Giving too much weight to feelings can stop you cold on the journey towards happiness
 

Have you ever told yourself something must be right because that’s how it feels? Or that you were correct to avoid an opportunity because it “just felt wrong?” Such emotional reasoning is very common. It’s based on assuming that your emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. Yet emotion is a poor guide to the truth.

People’s emotions are driven by many factors, including their state of health, their digestion and external influences from TV shows to magazines and chance encounters with others. We want some thoughts to be true because they feel so good. We want others to be wrong because we fear them so much. Why are people easily ripped off by slick operators? Because they so want the deal to be as good as they hope it is that they shut their minds to the evidence pointing the other way.

Emotions are natural and understandable, but they provide little or no useful information about the objective truth or falsehood of whatever triggers them.

When emotions are in control

Emotional reasoning leads to us seeing our world though a distorting mirror. Hope makes the good parts appear better then they are, while fear makes the bad bits look more threatening and terrible. Instead of getting an objective view, we oscillate between unreasonable levels of hope and equally unsupported feelings of despair. That’s why the world’s stock markets are bouncing around on a daily basis.

‘All-or-nothing’ thinking is a very common problem of emotional reasoning, especially today. If people tell themselves they won’t do something unless they can do it really well, they’re guilty of ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking—a form of temperamental perfectionism. When they say that, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” they’re doing the same thing. They’re indulging in melodrama. Making statements like that sounds so tough and dramatic that they miss the utter idiocy behind it.

People who think that way rarely stick with anything that it doesn’t bring them instant success. Their ‘all-or-nothing’ temperament cannot cope with the long-term nature of reality. Making significant change is a slow process, calling for patience and willingness to accept you’re not going to shine at any new approach for quite a while and pain often precedes gain. No one who starts something new does it well at first. That only comes later—often much later. Few new ideas bring instant rewards. But since these people are too impatient to hang on until things begin to work, they most often end up with nothing.

Emotional mind-reading

Mind-reading is another frequent expression of emotional reasoning. Your boss has been down on you all day, so you’re feeling pretty pissed off. About half-an-hour before it’s time to leave, she comes to your desk and slaps down a pile of papers. “I’m too busy to cope with these,” she says, “but they’re urgent. Read them through and give me a one or two page summary by the morning.” Then she walks away.

As the anger rises, your emotions turn you into a mind-reader. You tell yourself she did this deliberately to upset you. It’s obvious she dislikes you and enjoys causing you as much grief as she can. In fact, your mind-reading ability tells you, she’s trying to force you to leave—probably to save costs, so she can look good to her boss.

Is any of this true? Who knows? There could be a dozen or more other explanations for her actions. Do you consider them? Probably not. Your emotions fasten on the explanation that suits your mood of the moment, ignoring the fact that it’s all based on nothing more than supposition and mind-reading. So you go home late, spend a miserable evening fuming at your boss’s insensitivity, sleep badly and arrive for work next morning primed to explode at the slightest provocation.

Does this help you? Does your boss even notice? If she does, the chances are she’ll do some mind-reading of her own and attribute what she sees to your “constant bad temper” or “clear inability to cope with pressure.” Most breakdowns in work-based and other relationships are based on imaginary explanations of superficially observed behavior.

Emotional ‘guilt trips’

Then there are the ‘guilt trips’ that often follow outbursts based on emotional reasoning. You tell yourself you shouldn’t behave like that. That a colleague’s tantrums or laziness shouldn’t get to you. You should be able to cope better with deadlines. You really ought to be more adult about petty irritations by your age.

Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t, but there’s no need for guilt feelings in either case. If it’s true you could do better, do it. If it wasn’t anything to do with you—your colleague really is a lazy, egotistical bum—forget it and move on. Guilt is the most pointless of emotions.

Living in a ‘me-centered’ universe

The underlying problem behind nearly all emotional reasoning is living in an egotistical, ‘me-centered’ universe. Everything that happens is assumed to be aimed at you, personally. The whole of creation is centered on your concerns and needs.

