“I know money isn’t supposed to buy happiness, but I’d sure be happier if I were richer!”

(This is a guest article by Simon Oates)

Though it’s supposed to be common knowledge that money cannot buy happiness, many people seem to believe we can trade that hard-earned cash for a good smile. It amuses me that people seem to believe in both ideas simultaneously. We all appreciate a touching sentiment or love story, but we still crave possessions with an enthusiasm that maintains cash’s status as the universal key to happiness.

Can money actually increase our day-to-day happiness? We certainly act as if we hope it can. Our search for happiness seems more and more to focus on piling up possessions. Hence the fear that economic slow-downs will make us all miserable.

Is this true? Are people really unhappier as a result of tightening their purse-strings; or can we adapt and learn to enjoy life, despite having less money to go shopping?

Having more isn’t all you might expect it to be

With money comes higher status and social class. Many who have grown up in dirty back streets and clawed their way into the middle class expect their new status will bring them peace and happiness. In fact, the opposite is true.

Sociological studies have shown the middle classes are the most paranoid about their hanging on to their wealth and position in society. They feel pressured to spend more and more to retain their status. This is what caused much of the excessive borrowing in recent years—a desperate sign of families attempting to spend their way to security and peace of mind.

What it brought instead was increased fear, more defaults and a bitter exposure to the recent economic turmoil. Only a tiny percentage of the population truly feel rich. You could walk along any High Street and ask different people with a wide range of salaries whether they feel ‘well off’ at the moment, and, despite sometimes large financial differences, I doubt you would hear a single positive statement in reply.

Pleasure versus happiness

One of the fundamental reasons why money creates only the desire for more is that objects and experiences do not offer happiness. They offer only its short-term cousin pleasure. Pleasure provides a teasing glimpse of happiness, but never hangs around long enough to fulfill what it seems to promise.

Seeking happiness via purchases and possessions produces an effect similar to drug addiction. The short-term pleasure it brings quickly wears off, leaving you craving more. Over time, you become progressively desensitized to pleasure itself, so you have to take larger and larger ‘doses’ to produce any effect.

Most sources of genuine, long-term happiness—such as friendship, trust in others, an optimistic outlook, love and peace—are not directly related to wealth. If you think a bright future requires steady finance, think again! I have met some of the most optimistic people you could ever find in some of the most deprived areas of England.

This recession will most likely have a significant effect on your expenditure, your wealth and—through them— some at least of life’s short-term pleasures. Yet if you can see pleasure for the sham it really is, you will know the real sources of happiness in your life will not change at all. All you need to do is focus on the things that truly matter in the longer term. Most of those are free.

Here’s wishing you a cheerful economic depression.

Simon Oates is a financial auditor with a passion for writing. During the week he works in the businesses of many of his clients, where he has developed a keen understanding for how organizations work from the inside. At the weekend he maintains his leadership website and writes articles about leadership styles, leadership books and runs a dedicated leadership styles website.

Technorati Tags: happiness, fulfillment, enjoying life, pleasure, moving on

Caring is a good thing—but only if it is done by degrees to preserve your sanity, your marriage or your job.
 

Is it possible to care too much for the occasion? Is it possible to bring so much energy to a discussion or debate that the right solution gets lost in the drama? Do you bring the same level of energy to things that really matter to you as to those you could just let go? I am all for caring, but there is a point where caring too much creates unnecessary angst for everyone.

The ‘Circle of Care’ was created out of a discussion with a good friend of mine about how much should you care about a situation, and how much energy (if any) should you exert to try to resolve or debate an issue.

She claimed to have two positions—she either cared passionately or she couldn’t care less; there was nothing in between. Yet the ‘couldn’t care less’ position was not a good place for her. By nature, she is such a caring person that position was only a way to protect herself. She still cared, so the careless pose was not real. It did not bring the release from anxiety you should feel if you honestly did not care one bit.

We jokingly talked about creating ‘levels of care’ so that we could look at a situation and evaluate objectively how much energy we would allow ourselves to exert in caring about it. So the Circle of Care was born and, while it does have some cynicism built in, it can be useful in a pinch when you find you are becoming emotional and no one else seems to share the same level of concern.

When muscles are popping out on the side of your neck as you try to convince the team that Monday should remain Chinese-food day and everyone else wants Indian, you have to ask yourself if this is the hill you want to die on.

Understanding the Circle of Care

The Circle of Care is inclusive and gives you a wide playing field. It is a great screen to let you determine if the issue is really and truly important, or whether is it something you can and should let go—in a matter of a second or two.

There are times when you should go to the mat for an issue, and there are times when it should never have featured on your radar. Time is precious. Only what matters most is worth your energy.

Sometimes going to the mat is what must be done. There are also times when supporting someone else’s decision, even if it is opposite from yours, can be liberating—when an attitude of ‘I could not care less’ is exactly right.

I am not claiming that I have found the universal solution to knowing when to care and when not to, but it has certainly been fun applying this notion to situations.

