CHAPTER 2
One of the most important areas of our lives is our work. Whether we are working officially or unofficially, work is something that we spend a large percentage of our time doing, or putting off doing. This is the nature of our nature. So if mindfulness can practically help us to live our lives, then can it also help us to live our working lives? Does mindfulness work for work? Can mindfulness help us work more naturally, more enjoyably, more harmoniously and even more productively—for us and for the people with and for whom we work?
The short answer is yes.
Mindfulness can work for our work better than a promotion can, or a pay rise, or a new job, or an industrial relations tribunal, or even a familysized bottle of Prozac. The principles of mindfulness can be applied very successfully to work in general—any work, both paid and unpaid. Mindfulness can help us to transform our working lives into something that really fulfils us, rather than merely something that we have to do or that we are paid to do. It can help us to turn our own job, no matter how apparently challenging or even arduous it might seem, into something that we would do for free, as well as for freedom. So, if you would like to find out how mindfulness can do this and more, please read on.
You might have thought before reading this book that mindfulness is something that other people do, especially other people who are at least a little bit weird, or who have a particular psychological or physical condition that mindfulness can help to improve. Mindfulness, however, is actually extremely practical and useful for everybody, including us— especially us. The practical benefits of being mindful include being able to work more effectively and enjoyably, and a working knowledge of mindfulness can be an indispensably useful tool of any trade. If we can spend more of our time being mindful, and less of our time being mindless, we can better express who we really are—which is actually much greater than the sum of our working parts. Mindfulness isn’t just something that’s practised at home, behind closed doors, it can be taken with us wherever we go, including to work.
Many of our life stresses and strains come from our not knowing who we really are, often because our sense of self can get distorted or confused by our ideas of who we think we are. If we are mindful then we are living in reality, which means living in the reality of our true potential—both personal and professional. Knowing who we really are, and not just who we think we are, can result in myriad highly practical working advantages, including a better knowledge of what job we can best do, and how we can best do it.
There was a famous message inscribed at the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece: Know Thyself! The working equivalent of this key life instruction, that could be valuably inscribed above the entrance to any workplace, is Know Thy Need! This working wisdom can help us to ask some key work-related as well as some key life-related questions, and if we are really fortunate it can even help us to reach some answers. Perhaps, however, the real answer to any question comes when we realise that we no longer need it.
We don’t need complicated answers to our questions about what our job really is or what it’s really for. We don’t need a degree in industrial relations or a PhD in psychology or even an operating manual to work out what we are really working on, with whom and for whom. All we need to know to successfully start and finish and enjoy any work is the need we need to meet—and this includes knowing what the real purpose of our work is. If our job is selling hamburgers then the need that we need to meet might seem quite simple: to feed hamburgers to a hamburger-hungry world. If we are mindful of a deeper reality, however, then we might realise that our customers actually need something more than the hamburger they have queued up to buy, and that doesn’t just mean fries!
If our job is selling hamburgers, maybe our customers’ real need is for a sense of connectedness, of being appreciated for the unique and wonderful individual that they truly are and not just as the next body and wallet in our queue. If that sounds like too much to give somebody in a hamburger queue or to anybody else, and you would prefer to recommend a place down the road where they offer much more than mere hamburgers, then try thinking more deeply about what people’s real needs might be in any situation. Maybe the next person in the hamburger queue or our fellow CEO of a multinational company with whom we are trying to clinch a billion-dollar deal both really need to feel listened to, valued, connected and truly human. Maybe they need to feel this rather than like an exploited or ignored means to our end—a way for us to make a dollar or a billion dollars out of them with as little bother as possible.
Maybe the best beginning of a successful billion-dollar or two-dollar working relationship is to really listen to the person with whom we are dealing, to smile at them, to find out something about what it feels like to be them. We already have a great working model of this; we know what it’s like to be any human being because we know what it’s like to be us.
These general mindfulness working principles can help us do everything in our lives more peacefully, happily and productively—even our work. If we put these principles into practical practice then we can better understand whether our working situation is the best expression of who we really are and, if it isn’t, how to improve it.
What’s the benefit, for me and my work, of knowing who I really am? This is a perfectly legitimate question, and there’s a perfectly legitimate answer to it! If we don’t know who we really are, then we risk getting destructively attached to what we think we are. This can mean getting destructively identified with our ideas of ourselves, including our ideas about our roles or parts—including our working parts. We might, for example, think and believe: ‘I am a plumber’, or ‘I am a teacher’, or ‘I am a rocket scientist’, which is fine, as long we don’t become so identified with this description of ourselves that we forget our deeper selves. Identifying with who we think we are can mean that, in much the same way that a professional actor can get lost in his or her role, we forget our whole.