The truth is that we are all totally insignificant and the universe does what it does with no reference to us, good or bad. The traffic-lights fail and make you late for work. Was that aimed at you? Hardly. Hundreds of other people suffered just as much inconvenience—maybe far more. You get in a muddle over an important presentation and someone sniggers. Are they delighted you made a mess? Possibly, but it’s more likely they’re expressing their relief it wasn’t them screwing up this time.

A cure for emotional reasoning

Emotional reasoning is rarely useful and frequently causes you additional and unnecessary pain. The cure is to stand back and view situations dispassionately; to try to see reality as it is, unaffected by your current fears or wishes.

Many of your greatest triumphs were due mostly to chance—but so were most of your worst disasters. Enjoy the positive times and don’t let the negative ones get you down. The world has enough ups and downs for everyone, without you manufacturing more by letting your mind confuse emotion with reason.

The bad news is this won’t support the false feelings of euphoria when something goes well and you decide the universe is on your side after all. The good news is that it will cut your ego down to size and stop you accepting responsibility for negative events that had nothing whatsoever to do with you. The best news of all is that thinking this way will set you free: free of pointless guilt, self-inflicted misery and negative emotions driven by nothing more than your fearful imagination.

Technorati Tags: emotional reasoning, happiness, overcoming fears, seeing things clearly, objective reasoning, freedom from guilt, coping with negative emotions, building self-esteem, feeling good about yourself

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Should you care what other people think of your job?
 

Photo: Kevin Rosseel   

Walking down a street in a Tokyo commercial district some years ago, I passed one of the innumerable company buildings as the early-evening rush home was beginning. In the lobby of the building, two portly, middle-aged men in vaguely military uniforms were standing at attention facing one another.

As far as I could make out, one of them was saying “Everything is in good shape; I entrust the safety of the building to your care.” Then they snapped each other a smart salute, before the day shift man went home.

A typical western reaction might well be pity, mixed with a little contempt. Imagine taking a job like a night security-guard seriously: poorly paid, little status, and, in a part of Tokyo where hardly anyone lived and there was almost no crime, apart from the odd drunk urinating against a window.

Does value only lie in the eye of the beholder?

And yet, and yet. It’s a strange thing that, in our society, we frequently judge our jobs not by what we think of them, but what others think . A ‘good’ job is one that impresses others with its status, its baubles (travel, car, expense account, large office) and, most of all, with the amount of money it pays. We are taught that rewards are primarily external to the job itself; that job satisfaction does not really matter that much in comparison; and that we may well have to put up with jobs we dislike, if they pay well or have other advantages.

At work too, superiors typically assess our value by external factors: how much money we make for a company; how quickly we get rid of clients at call-centers; what percentage of queries are answered in such-and-such a time.

This article isn’t another kick aimed at the twitching corpse of quantitative measures of performance. It’s a expression of bemusement that organizations today pay so little attention to the satisfaction that people get from their jobs. Somewhere in a Powerpoint presentation somewhere there may be something about ‘excellence’—and no doubt somebody has been heard to say at least once that “people are our most important asset”—yet it’s a shame that organizations don’t behave as though either were true; especially since happy organizations where people are fulfilled in what they do are much more successful and, in the case of the private sector, more profitable.

Whose line is it anyway?

Wait a moment. Don’t you have some choice in this? Why should you let others decide how important your jobs is? In the end, surely it’s what you think that’s important.

Many people do hard, unlovely, even dangerous jobs, which are poorly paid and have low status. But we’d be in trouble without coal miners, deep sea fishermen and those who get up at 4.00 AM every day to pilot the planes and drive the trains and deliver the mail. You may think being a cleaner in a hospital is about as low-status a profession as you can get, a job only fit for the least able workers and illegal immigrants, but millions of people around the world would die every year in hospitals without someone to remove the dirt and the germs.

Where value really lies

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what others think of your job, or even whether you yourself think it’s important. What matters is how you approach it.

A good organization encourages you to have pride in the quality of what you do. Even in a bad organization, there’s nothing that stops you developing that pride yourself.

You can do this best by a single-minded concentration on every detail of the job. It’s what great athletes have apparently always done; it’s also at the root of all the Zen disciplines, which take mundane tasks, like making tea, and ritualise them into art forms. It’s a way of giving importance and dignity to everything you do, and therefore to yourself as well—like the two security guards I watched that evening in Tokyo.

