What does work mean for you? Is it primarily a paycheck, a means to an end for survival’s sake? Does it give you social status, a life apart from your home life that creates a sense of yourself in relationship to the larger world? Are you competitive, your sense of meaning derived from victory over others, excellence in your field, promotion up a hierarchy of rungs in your chosen profession? The meaning of work is essentially subjective, contextual, and fluid.
Some sense of meaning is vital to being happy at work. Most of us want to feel that what we do matters, somehow; that we do it with an open heart, an intention to connect with others, to improve something in this world, to be part of the solution, even in some minor way, rather than be a part of the problem.
With all the time we put into work, it seems fair to expect some fulfillment in return. Our satisfaction, as well as a sense of meaning, may arise from any number of directions. The tasks we perform may be significant to us if we’re lucky enough to do what we love for a living. We can also simply find meaning in being gainfully employed and capable of supporting ourselves. The meaning of work may come from the relationships we enjoy in the workplace or from promoting goodness in the world. Finally, we may derive meaning from working with adversity on the job, using work as a spiritual practice to work “against the grain,” freeing ourselves inwardly in less than ideal situations.
We tend to have varied orientations toward our work. Are we doing it for a position and a paycheck? Are we identifying our work as a profession? Are we passionate about what we’re doing? Depending on our predominant sense of why we are working, the things that give us fulfillment will vary. In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski at the University of Michigan and her collaborators released a study on the different ways in which we experience work, breaking it down into three categories:
As a job. As a career. As a calling.
If you work out of necessity at a job that you wouldn’t choose, the financial rewards of the position might hold more appeal than anything else and have the greatest impact on whether you stay or go. Many people work for the money, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There can be great moral satisfaction in earning your own way in the world, being self-reliant, gainfully dutiful. Working to support yourself is not to say that work can’t also be pleasurable, whether or not you have the ideal job. But for people who work to live, rather than live to work, searching for meaning in the tasks you perform can seem superfluous, if not downright silly.
If you see your work as a profession, you may find satisfaction or pleasure in the work itself, but the promotions, reputation, and opportunities to further your career are part and parcel of the meaning of your job. Individual positions are often seen as stepping-stones to future glory, a defined goal in the hierarchy of your chosen field. Your status or power at work is likely to have an influence on your level of satisfaction. And if you see your work as a calling, if you do what you do because of passion—whether or not you’re getting rich or furthering your reputation—the meaning of your work will be in the doing. Healing the sick, painting a canvas, being a public schoolteacher, may be enough in itself to make your work life meaningful. It’s not surprising to learn that people who work from their passion, and earn a livable wage, report the greatest work satisfaction.
That passion can take root in us from many different sources. I remember sitting in the majestic, imposing courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court watching my friend David Ferleger argue a case he had first filed at the Federal Courthouse in Pennsylvania two years out of law school. The case was Haldeman v. Pennhurst State School and Hospital, and contended that conditions in the state school were inhumane and dangerous and that developmentally disabled patients in the care of the state had a constitutional right to appropriate care and education. I knew that David’s parents were Holocaust survivors and that part of his intense concern with people who were treated as less than equal came out of his personal background.
Sometimes a calling comes to us when we’re not expecting it. Leslie Booker describes how one came to her. “I was doing event coordination for a New Age holistic center after leaving the fashion industry. I met everyone who was on the circuit, and my mentor, Stan Grier, would say to me almost weekly, ‘You should really teach for the Lineage Project.’ The Lineage Project is a nonprofit that brings awareness-based practices like yoga and meditation to incarcerated kids in New York City. ‘Why? I hate teenagers and I don’t teach yoga; why on earth would I ever work with them?’ I’d reply. It sounded like the one thing I would never do with my life!
“Stan, however, was the most patient and persuasive human being I’ve ever had the privilege to know. After about a year, I found myself in a yoga teacher training, not with the intention of teaching, but simply to deepen my understanding of my body and of the practice. Within a few months of completing my teacher training, I was teaching alongside Stan at a secured juvenile facility in the South Bronx.”
At that facility they worked with young women twelve to sixteen years old. As Leslie taught, and slowly watched the women learn to express vulnerability, comfort one another, and openly grieve instead of diverting that pain into rage, a lot fell into place for her, “That’s where I really understood what I was meant to do.”
