How to Get Naked, Win Friends and Influence People

The minute winter hits I go into hibernation mode. I made five pies yesterday, for instance. Starting with the first frost, I go straight into the burrow.

We come from the time before Godzilla, let's admit it. We remember that when it's dark outside at 4:30 p.m., it's time to head home and make soup. We can't pretend we don't notice the seasons. This time of year is just as ordinary and just as awe-inspiring as it's ever been. We have old memories.

We know about hunkering down until the sun returns. We can pretend all we want that glass-and-chrome high-rises, social media software, budgets, forecasts and job titles remove us from the earth we came from, but in our hearts we know that's false.

We are animals first, then people, then family and tribe members, and only working people last. That goes for every working person, at every level on the pile. And that's assuming there is such a thing as business in the first place. The older I get the more I feel that 'business' is a made-up idea for a world where we're expected to follow other rules, behave in other ways and speak in a different voice than we use when we're doing human things. Maybe 'business' is just a name for the blanket permission we give ourselves to meet less human ones standards than the standards of the family and the tribe.

Since there is no justification or good reason in Human World to turn off our brains and shut down our personalities, we had to invent a Godzilla World where these things make sense and are in fact prudent and adult things to do. That's the business world -- and the institutional world, too.

We don't have to reduce business to its lowest form, of course. We can remember that we've always had work to do on this planet -- fields to plow and babies to watch and barnyard animals to milk. Work isn't new to us. It's the separation from our work, from the joyful and creative part of it and the natural connection between our work and our communities, that stifles us and sucks our mojo away.

We can make work as artistic and musical as we want. We each get that choice, and when we buy into the victim-y "What can I do to change things?" we reinforce our own powerlessness. The brilliance of the Godzilla system is its juxtaposition of the paired wheezes "What am I supposed to do - my boss is the problem!" from employees and "You can't believe what I put up with from these employees" from managers. And that brings us back to layers.

I know that my brothers and sisters in the southern hemisphere aren't gearing up for Jack Frost right now, but seasons make us stop and take notice whether they're shifting from warm to cold or vice versa. Seasons sober us up. They remind us that we won't always be here to notice them changing.

When we pull out our summer clothes or our winter sweaters, we say "Oh, yeah - you! I wore you when I made that trip to Boston - was that already a year ago?" We fall out of Godzilla world, then. Geez, we think. I'm a year older. Me, the person, this body and this mind. Your job title and your business card have nothing to do with the cycles and the seasons, but your body knows all about 'em.

My friends in Australia are taking layers out of their cars about now, baring shoulders and letting a little skin show. Nakedness, skin-to-air contact, is so secret and shameful (or holy?) that only a very few people ever get to see us naked. Nakedness is exposure of the very worst kind.

What makes humans the only species to cover its body with other skins? (If there is another species that wears clothes, leave a comment and tell us!) Clothing is such an old part of our culture that we don't question it. We're as ashamed as our nakedness as everybody else.

Who says we must wear clothes - where did the idea come from? In some places, New York City among them, it's legal for women to walk around without tops, but you don't see them doing it. Most of us wouldn't be caught dead naked in public. Sometimes we have nightmares about being naked for a presentation or some other event. To those of us who aren't nudists, nakedness is the ultimate shame.

We hate to be naked, so we cover our bodies. We hate to expose ourselves, so we use business jargon instead of saying what we think and feel and running the risk of looking stupid. We brand ourselves with walls of worlds that shield us from closer examination: I'm a Results-Oriented Professional or a Motivated Self-Starter.

We brand ourselves with our current job title or our industry designation - those suits of armor that keep prying eyes away. We prefer these layers to the nakedness of our selves behind the business card:

Who am I? How should I know? Why would you ask me that, the hardest question there is to answer?

2014 is on top of us, and the old world of work is slipping away. Godzilla is running down, and fewer and fewer people are willing to prop him up and keep him going. Floods and wildfires and human need everywhere remind us that the family, the tribe and the community are our focus and that that's as it should be. Any employer who deserves our talents knows already this about us: our cat outranks our boss, and our kid outranks the cat. They wouldn't have it any other way.

We can get past the business card and the body armor to share a bit of skin at work - in the way we talk about ourselves and the way we talk and act on the job. We can bring ourselves to work and be as human there as we are anywhere. We decide how much of ourselves to hide, and over time we learn that the more we hide, the more we suffer. People who get you want and deserve to see more than the pleasantly bland business side of you, the make-no-enemies and play-it-safe-side.

When you're asked "What do you do?" you can tell your story. You can talk about where you came from and how you got where you are now. Your business card and your job description are almost certainly boring, but you are not. You are vibrant and compelling to the exact degree that you remember and convey yourself in your self-description, and not your business card.

But that requires taking off layers, and letting some of the real you out.

When you speak from your heart and your gut rather than from the Godzilla script you've memorized and internalized, your muscles will get stronger. Your voice will become more sure.

Let the changing seasons remind you that Godzilla world is a tool in your life plan, not the point of it -- and that you make the choice every day how to be and who to be at work.

You can cover up what's real and passionate about you, and dampen your flame under layers of pinstripes and wool. Or you can get naked, just a bit - remembering who you were before the pinstripes and who you'll always be, business card or no - and bring the self behind the suit to work with you on Monday.