The Four Noble Truths according to Calvin

In the workplace, it helps to have an elevator speech or two—messages that last as long as it takes to share an elevator ride. In an elevator speech we step out from behind the torrent of tweets, emails, Skypes, and phone calls and deliver a face-to-face, short, compelling message with passion and clarity.

The beauty of delivering an elevator speech is that we force ourselves to simplify and communicate clearly about even the most complex topic. Maybe we are asked, “Hey, what’s this quantum mechanics thing all about?” Or maybe, “I thought you left the company—why are you still working here?” And right there without a misstep we deliver a short, focused speech that simplifies and clarifies while connecting with another human being on the spot. It’s an indispensible skill in today’s workplace.

One of the elevator speeches I’m often invited to give is: “How can mindfulness meditation help me at work?” In my experience, people often seem to expect a catalogue of benefits: how mindfulness meditation can repair our damaged immune system, cultivate self-awareness, reduce stress, lower absenteeism, and improve productivity. And though such an elevator speech can no doubt be helpful, I choose a different approach:

Mindfulness at work starts with synchronizing with our experience.

Then we can address our primary responsibility: seeing clearly.

By appreciating our circumstances in such a way, we can more skillfully contribute to our world.

And in the end, live a confident, decent life at work.

The thing about elevator speeches is that there is always a hidden hope that when the elevator reaches its destination our colleague will say something like, “Wow, that’s fascinating stuff. Why don’t you come over to my office for a cup of coffee so we can discuss this further?”

So, here we are. For those who would like to explore this topic further, please read on. For all the others, thanks for listening—and this is your floor.

Mindfulness at work starts with synchronizing with our experience.

Being mindful at work is not simply a matter of being alert to the present moment, as if we were intently sightseeing or inspecting our experience. Rather, mindfulness introduces us to the reality that we are fully immersed—utterly harmonized 360 degrees—in the circumstances we find ourselves in. We instinctively take a panoramic view and become emotionally and physically in tune with our experience.

Let’s take a simple example. One of the classic missteps at work is firing off an email in response to a perceived insult or criticism. We’ve arrived at work a bit late and are rushing to make a meeting in fifteen minutes when we notice an email in our inbox from the IT department. The subject line says, “Project over budget, late, being reconsidered.” We know the author, we’ve received these broadsides before, and frankly we’re a bit fed up.

We open the email, glance quickly over familiar criticisms: “…we have some concerns about your estimates…,” “…there has been no follow-up…,” “…meetings have been missed…” Heated up, we fire off a curt response in bold caps: “PLEASE STOP SENDING THESE EMAILS. IN THE FUTURE, JUST CALL.”

We’re feeling pretty good as we leave for the meeting, when we pause. A little flutter in our stomach tells us we may have missed something, that we ought to check one last detail.
Reopening the offending email, we find to our surprise that we are not the intended recipient. The email was addressed to a colleague, copied to several senior managers, and we were blind copied as a courtesy.

Such missteps often cause lasting damage at work, and at times end careers. When we’re mindfully synchronized with our workplace, however, our instincts inhibit such missteps because we are naturally alert to the full picture. We know that the stage is as important as the actors. We recognize an organization to be a web of lively relationships, not a series of isolated transactions “about me.” When we train our minds in mindfulness, we become more and more aware that no matter what we do or say—whether in an email or in the boardroom; in the cafeteria or at a press briefing—there is
always a greater context to consider. Narrowly focusing on ouragenda, ourinsult, ourneeds, simply makes no sense when we are fully synchronized with our workplace.

Then we can address our primary responsibility: seeing clearly.

At work we are all very interested in doingstuff—performing, achieving, executing, and accomplishing. Whether we are on a construction site, in a hospital setting, the corporate world, or academia, we regularly confront standard questions: “What do you do for a living?” “What do I do next?”  “Do they have enough to do?” Work is all about doing—meeting goals and getting stuff done.

