Things Add Up

A colleague said to me recently that our leadership goal should be to allow people to experience joy and to flourish. They were not my words, but this is an accurate reflection of how I feel about the world of work. My job is part problem solving, understanding technical detail and technology, and also participating in effective business decision making. But rising above that job description criteria is a more deeply felt personal need and driving belief, that the more space we make in the workplace for people to feel loved, to experience joy, and to create and have fun, the more likely we all are to be successful.

The salvation of man is through love and in love -Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Hold things lightly

Everything we think and feel has a need to be recognized. Feeling angry or resentful, mournful, or even depressed is not a failure. It is not something we benefit from hiding away and pretending it isn’t real. But there is a vitally important difference between experiencing our emotions and acting them out. It’s something I’ve spoken of before; the need to cultivate a space between the events that occur in our lives and actions we choose to take. 

Mentally this is akin to the strength and at times the desperation with which we hold on to the judgements we attach to situations and the actions of others. When we do not have enough space in which to feel without judging or to abstain from reacting, we will cling to the subsequent thoughts and actions we generate. We can become dependent on that justification to avoid the shame of having to look back at how we have chosen to view others or what we have inflicted upon them which in turn creates a need to be righteous in some way. 

When we are able to hold everything more lightly, our sense of being wronged will fade. It is always possible to see things in a kinder light; to be good humored and even-tempered regardless of the kind of provocation we may have imagined. This is what the ‘space’ between event and response makes possible; to accept everything as it is, to be absorbed and present in what is happening right now, and not be unduly influenced by what our past experiences push us into thinking, or what our imagination engineered future drags us toward.

This story from an old Cherokee to his grandson springs to mind:

“My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth.”

The boy thought about it, and asked, “grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied,

“The one you feed.”

Self-acceptance and self-compassion

We need to feel compassion for ourselves, because without it we can never forgive and heal from the mistakes we will inevitably make. This is not a process of repeatedly telling yourself that you were right and everyone else was wrong; about pretending the mistake was not ours. It is about replacing blame and shame (those twisted rhyming cousins) with a determination to amend and improve.

The first steps in that process must be the acknowledgement that the events have happened, that they cannot be changed, and that the world continues to spin despite all our conscious or unconscious efforts to knock it from its axis.

Acceptance is our way of letting go

Acceptance is our way of letting go. It is about relinquishing the control we never actually had over the outcomes and understanding that our opportunity to control the actions that contributed to the undesirable result is now in the past. Acceptance allows us to live in the ‘now’ using the knowledge of the past to steer us away from repetition rather than holding us frozen with fear in a negative feedback pattern.

Our ills and troubles can accumulate into insurmountable challenges if we let them. My suggestion instead is that you perform a small retrospective each day, writing or speaking the actions you took that could have been better. Then make a plan to heal any pain you may have caused others, extend the same kindness to yourself, and propose an experiment to improve your handling of future situations. In this way the small kindnesses you make space for will also add up as will each tiny step towards a better habit of living. 

I have a meditation I practice and have shared with others, which involves recalling your past self, the child you once were. When you are faced with that small child whose errors are really part of the learning process, the wiser future version of yourself is easily able to forgive and to help that child feel loved and unafraid. The point of this meditation is that if you could extend that grace to a small child, you could perhaps see that you are still on a path of learning, that you are yet to be complete.    

“In the end, only three things matter:

How much you loved,

how gently you lived,

and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

Prince Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

Life, work, love, breath: all can have patterns that advance, or which hold us back. Even when we may feel that circumstance controls us, or others constrain our freedom, we retain the choice to refrain from judgement. There is so much outside of our control, and yet the most important things of all are always freely given and only we can give them away: our ability to think and the actions we choose to take.

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About the Author:

KYLE RICHARDSON

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