Yet any job can be meaningful, or meaningless, depending on how we look at it. Most of us have known miserable “successful” people who resent their golden handcuffs, and delightful, compassionate, and insightful people who work at jobs we don’t normally associate with a calling, like housekeepers and cabdrivers. That cliché about having informed discussions of the intricacies of government policy with Washington, DC, cabdrivers often turns out to be true! Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. We can be purposefully helpful and attentive in conventionally trivial jobs and blasé-ineffectual in potentially world-changing positions.
I was once meeting some friends in San Francisco in order to attend several days of lectures by the Dalai Lama. I arrived at our hotel at night, tired, only to be told by the desk clerk there were no nonsmoking rooms left, even though I had requested one, and had called again to confirm my need for it. I have asthma, and I knew there was no way I could sleep in a room where someone had recently smoked without getting quite sick.
Exhausted by now, I went to the hotel restaurant to find my friends, to tell them I was going to start calling other hotels to try to find a room. The waitress, filling water glasses at the table, saw my distress and asked what was wrong. When she heard my story, she immediately went to get her manager, in charge of food service. They were both so kind! Even though they weren’t involved in room assignments, they promptly went to speak to the desk clerk. Before I knew it, a nonsmoking suite at the price of my original room opened up for me, complete with a fruit basket and an apology. The waitress and the food service manager didn’t have to do any of that, but it made a very big difference to me that they did.
The question is: Why did they do it? Was it for the simple satisfaction of doing a good deed? We are inwardly rewarded by being generous; in fact, altruism is linked to elevated levels of dopamine in the brain. We feel better physically when we help others. Or did their help stem from empathy? I may have looked upset and their kindness stemmed from my nonverbal call for help. The mystery of human kindness can be baffling. It is also a key to finding meaning at work. These lovely food service employees stepped outside the box of their given roles to help a distressed stranger. They acted as fellow human beings rather than just employees, and this made their jobs more meaningful in that moment. I could see how relieved they were, too, when that nonsmoking room materialized! You have opportunities every day to step beyond your role at work and act like a whole human being, offer a helping hand, learn the skill outside your scope of work, allow yourself to be helped by others. This will make your work life more humane and deeply fulfilling.
In cases where your job does not easily align with meaningful purpose, it’s still possible to use work as an opportunity for doing good. Maia Duerr, founder of the Liberation Life Project, talks about having a “liberation-based livelihood.” Maia recommends remembering your core intention and shaping its expression to the real circumstances you find yourself working in. Let’s say that your deepest intention in life is to be a healer but you’re working at a supermarket. If you do your job using the right frame of mind and focus on your positive intention, it is possible to be the healer you want to be while directing customers and bagging canned goods. As a healer working in a food store, you can greet every customer with kindness and compassion and bring that healing energy to your job. When your intention at work is to manifest the creative, proactive, most helpful and loving aspects of who you are—and what you care about—you can transform the most tedious work into an opportunity to help others, become more aware, and learn a lot about yourself. Each morning before you go to work, you can set your intention for the day. Don’t let it be simply task oriented, like, “I’m going to clean off my desk, finally!” or “After all this time, I’m going to reorganize those files!” but something bigger, and bolder like “I will try to treat everyone I encounter with respect” or “Even if I am very busy, I want to take the time to truly listen to anyone who approaches me” or “When I see myself slipping into judgment, I want to remind myself that everyone wants to be happy; we just all get misguided sometimes” or “Instead of smoking a cigarette or blowing up at colleagues, I’m going to find practical, better ways of dealing with stress.” Knowing and perhaps purifying our deeper intentions for our work becomes the basis for sensing what will bring us fulfillment.
Matt Hagebusch, owner of Peace Frog Carpet & Tile Cleaning, writes, “I returned to the States after five years living and teaching in Japan, jobless and with very little money. Other than a pizza delivery job, I was unable to find work. With hesitation, I got back into the carpet cleaning industry where I had worked when I was much younger.
“I tried to bring the practice of loving-kindness into every customer’s home, and I made it an intention to connect with every person I met. I searched for commonalities to discuss, like their dog, a piece of artwork, or travel experiences. Connecting with customers, leaving them smiling and happy, was not only my specialty, it was my personal policy.
“One early morning I went into an Indian gentleman’s home. He immediately started adding rooms to be cleaned that were not on his original order and seemed to expect me to clean them for free. He ordered me around like I was a disobedient child. Irritated, I told him that I would leave if he was going to be abusive. He wanted to speak to my boss, and I wanted to tell him to go jump in a lake! I decided to clean as fast as I could and get to my next job. I put in my ear buds, cranked up the music, and got to work.
