True security lies inside, not in events around you
 

When people speak about the soul—outside of a purely religious context—they’re usually referring to the qualities of something (or someone) that they see as fundamental to its identity. The word ‘soul’ is shorthand for the innermost, truest or most obviously unique nature of whatever or whoever they are referring to.

Used in this way, the word can apply to people (where it means whatever they feel is quintessentially ‘them’), ideas (the part that cannot be taken away without destroying the whole), artistic works (the essence of what makes them great), and communities and organizations. The ‘soul’ of an organization, for example, consists of those apects that make it uniquely what it is—for good or ill.

In the workplace, the souls of many people meet with the soul of the organization. In a civilized organization, this is recognized: maybe not precisely in this way, but in the sense that time and space are allocated to treating people with dignity and allowing them to be themselves. Sadly, in others great violence is done to people’s souls.

The souls of organizations like this are harsh and unforgiving. People are treated as mere resources to be used in whatever way most benefits the ruling clique of the organization—and thrust aside when their usefulness is past. Their uniqueness is ignored and their innermost hopes and dreams seen as irrelevant to economic goals.

Harming your soul

Individuals also do violence to their souls whenever they act in ways that they know, deep down, are at variance with who they truly are; when they accept situations out of fear, greed, or yearning for security, even though they feel sick at heart for doing it; or when they fall in with convention for the sake of ambition or “not rocking the boat.”

I do not think you can do damage to your soul with impunity. I am not talking in religious terms. I am speaking merely of that sense of yourself and what you feel, deep down, is right and good for you. Harming this—even compromising it regularly—does serious psychological damage that builds up into stress and depression. In extreme cases, it can become a kind of self-loathing that leads people into terrible actions.

True security

In difficult times, when all seems bleak around us, we naturally yearn for security. External safety may not be available, if we are caught in the grip of forces too strong for us. Yet inner security is always there for the taking.

To act in ways that are true to who you are, deep down, is to feed your soul—the uniqueness that makes you an individual. Then, when times are better around you, you can once again move forward along your chosen path, free from the taint and heart-sickness others may have taken on to try to compromise with a threatening world.

True security comes more from feeling at peace with yourself than avoiding the challenges of reality, just as misery and frustration are more likely to arise from becoming messed up inside than from being tossed around by events.

The civilized life matters

Finding ways to make your life civilized, at home and at work, isn’t simply a pleasant idea, like decorating a house to make it look welcoming and an attractive place to live. It’s essential to your well-being. It’s also essential for the long-term health of an organization, so those that stay true to their souls and avoid treating their people badly are much more likely to emerge from turmoil in the best state to prosper.

David Whyte, writing in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, puts it exactly.

For consultants and management gurus, the soul is a slippery customer. One the one hand it may be dismissed completely. Many trainers and consultants maintain that the soul belongs at home or in church. But with little understanding of the essential link between the soul life and the creative gifts of their employees, hardheaded businesses listening so carefully to hardheaded consultants may go the way of the incredibly hardheaded dinosaurs. For all their emphasis on the bottom line, they are adrift from the very engine at the center of a person’s creative application to work; they cultivate a workforce unable to respond with personal artistry to the confusion of global market change.

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