Meditation at work

Concentrating on carrying out every task as well as you possibly can produces something else too: a type of active meditation, where you lose consciousness of yourself and of your ego in your application to the task in hand. It’s what the psychologist Mihaily Csikszentmihalyi called “Flow”, although it’s been known to Buddhists and others for thousands of years.

Most of us experience it occasionally in our work or in our private lives. With me, it happens sometimes when I’m lecturing. Often it’s an effort to keep the attention of the audience, but sometimes everything clicks and I lose consciousness of everything except what I’m doing. The words come easily. I scarcely glance at my notes. I know I will finish within a minute or two of my allotted time, even without looking at my watch.

“Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,” wrote the English religious poet George Herbert, “makes that and the action fine.” Whether you’re sweeping a room, cleaning a hospital or acting as a night security guard, you have the choice of doing an average job or doing the best job you possibly can.

Whenever you do the best job you can, always—not for money or to impress others, but because it matters to you—you’ll be taking a few more essential steps in the direction of being happier at work.

Technorati Tags: happiness at work, doing a good job, excellence, building self-esteem, self-worth, building value,

Is your definition yours or are you trying to live up to some else’s idea?
 

If you Google “success”, you’ll come up with some 400,000,000 hits. Google “success quotations” and you’ll find 11,400. “Success in life”, and you’ll have 1,100,000 options from which to choose.

It seems that people love success quotes. I’ve selected a few. Perhaps you might be curious about what they have in common:

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” —Bob Dylan

“Getting what you go after is success; liking it while you are getting it is happiness.” —Anonymous

Does success have common factors?

The only common factor in most quotations about success is that they’re all someone else’s notion of what success is—or ought to be.

I often find people walking around with someone else’s neat, cool, pithy success definition swimming in their mind. It’s a nice idea, but at 9:00 Monday morning, when they’re mired in their own mis-alignment, confusion, self-doubt and mis-direction, they’re still attempting to gain “success” by mimicking another’s dream. If they fail, it’s against someone else’s definition. Even if they succeed, that’s still true.

How can you feel good if your triumphs are not your own? Why should you feel bad if your disasters aren’t your own either? Surely true success must be against your own definition of what works for you? Anything else is synthetic.

The most important tool for success is deep reflection, which many cannot or will not undertake. As a result, they live a life of indecision and dis-harmony, with little or no alignment between what they say, feel, think and do.

Isn’t success all about results?

A good many people today do define success as “results”. But getting results without learning something about yourself leads to an incomplete and often unsuccessful life. Doing alone (i.e. getting results) without being who and what you need to be is not a solid formula for success—the “successful” Bernie Ebbers of Enron and all the others who ended up in ignominy and infamy are testaments to this fact.

Many who accomplish results without personal growth wonder why they still don’t feel alive and fulfilled; why they don’t experience good health, energy and full enthusiasm for life; why they lack fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability.

How can you claim to be successful if you don’t have well-being and peace of mind along with those longed-for results? Did you even choose which results count?

Washed away by events

The idea of success being equal to external results makes it ephemeral. Bad times, like those we have today, can come along without notice and obliterate everything you’ve made your measure of a successful life—just as if you wrote the word “success” in the sand on the beach and it was wiped out by an incoming a wave.

Some natural disaster, a health issue, job loss, divorce, accident, old age, bank failure—any of these can destroy success for many people. Yet others weather such ‘disasters’ and still keep their equilibrium. Perhaps the secret of true success can be glimpsed in discerning the difference.

Making your own success

There’s success and there’s success: the one based on external factors and subject to constant insecurity; the other internal and far more resistant to bad times.

Truly being successful requires a conscious exploration of what success means to you—creating your own quote. Unless you take the time to define success for yourself, there’s a good chance someone else is defining success for you. Is that OK?. Can you live up to something that you didn’t really choose for yourself? If you lack you own success quotation, perhaps today is the ideal time to begin to create one.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• Do you consider yourself successful? How did you come to be a “success?”
• What are the criteria you are using? Are they yours or taken from someone else?
• Do you ever feel empty or unfulfilled even though you are a success? If so, why do you think that’s so?
• How much of your life is spent doing what you think you should do as opposed to doing what you want to do?
• Do you find meaning, fulfillment and happiness in your life? Do you have fun? If not, why not?