For mindfulness practitioners, though, doing our jobs well, while important, is not our primary responsibility at work. Mindfulness reveals that for us to accomplish goals, conduct ourselves ethically, and contribute to our world we must first see clearly.

I’m often asked to work with executives to help them refine and improve their leadership abilities. At the beginning of each assignment, the executive is often eager to set goals, improve performance, and experiment with new techniques. But inevitably I have to slow them down and suggest a different approach.

“You’re pretty good at doing things,” I typically remark to the executive. “You wouldn’t be where you are in your career if you weren’t good at getting stuff done. So, we are not as concerned about what you dofor a living. Rather, we are interested in what you seefor a living.”

It is from that perspective that we refine leadership abilities. “What are the top three central challenges your employees face?” “What unspoken messages are you receiving from your team members, colleagues, or vendors?” “What are people afraid of in your organization? What inspires them?” These and dozens of other vital questions are not about doing anything at all. What’s required is to discern, recognize, and understand.

For mindfulness practitioners, cultivating this ability to see clearly is at the very heart of the practice. The discipline trains us to step out from behind the curtain of our restless minds and touch reality directly—getting a full, authentic measure of our experience beyond self-deception and impulsiveness. And on the job, such a commitment to first seeing clearly becomes central in inspiring the very best from an organization.

By appreciating our circumstances in such a way, we can more skillfully contribute to our world.

Typically, at work we want to do what is correct. We want to make the right decisions, we want to be accurate in our assessments, and we always want the facts on our side. Obviously, such an approach makes a lot of sense since trying to be inaccurate, incorrect, and fictional at work would be disastrous (unless of course you’re running a political campaign).

But, in a sense, being correct at work is the easy part. Indeed, many of us know how to do this quite well. The hard part is being skillful.

For mindfulness practitioners, meditation is not about living our lives more correctly. Nor are we interested in becoming meditation experts, entitling us to inflict our spiritual viewpoints on our friends and neighbors. We practice meditation so we can learn about our mind—and not surprisingly the more we learn about our own mind, the more we learn about the minds of others. Appreciating others’ minds can be quite profound and poignant. We can come to know directly the motivations, aspirations, foibles, hopes, and fears of others. Such insight into other people can be a sobering responsibility, and it naturally makes us more skillful and lively in how we accommodate others. By knowing ourselves, we learn to know others as well.

In “Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators,” by Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach, and Gus Vlak (Harvard Business Review, December 2008), the authors point out that the defining skill of great organizational innovators is appreciating the hearts and minds of others:

…innovators must be able to walk into a conference room full of diverse constituents, including colleagues, customers, subordinates, bosses, vendors, and partners, and quickly discern the underlying motivation of each one. They leverage that information to craft and communicate a message that resonates with every constituent. This is the art of bringing a diverse group onto the same page—and it is absolutely essential to transforming an interesting idea into a companywide innovation….

Like successful innovators, mindfulness practitioners are highly attuned to what “resonates” with others. We know that being right or an expert at work is at best half the journey—a journey that cannot be traveled alone. And because we explore our minds on the cushion, we are naturally curious about others and quietly passionate in perfecting “the art of bringing a diverse group onto the same page.”

And in the end, live a decent,

confident life at work.

In my role as a business consultant, I regularly ask my clients to complete the following sentence with the first word that comes to mind:

At work, I want to be…

While my survey is not scientifically reliable, I can report that there are some patterns to the responses. Here are the four most frequent answers:

Successful

Happy

Rewarded

Stress-free

Such responses come as no surprise. Given the demands, risks, and relentless pace of our modern-day workplace, it is little wonder that most of us would like a little stress-free happiness on occasion. Rewards and success—isn’t that what we are all looking for at work?