“Keeping with my ‘no customer left unhappy’ policy I decided to try to find something we both could appreciate. I happened to be listening to music by Krishna Das, which is beautifully melodic Hindu chanting. I asked him if he could possibly tell me what the words mean in these songs. I handed him my iPod and watched his facial expression change from agitation to sweet reverie. Face beaming, he hurried into an adjoining room and closed the door behind him. He stayed behind the closed door for nearly thirty minutes. When he emerged, he was wiping tears from his eyes. He looked at me and said he was unhappy with his life and expressed his gratitude for reminding him of his long forgotten spiritual practice.”
Setting your intention is important everywhere and certainly in fields devoted to consciousness. Gina, the photographer and yoga teacher quoted in Chapter 5, has made this part of her daily practice. “When we’re feeling lonely, isolated, or overcome with the daily stress of living in a big city, where we can lose ‘connectedness’ to everyone around us and to ourselves, I try to remember that being kind to oneself is key. This kindness can then extend naturally to other people. What I have found helpful when encountering a student or coteacher who may be having an off day is to remember that we all want one basic thing and that is to be happy. What restores me is knowing that my practice not only makes me a happier person, but the happiness that comes from my practice extends outward to everyone. Doing my work in a grounded way helps me experience the world and the people around me as the gifts they are.”
When we lose our right intention—the inner spark of motivation for the work we once may have loved—our work lives can sour and job performance flatten. While intention is cultivated from within, we cannot help but be affected by attitudes in the workplace. Research shows that supervisor mindfulness has significant impact on employee performance and well-being. When leaders and supervisors show higher levels of mindfulness, employees show greater well-being and higher performance—“with less emotional exhaustion and a more contented sense of their own work-life balance.” Leaders who are fully present when interacting with their subordinates get a better understanding of their employees’ needs, increasing support and creating a sense of interpersonal fairness.
When the intention of the boss is to make us “feel heard,” we are prompted to be better workers. And better to ourselves while on the job. But of course, we can’t determine how others will treat us.
Employers can assist people in finding personal and specific passion at work. “Helping employees identify their talents and skills, uncover their work and life values, and assess the environments and activities in which their values will be met while their talents are utilized is a boon to the workplace,” says Tom Welch, president of Career Dimensions in Stuart, Florida. When employees devote their talents to projects and companies that support their values, the work tends to be meaningful to them. Imagine the kind of commitment companies could generate by helping employees find and apply their passions while they’re still employed.
Stealth Meditation
Use doorways consciously. As you come upon that in-between space, feel your feet against the floor, your hand on the knob; touch the doorway you pass through.
Ari is a talented industrial engineer and amateur bass player who never wanted to work a nine-to-five job. As a millennial—someone born between the late 1970s to the early 2000s—Ari sees work as an important part of his life, but not as his entire life. After graduating from college, which was funded with loans, Ari resisted the pressure to take a full-time job and accepted his parents’ offer to pay for graduate school to study music and help him pay rent. It was a great experience while it lasted, and Ari was happy being a student and teaching music as well.
Then the recession hit. Music teacher positions were cut. Ari moved back in with his family, stopped paying off his student loans, and delayed finding whatever jobs were available. He was anguished over his uncertain future, withdrew from his friends, and felt a strong sense of having been betrayed by the promise of the American dream. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself; he was genuinely shocked when making a living turned out to be so much more demanding than he’d expected. “My parents raised me to expect opportunity,” Ari says. “Isn’t that what this country’s supposed to be about?” Ari isn’t lazy and he isn’t a whiner. He feels he was misinformed and now finds himself unsure of how to proceed. Should he stick to his dream of teaching music? Should he backtrack and get a graduate degree (on his parents’ dime) in industrial engineering, even though it isn’t his passion? Should he grab his bass and hit the road, hoping to be discovered? Overwhelmed by choices, none of which seem clear or right, Ari feels trapped.
An educator and former executive named Srikumar Rao has worked to help people like Ari move beyond their suffering. Rao says, “People have the choice of deciding which emotional domain they occupy. Much of the time we occupy the domain which leads to stress and anger, and we don’t recognize that we have a choice. So stop looking at employers to make you happy. Take charge of it yourself.”
This begins with assuming responsibility for our own happiness. As one expert puts it, “I am self-employed regardless of who pays me.” When we work using our greatest strengths, dedicated to something larger than ourselves, we are likely to feel the most fulfilled.
