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It is 6 p.m. You have logged off from work and are unwinding with a glass of wine. You turn on the TV, but instead of Netflix, you click on a new app called 6pm in Paris, and spend the next 30 minutes learning French. Not on your desk. Not on your phone. But on your couch, watching a short movie. This is the vision behind a new language learning platform that recently launched. 6pm in Paris merges Netflix’s addictive streaming format with the short lessons style of Masterclass. The concept is simple yet effective: Each week, you pick a short film from a curated collection of French licensed movies. Then, you dive into the story and language through an informal video lesson called After Short. You can watch the films with dual subtitles and adjust the playback speed to your preference. Diligent learners can also review a phrasebook of key words and idioms, then take a short quiz to reinforce their knowledge. While apps like Duolingo are pouring resources into AI and gamified learning, 6pm in Paris is choosing cultureand therefore the human experienceas its primary lens. A big part of our vision is to be a window on the language, and the people, and the culture, says CEO and cofounder Lea Perret, who dreamed up the company with cofounder and COO Julien Frei. If people take to the format, you can soon expect 6pm in Tokyo, and 6pm in Rioand basically 6pm anywhere. Julien Frei and Lea Perret [Image: 6pm in Paris] Learning as a lifelong journey Perret imagined 6pm in Paris as a way to help students learn French beyond the classroom. Most people will sell you methods to learn French in three weeks, but it doesn’t work like that; it’s a lifelong endeavor, she says. And if you want to spend a lifetime learning a language, it has to be entertaining, or else you will throw in the towel. Originally from Toulouse, France, Perret moved to New York 17 years ago and has been teaching French in the U.S. since then. In 2013, she cofounded Coucou French Classes, which provides in-person classes in New York and Los Angeles. Since the pandemic, her team also launched online classes to over 50,000 students. Today, the company remains profitable, but 6pm in Paris is here to fill a gap that Coucou couldnt: to help people immerse themselves in French culture. While Perret was at Coucou (she left to run 6pm in Paris) students would often ask her for additional resources to help them improve their French. In response, she would send them a 17-pager recommending, among other things, French books and TV shows to watch. (Yes, Call My Agent featured on the list.) These shows, however, can be too long, which can wear out the learner, and the subtitles can be either inaccurate or incomplete, completely skipping quintessentially French filler words like euh or eh ben. This approach, she says, can take learners away from real language experiences and make it harder for them to connect the spoken word with its written form. [Image: 6pm in Paris] The 6pm philosophy With 6pm in Paris, the team is hoping to address many of these challenges with shorter, more digestible films and customizable subtitles that were crafted in-house to perfectly match the dialogue. For now, the team has licensed more than 60 short films by local filmmakers. These range from sci-fi to rom-coms to documentaries. The shortest lasts a mere two minutes; the longest clocks in at 25. (My personal favorites so far are Cloud Paradise, and Amoureuxse, both of which boast excellent storytelling.) By next yearif the team can raise the $1.2 million they need to growthey want to start producing films in-house, which would allow them to tailor the content to various levels by, for example, streaming down the dialogue so actors don’t talk over each other. They also expect to launch a whopping 170 masterclasses covering grammar for all levels. The series will feature short, digestible episodes delving into French conjugation. We believe in grammar, we just think there is entertaining efficient way to bring it to people so it doesn’t feel like a chore, says Perret. The current selection is more suitable to someone with an intermediate understanding of French, but the team maintains this shouldn’t preclude anyone from subscribing to 6pm in Paris. In fact, they believe that segmenting learners by levelsand tailoring content accordinglyis the wrong approach. The 6pm in Paris philosophy is that one of the most essential ingredients to learning a new language is exposure. Sure, you can start