After forty-four years of work and thirty-four years of mindfulness meditation, I’m not so sure. My survey indicates that most of us thinkwe want to be happy, successful, and stress-free at work, but we also know that such aspirations are wishful thinking. We all know work offers both success and failure; happiness and angst. We know that work, indeed all of life, unavoidably presents both rewards and penalties; joys and disappointments. So, while most may wish to be happy and successful at work, what we really want, from my vantage point, is to be confident: confident that no matter what work offers up, we will remain self-assured and at our ease.

For meditators, coming to this conclusion viscerally and completely is one of the great accomplishments of the practice. Sitting still hour after hour, day after day, year in and year out, we slowly and gently exhaust our futile struggle to secure our lives with paychecks and toys, emotional security pacts and
addictions. We awaken to a simple yet powerful fact of life: when we stop struggling, we are naturally confident and at our ease.

Ironically, such confidence is not a personal experience, so to speak, but something larger and more fundamental. Just as a sparrow flies with ease or a tiger walks with confidence, so too we discover the ease and confidence of our humanness. A sparrow never second guesses its wings; a tiger never arrogantly proclaims its stripes. And as humans, we relax back into our unshakeable confidence that we, too, are perfectly equipped to be on this planet under all circumstances.

Bringing such natural poise to the job is how mindfulness practitioners clean up the toxic emotions and insipid materialism that plagues our workplaces today. Being confident at work is, in the end, the height of decency because…well…that’s what we humans do.

Image via Wikipedia

Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.”

This is the introduction to a short paper from The Harvard Gazette.  It is well worth the read.  It also speaks very simply about insight meditation (also known as Mindfulness) – what it is, what it is not, and how it (as a behaviour we do, and an attitude we hold) activity shapes are brain.  This is what Psychologists call neuro-plasticity.  It is like taking our brains to the gym, giving them work out over a period of time  (but nothing really excessive required here), and realising that we have gotten fitter as well as well as “fatter brained” in this case!

“Because we tend to live life so unconsciously, we take things like the ability to walk for granted. When you pay attention to it, you will appreciate that it is an amazing balancing act, given the small surface area of the feet. This is the essence of Mindful Movement: learning to notice, appreciate, and enjoy the wonder of the body you have” .  This is an extract from an article by a colleague about body awareness with a particular emphasis on kids and helping them  to really appreciate their body.  It’s worth a read…whether you have kids or not.    It reminds me how much I take my body and my own good health for granted.  I am very grateful for this practice to bring me closer to gratitude.

So far the core assumptions I’ve listed are:

Goal Setting (Photo credit: lululemon athletica)

I am really happy about regarding 2012?  What need/ cause will I have served?  What hidden gift has been lying dormant, that this year will have come to the fore?  How do I name those cornerstone attitudes and intentions, so that when things get rough they still pop up in my mind and behaviour?

I am doing pretty well right now working my way through these questions, talking with others with aligned intentions, jotting down my wonderings and doubts, as well as my inspirations and  moments of brilliance!

It is all a bit BIG though!  I came across this very simple article this morning which talks to the fact that we can let our days pass, aiming for those huge goals, yet miss the moments for real presence and connection – which after all are at the heart of our biggest goals.  Here are 5 simple suggestions for small changes or at least areas to attend on a moment by moment basis.   I have plucked them straight out of the original article from BK communique  referencing  Ken Jennings and Heather Hyde’s new book The Greater Goal: Connecting Purpose and Performance 

1. Pick Just One Positive Behavior: Pick one behavior and commit to practice it every day. For instance, if you want to become known as an encourager, find three occasions every day when you see someone doing good work and recognize them for it. Put three coins in your left pocket each day and each time you encourage someone, move the coin from your left pocket to your right pocket.

2. Connect with Just One Colleague: Most jobs, functions and projects in organizations are highly interdependent, but people try to operate as if they weren’t. Select someone who is working on a project with you or working on a project that directly or indirectly impacts you. What power does that person have over your ability to achieve your goals? What power do you have over their outcomes? Talk over how you can help each other reduce effort. Challenge each other to come up with a specific request or offer of help that will make a positive difference in your shared goals.