The Circle of Care is made up of five levels:

1. Level 1: Care Passionately—This is critical for you. You are willing to go to the mat for this issue and may be willing to die on this hill to defend your position.
2. Level 2: Care Enough to Influence—This is an important point. You are definitely willing to debate its merits and argue passionately, but civilly, about it. You may not be willing to die on this hill, but you’ll fight your ground.
3. Level 3: Care Unless Career Ending—A somewhat important issue, but you are not willing to make this the issue you are known for. You’ll argue for your point, but tread lightly and generally give in with a good grace. You will only fight if losing might end your career.
4. Level 4: Care, But You Can Release—You can go either way. You may enjoy a debate, but you can live with and support the outcome whatever it may be.
5. Level 5: Realm of Careless—You don’t care at all, so why are you in the debate? This is not an issue for you. Move on and be grateful you have not been sucked into the vortex of extra worry.

As you can see, although there is nothing scientific about the Circle of Care, it’s still useful. It can talk you down when you are about to escalate the argument on an issue that is either not that important or you have no control over. Instead of rushing to the barricades over every little disagreement, you pause, think about it, breathe slowly, then decide what you want or what, if anything, you can do.

The Circle of Care in action

This past weekend, the Circle of Care saved my date night (Don’t get jealous, we are just trying to keep up with President Obama and the First Lady). We made the decision about the movie we were going to see without the normal drama that goes with selecting the right one.

Typically, selecting a movie is a major debate that can get a little ugly—but not this time. I put myself in the ‘Care, but I could release’ space, so we selected an excellent movie, enjoyed the evening and are still married. Go figure.

Hail to the Circle of Care!

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: caring, prioritizing, staying balanced, saving energy, stress, being yourself

“Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason.“ (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
 

We live in an angry time. People are angry with politicians, greedy bankers, unfeeling bosses, colleagues who ‘don’t get it’, careless drivers, and especially anyone ‘different’. Some are just angry with one another. What we rarely grasp is that our anger is really aimed within.

While what provokes anger may be outside us, the actual source is always within. Anger is a powerful emotion. When we cannot contain the energy of anger, we act it out on other people or things. Most of the time we are so afraid of it we try to deny or hide it. Sometimes we direct in inwards.

Although, like all emotions, anger is normal, when you suppress it and allow it to build up inside, it saps your strength, causes yet more stress, destroys relationships and stops you feeling happy.

Anger is also part of an emotional force we need to spur us on to achieve what we want and carry us along through life’s challenges. Dissipating our ‘fire energy’ in anger is a waste.

The ‘fire energy’ of anger

Anger is an emotional energy. It’s not a thought, idea or belief—not mental or intellectual. It’s an energy you experience as much in the cells of your body as in your head.

Next time you feel angry, notice what happens—how you tense your muscles, how the blood flows to make your face red, how your heart pounds and you feel hot. For millennia, people have associated anger with fire. In Eastern traditions and Chinese medicine, it is often seen as an aspect of ‘fire energy’—a primal energy associated with power and strength.

Most people have never learned how to cope with, or contain, their anger without doing themselves harm. Instead, they try to suppress it. Yet if anger is misdirected or blocked like this—turned inwards, held down hard and allowed to smolder away—it builds up until it eventually bursts out in ways that are even more destructive and harmful.

Maybe the greatest, and most misunderstood, stimulus for anger is a set of false expectations about life, usually associated with emotional immaturity. Many people expect to stay on the ‘happy’ end of the happiness-unhappiness continuum permanently and become angry because life is tough. They don’t get what they believe they are entitled to from life. As a result, they get mad at the universe. Then, since the universe is impervious to their feelings, they take their anger out on whoever is nearest and easiest to

Dealing with this ‘fire energy’ positively

You usually feel anger in the abdomen or belly. That’s also where you feel strength. In the West too, we have expressions that refer to the location of ‘fire energy’ here. Cowards have “no guts.” They lack “intestinal fortitude” and “have no stomach for” whatever it is. The powerful person has “fire in their belly.” Positive ‘fire energy’ is manifested as strength, courage, steadfastness, drive, and commitment. It supports us to be fearless. It gives us ‘spirit’. Lacking it, we find it hard to persevere and forward the action of our lives. We become exhausted and lack-luster.

Whenever we give in to anger, we misuse our ‘fire energy’ to ignite anger in place of courageous action. In place of strength and power, we are caught up in fear and bitterness. All that energy goes within, until we burn out. Misusing our ‘fire energy’ and turning it inside, we burn away our liveliness, our happiness and our self-confidence.

Turning your ‘fire energy’ into positive channels will generate strength, courage and confidence. Instead of wasting it in anger, use it to feel empowered and open to facing life’s challenges and pressures with a sense of curiosity and freedom.

When you do feel angry, rather than ‘acting out’, playing the victim or becoming abusive, try breathing deeply and sensing the heat build-up in your body. Welcome that ‘fire energy’ as natural, ready to be used for positive as well as negative ends. The more you contain and re-direct your ‘fire energy’, the more centered you will feel—less subject to the pull to waste your energy in becoming angry.

Expectations and emotional maturity

Much of your happiness depends on setting yourself realistic expectations about life. When things go wrong—as they surely will from time to time—it’s not all about life being unfair or bad luck and bad karma.