“Even the most daring and accomplished people have undergone tremendous difficulty. In fact, the more successful they became, the more they attributed their success to the lessons learned during their most difficult times. Adversity is our teacher. When we view adversity as a guide towards greater inner growth, we will then learn to accept the wisdom our soul came into this life to learn.” —Barbara Rose

Technorati Tags: success, fulfillment, happiness, fun, enjoyment, inner growth

Maybe it’s high time to make a change . . . for everyone’s sake
 

When it comes to jobs, far too many people are in a state of more-or-less comfortable misery. This is the state wherein, according to Daniel Johnston’s book Lessons for Living: Simple Solutions for Life’s Problems, “You’re miserable, but you have gotten used to it.”

We all know the feeling of sticking with something beyond its productive benefit or purpose—whether it’s an old pair of jeans, or shoes, or a relationship that you just keep on giving “just one more chance”. What causes us to knowingly stay in situations or hang on to things we know we ought not to?

The answer to this question is the same as to why most people are still in jobs that offer no true satisfaction.

For many people, it feels easier to stick with an unhappy known than to attempt to find a better place in the unknown. Fear of the unknown holds them in jobs that they don’t enjoy, in relationships that aren’t working, and prevents them from living a better, happier life. Granted, there are risks associated with change, but that doesn’t mean you should fall victim to the false notion that there are no risks in not changing. In fact, the risks of inaction often far outweigh the risks of doing something new.

Job satisfaction is falling widely

What’s interesting to note about job satisfaction levels in recent years is that they are declining across the board, regardless of age, income or even residence. Workers below the age of 25 have over a 60% dissatisfaction rate, the worst level since the inception of The Conference Board job satisfaction survey. While age, money and geography can make a difference in these survey results, people overall are simply less and less happy in their jobs.

Clearly something has to change. Is it the work itself? Is it specific company policies? Is it compensation and/or benefits? Personally, I believe that changes in these things could have short-term impacts on job satisfaction. But, for a long-term solution to this problem, what has to change is employee attitudes and expectations.

I think people must modify their personal definition of what “satisfaction” from a job actually means. For example, as younger workers enter a new position, they’re excited by the nature and meaning of the work itself. As they advance in their careers, however, and rise in the organizational chart of their company, they get further and further from the job itself and assume more responsibility for management of the work process.

If the work itself is what they enjoyed most, they may find the change to being a supervisor robs them of much of their job satisfaction. Too often, this dynamic leads a manager to micro-manage—to try to stay involved in ‘doing’ instead of leading—thus aggravating those beneath them and causing voids in the management process they ought to be focusing on. If this process continues, they eventually lose interest in their jobs, their employees become increasingly dissatisfied and the overall work environment becomes laden with negativity and frustration.

A fresh perspective

If people could shift their definition of what constitutes satisfaction, and normalize their expectations about their jobs, overall job satisfaction levels would likely increase.

I have learned in my professional years to derive satisfaction less from doing the day-to-day work itself and more from helping others and motivating teams to get the work completed on their own. Mostly what I do today is manage the overall team outcomes and future directions. Being able to derive satisfaction from helping others advance their careers and managing the expectations of appropriate stakeholders required a major shift in my perspective.

Of course this wasn’t always easy. I had to learn some hard lessons along the way. However, I’ve been able, gradually, to relish this experience and successfully make the mental shift to re-define satisfaction for myself.

Don’t allow yourself to fall prey to comfortable misery within your career. Not only does doing so make for many unhappy days in your job and life, it serves no productive purpose for your company either. Instead, try to leverage your power to shift your thinking about what satisfies you. To be sure, sometimes a job change is the right decision, but it could be that making a mental pivot is all that is required.