When we believe that we have no choice, viewing ourselves as objects being moved from one situation to the next, we lose feelings of autonomy and personal power. Although a job may not be perfect, we are choosing the work we do at least for the moment (except for those rare circumstances where coercion or forced servitude come into play). Mindful that we are not victims, we break the mental model of “work or die,” the feeling of having no choice, and tap into the creative potential of our situation. This creative potential can be cultivated in the most unlikely places.
As psychologist Martin Seligman puts it, “It is difficult to feel satisfied with something you aren’t very good at, so rather than spend time beating yourself up about it, take a long, hard look at the things at which you excel, and try to find a position that uses some of those skills, too.”
If fulfillment at work is not possible, for whatever reason, and if it looks like it really won’t change, we turn our attention to cultivating meaning elsewhere. We can work on that book that’s been rattling around in our head or the Internet start-up idea or community service project. We can get up early and devote our time to something we care about. Taking positive action in the face of intractable dullness or lack of advancement possibilities or job insecurity or the boss that righteously annoys you teaches us that we can, in fact, be happy and less-than-ideally employed at the same time.
Sometimes our meaningful hobbies can lead to changes of career. This happened to a student of mine named Laura. While Laura was a student in a musical theater program, in preparation for a career in that field, she saw a lot of folks walking their dogs on the street and missed having a pet herself. To satisfy this nostalgia for home, she began walking dogs for extra cash while preparing for a life in the theater. She loved taking care of, and later training, animals so much that she decided to do it professionally. “Because it’s not really a job to me,” she says. “I get to build a relationship with my clients and their dogs that focuses on their beloved pets. I meet a lot of clients who rescue dogs from shelters, and if I can help an owner with a puppy who has leash aggression, then I am reaching my goal of keeping the dogs happy and healthy and in a good home for their full lifetime. And I make money doing it!”
Ambitious souls like Emily, a senior publicist at an advertising agency, thrive on adrenaline-fueled environments. “When my job is going full speed, that’s when I feel fulfilled,” she says with some embarrassment. “I like being superproductive. I’m not saying that I don’t get stressed out and nervous sometimes. But I’d rather be challenged than bored. I enjoy feeling game. That’s why people at the office know they can rely on me to give 100 percent to a project. They know they can trust me, and I find this trust very fulfilling.” Emily is quick to add that without her daily meditation practice, she would not be able to tolerate the pressure. “I need to empty out,” she says, referring to the silence of sitting practice. “It keeps me aligned. During the day, if things get too heavy, I can go to my office, shut the door, and sit with my eyes closed for ten minutes. There are high-pressure jobs to be done in the world and somebody’s got to do them,” she says with a smile. “That person would be me.”
Stealth Meditation
Look for ways to acknowledge someone’s accomplishments. For example, you might praise their promptness, diligence, or efforts to collaborate.
In an ambitious meritocracy such as ours, it’s especially easy to identify excessively with our position, profession, or role. This is true whether you are a steel worker or a meditation teacher, a gardener or a fashion model. Especially in competitive environments, it is a constant practice not to confuse our true identity with our public persona, or to “believe our own PR” in professions requiring self-promotion. In New York City, strangers at parties will often ask one another, “What do you do?” as the opening salvo to getting acquainted, as opposed to “How are you?,” “What do you love?,” or “Where do you live?” Using the ancient philosophical distinction between “doing” cultures and “being” cultures, ours is one defined by doing.
This is not to say that what we do for a living doesn’t affect our off-the-job quality of life. Certainly, work provides self-esteem off the job, a structure for the day, a purpose for getting up in the morning and going to do something. Work can offer friends, a social group to belong to, a sense of being a contributor, part of something with a bigger purpose that’s valued by society. However, while work may give us these benefits, it is risky to make it our reason for being.
Many jobs do not provide the social status that our ego might wish to project in the world. In the professional pecking order, we may feel like peons. An office worker named Tracy struggles with this. “It’s a huge challenge to not see myself as just a secretary,” says Tracy. “The fact that my work life is full of nonchallenging tasks is also an ongoing struggle. Many times it appears to me that my boss looks down at me. I do my best to be of service at a job that was never a great fit, practically or spiritually, and try not to let personalities get in the way of what my fundamental job there is. But it’s wearing me down.”