Happiness is linked to growth and that does not does not take place smoothly, or only on the happiness end of the spectrum. Growth demands facing challenges and struggles. Without them, you cannot build up your capacity to be strong, courageous and confident. You need things to push against to develop those ‘muscles’.

That’s why you need to use your ‘fire energy’ positively and stop wasting it on anger. Happiness and satisfaction arise when you consciously contain your ‘fire energy’ and keep it for better purposes.

This week’s food-for-thought questions are:

• How do you react to setbacks? Do you tend to be whiny, passive-aggressive or explosive? Do you manipulate, bully, or seek to ‘take it out’ on others, physically or verbally? Does your anger ever lead to hostility, abuse, anxiety or depression? How does this show you are using your ‘fire energy’?
• Have you noticed the physiological symptoms you experience when you’re angry? Do you get head, neck, back, or jaw pain? Irregular heartbeat? Sweating? Upset stomach? What is this telling you about where your anger is being directed?
• What emotional beliefs lead you to react with anger? Think about a person, place, or issue that really pushes your anger button. What is it about that person or situation makes you angry? What is your belief or story that you use to rationalize or justify your anger? Is it even true?
• Have you noticed how the aftermath of anger leaves you feeling weakened? How that ‘fire energy’ has been consumed by your anger? Where else could you use that energy to feel strengthened and empowered instead?
• What do you expect from life? Is it realistic? Are false expectations and feelings of entitlement setting you up? Are they stoking your ‘fire energy’ into anger and wasting it?

Technorati Tags: anger, emotions, energy, coping with setbacks, expectations, realism

(A few days ago, I published an article I had written on ‘Delusional Optimism’. This guest article from Karen Senteio takes a very different view on broadly the same topic.)

Hope in a Prison of Despair by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919)

‘Hopetimism’. Don’t bother to look it up in the dictionary. It is a word made up just for you.

The good thing is that we are all born with hopetimism; it is a matter of finding it and putting it into practice. Hopetimism allows you to believe and belief is the catalyst to action.

Learning to listen to your own needs

To reacquaint yourself with your hopetimism, you need to spend some time to learn to hear yourself. We are all going, going, going so much of the time that we do not hear ourselves when we are crying out for a break, self-care or love. We needed all these as children and were not shy about asking for it. We cried for them, yelled for them and even threw tantrums for them.

As we grew up, we were conditioned to think we did not need these things. We suppressed our desire for them and they were replaced by stress, anger and pessimism. We did not know this was happening; we just attributed it to life. Now, here we are in the midst of global uncertainty and a host of other issues and we are exhausted with worrying about it all. There is a difference between being informed and knowledgeable about things and being completely consumed by them. We can choose consumption or Hopetimism. Chose hope. Believe me, it is difficult to hold onto hope, but try.

Looking through the eyes of hope

Looking at a challenge with the eyes of hope is far different than looking at it with hopelessness. With hope, you are firing on all cylinders, creative, happy, ready for the risks and challenges that you will encounter. You have vision and can see a positive outcome. You are not derailed by the hurdles or naysayers. You expertly navigate around them determined to succeed. Hopetimism sits differently in your mind and attracts positivity to it.

I confess that sometimes anger and negativity gets the best of me and I can get quite Grinchy (green fur and all). What is different now compared to a couple years ago is that I can snap myself out of it. Before, I would let self-limiting doubts cloud my thinking. When your eyes and heart are clouded with pessimism and negativity, you give up to soon, abandon your dreams or doubt the dreams of others.

This low-energy thinking does not serve you. It is not worthy of you. Opt for Hopetimism. It will sit comfortably in your heart and keep the doors of opportunity open.

Some quotations that help explain ‘hopetemism’ for me:

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” (Barbara Kingsolver)

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops
at all.” (Emily Dickenson)

“Hope is always available to us. When we feel defeated, we need only take a deep breath and say, ‘Yes,’ and hope will reappear.” (Monroe Forester)

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: optimism, hope, moving on, being positive

Many people shy away from change because of the pain they associate with failing. It doesn’t have to be that way.
 

As we try to pull ourselves out of our current problems, it’s clear that we are all going to have to make some significant changes. The chances are that you will fail in at least some ways in your first attempts.

That’s part of the natural learning process. If you let this put you off, you’ll remain stuck where you are—miserable with what you have, but afraid to change it in case that makes you feel worse.

What’s the way out? Is there some way to lower the risk associated with change and reduce the pain of failure? Part of the good news is that those usually go together. What reduces one often lowers the other as well. The other good news is that the solution—or a good part of it—is in your own hands.

What causes the pain?

• Losing face. We don’t want to look stupid or have others laugh at us. We would rather stay where we are that risk being seen to have tried and failed. The truth is that it isn’t that big a deal. What are a few sniggers compared with days and hours stuck in a job you hate? Besides, most people are so wrapped up in their own concerns any attention that pay to yours will never last long. Let them laugh. If you stop caring, it can’t hurt you.
• Perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. It’s easy to set yourself goals that are so ambitious you will never reach them. That sets you up for failure before you start. Perfectionism causes people to devalue their achievements, simply because they can imagine something better. To fail at some unrealistic goal is a self-inflicted wound. Baby steps, repeated with perseverance, will take you further than leaping headlong into the quest for some imaginary perfection.
• Unwillingness to let go and escalating commitment instead. How often have you wondered at someone who is obviously backing a losing strategy, yet refuses to give up? What about the person, or business, that pours more resources into a project that has already consumed more that it will ever be worth? In truth, we all do this. Knowing when to let go is a precious gift. So is the courage to do it. Too many people respond to failure by increasing their commitment in the hope that, somehow, it will all come right if only they spend a little more. It won’t. You’re compounding your losses and doubling your risks. Investors are advised to set a specific level in advance at which they will cut their losses as a means to get past the emotional urge to try just a little longer. That’s good advice for the rest of life too.