Technorati Tags: change, risk-taking, self-improvement, leadership, developing others, not settling for second best

Most people ignore more options that they recognize
 

One of the many oddities about the human race is our reluctance to deal with options. We don’t like having too many choices. It makes us anxious. Every alternative means an opportunity for messing things up. Many of us are more concerned about not being wrong than we are about being right. That’s why we let our habits narrow down the alternatives to one or two familiar ones. It’s much less stressful.

If you want to transform your life, the first step is to re-establish conscious choice in place of all those automatic, habitual decisions. This will give you back your ability to find fresh options to replace worn out habits; permanently increase your opportunities to learn; and free you from repeating past mistakes.

Beating the workplace blues isn’t a once-and-for-all action. It’s a way of living that will make everything you do more vibrant, more alive and more fun.

Think about your future with an open mind

What alternatives have you been ignoring? Which ones have you skipped over? You don’t have to follow them, but thinking about them sure beats rushing ahead blindly.

You have more options than you think. Whenever something happens, you have a choice about how to respond. No one can take that away.

Here are some areas where simple choices can transform your day:

• Try choosing to listen longer before giving a response. Most of us are too keen to talk and not willing to listen carefully enough before we do so. Better listening will save you from many screw-ups.
• Try never to take action when you’re feeling emotional. Step back and wait until you’ve calmed down. Anger, frustration, jealousy or revenge make poor advisers.
• Try seeing things from the other person’s point of view. It might look very different.
• Try to avoid making snap judgments. We’re all too eager to rush into deciding who’s right and who’s wrong. Do you like people making judgments about you? No? So why do it to them?
• Don’t tell yourself what you can’t do. As soon as you do this, it’ll be true. Try telling yourself it’s okay to try it and find out.
• Don’t take yourself so seriously! Mistakes aren’t the end of the world. They’re so common, anyone can make them. Just remember the person who never made a mistake, never made anything else.
• Don’t be a wimp! Be bold, try new things, take a few risks. That’s the only way to create a life worth living.
• Look at your unused options. It can be tough to think about what you haven’t done in the past that might help you transform your life in the future, but you may find some unused gems.

Many people find it really helpful to take an objective look at themselves and their past and present choices. You can do this too. Only you can change your life for the better. Only you can make it worse. It’s up to you.

Technorati Tags: choices, options, priorities, choosing a path, lifestyles, risk-taking, new opportunities

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Looking for life’s answers inside
 

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon around people with whom I work; many whom I only know as friends, colleagues or acquaintances. Several, now in mid-life, are exploring work-life issues around family, career, health, finances, relationships, and personal and professional growth and development.

There is a single thread that runs through their concerns: they are all seeking something. Some are seeking inner peace and tranquility. Others are looking for a way to create a solid foundation around which to grow and experience a true sense of family. Still others are looking for greater rewards, more achievement or wider recognition through their work. Just about every one of them has decided the goals they thought were important, the dreams they held as sacrosanct, the “gold ring” they were chasing, just doesn’t do it for them any more. They’re no longer experiencing fun, pleasure, peace or joy. They’ve decided they need a new path to happiness.

Entering a new stage of life

The ‘happiness’ these people thought they wanted is no longer palatable. It’s been replaced by a nagging sense of boredom and malaise; they are experiencing more sadness, frustration or emptiness. They find themselves at a life stage where they need to find something to replace what they thought were their goals.

What they’re discovering is that their egos got in the way earlier on in life. The expensive cars, homes and toys don’t do it for them any more; nor do the exotic trips, the younger women, trophy wives or toy-boys; not even the plastic surgeries, the crash diets, the wrinkle-free creams and non-stop shopping. Like all the other artificial means they thought would boost their sense of self, these too have failed to deliver what they promised.

Since their attempts to cover over increasing age artificially in order to impress their circle have done nothing, they have finally reached this place of seeking—knowing now that they need to address the problem, not the symptoms, but still not sure how to do it.

Shifting perspective

After spending all those years, dollars and energy on primping their outside, what these people are starting to find is that what they’re looking for is on the inside.

Life dealt some of them a challenging hand: they faced issues with careers, spouses, children, health and finances. That’s why so many are sad and angry. Now they’ve reached mid-life full of guilt and regret, disappointed and disheartened by what little they have managed to achieve by following conventional paths. They’re at the point where they are starting to feel a need to explore their legacy, many for the first time. What do they want to leave to the planet? What is it people will say about them at their funeral? What’s their epitaph?