When we do any work mindfully the work can be a valuable reminder to us of our true freedom—our pure consciousness. Whether we work as a butcher or a baker or a rocket-ship maker, or a lawyer or a salesperson or even an actor—we will soon end up typecast if we identify too strongly with our role. We have a great opportunity in life to play our true role truly and then let it go. Work can help us more than anything else to realise that we are more than the sum of our working parts.
Socrates and Plato were a famous ancient Greek philosophical superstar double act (Socrates spoke, Plato wrote). One of their key ideas forms the active ingredient of many wisdom traditions. According to Socrates and Plato there is ‘the formless’—an absolute—and there are forms that arise in this formlessness and then return to it. These forms include our thoughts and our bodies and our jobs, and we can get stuck in them if we mindlessly believe in the reality of this unreality. This would be like someone in a cinema theatre getting so caught up in the movie that they forget that it’s just a movie and start screaming out earnest advice to an actor on the screen: ‘Look out, there’s a dinosaur chasing you!’
According to Socrates and Plato, and many other reputable wisdom traditions, suffering comes from the illusion that the fleeting forms that we can get so hung up on are permanent, and that therefore the show is the substance. To transcend our suffering, including our working suffering, all we need to do is simply realise that what seems either painful or pleasurable won’t last long, so we can just enjoy the show and do what we need to do to make our life work.
The ancient wisdom traditions that gave us mindfulness practices also gave us the highly valuable working knowledge that we all have a unique talent—all seven billion of us—as well as the knowledge that we are far more than we can describe. Discovering our true and unique talent—our natural role—is a vital part of our life’s work, although this is often unrecognised. Socrates and Plato gave us the hot working life tip that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’. This doesn’t mean that we have to pass an examination before we can go on to our next job, but rather that to be the best person that we can be we need to live life mindfully enough—consciously enough—to discover who we really are and how we can best express it, including through our work.
Despite the proliferation in modern times of careers counselling and careers, we have too much work choice and too little reason to choose. According to an ancient Indian wisdom tradition, infants were once given a collection of particular work-related toys and invited to choose some to play with. The child’s choice was respected as revealing their deep professional talent and interest, which was then nurtured. In modern times, the psychologist and philosopher Abraham Maslow developed a theory of ‘self-actualisation’. This theory basically states that to be truly happy we need to feel that we are expressing who we truly are; that we are playing the part that we were born to play.
To be fully mindful in our lives and in our working lives, we need to recognise that our roles, including our working roles, are just roles—and therefore parts of the whole us. We are infinitely more than our infinite parts and we are infinitely connected to others, including to those with whom we have working relationships.
Can being mindful of our vital connection to others help us to work better and more enjoyably? Ultimate working knowledge comes when we are mindful—when we are fully aware, alive and connected, and then we can act optimally and ultimately successfully in our jobs, and we can choose jobs that allow us to act optimally and successfully. This working mindfulness can also help us to recognise our true selves by helping us to recognise our connection with others.
There are people living and working in modern Africa who still live and work in the ancient Ubuntu wisdom tradition. The traditional Ubuntu response to the question ‘Are you well?’ is ‘I am well if you are well!’ There are people living and working in modern India, Nepal and elsewhere who still live and work according to the ancient Indian Vedic wisdom tradition. They greet other each other with the word ‘Namaste’, which means ‘The universal within me recognises the universal within you.’ Ultimately all working harmony and also all morality comes from our recognising our integral links with others, and there are versions of this recognition in all of the world’s great wisdom traditions, such as the New Testament’s ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ We gain happiness by giving it; similarly, working with others is actually the best way to work for ourselves.
A highly practical example of the working usefulness of unity is teamwork. We all know that a champion team will beat a team of champions any day or night, and this is because of their unity. The Geelong Australian Rules football team is a good example of a sporting team successfully using working unity. Shortly before entering a highly successful phase in its history the Geelong football team consciously employed practices that would help them bond together as a unit, such as yoga, which helps to reduce friction by harmonising bodies, minds and spirits. After this conscious commitment, the Geelong football team showed marvellous free-flowing football teamwork—unity—and achieved great on-field success. Many other sporting teams have used mindfulness principles successfully, and these techniques are regularly employed by sports psychologists and other helpful experts even though they are often not described in mindfulness terms. The practical benefits of unity apply to working teams and life teams, as well as to sporting teams.