What drives up the risk?

• Having an ‘all or nothing’ attitude. This goes with perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. Most success comes mixed with a little failure. If you seek only unblemished achievements, you’ll go on looking. Be grateful for what you can get and make the best of it.
• Changing too much too quickly. Couple this with escalating commitment and you have the perfect recipe for disaster. There’s only so much change any of us can handle at one time. Going beyond this makes no sense, however tough it makes you feel at the start. Accept your limitations happily. They’re usually there to prevent you from messing up more than you can handle.
• Failing to stop and think if what you are changing is the real problem. It’s common to find people have jumped into a commitment to change before thinking about it properly. Then they don’t want to lose face by backing down. The old military adage that time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted is worth remembering. Don’t make a move until you are as certain as you can be that it is going to address the real problem.
• Following fashion. Just because ‘everyone else is doing it’ doesn’t make it a good idea. Most fashions are based on little but gossip and people’s fear of being left out of something. To go back to investing for a moment, the advice that it’s a poor idea to be buying what everyone else is buying makes sense. Doing that pretty much ensures you’ll pay over the odds. Fashion may sound important, but it never lasts long enough to be worth paying much attention to.

Handling rejection

You are going to experience rejection. Dealing with that can be a painful process too. There’s nothing worse than feeling you’ve truly given your best, only to find the other person wasn’t impressed. With so many people chasing every job, and more trying to find ways to get out the rat race altogether, rejection in the job market is inevitable. If you set up your own business, many people will reject what you have to sell. The trick is learning how to handle rejection and use it as preparation for another opportunity. I know it’s easier said than done, but the alternative—giving up—is usually worse.

• Don’t get mad. That is going to increase the chances that your response will be strong on emotion and short on common sense. It’s easy to burn your bridges for the sake of short-term satisfaction and get a reputation for being a hothead. Anger is a poor adviser.
• Pay close attention. People’s typical response to rejection is to shut it out—to close their ears and block off the source of pain. Bad idea. Even rejection and failure—especially those two—can be useful if you are willing to learn from them; and learning starts with listening carefully, so you can understand why things didn’t turn out the way you wanted. Just because the message hurts doesn’t mean it isn’t essential to your future success. Too many of us condemn ourselves to repeat our failures because we won’t pay attention to what is causing them in our own behavior.
• Let go and move on. Don’t tie up your time and energy in going over and over the rejection and the hurt it caused you. That won’t change anything. The minute you fail, or suffer rejection, look for the next positive step you can take towards your goal and take it right away.
• Don’t give in to desperation. Other people can ‘smell’ it and will write you off before you open your mouth. Despair is the ultimate ‘sin’ against yourself. Once you give in to it, there’s nowhere else to go. Life is never as bad as it seems—and never as good either. As my great-grandfather used to say, “It will all be the same in ten years time.” If you look what has happened with that in mind, you’ll get the hurts in perspective.

Change is essential and natural. It always comes with some risk and pain, but it doesn’t have to be so much that it prevents you from doing what needs to be done. By addressing the risk and pain openly and directly, you can nearly always take steps to minimize them. It’s also worth remembering that you may get as much pain and risk, or more, from standing still.

Technorati Tags: change, overcoming rejection, dealing with setbacks, handling failure, moving on, finding success

(Another guest article by Karen Senteio)

In tough times, you can still come alive again—but only if you are willing to risk coming out to play.
 

When we were kids, it was the best thing in the world to have friends knock on your door and ask you to come out and play.

Opportunity knocked and you were ready.

Somewhere along the way, it became harder and harder to step out of the house and play. I am not sure if the kids stop knocking or we stopped answering. Either way, we stopped inventing, playing, dreaming, doing and taking action on the things that interested us. They were silly childhood things that no longer had a place in our lives.

Well, I beg to differ. They are what will make you come alive again.

Find that child again.

It is the childhood skills of reinventing, exploring, doing and taking action on opportunities that are the new core competencies in making real change in your life. Those are the keys to open doors that seem closed. You have these skills, though they may be locked up somewhere in your head.

Lucky for you, that little kid inside you knows where the keys are. Find them and shake them. Hear them jingle. Wouldn’t you like to use them again?

• If you are in a dead end job and you desperately need a new opportunity, shake those keys.
• If you are thinking about starting a new business, but are afraid of what people may say, or whether it will work, shake them.
• If you are thinking about going back to school, but think you are too old to be of any use, shake them.
• If you think you have burned too many bridges to change who you have been, shake them.
• If you are thinking big and others are telling you to play small, shake them. Shake them until you shake some sense into yourself.