Tracy’s story is all too common. So what can you do when your job fails to give you the ego satisfaction you might like? How can you maintain your self-respect in subservient positions where others may treat you, condescendingly, as a functionary instead of a whole human being? This is where the rubber of spiritual practice meets the road. Like all conditions that disappoint us, push our buttons, or challenge the image we hold of ourselves, inferior jobs offer an excellent—if not always pleasant—opportunity to work with negative emotions, practice humility, and strengthen mindfulness of unhealthy attachments to status, competitiveness, appearance, greed, and so on. Regardless of how much you hate your job, you can always learn from your own responses and use the experience to wake up. This may seem like cold comfort, but in spiritual terms it could not be more beneficial. From a spiritual perspective, while it’s lovely to get what we want, of course, it can be more beneficial, more self-strengthening, and more enlightening, not to get it, since challenge and loss have the power to reveal where we are deluding ourselves (“If only I got a promotion, I’d be a more worthy person!”), and shift our awareness to what is true; namely, that job titles, salary, impressive responsibilities, have nothing to do with who we really are. This inevitable gap between what we want and what we get, serves a vital function: to remind us of impermanence, directing our awareness toward what truly matters.
As the songwriter Leonard Cohen puts it in one of his songs, “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” In other words, when we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does sooner or later, regardless of how impressive their job is, we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up. So you thought that your job would solve all your problems? Big surprise! So you believed that job success and appreciation would render you forever secure, shore up all your self-doubts, your craving for esteem, and your faith in universal fairness? Hello! Waking up from our most cherished illusions is a vital step in spiritual maturity. Realizing that everything changes and nothing satisfies completely is comparable to no longer believing in Santa Claus, shocking at first but fortifying in the long run. Like intense disappointment on other fronts, such as family dynamics, romantic heartbreak, and the concerns of aging (which a friend of mine calls Miracle-Gro for your character defects!) letdowns at work may bring out the worst in us in order for us to heal and free ourselves of false expectations.
Mindfulness is the tool we use for forging this path. Realizing that our jobs are conditional and impermanent, like all relationships, we learn to perform these jobs well without losing ourselves to these temporary roles. Jessica, who works as a cocktail waitress while waiting for her break as an actress, has discovered that she can enjoy her work without it coloring her self-image or clouding her larger purpose. “I have always felt I could survive in this job as long as I maintain my own boundaries,” Jessica explains. “I am happiest when I’m able to keep everything totally separate. This has always been my goal since waitressing was not what I wanted to do with my life. A lot of people I work with get really frustrated because they take work-related stuff too seriously. For me, it’s just a job that provides me really good money to do what I really want to do.”
As a police officer, Caitlin is more devoted to her job than Jessica is but equally determined to keep it separate from her personal life. “As much as I can, I try to relate to my work as though it’s just a job, to maintain a sense of life outside of police work. I have friends who are not in law enforcement, who have interests that are different from mine and who keep me grounded.” Staying connected to life outside the precinct house enables Caitlin to perform her professional duties without losing her civilian identity.
When work becomes a source of connection, it gains in meaning. This begins with the relationships we make in our immediate work environment and radiates out to the larger world: the customers we serve, the impact of our work in the community, and the mysterious ways that what we do may be impacting the world outside our awareness.
Many times in my own life, the work I do has touched people in ways that I could not have predicted. For years, one of my heroes has been the Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Although democratically elected to run the country in 1990, she was prevented by the military from taking office, having been placed under house arrest the previous year for her democratic activities. While detained she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
Suu Kyi has said that there were times throughout her then six-year confinement when she was offered the opportunity to leave Burma, but it was clear that if she did she would not be allowed back in, thus abandoning the people who had chosen her as their leader. And so, even though she did not see her children or her husband for many years and was at times malnourished and ill, she chose to stay.
One of my primary meditation teachers, Sayadaw U Pandita is also from Burma. In 1984, he came to the United States for the first time to teach a three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. Later some friends and I decided to make a book out of the talks he had given. I raised some money, found a transcriber, an editor, and a publisher, and the book In This Very Life came into being. I felt happy that I had done something to express gratitude to my teacher. As a classical and clear depiction of that particular lineage in the Buddhist meditative tradition, I knew it would help people, but also thought it possible that not all that many people would be drawn to such a classical approach. The book went into the minor good deed category in my mind.
