic potion of industry and finance instead of being ourselves. We’re told to succeed, push harder and longer, beat out the other person. No takebacks. Win at all costs. No warriors left on the battlefield when we’re done — and they all fall like toy soldiers lined up ready to fall again when the next assignment comes along. Business as usual is just one long bro-mantic comedy where all the miscreants show up, but the guy in the expensive suit is the one that wins out. The bro-mance novel of the century is happening in Washington, DC right now — businessmen taking over the country’s right to be sovereign, independent, and free. They are unwelcoming in their appearances, jokes, and how they treat the people around them. History's miscreants always take a toxic bath in their own self-fulfilling agenda.

Feeling welcome is everything in the workplace and is part of the felt sense, or climate. While a beautiful, contemporary interior design helps people feel engaged with their work, how they relate to their coworkers is what really keeps them happy. They feel welcomed due to other people’s actions toward them and will follow suit by changing their behavior to do the same. It often starts at the leadership level and trickles down — the true form of ‘trickle down economics’ which relates to the capital of our heart centers, our relationship to each other and should be in expansive flow. From parents modeling positive behaviors to their kids, to teachers and others willing to show how positive relating can affect change, we know through our experience how it feels to be related to in love. But it doesn’t have to all come from ‘above,’ it can also come from the groundswell, the collective — people as a community — workplace or otherwise — deciding to be the model of behavior they want from their leaders because the leaders comes from the group.