What are you waiting for? The sun is shining. Opportunity is knocking. Go out and play.

Karen Senteio is a business and life coach and president of VERVE. She has over 20 years experience in developing and coaching individuals and groups to achieve personal success and work-life balance. You can visit her web site at Verve and contact her at Karen@vimandverve.net

Technorati Tags: opportunity, moving on, making a fresh start, life skills, inner child, starting out again

Maybe it’s time to ask some fundamental questions about the purpose of business.
 

Reading Simon Caulkin’s column last week brought me up against a fundamental question: as the recession tightens its grip, more and more people lose their jobs and we discover ever more dubious actions taken by large (and formerly respected) organizations, should we be reformulating our views about the purpose of work?

Caulkin reported on a seminar entitled ‘Recession: health and happiness’, organized a week or so ago by Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council. One of the topics raised at that meeting was the direction of public policy in supporting business and trying to help us out of the recession. During the debate, Richard Layard of the London School of Economics and Warwick University’s Professor Andrew Oswald argued that the aim of public policy should switch from boosting GDP growth to measures that more directly relate to human happiness.

That’s a revolutionary concept. Should the value of a business be measured, not by how much wealth it produces (the conventional view), but by how much happiness it generates and for how many people?

Some of what lies behind this thinking is the so-called Easterlin Paradox—a key concept in ‘happiness economics’. In the 1970s, American economist Richard Easterlin sought evidence for what made for happiness. As most of us would expect, he found that people in a given country who earn more are more likely to report being happy. However, if you look at international comparisons, he said, the average reported level of happiness does not vary much with income per person—at least for countries with incomes generally sufficient to meet basic needs. And although income per person rose steadily in the United States between 1946 and 1970, average reported happiness showed no long-term upward trend—and actually declined between 1960 and 1970.

Unemployment harms people more than we think

While trying to cope with recession and cut-backs makes everyone less happy, we should not underestimate the truly devastating effect of unemployment. Yet, so long as the opinion remains dominant that the main (even sole) purpose of a corporation is to create wealth for its shareholders, those effects—as bad for individuals’ well-being and happiness in many cases as divorce or the death of someone close to them—have been widely ignored in public policy and corporate deliberations. As Caulkin writes:

“Over the past 30 years of shareholder dominance, however, redundancies have become the measure of first resort rather than last. However, while shareholders may be temporarily mollified, sackings frequently cast a pall over the survivors, with dire effects on engagement. Lower costs but higher disengagement is not likely to be a winning trade-off in an environment where attracting customers may be key to survival.”

If, as conventional management theory claims, the duty of management is to maximize shareholder (or stakeholder) value, a cursory glance at people’s 401(k) retirement funds, or just about any mutual funds, will be enough to show how dismally they have failed. Rather than increasing value, several decades of unbridled take-over activity, macho management and obsession with numerical measures have destroyed that value on a gargantuan scale.

Nor have other ‘stakeholders’ fared better: employees are being laid off in unprecedented numbers, suppliers are facing ruin and even customers are faced with cutbacks in service and limited options. It’s a wonder that there aren’t many more unemployed executives out there, given their appalling levels of performance against the standards they claimed to espouse.

Is shareholder value the wrong metric?

The view of the economy as nothing but a financial operation for shareholders and highly-paid executives is now being challenged. ‘Happiness economists’ focus on the notion that purely financial measures of a country’s success—such as GDP or average income per capita—are inadequate. The real indicators of national ‘wealth’, and the true purpose of government, is more closely linked to the oft-quoted words in the U.S. Declaration of Independence—that people have a self-evident right to: “. . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [and] That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . .”

Looked at this way, the age of unrestricted economic self-interest has turned out to be as destructive of human happiness as it has of the economy. As I pointed out last week, even Jack Welch now admits that chasing ‘shareholder value’ as the prime purpose of business was a dumb idea. Maybe a more civilized and human-centered approach could benefit us all. Surely it’s worth trying, given the way the current orthodoxy has ended in disaster?

Many Japanese companies go to extraordinary lengths to avoid lay-offs of permanent staff and commit themselves publicly to maintaining lifetime employment. In contrast, the Anglo-American view stresses work as a purely personal matter; whether you have a job is pretty much up to you. In lands dominated by conventional free-market, capitalist economics, jobs simply form another market—sometimes vibrant, sometimes not—as subject to the ‘laws’ of supply and demand as any other. You sell your labor to an employer, seeking the highest price you can get. The employer buys it, seeking to pay as little as possible.

On that basis, it is quite logical for employers to take on the minimum number of people they can get away with; and to fire them as soon as their cost becomes difficult to meet. It is also logical for employees to look only at the wages paid and leave immediately they can get more money elsewhere. There’s no call for loyalty on either side.

Of course, in reality, we know business cannot behave that way. The only result would be ever-increasing salaries as people kept swapping jobs for more money, until the employers were priced out of the market. Loyalty is essential to keep a trained and experienced workforce. What we have seen, however, is an attempt by corporations to make that loyalty work only one way.

Is there a more civilized approach?