by learning the phrase, ‘je m’appelle Lea et j’habite New York,’ but what’s point of knowing how to say that if you don’t understand what the person replies to you? she says. According to Perret, Americans are obsessed with talking, but even more important are listening and comprehension. By watching a short film in French, even with English or French subtitles, you can slowly soak up the language, notice how words are spelled, and train your ear before ever uttering a single word. As someone who moved to a French-speaking country at age 7 and was encouraged to sit at the back of the class and just listen, I can attest to the efficiency of this method. (I was fluent in less than a year.) [Image: 6pm in Paris] TV as a learning tool Research backs this up, and many studies show that watching TV shows, especially with O.G. subtitles, can be a surprisingly effective way to build your real-world language skills. According to a 2022 study from researchers in Turkey, 44 participants from Kosovo who watched Turkish TV series with subtitles for one to two years saw measurable improvements in all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing.) Another study from Spain shows that university students who watched Friends over the course of seven weeks, and with English subtitles, learned more informal English (like slang and idioms) than those who used Spanish subtitles. Television might be the greatest source of first language input, and learning a foreign language by watching TV is more common than it might seem. According to a recent survey performed by the research platform AtomRadar for Fast Company, 43% of participants have tried to learn a foreign language by watching TV shows or movies. Of these people, 60% found it effective. AtomRadar, which surveyed a representative panel of 300 American adults over 18, also found that younger people are substantially more likely to have tried learning a foreign language through movies and TV, with 55% of 18 to 24 year olds having tried it, compared to only 30% of 55 to 64 year olds. (Once again, I can relate as I distinctly remember looking up the definition of rooting for someone after a love triangle materialized on the teen-cult TV show One Tree Hill.) 6pm in Paris isn’t the first company to recognize the potential for cinema to double as a learning tool. FluentU uses beginner-friendly movie trailers and music videos to teach you vocabulary and grammar in context. Lingopie offers a streaming library of foreign-language TV shows with interactive subtitles. And France Channel, which lets you stream French films and series otherwise unavailable in the U.S., markets its platform as a way to learn the language through immersion. Earlier this year, Duolingo, too, recognized the power of cinema with a Korean campaign in collaboration with Netflix. Korean course sign-ups had jumped 40% after the first season of Squid Game aired in 2021, so when season 2 rolled around in 2025, Duolingo launched Squid Game-themed vocabulary lessons, a TikTok filter that could test your pronunciation skills, a K-pop music video, and a music video featuring Duo the owl suited up as a Pink Guard. Is 6pm in Paris worried about all the competition? Not in the slightest. She notes that her team wasn’t inspired to start a new company to fill a gap in the market, but to meet their students’ needs. The outputs may be similar but the motivations are different. The company is still too young to gauge success, but the first few months show promise: After a beta run with Coucou students, the team opened up the platform to the public and leaned heavily on a marketing campaign to attract subscribers. So far, 1,300 people have joined (and 70% of users who started with a free 7-day trial have converted to a paid subscription). Three quarters of subscribers log in every week to watch the weekly film, followed by the after short. For now, you can only watch on your laptop or by casting to a Smart TV. But once the team secures more backing, they plan to upgrade to a more robust (and pricier) streaming platform that supports native TV apps. Some years down the line, you could soon turn on your TV, click on your 6pm streaming app, and choose which language you want to learn based on the culture you want to discover. I want it to be as easy as ‘you turn on TV, go to 6pm in Tokyo and discover many things about the Japanese culture, says Perret. I do believe there would be lot more understanding, and the world would be a better place if we knew more about each other.