In 1995, Suu Kyi was released from house arrest for a while, and she had an opportunity to speak to the outside world. In interviews and writings she said that during her years of house arrest, an important source of spiritual support had been U Pandita’s book In This Very Life, which her husband had sent to her from England. Using the book, she had started to regularly meditate and, as she told one friend, that book had been her lifeline. Hearing that, I immediately took the book out of the “minor good deed” category, and put it in the “I wonder if this will be the best thing I will have done in my life” category. I had done something thinking it would have one kind of effect, and in a million years couldn’t have predicted it would make its way back into Burma to support someone I considered a genuine hero.
That experience taught me to do the good that is right in front of me, even if it seems relatively small or inconsequential. I thought that someday I might write a book called Basically Clueless, because in so many ways we are. There is so much we just can’t see or know right now, including precisely how our actions will ripple out. We help someone have a better day, and they may go out and encourage an employee or relax enough to see a creative option or forgive a minor transgression and give someone another chance.
Maria was privileged to feel the power of a small gesture, and never forgot it. As a young editor at a publishing house that was run by a tyrannical and moody publisher, Maria was often in the hot seat. With a new baby and a heavy workload, it wasn’t too hard for her to feel frustrated to the point of tears. One day, after having been yelled at for the whole floor to hear, she left the building feeling horrible, wanting to quit, feeling that her child would look on her as a failure if she were to ever see the way Maria was treated. When she came back, there was a little box of candy on her office chair with a note: “Noticed you were having a hard day. Hope this helps.” It was from a young assistant, whom Maria did not even know particularly well, who just wanted to offer solace. Maria was affected deeply by the generosity and pays it forward, in the name of her friend, whenever she can. The assistant’s name was Michelle and while they’ve lost touch, Michelle’s generosity is still a part of the world at large.
We cannot always know how our work contributions are affecting others. This is where trust comes in. When we work with a positive intention, even when our tasks seem somewhat trivial, our actions will have positive results. “Small things with great love,” Mother Teresa counseled individuals worried that their work was meaningless. In other words, what we do is frequently less important than how we do it. I heard a wonderful story about a dramaturge—a person trained to work with playwrights—who believed that her work was unimportant in a world where people are starving. This woman, we’ll call her Ann, dreamed of moving to Calcutta to help Mother Teresa in her mission to feed “the poorest of the poor.” When Mother Teresa arrived in Ann’s home city to receive a humanitarian award, Ann waited outside the hotel where Mother Teresa was staying, eager to offer her services. Finally, a car pulled up and out stepped the tiny reverend mother in her blue-and-white sari. Ann told Mother Teresa about her dream of giving up her work in the theater in order to come to India and do some real good. Mother Teresa listened patiently to her story then inquired into her line of work. When Ann told her that she helped people put on plays, the old nun smiled and took her hand. “No, dear!” she said. “You must stay here and work. Just do it with an open heart. In this country, there is a famine of the spirit. Stay here and feed your people.”
Most of us want to believe that the work we do is connected to a cause greater than ourselves. We long to know that we are working and living for a bigger purpose. Yet herein lies a paradox critical to wisdom and well-being. For our work to be of maximum benefit, we need to let it go. For our contribution to help the community, we need to remember that it’s not about us. We work with an open heart and the best intentions and trust in life to do the rest. This is the essence of trust, which is not something that we possess but something that we do, a willingness to take the next step.
In the work we do, we remind ourselves that we cannot control how others will ultimately react to our efforts. We can only do our best to make a difference. We can maintain an awareness of how little we actually know about how our work will finally impact the world and do our best to remain connected to our own creativity and caring. When we approach work in a creative spirit (which is possible no matter our occupation), learning from daily experience, we remain engaged and enlivened.
When we remember that the work we do does matter, however inconsequential the task, and that our personal worth does not rise or fall with professional standing or reputation, we can then perform it with an open heart and be grateful to others. Gina LaRoche of Seven Stones Leadership writes, “Today I am profoundly grateful for all who serve me. I do not take for granted the newspaper delivery, the recycling pickup, the bus driver, the barista, the security guard, the cashier, the person who cooked my lunch, bagged my groceries, or hung my dry cleaning.” Just as others serve us, we are able to serve others. By disentangling work from self-worth and remembering that we’re good enough—already blessed by life and a capacity for wisdom and love—regardless of our salary or job description, we learn to approach our work with insight and generosity. We learn that creativity comes from within—how we see, what we notice, when we help, whom we touch—and is always available to us when we are paying attention. This choice to be awake at work can change the most seemingly meaningless employment into an opportunity for connection, creativity, and personal growth.