In contrast, try to keep people in work is an obvious expression of confidence in the long-term future, both by corporations and governments. After all, firing employees sends a simple message that your business is going to be too weak, too small or too close to bankruptcy to need them. If actions speak louder than words, all the words about “employees are our greatest asset” are plainly nonsense, if the first action on encountering tough times is to lay off those ‘assets’ in droves. All that demonstrates is that protecting the wealth of the shareholders and executives is the first—sometimes the only—area of interest.

Maybe today’s business leaders should reflect on this simple question: if you let your skilled and experienced employees go to achieve lower costs and higher profits, how will you defend those profits against the competition?

Wrecking morale, encouraging those with the best chance of getting other employment to leave, and overworking those who remain—all common effects of widespread lay-offs—is hardly likely to be a winning strategy in an environment where attracting and retaining customers may be main key to survival. If all those macho bosses aren’t swayed by humanitarian arguments, or simple human feelings, maybe looking at the economic effect of lay-offs will attract their attention?

A narrow-minded, selfish emphasis on personal wealth is perhaps not surprising amongst the rich. But if government is truly instituted to “ . . . secure these rights [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] . . .” as the U. S. Declaration of Independence states, and “. . . whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it . . .”, today’s politicians should probably be worried about their security of employment.

Technorati Tags: leadership, shareholder value, purpose of business free-market capitalism, future of capitalism, unemployment

Maybe finding some serenity is the best anyone can do
 

This will be a long article, but please bear with me. I need to explain some things first, but there is a practical outcome, I assure you; one that might just save you from a good deal of today’s pain and unhappiness.

Today, many people are afraid. Still more are insecure, both personally and in career terms. Probably most are looking for fresh sources of hope to see them through the bad times and point to a better future. I was interested therefore to read an article by Margaret Wheatley (entirely by chance) that suggests the best way forward might be to give up both hope and fear and find a place beyond either.

What struck me at once was her view—not original to her either it seems—that fear is the ‘price’ of hope. You cannot have one without the other, since the moment you fix your hopes on something, your mind automatically generates a corresponding fear that you may not get it. Every hoped-for triumph produces a reciprocal fear of failure. Since most of us assume that hope is a good thing, and that life without it would be either impossible or hopelessly negative, we tend to get equal ‘doses’ of hope and fear that alternate to produce a kind of mental roller-coaster ride.

Reading her article (and not being very attracted to the metaphysical approach she takes), I began to wonder: might today’s constant obsession in organizations with results, results and results not be counter-productive, especially in bad times?

Another kind of cost-benefit analysis

If fear is the inevitable companion of hope—and I can see how this would be the case—today’s emphasis on achievement and results as virtually the sole purpose of work (and the goal of every career) will only increase people’s fear—probably to the same or an even greater extent. Unless you are so confident as to entirely dismiss the idea that your hopes might not come about, you are likely to be rather more afraid of failure than confident of success.

It it worth the price?

Organizations full of fear are not likely to be successful in their endeavors or pleasant places to work. The coin flips over to the other side and, in place of expansive hopes for the future, you get a constricting fear of failure that quickly leads to obsessive attempts to ward it off. Such constant pressures brought about by these fears is also likely to increase the prevalence of command-and-control forms of management and autocratic leadership.

That is what we have certainly seen in recent months: a quick ‘flip’ from irrational exuberance, to recall Alan Greenspan’s words, to equally irrational terror and near despair. What if the former brought the latter along with it? What if the cost of all that wild hope now has to be paid in fears?

A hard look at hope

How could you live without hope? Wouldn’t that be (literally) a hopeless life?

Hope is about having a vision of how things (you hope) will be at some future time. The fear it brings along with it is based on knowing (or at least fearing) that things will not turn out that way, whether by your own failure, other people’s interventions or some ill chance. You cannot change the past, so there is nothing to hope for, or even fear, there. The present should be a place of immediate perception and action, equally free from hope because hope cannot deal with what is already here. In practice, I think most people more or less ignore the present because their minds are so fixed on what they hope for from the future.

Fear, like hope, is future-based. It fills the mind with images of what might happen and dread of the result. That’s why it makes sense to me to see it as hope’s counterpart. If I don’t hope for anything, or even care much about the future, there will be nothing for fear to get its teeth into.

Our desire for security

To increase the chances of what you hope for, and simultaneously decrease those of what you fear, you plan—and that is where security comes into the equation. Hope and fear create the desire for security. If you can be secure in your plans, hope is replaced by gleeful anticipation and fear doesn’t come into the picture at all. Is it any wonder that managers constantly demand that their subordinates produce no surprises? Security looks like heaven itself.

Planning is all about creating an illusion of security around something that you can neither control nor trust—the future. The more carefully and fully you plan, the more you tell yourself that either nothing can go wrong, or you can deal with anything that does. Every plan is a mass of hopes wrapped up in attempts to remove the accompanying fear and insecurity; and because so many people persist in the feeling that the universe ought to be just, we fall prey to the urge to over-plan in the hope (that word again) that doing so will earn us the security we crave.

What would happen if you gave up on the search for security altogether?

What we all surely know, even if we don’t like to admit it, is that security is illusory. The reality of this world is that everything is insecure. Whatever it is, it’s subject to unpredictable changes at any time, and never certain in form, timing or outcome.