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E-Commerce
Behind some of the most recognizable iconography in the world, from American presidential campaign logos to New York City subway signage and Apple keycaps, is one Swiss designer and a textbook he published in 1949. Youve probably never heard of either. Walter Käch was a calligrapher and educator at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts in the late 30s and 40s. During this time, he published a simple manual, called Lettering, which laid out his approach to crafting letterforms, letting students learn about proper technique and trace and copy letters directly inside the book. Experts have credited Lettering for popularizing the idea of type families and directly inspiring the creation of Univers and Helvetica, two of the worlds most famous typefaces. Over time, Kächs contributions have largely been overshadowed by those of his students. Now, theres a team working to fix that. This week, the first modern reprint of Lettering was published through a collaboration between Dinamo type foundry, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and the graphic design firm Omnigroup. For the designers behind the reprint, its a passion project thats been more than six years in the making. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The book that inspired Helvetica Fabian Harb is the cofounder and head of type design at Dinamo. He discovered Lettering while studying at the Basel School of Design, where he learned that, despite being printed in an extremely limited run (likely between 500 and 1,000 copies), Kächs manual has had resounding ripple effects on how typefaces are designed today. [Käch] really went about type design in a quite broad way, Harb says. If you look through the manual, it’s not just sans serifs; it’s also about serifs, its also about script typefaces. Back in those years, there wasn’t a lot of teaching material around, so this being such a proper folder, I’m 100% sure it traveled and people that were teaching in other places also drew from the same material. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Letterings holistic approach to type design represents one of the first true explorations of a versatile type familyor a cohesive system of fonts with various weights and orientationswhich is the standard in todays industry, where most new typefaces come with eight to 10 different weights. Käch also directly inspired his student, Adrian Frutiger, to conceptualize the typeface Univers in 1957. Univers is now one of the most influential typefaces of all time, appearing everywhere from George W. Bushs two campaign logos to some of Apples early keycaps and the UNICEF logo. Likewise, the font Helvetica (the basis of NYC’s subway signs) is believed to pull direct inspiration from Kächs work. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Theres a direct connection to Univers and Helvetica, which are typefaces that just became so big, so visible, and so influential up until today, Harb says. Designers definitely know Univers, and Helvetica is probably known even to people that dont have anything to do with graphic design. Helvetica is so closely connected to Käch, but nobody knows about him. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Reprinting an iconic text The idea to issue a reprint of Lettering came as Harb learned more about the text for himself. In school, Harb discovered that copies of the manual are considered rare and precious, and those that are available in Switzerland are mostly held by libraries that dont allow them to be checked out. Meanwhile, designers interested in owning their own copies often found themselves in intense bidding wars on eBay, as those “in the know” on the manual’s influence jostled to secure a version for their collections. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] It was a little bit of a sport to check the eBay and see, Okay, is a copy coming up? Harb says. Then everybody would bid on it, and basically whoever had the most money would get it. Very often it went for crazy prices, especially as a studentlike somewhere like 250 and 350 Swiss francs. Due to the manuals interactive nature, nearly all surviving copies of Lettering tend to be in poor condition. People worked with them, a lot was traced in them,” Harb explains. “You can see that sometimes, people drew their own guidelines to figure out the proportions. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Finally, in 2014, Harb’s type foundry Dinamo was able to secure its own copy of Lettering through his connection with the Basel School of Design. The acquisition began a years long exploration of Kächs work for Harb, starting when he designed a custom typeface inspired by Kächs core teachings called Walter Alte. When Walter Alte was used in a contemporary art exhibition, the publicity led Leonardo Azzolini and Simon Mager, cofounders of Omnigroup, to connect with Harb over their shared interest in Kächs work. Together, the three created another Käch-inspired typefacethis time translated for a digital agecalled Walter Neue. Both Walter Alte and Walter Neue were officially published in 2022. As Harb, Azzolini, and Mager dedicated months to closely studying Kächs principles, they realized that the rest of the design community should have access to this resource, too. So, they joined forces with the Museum für Gestaltung on a new reprint of Lettering, a project that took another three years to complete. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The 2025 reprint of the manual, designed by Omnigroup and co-published by the Museum für Gestaltung, is made to come as close to the original as possible. All of the text, Harb says, has been copied one to one. And, just like the trailblazing 1949 text, the new version of Lettering allows todays generation of type designers to trace directly in the book itself. The book is now available online for 48, a far cry from the cutthroat prices on eBay. Still, Harb says, anyone with an interest in type design should get the chance to look at one of Kächs original manuals at least once. [The reprint] is very similar to the original, Harb says. But if you ever have the chance to see the original, youll see that it has a richness of materiality that, in todays world, is almost impossible to recreate.