Stealth Meditation
Look for ways to acknowledge someone’s challenges. Even when you can’t fix things, people appreciate the recognition that the workload is growing, the new deadline is a killer, that it’s hard to deal with others’ grumpiness.
EXERCISE: Articulate Your Own Mission
How do you find your core intention? How can you discern your passion and purpose on the planet? One fun way to do this is by identifying one or two qualities that make up the very core of who you are. Having a personal mission is such an important part of so many dimensions of a liberated life—including one’s livelihood.
Look at the list of verbs that follow. As you look at each word, say it aloud and allow a full minute to register how much each particular quality resonates with you. Then write a number next to the word, using a rating scale of 1 to 5. If you feel nothing at all about the word, give it a 1. If you’re ready to jump out of your chair because you feel so in tune with that quality, give it a 5.
And you may find there are some powerful verbs not included on this list that you want to add. Go for it!
Now look at your numbers—every word that you’ve rated with a 4 or 5 should make it into your mission statement. My key words are “discovering” and “connecting.” These words describe both what makes me feel most alive as well as how I am here to serve others. I am at my best when I embody discovery and connection and when I am helping other people to discover and connect.
Your words can become the beginning of clarifying your personal mission. Once you’ve come up with a list, consider how much your current work situation allows you to experience these qualities.
When you come to the end of this exercise, consider if and in what ways you can bring a new sensibility to work to even more align your livelihood with these deeper ambitions and longings.
EXERCISE: Moving from the What to the How
Think of a specific task at work—teaching a child to read, preserving a client’s wealth, protecting the rights of an elderly nursing home resident—whatever it might be. As you establish a metric for success, add a dimension of how you are doing the work. How focused are you at meetings? How much patience and compassion are you bringing forth? When you’ve been impatient or distracted, how gracefully have you been able to begin again? Rather than viewing those elements as superfluous, recognize that they are a large measure of finding fulfillment and meaning at work. They also may have a ripple effect of positivity that you may never know, but that improves lives nonetheless.
EXERCISE: Basically Clueless, Planting Seeds
Write down something you would very much like to accomplish at work—a new project, an innovation, a big departure from the current routine. In one column, write down everything over which you have direct control—your own attitude and input, of course, but also whatever policies or procedures you can mold on your own. In another column, write down whomever or whatever would have a role in determining this outcome—your boss, your clients, economic trends—whatever comes to mind. When you’re done, look at the lists.
So many times, we take to heart and feel responsible for too many things on that second list. I have friends who were inconsolable about losing jobs. In addition to economic pressures and hardships from the loss, they seemed to blame themselves for everything—the worldwide economic collapse, the retooling of their industry. With that feeling, it’s especially hard to start over.
The healing effect of this exercise is similar to the serenity prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Seeing those two lists empowers us. They are a good reminder of the interconnected world we live in. That first list reminds us of the importance of our planting seeds—we have to do our part or nothing will happen. The second reminds us to acknowledge other forces and to be open as we try to make a difference.
Q&A
Q When I look back at what used to drive me to success, it was really ego. Now that I’ve discovered the benefits of meditation, I think of my life simply in terms of how I want to live with mindfulness. How do I reconcile that with my work?
A Your work can fit into the larger vision of what is important in your life instead of defining all that is and will remain significant. We can have an impact on the world doing all kinds of work. When we feel driven to succeed, it can be very energizing, but we might also question what is compromised or sacrificed for success. What we find energizing at one point in our lives might prove exhausting at another—we can be so hell-bent on success that we drive ourselves into loneliness and alienation. Reflecting on how to find your own deeper happiness, perhaps outside of your work, isn’t a selfish or superficial thing. It is the fuel for sustaining effort at work without damage to yourself and those you care about.
Q I tend to focus on meditating when I’m feeling stressed at work but often forget about it when things are going well.
A Meditation can have a beneficial effect whatever we’re encountering at work. It helps us appreciate easy and joyous times more by reminding us to recognize and focus on them. It helps in times of stress to give us greater resiliency so that we are not so overwhelmed by the difficulty. And it helps in ordinary, repetitious, routine times, too, so that we have a more acute sense of awareness and connection than we otherwise might. Sometimes the easiest way to establish a regular practice is to create a realistic and achievable commitment, such as meditating every day—even just five minutes—for the next month or so. After the month, we can decide whether to renew or change the commitment.