People go on seeking for security precisely because they never attain it. It’s an endless and futile search that most of us spend a good deal of energy on every day. Since “no surprises” is the mantra of the majority of senior managers, all that time devoted to planning, budgeting and organizing priorities has a single objective: to remove insecurity about the outcomes. Sadly, that objective will never—and can never—be met, do what you may.

I suspect that the real alternative to seeking security is to cultivate curiosity. Whatever the outcome, you can be curious about it without seeking to control it. If you enter the future wrapped in a mass of hopes and weighed down with plans to obviate insecurity, you are bound to be both fearful about the outcome. Rightly so; at least some of those fears will always prove true. If you look forward with curiosity to what might happen, unattached to any particular outcome, neither the lure of hope nor the pain of fear will have any power over you.

The need for some grounding

Left at that point, what you have is a metaphysical argument: attractive, somewhat logical, but likely to be rejected by most people as impractical, especially in the workplace. No business can exist with some objectives; no job can be framed purely on the basis of “let’s do something and see what happens.” It all appears far too idealistic to be useful in day-to-day terms.

I think this is wrong. What you need to do is frame the concept in a more down-to-earth way.

• First let’s deal with hope and fear. You will always have hopes and always suffer from the fears they bring. The trick, it seems to me, is to accept the link as inevitable. Where our problems lie is in trying to have the one without the other.
• If you accept that hopes produce fears, as well as the other way around, I suspect you can deal with both perfectly well. As you look at what you hope for, you need also to accept and live with the fear that it may not be possible. You don’t obsess about it or tell yourself that it’s ‘wrong’ to be afraid. You don’t try to ‘buck up’ or drive your fears away by an act of willpower.

You know that whatever happens will still happen, however much you either deny your fears or resort to paroxysms of effort to drive them away. If you simply forget all this obsession with the future and get on with things right now, doing whatever seems best in present circumstances to lead you in a positive direction, neither hope nor fear can lead you very far astray.

If things go well, that’s fine. If they don’t, you change in whatever way is needed to cope with the new situation. That’s it.

The real wisdom of accepting insecurity

I think the futile pursuit of security is altogether a more insidious and dangerous problem. If I hope to hear good news, and fear I may not, both are simply thoughts. If I plan assiduously to make something I want happen, I quickly become attached to my ‘creation’ and invest a great deal of myself in it. Then, if it appears to be about to fail, two things happen.

1. I cling to my plan even more, probably pouring more resources into trying to make it succeed by brute force. Organizations are full of ideas that didn’t work, but were not abandoned until huge amount of time, effort, resources and people’s energy were wasted in trying to rescue them.
2. I feel angry (and probably guilty) as well as disappointed. It ought to have worked. It should have been successful. Now I’m suffering still more. I’m not just disappointed at the outcome, I’m railing against the injustice of it all. I’m depressed that my creation, something I set my heart on, has failed.

Accepting insecurity as the way things are seems to me to be essential if you want to navigate life and work with some degree of equanimity and sanity. Curiosity could well be a good attitude to future events where it is possible. In other cases, where some specific result is needed, the answer seems to me to be to do what you can, concentrate on the present, and leave off worrying about the rest. If what you do fails to work, try something else; but don’t feel bad about it or obsess over it. Life is insecure. Hope always brings fear. That’s the way life is.

Looked at another way, such an attitude might be even more useful. Even the worst of fears must have a corresponding hope. In these tough times, maybe the way out is to look our fears full in the face and ask what hope is the opposite of each one. That might at least provide some notion of what direction to take to find a way out of the mess.

The very worst thing to do is to cling to failing hopes and deny real fears, all the while persisting with actions that have already proved a failure. That is only going to make any suffering far greater than it need be. It’s also what those in charge seem to want to do.

Now that’s really scary!

Technorati Tags: hope, fear, insecurity, seeking security, planning, charting the future, looking ahead, acceptance, finding serenity

Here’s another article by Professor Freek Vermeulen that it’s well worth thinking carefully about (“Slow and Steady Wins the Growth Race”).

In it, he points out that the human brain needs time to digest new information and be able to put it to good use. Six hours spent studying a topic over a week, with gaps in between, will be far more effective that six uninterrupted hours at the last minute. Both learning and thought, let alone creativity, are much less effective if you don’t allow time for some rest and changes of focus in between periods of directed activity.

Here’s how he relates this to business:

“. . . as an adult examining corporate strategies, I see that firms often fall into the same trap. In order to catch up with competitors, for instance, they enter new markets at double the speed, undertake twice as many acquisitions, or hire double the number of employees. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Just like me practicing the cello [his own example earlier in the article], organizations need rest and time in between growth spurts to recuperate and digest the effort. Trying twice as hard does not mean you’ll get twice the benefits. There are limits to how fast you can grow, without starting to suffer from it.”

This rings very true to me. The faster people try to do things and the harder they work over concentrated periods, the less return they usually get for all that effort. The human brain is a long-distance runner, not a sprinter. It quickly gets tired and loses a good deal of its power and flexibility.