Category:
E-Commerce
The University of Southern California is attempting to block faculty from forming a union with an argument pushed by SpaceX and Amazon: that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional. In December, non-tenure-track faculty members at USC filed a petition for a union election in hopes of certifying the United Faculty-United Auto Workers union as their representative. The petition was submitted after a majority of the roughly 2,500 non-tenure-track faculty signaled their support for a union. Ten days later, as first reported by USC Annenberg Media, USC asked the NLRB to dismiss the petition in part by arguing the structure of the board itselfan independent federal agency that works to protect worker rights by enforcing the National Labor Relations Actis unconstitutional. Corporations including Amazon, Trader Joes, and SpaceX have all challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB in recent years. In February, the administration of President Donald Trump also declared that provisions limiting the administrations ability to fire members of regulatory commissions, including the NLRB, were unconstitutional. USC did not respond to Capital & Mains specific questions about its challenge to the NLRB and instead provided the following statement: USC respects the role of unions and has worked collaboratively with them for many years. For their part, supporters of the union organizing campaign disagreed with USCs statement. Sanjay Madhav, an associate professor of technology and applied computing practice in USCs Viterbi School of Engineering and an activist with United Faculty-UAW, said he feels the university is aligning with political forces that are very anti-worker. Jennifer Abruzzo, the former NLRB general counsel who was fired by Trump in January, echoed Madhav. USC can choose to recognize the faculty union voluntarily and eliminate the need for a union election altogether, she said. You cant support unionization and then claim that we cant support unionization at our own institution because the NLRB is unconstitutional, Abruzzo said. Whether the NLRB is unconstitutional or not does not preclude USC from recognizing and bargaining with their workers chosen representative. ‘Private universities are just like every other sort of large, private employer’ Constitutional challenges to the labor board have surfaced in recent years as anti-union companies sense a conservative Supreme Court might reconsider precedent, said Celine McNicholas, general counsel and director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the board in 1937, shortly after the National Labor Relations Act created the NLRB. It has been treated as settled law since. McNicholas said she is not aware of any other colleges or universities that have argued that the NLRB is unconstitutional. Private universities are just like every other sort of large, private employer that wants to resist its workers right to organize, she said. The universitys objection to the union petition argued the labor boards structure is unconstitutional because it limits the removal of administrative law judges and board members, and permits board members to exercise executive, legislative, and judicial power in the same administrative proceeding. Elon Musks SpaceX similarly argued the NLRB improperly exercises executive, legislative and judicial power in violation of the separation of powers. SpaceX also argued that the boards use of administrative law judges is unconstitutional because the judges are insulated from presidential oversight and NLRB proceedings deprive the company of its right to a trial by jury. USC and Trader Joes have made their arguments as part of labor board proceedings, but both Amazon and SpaceX have taken their cases to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involving Amazon remains open. The appeals court dismissed the case involving SpaceX in March. A ruling that finds the structure of the board is unconstitutional could fundamentally upend labor rights for nearly 170 million civilian U.S. workers Abruzzo said. Without a functioning NLRB, workers cannot hold union elections or hold employers accountable for violating laws that protect workers collective action and bargaining rights, she added. Its a big deal to preclude workers from exercising the rights guaranteed them by not only the National Labor Relations Act but also the First Amendmentthe right to freely associate with one another, Abruzzo said. At USC, Kate Levin, an activist with United Faculty-UAW and an associate teaching professor of writing in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said she expected pushback from the university but did not expect it to take aim at the NLRB. In doing so, Levin said, the university signaled that it is willing to undermine the collective bargaining rights not only of their own employees but of employees across the country. The Trump administration has also disputed the constitutionality of provisions affecting the NLRB. Sarah Harris, acting solicitor general in the Department of Justice, sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in February arguing that rules limiting the presidents power to remove members of three regulatory