The good news is this can at last make them conscious, willing and able to look back productively, seeing beyond the disappointment to learn from their experiences and choices. Maybe those choices didn’t produce the life experiences they had hoped for. Nevertheless, from a deeper exploration, wisdom can bubble up, along with hope and optimism.

Going within

For everyone in this position, seeking and renewal start on the inside, with an open, honest and self-responsible exploration of “Who am I?” and “What am I?”— all seen from this inner place.

Any inner journey like this can serve you well. You can find out what you have learned and what lessons are still there for you to see. You can discover what will support you to go forward; what you have learned about dysfunctional relationships, abusive partners and toxic friends—plus your own addictions. What you have learned about you as a result of all those work-life choices you made.

It’s only at this point that you will begin to realize the gift you’re receiving: the gift of being able to be conscious and honest about where you’re choosing to go. It’s likely that will be a new direction. One that will, hopefully, result in a life (not a lifestyle) based on dignity, harmony and inner peace. A place to find true self-worth and self-esteem—maybe for the first time.

Here are some questions to help with the process:

• How would you answer the question, “Who am I?” Do you have any idea of what your legacy might be? If not, do you care about your legacy?
• What do you now want out of life? What qualities do you want your life to represent most? Why are you on the planet?
• Where are you in your life and why are you there? Would you say you’re living your life or trying to follow some kind of lifestyle? Do you know the difference?
• Do you spend much of your time regretting past life-work choices? Do you feel like a victim? Do you find yourself being overtly or covertly angry? Why? What will change this?
• What brings you real happiness and joy? How often do you experience that? What would help you feel that way more often?
• Do you journal or do deep exploratory or reflective work on your life and choices? If so, what have you seen about yourself? If not, why not?

“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”
~ P.D. Ospensky

Technorati Tags: mid-life crisis, life choices, choosing a life, setting life priorities, establishing a legacy, dealing with regret

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Can organizations ever give up their attachment to money?
 

“Financier leaving your little room/where the money is made but not spent,” wrote the poet W.H. Auden, “the game is up for you and for the others.” Auden’s warning to a sick society, written just after the 1929 Wall St crash, was very nearly fulfilled. Only the massive rearmament and mobilization of the late 1930s and the Second World War saved the financial system of the day from destruction.

And now, here we are again. The western economy may have collapsed completely by the time you read this (in which case you may not be reading it all); but, even if things don’t get quite that bad, it’s obvious that the game is up, not just for much of the finance industry, but for an entire philosophy of management and leadership—borrowed ultimately from that industry—which tries to motivate people through greed.

Incentives to be stupid

I wrote in an earlier post about the dangers of “monetizing” organizations: trying to motivate people by giving them financial incentives to do things. There’s a lot of agreement now that this approach can hurt organizations. Until the last few weeks, though, I don’t think anyone had appreciated quite how quickly it could completely destroy them.

The disappearance of the largest banks in the United States turns out, on examination, to be related to quite small and technical changes in the rules governing how much money they were allowed to borrow. Give somebody an incentive to be stupid and they will be stupid. Give somebody a large incentive to be stupid—like allowing them to borrow thirty times the capital of their bank to gamble with—and they will be extra-stupid. What are we going to do about this?

Obviously, different types of organizations will always have different relationships with money: a merchant bank and a school will never look at financial incentives in quite the same way. But it’s clear that the time has come to think again about a basic question: what effect does offering financial incentives to the workforce have on how an organization works? It used to be argued that organizations would benefit because people were motivated by more money to work harder. In fact, it turns out that people simply do more of what brings them extra money, at the expense of what doesn’t, even if the latter is actually more important.

Why is money supposed to motivate people?

It can’t be because people value money as money—like a miser, dripping gold coins through his fingers in a darkened cellar. That would be pathological. Presumably it’s because of what money is supposed to bring: status, freedom, and, most of all possessions. These things are supposed to make us happy. And the purpose of earning money is ultimately to be happy . . . Isn’t it?