Professor Vermeulen writes that he examined the growth strategies of 25 multinational companies and found that strategies based on growing at a moderate-yet-steady pace increased profitability almost twice as much as those based on short bursts of rapid expansion. I suspect that’s even more true of individuals. Throwing yourself headlong into some process until exhaustion is reached, then expecting to see significant progress, is a very poor idea.

Slow and steady is more effective than fast and erratic. Save yourself some grief and frustration. Slow down, take sensible periods of rest and allow your mind to wander onto something else from time to time. I think you’ll be happier and healthier—and ultimately wiser and more productive—if you do.

Technorati Tags: productivity, creativity, getting things done, pace of work, slowing down

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines envy as: “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.” It’s no surprise that a fair number of people are suffering a spell of envy. The combination of people losing their jobs and position in society with so many still caught up in the modern obsession with being ‘somebody’, would almost guarantee it, let alone the extra spur of learning almost daily how much the rich and powerful have been taking for themselves.

Envy is also built into the modern belief in competition as an essential spur to success. What drives competition save some level of envy of the winners? And if envy can be a positive motivator in some cases, as it can, mental health statistics and reports also point in a different direction, showing how envy can become the catalyst that leads to depression, resentment, malice and deep-seated negativity. Competition works for the winners. Envy has least impact on those who already ‘have it all’. For the rest, it’s usually negative in the extreme.

Envy isn’t about others. It’s about you.

The underlying energy around envy is twofold: both wanting what others have and dwelling on what you suspect may be wrong with you. It’s a place smelling of self-loathing and self-pity. It’s a spur to feeling ‘less than’ and focusing on what you don’t have. Lack attracts lack. Caught up in a downward spiral of envy, you’re steadily moving backwards, sowing more seeds of doubt about your real worth.

The corrosive power of envy comes from this accompanying sense of deficiency. Like an ulcer, it eats away at you. It runs your life and builds frustration. It warps your perspective, making you want to ‘get even’ with anyone who even seems to have more than you. It is completely self-destructive. In the throes of envy, you either obsess about ways to prop up your ego, or plan how to denigrate others for having what you imagine you ought to have too. Either way, it’s a lose:lose proposition.

Envy is never, never really about the other person. It’s about you and your own sense of self-criticism and failure. Few of us realize we are our own target when it comes to envy, but it’s true. Only the person who believes, deep down, that he or she is a failure will be envious of others. Only the loser wastes time imagining how it would feel to see the winner knocked off that long-for pedestal.

People who are taken over by envy spend much of their time gossiping, bullying, spreading nasty rumors or quietly reveling in others’ mistakes. Secretly, they want others to fail because they imagine this will make them feel better about themselves. Envy quickly erodes relationships, eating away at intimacy, openness and connection. How can you deal fairly with others if you are simultaneously plotting how to ‘bring them down a peg or two’?

The antidotes to envy

1. The first step in finding a way out of envy is to admit what you feel. See it for what it is, without judging yourself for feeling envious.
2. The next step is to choose to eliminate or reduce your distraction with what others have. That’s a choice. If you continue to fill your mind with thoughts of what you lack, there’s no room for feelings of self-worth or self-value. They’re still there, of course, but you have covered them over with all that envy. Rather than being caught up in all the depression, hopelessness and worthlessness that accompany envy, your choice is to move towards letting go of them.
3. Next you need to make an honest and conscious effort to explore your intrinsic self-worth. If you stop beating yourself up, you can begin to access some inner self-esteem. This involves promoting positivity, self-discipline and compassion for yourself.
4. As you consciously choose to let go of the feelings of envy, take up instead a sense of adventure and curiosity. Begin to explore new possibility and opportunity for your life. If your mind gets in the way with sour judgments and criticisms, recognize them for what they are—just thoughts—and allow them to float by like the clouds on a windy day.
5. Focus on yourself and be curious about what arises. Don’t judge or rule anything out. When a nugget of information that seems important arises, write it down and return to your reflection.
6. When you feel complete with each session of reflection, explore what you discovered and look objectively at the potential it offers. Make a list of ‘baby steps’ you can take to make it reality. What might you need to do next? Whom might you need to talk with? What skill might you need to develop? What knowledge or information might you need to gather?
7. Finally, organize the action steps, prioritize and schedule them and begin your journey into the future.

You can decide not to be envious or jealous. It is a choice. If you are free of envy, you will find the control that your negative feelings had on you is released. You can spend your time creating more possibility, hope, optimism and self-worth. From this place of well being and positive esteem, you can move your life forward with a sense of power and freedom, finally unencumbered by the dead weight of envy.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• Whom do you envy? Whom do you privately criticize, make fun of, slander, resent, act maliciously towards or feel insecure around?
• Do you constantly put yourself down? Do you often find yourself throwing “pity parties” for yourself? How does this make you feel?
• Do you find it hard to compliment or praise people? Is it easy or challenging for you to empathize with them?
• Do you feel others are better than you? Do you ever feel fake, that your life is a facade?
• Do you have a strong need to be seen, appreciated and admired?
• Do you make up stories to justify your envy and your envious behavior?
• Can you visualize a life without envy?

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Technorati Tags: envy, jealousy, malice, low self-worth, self-loathing, undermining others, putting people down, putting yourself down