agencies, including the NLRB, are unconstitutional. Trump tested those rules by ousting NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox, who sued over her firing. The move left the board without enough members to reach a quorum, effectively halting agency proceedings managed by the board. On April 7, a federal appeals court reinstated Wilcox. On April 9, the Supreme Court granted an administrative stay that blocked the reinstatement. What’s next for USC workers? Meanwhile, USC faculty members are waiting to hear whether they can proceed with a union election. In addition to arguing against the constitutionality of the NLRB, USC argued the non-tenure-track faculty members cannot join a union because they are managers and supervisors. The university also argued that the faculty members already have a voice in their working conditions through forums such as the Academic Senate. United Faculty-UAW rejected both arguments, contending that non-tenure-track faculty members serve only in advisory roles and have no power over university policies. They also argued that faculty unions are increasingly common. Nearly 27% of faculty members across the country are represented by unions, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York. USCs Madhav said he wants the ability to collectively bargain for merit pay and changes to retirement benefits. The need for greater faculty input was magnified in recent days, he said, after the university implemented hiring freezes and budget cuts to contend with federal funding uncertainty and ongoing budget issues. In these moments of crisis, as an individual, non-tenure-track faculty, I have no say in the decisions the university makes, he said, urging the university to support a union election. If USC really is pro-union, they should respect our legal right to vote. By Debbie Truong This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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E-Commerce
Centuries before encrypted texts and secure video conferencing, people relied on physical engineering to keep their written messages sturdy, sealed, and secure against eavesdroppers. In a new book, researchers Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith outline the “letterlocking” techniques used by figures from Queen Elizabeth I to poet Emily Dickinson to protect their paper lettersand the methods Dambrogio, Smith, and a growing number of other scholars have developed to reverse-engineer those historic documents, from algorithmic analysis of X-ray images to careful paper modeling. Dambrogio, a conservator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, traces her interest in the subject back about 25 years, to a fellowship at the Vatican’s archives. There, she noticed security features in a trove of historic legal and accounting documentsdifferent kinds of mechanisms engineered to keep them sealed, make tampering visible, and verify that senders were who they claimed to be. The features were fascinating on their own, but understanding how they worked also seemed crucial to preserving the documents, ensuring that these security aspects wouldnt be inadvertently lost during repairs. “That object is like the time capsule from that time period,” Dambrogio says. “If I change anything not knowing, then that object loses its voice.” To understand how the documents functioned, she built more than 100 models of objects in the collection. Later, she connected with Smith, now a senior lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College London. Smith explains that while his colleagues had long been interested in the physical aspects of historic writingslike how poet John Donne arranged words on a pagescholars had largely overlooked the technical side of how letters were assembled. “When Jana showed me these models, suddenly all this kind of material fell into place,” he says. “Because you could see through modeling how these objects worked as kind of engineered structures and devices, designed to travel long distances and keep information safe.” Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter, by Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, with the Unlocking History Research Group [Photo: MIT Press] Together, the pair began studying what they came to call letterlocking, reconstructing through close analysis and modeling the many ways historic letters were folded and secured. These included elaborate locks created from sliced-off portions of the letter paper itselfdesigned so senders could rejoin them and confirm the letter hadnt been replaced in transit. These sliced strips were passed precisely through slits in the folded document before being sealed with wax. They searched for additional examplesfrom letters listed on eBay to ceremonial correspondence between heads of state stored in the National Archiveslearning to recognize the telltale markings of different folding and locking patterns. In 2012, they established the Unlocking History Research Group, which grew to include dozens of other researchers. As their work expanded, they began constructing a taxonomy of letterlocking, creating a periodic table-style diagram categorizing the combinations of folds, insertions, holes, and adhesives used to secure