At this point, we should remember that Buddhists have always argued that it’s precisely this hunger for the things that money is able to buy—“attachment” as it’s called—which is at the root of unhappiness. [Navajo myth refers to evil and witchcraft as "the way to make money."—Editor] True happiness comes from letting these attachments go. Some people interpret this as giving up all your possessions and going to live in a wooden hut in the forest. That can work in certain cases, but it’s not money or what money can buy which is the problem, but rather our relationship with these things. Too often, we don’t own these possessions: they own us.

Rethinking our relationship with money

The cure for this problem is to rethink our relationship with money—not just as individuals, but as leaders and members of organizations. For some years now, organizations have tried to motivate people by extrinsic rewards—money, status and so forth—rather than the intrinsic rewards of the job itself. As a result, people have come to measure their worth by their salary, the size of their office or the type of car they have been given. Yet, as Buddhists have long pointed out, unlike job satisfaction, extrinsic rewards can never be big enough to make us satisfied forever. There’s always more money, a bigger office, a better car. No wonder so many people in organizations today are rich and still unhappy.

Workers in organizations take their cues from the top. A good start would be a rigorous programme to ban every single financial incentive. Then, when the attachment to money and status has been flushed out of the system, you can start building a new system in which money is just a way of translating work into the means of living; and status comes not from the size of your salary, you office or your car, but the respect of your peers.

Organisations which hope to survive will have to move in this direction anyway. The sooner they start doing it the better. As Auden wrote in the same poem: “it is later than you think”.

Technorati Tags: motivation, rewards, monetary rewards, incentives, relationship with money, status, unexpected consequences

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In what ways does your working life need ‘fixing’?
 

Is the pursuit of happiness the main cause of your problems and misery?

Our modern world is too attached to options, choices and preferences. Everything is ‘customized’ to your wishes—or can be, if you have the means to pay. People are obsessed with ‘having it all’—whatever ‘it’ is and however likely or unlikely it may be that they can ‘have’ it.

This goes well beyond material possessions. People demand to ‘have’ certain life experiences and emotional states. They want to ‘have’ a perfect life, perfect relationships, a perfect career—plus extensive wealth, mind-blowing sex on demand, perfect feelings of joy and happiness all the time and complete freedom from the ‘bad stuff’.

When this doesn’t come about—and how would it?—such people believe they and their lives are broken in some way. Now they want a cure—preferably one that is instant, low-cost, and requires little or no effort. Is it any wonder the world is full of snake-oil salespeople selling personal development and lifestyle ‘cures’ for lots of money? Read the full story

Never confuse aspirations with strategy

 
I had a conversation with a colleague recently about the relationship between having a dream and actualizing it. The quintessential self-help book these days that pursues this notion to an extreme is The Secret. It promises that if you follow the suggestions within, you can pretty much ‘have it all’.

The essence of The Secret is to have a vision, a dream—anything from winning the Super Bowl, to winning the lottery, or finding a parking space at Starbucks the second you arrive. All you need to succeed is to hold the dream and stay focused on it. Believing in the belief itself is the key to success.

That’s the illusion and essential fallacy within The Secret, indeed within all cult-like thinking. The reality is that dreaming is not a strategy for success—nor is hope or willpower. If dreaming and visioning alone were sufficient, everyone who ‘dreams big’ would realize their dreams. Few ever do. Read the full story

Be careful where you place your focus and attention. Whatever you focus on will grow more prominent and more present to your mind.

If, like many people, you focus mostly on what you haven’t got, what you haven’t done, and how your life doesn’t match your hopes and dreams, those negatives can easily come to dominate your thinking. Not only will this depress you, it will block your way towards all the things you do want to achieve.

Some people believe you ‘program’ your unconscious mind to concentrate on ways to bring you more of whatever you’re focusing on most. I’m very unsure about this as an actual mechanism, but it certainly reflects the way things can seem. More likely, amidst the mass of more or less random events that come along, your mind is trained to pick out the ones that match the areas where you habitually pay most attention. If you’ve developed a deficit-based outlook (what you don’t have or do), that’s what you’ll notice first. Then, to the extent that your words and actions produce consequences, these will be negative as well. Read the full story