3. Just Listen to One Person at a Time. All coaching starts with great listening – being really present to the one who is trying to do their very best thinking. Next time a friend asks you to listen about an important decision they’re making, ask them “What do you care most about achieving by making this decision?” Then just listen without interrupting, probe for details, maintain a relaxed and attentive presence, and resist the urge to react or think about your response. The other person will eventually reveal their deeper, greater goals.

4. Have People Share and Trust One at a Time: Sometimes lack of trust occurs simply because people haven’t had the opportunity to share hopes or concerns in a “safe space” – a forum where they won’t be judged negatively for sharing. To build trust at your next work meeting, suggest that you begin with asking each person present to state the greater purpose for the meeting — from their personal perspective. End the meeting with another round for each person to express what’s working well with trust and alignment, and where they see opportunity to expand trust.

5. Examine Just One Unexpected Success. It’s funny how larger companies forget that unexpected success is really important feedback that should be paid attention, rather than just celebrated and then disregarded. Find an unexpected success in your work that occurred somewhere on the fringes of your efforts, rather within the core of your focus, and see what it tells you about your customers, your products and your future.

I’m keen to hear your own simple guidelines – the very day small ones that keep you “on to it” and present to what’s really going on.

I’ve registered already for this Summer Institute in Canada.   I’d love you to come too.  I went back in 2009 and I loved

it.  For me it integrated so many aspects of my life – leadership in complexity, mindful presence, innovation and social change.  Some fabulous presenters will be there – but they do not “present” – instead they create the space and context for us to deeply learn.  I’m going, are you coming with me?  How awesome it would be to get a NZ contingent there.  What difference could we make together to our world – right here in NZ?   Here is the brochure.

Go to http://aliainstitute.org/summer2012/ to register before December 12th for the early bird rates.
ALIA Summer Institute

Halifax, Nova Scotia • June 18-23 • Earlybird registration now available

LEADERSHIP STARTS HERE
Resilience and Innovation in Turbulent Times
June 18, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm

The times are calling for leadership that is resilient, daring, and innovative. This leadership creates an environment that is inviting and empowering. It reaches across old divides, bringing together unlikely partners to “build the road as they walk it” towards a more sustainable and resilient future. Where will we find this leadership if not in ourselves, our businesses, and communities? In this one-day session you will hear voices and stories from across generations, across sectors, and across the globe. Together we will share our discoveries and surface patterns of success.

Be prepared for a day that will engage, challenge, and inspire, and that will leave you with fresh ideas for your own innovations back home.

LEADERSHIP INTENSIVE
June 18, 6:00 pm – June 23, departure

The four-day Intensive is an immersion in the practices, skills, and connections you need to deepen your leadership and accelerate your work. Here you will learn new skills and practices, in community with thought leaders, artists, meditation teachers, and inspired change-makers from around the world.

You will leave ready to
• step into leadership in a way that is authentic for you
• engage uncertainty and change as your ally
• bring out the leadership in others
• navigate effectively through challenge and complexity
• apply new lenses and strategies to your current leadership goal or project
The Leadership Intensive weaves together three integrated streams: foundations of authentic leadership, skill-building for action, and community dialogue and exchange.

LATEST UPDATES:

Six track descriptions are now on the website. Two of these (Cutting through Complexity and Leader as Spiritual Warrior) are about “going deeper” into some of the ALIA practices, as some requested in the recent survey. A third personal leadership track will be led by Erica Ariel Fox, founder of the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative (welcome Erica!) Three additional tracks take us further into the practical application of powerful systems tools: the Change Lab, Scenario Process, and Appreciative Inquiry. Read about these tracks here.

• A seventh track now in the works will focus on grassroots community movements, with case examples from different parts of the world. One example is the Oasis Game which began in Brazil and has now spread to communities worldwide and is connecting local innovation with online gaming metaphors and social media. Another is the Future Centres work that Bob Stilger is now working on with Japanese business leaders.