letters. This gave researchers a common language to describe and compare techniques. The letterlocking categories and formats chart visualising different ways to organise letterlocking evidence. [Image:MIT Libraries, MC0760, UH6203.] When they learned of the Brienne Collectiona centuries-old Dutch postmaster’s trunk containing around 2,600 undelivered letters from the late 1600s and early 1700sthey worked with a team of experts to explore the letters’ seals and contents without disturbing them. X-ray experts captured painstaking, high-resolution scans of the documents, while computer scientists devised new computer vision algorithms for what they called “virtual unfolding” of the letters. A paper by the team, published in Nature in 2021, has since been cited in research across fields including AI, cryptology, and literary history. “It’s been so much fun tracking the citations,” Smith says. “We’ve been cited in antenna studies. I didn’t know anything about antenna studies.” Left to right: A letter from John Donne (February 12, 1602) showing evidence of letterlocking, in The Folger Shakespeare Library (UH0027). Step by step drawing showing how the John Donnes oulus lock works. [Images: Folger Shakespeare Library, L.b. 528 (UH0027); MIT Libraries, MC0760, UH0027.] Their research also offers new insights into the personalities and correspondence methods of historic figures. In their book, Dambrogio and Smith cite an example where King Charles I verified a letter was sent by a particular secret agent based on its fold pattern, as well as a 17th-century English statesman scolding his university student son for folding his letters “like those that come out of a grammar school.” And one of Donnes letters, Smith says, appears to reflect his writing style in its physical engineering, using an unusual and ornate locking mechanism. “It was so immediately striking that the way he was folding his letter was so similar to what else I knew about him,” Smith says. “His love of complexity and difficulty and elegance, and not doing things the way that everybody else did them.” Through projects like a series of YouTube videos and detailed step-by-step diagrams included in their bookthe authors say they chose MIT Press not only for Dambrogios affiliation but for the publishers experience producing graphical engineering textsthey hope to inspire more people to explore the field. That includes scholars building their own models of historic locking techniques, even without a background in engineering or paper arts. While letterlocking techniques became less common after the rise of the modern pre-stickied envelope in the 1800s, the goals of security, authentication, and aesthetics remain familiareven in the age of digital communication. “People’s desire across time and space is to communicate with each other and to protect that for the person for which it’s intended,” says Dambrogio. “We still do that with two-step authentication in our bank accounts and whatnot.”
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E-Commerce
Thinking back to childhood, what role did you play in your family dynamic? Maybe you were the straight-A student? Maybe you flew under the radar, not causing trouble? Or perhaps you were charged with taking care of siblings? The person you were inside your family relationship can impact how you act in the workplace today, says Dr. Alexandra Solomon, clinical psychologist and host of the MasterClass In Practice series on dealing with anxiety. Sometimes we repeat those family roles in our adult relationships, and sometimes we do a 180 flip, she says. There’s a path of repetition and there’s a path of opposition. Our goal is to be on the third path, which is the path of integration. Solomon identified six common roles children play inside of their families based on their experiences. People tend to identify with one or two roles. Roles can also change, often due to a shift in the family dynamics, such as a divorce, a death, or an older sibling heading off to college. Each role has a function with two parts, explains Solomon. The individual takes on this role in an attempt to belong and to access love, she says. And the person takes on this role in an attempt to stabilize the [family] system. 1. The Perfect One A child who assumes the role of the “perfect one” attempts to gain love through performance. They stabilize the system by being a straight-A student or a superstar athlete, so the family can feel good about itself. In the workplace, the perfect ones gift is competence. If you give them a project, you can be pretty sure that it will be done and done well, says Solomon. The challenge is that perfect ones tend to be hard on themselves and, oftentimes, demanding and critical of the people around them. 2. The Easy One The family member who is the “easy one” tries to obtain love by going with the flow. They create stability for the system by not adding any additional strain, which often happens when parents are stressed. The easy one attempts to help their parents feel as calm as possible by needing less. Their gift at work is flexibility, which is an asset on a team because you can put them anywhere and they’ll figure it out without asking too many questions or being a squeaky wheel, says Solomon. Their challenge, however, is that they can end up feeling resentful because their needs aren’t being met. 3. The Struggling One The child who is the “struggling one” is often the center of attention. Solomon says this role captures an idea from family therapy called the identified patient. This happens when parents bring a child to therapy saying, Our kid is having a problem. Its possible that they are focusing on the child to avoid their own marital conflict. To gain stability, the child may back up what the parent says as long as it keeps the parents from fighting with each other. Its possible, too, that the child has identifiable challenges. The struggling ones gift as a coworker is that they become a strong advocate, says Solomon. They make people around them feel safe because theyve struggled, too. The challenge, however, is that they need to be more independent. 4. The Peacemaker The peacemakers role in the family is to help people get along. They gain love by solving problems, such as getting parents in conflict to understand each other. Even at a young age, they try to have everyone’s best interests at heart. In the workplace, the peacemakers gift is an eye for fairness, advocacy, and mediation. They help everyone understand each other’s perspectives, and they’re unafraid to get in the mix. The challenge, however, is that they spend so much time with their finger on the pulse of the system, anticipating a problem, that they have a hard time accessing their own emotions. 5. The Parentified Child A parentified child is someone who attempts to gain love by providing a source of comfort to the grown-ups in the family. This role is similar to the peacemaker; however, they offer more support for issues rather than trying to solve them. They act like a little adult in the household. The parentified childs gift at work is having empathy and caregiving for others. Their challenge, though, is that they often have difficulty with boundaries. They often define their worthiness by the degree to which they are needed by others. 6. The Rebel The final role is the rebel. This is someone who isnt afraid to call out how the family dynamic isnt making sense or working. They attempt to gain love through authenticity, speaking up, and trying to create stability by calling out what’s happening. The rebels gift is fearlessness, saying the thing that nobody else wants to say. The challenge, especially in peer-to-peer relationships, is that their self-identity is organized around opposition to the system. It can be hard to meld into a group when you spend time pointing out the things that are wrong, says Solomon. How Your Role Applies to the Workplace Carl Jung said, Until you make the unconscious conscious, it’s going to direct your life, and you’re going to call it fate, says Solomon. Were usually not conscious of our role, and we don’t usually have language for our role. We just do relationships the way we’ve always done relationships. Once you recognize the role you played in your family, you can start to notice core pain points at work that connect to a role you played. If you have a difficult boss, for example, its not just about a difficult boss; its what you do in the face of a situation with a difficult boss. A rebel might feel like calling foul on their boss. The more the rebel calls foul, however, the more the difficult boss is frustrated with the rebel. You can take a step back, realize your go-to reaction, and consider options of what you can do differently. You may not be able to change your boss, but you can become more empowered and not fall into the same patterns, says Solomon. The rebel may want to figure out what they can let go of. If they notice the urge to speak up, what will happen if they stay quiet? Maybe somebody else speaks up? Or maybe they realize it wasn’t the end of the world. [It’s about] trying a different behavior and noticing what the dfferent outcome is instead of being led by knee-jerk responses. Your Coworkers Roles Understanding that we bring family roles into work can also help you create hypotheses about why your coworkers act the way they do, which can help you feel less reactive to their behavior. If I watch my coworker pointing out to the boss again and again everything they did, you might start to wonder if they were a ‘perfect one’ in their family, and the only way they think they can be safe and belong is to prove their value again and again, says Solomon. Maybe you can have compassion. It may drive you crazy, but if you see that its their family of origin wound, you can take it less personally. Theyre doing that because that’s what they believe they have to do to be seen as valuable. Stress and anxiety are inevitable at work. The good news is you dont have to be helpless victims, says Solomon. There are things we can’t change about our workplace, about the state of the world, about other peoples behavior, about the things that happened to us in the past, she says. But we can get insight around why you see things the way you do. The experience of doing something different in a difficult moment reinforces a feeling of trust in oneself, which is vital.
Category:
E-Commerce
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