• A PechaKucha (20 slides @ 20 seconds) evening will surface stories of innovation in the program community, including some of the leading-edge work being done in networks such as Presencing, Berkana, Art of Hosting, and Reos. In the days that follow, people will be able to self-organize around those stories they want to explore further (and/or present their own).

• On Thursday afternoon, a plenary session with guest speakers will continue the theme begun on June 18, under the tentative title “Global Winter or Global Spring? Making Sense at the Crossroads.”

REGISTER NOW

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Whyte speaks on this Ted Talk about letting go of our aloneness as leaders. He speaks of realising that we do not need to carry the burden of our mission on our shoulders alone, that through turning to the edges – having the conversations that matter – sensing the visible and invisible (all the factors at play), and their interconnectedness  we can move ahead.  He speaks of how each moment and each element co-creates the next and hence implores us to let go of any seeking for perfection.

Image by InaFrenzy via Flickr

10) Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember?

David Whyte is the author of The Three Marriages, Crossing the Unknown Sea, and poetry collections including River Flow and Everything is Waiting for You.

This is his 10th of 10 powerful questions.  They are questions that last a life time.  Questions to ponder, and to love, not necessarily to answer fully, and certainly not to answer quickly.   I have posted all the previous questions and added a wee bit of my own too, in previous blogs.   This one stands as it is.  Here is what David has to say and to challenge us with.

“Here’s the explanation for what sounds like a strange question. I have a poem called “Coleman’s Bed” about a place in the West of Ireland where the Irish saint Coleman lived. The last line of that poem calls on the reader to remember “the quiet, robust and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember.”

We go to places of pilgrimage where saints have lived, or even to Graceland, where Elvis lived, because these people gave something to the rest of us—music or good works— that has carried on down the years and that was a generous gift to the future.

But that blessed saint could also be yourself—the person who, in this moment, makes a decision that can make a bold path into the years to come and whom your future happiness will always remember. What could you do now for yourself or others that your future self would look back on and congratulate you for—something it could view with real thankfulness because the decision you made opened up the life for which it is now eternally grateful?”

Image by SIDΔ via Flickr

9) Can I live a courageous life?

So many times in leadership groups I’ve run the question of courage comes up.  How to take courageous steps ahead? What is courage?   This is David Whyte’s 9th question.  I am relating it to leadership.  How do we know when we are wholehearted? Is it when we feel courage?  Or when we feel fear perhaps and respond with strength regardless.   How often do we hold ourselves back from reaching our full potential, or that of others, for fear of “breaking our hearts”?  If we truly believed that our broken heart was just part of living…what would that free us to do?  What could that free me to do?

Here is what David Whyte has to say on his question ( from www.davidwhyte.com )

“If you look at the root of the word “courage,” it doesn’t mean running under the machine-gun bullets of the enemy, wearing a Sylvester Stallone headband, with glistening biceps and bandoliers of ammunition around one’s neck. The word “courage” comes from the old French word coeur meaning “heart.” So “courage” is the measure of your heartfelt participation in the world.

Human beings are constantly trying to take courageous paths in their lives: in their marriages, in their relationships, in their work and with themselves. But the human way is to hope that there’s a way to take that courageous step—without having one’s heart broken. And it’s my contention that there is no sincere path a human being can take without breaking his or her heart.

There is no marriage, no matter how happy, that won’t at times find you wanting and break your heart. In raising a family, there is no way to be a good mother or father without a child breaking that parental heart. In a good job, a good vocation, if we are sincere about our contribution, our work will always find us wanting at times. In an individual life, if we are sincere about examining our own integrity, we should, if we are really serious, at times, be existentially disappointed with ourselves.

So it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, “Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?” ”

David Whyte is the author of The Three Marriages, Crossing the Unknown Sea, and poetry collections including River Flow and Everything is Waiting for You.