Truth comes from open-mindedness, which can lead to vast successes that we can’t achieve when we are not open to our true opportunities. An open mind allows us to recognise that truth can truly be found anywhere—in a book on mindfulness, in a Simpsons episode, or even in the words of somebody with whom we don’t agree. To be open-minded is to be prepared to be proven wrong, and to work towards the truth rather than my truth. When Socrates said that he knew nothing he wasn’t accusing the Athenian education system of incompetence; he was saying that we can’t learn anything if we think we know everything. There is the story of the university professor who went to visit a well-known Zen philosopher. The Zen master poured him tea and kept pouring until the professor’s cup literally overflowed. Then the Zen master told the protesting professor that he couldn’t learn anything with his over-full mind that let in nothing new. If we have an open mind we can see a better way of doing any job—even if somebody else suggests it.
Work can be a wonderful opportunity for us to maintain our awareness—to consistently connect with and focus on something useful—and therefore develop deeper levels of mindfulness, of consciousness. There’s an old saying that when a wise man (or woman) fetches water (or even wine) they just fetch water (or even wine); when they hew wood they just hew wood. This might seem simple but it’s also profound, and real profundity is often revealed in simplicity. Think about how well we might fetch water or hew wood or even hammer in a nail or wash a dish or clinch a billion-dollar deal if we are thinking about how well or badly our team did last week, or about how much the person with whom we are on water-fetching or billion-dollar-deal-clinching duty pleases or displeases us. Chances are that we will both get wet! Consider what might happen to us if we hew wood or slice sushi without awareness!
Most of us aren’t enrolled in formal mindfulness programs, but most of us are enrolled in formal work programs. Our work is a great opportunity for us to work towards our ultimate happiness, meaning and peace by simply staying tuned into, rather than out of, whatever we are working on. A fringe benefit of being mindful at work is that it can help us to be more mindful during all our life activities. If we are fully with the present moment—and not against it, distracted by thoughts of other moments—we can perform any job well, and this can awaken our full working and life potential.
Service is probably about as sexy as asparagus, but they are both deeply good for us and they can both give us deeply enjoyable experiences, if we embrace them like a thistle—so hard that we feel their love and not their prickles! Our happiness and peace of mind increases, as well as our professional success, when we genuinely serve others, when we genuinely give something to them, when we genuinely connect with them through meeting their need, and not through meeting our idea of their need.
Our motivation is the key to how well we will do any job, and it’s vital that our motivation is to meet the needs of the person with whom or for whom we are working, rather than meeting our own ideas about our own needs at the expense of the person we are serving. We might have trouble with words such as ‘service’ and ‘surrender’ and ‘devotion’ because they can suggest to our minds that we will lose something by practising them, but what we are really surrendering through serving others is the need to be an island. This then lets us fully connect with others and therefore with our true selves. Ice cream might seem more appealing than asparagus, just as self-service might seem more appealing than serving others. According to some highly reputable and practical ancient wisdom traditions however, what seems like nectar can soon turn into poison, and what seems like poison can soon turn into nectar.
Paradoxically, there are things that we get more of when we give them away, and these include love, attention and service. We get more of all of these by giving them away, and nothing will prove this better to us than mindful service will. Giving service grudgingly or without attention isn’t real service at all and it isn’t really useful to anybody. Service is our great opportunity to meet our own real need by meeting the needs of others, and the key to service is listening to people and not to our perhaps prejudiced (pre-judged, pre-packaged) ideas about them.
Whether or not service is good or bad depends on whether it’s provided with care and attention. We probably all remember situations when we’ve gone into a shop and bought a selection of particularly worthy, wisdom-enhancing books, or even three meat pies with sauce and a can of Coke, and then been charged ten times what they should have cost by a shop assistant who appeared to be giving more attention to their bubble gum and dreams than to us! We probably all also remember situations when we were served by someone who cared about us enough to connect with us and who offered us even more service than we hoped for. We probably also all remember which of these situations we liked better and who we would be more likely to offer our return business to.
Reason is going out of fashion even faster than talking to people rather than texting them is, but it can be highly valuable to us professionally as well as personally because it can help us to work in line with everyone’s best interests, and not just in line with our ideas of our own best interests or our employer’s best interests. Reason relates to service because there’s actually a good reason for serving others (just as there is for talking to them), and this is that our welfare and happiness is closely connected to that of other people. We are in this play called life together.
Reason relates to justice because our actions that are good for everyone are just and our actions that aren’t good for everyone are unjust. It’s therefore practically important that we act on a broader basis than how we can best make a dollar, or a lot of dollars, or best look important. Acting on the basis of reason rather than blind selfishness will eventually result in our getting more of everything anyway. Reason has fringe benefits that are neither taxable nor taxing.
Two particularly practical examples of the benefits of using reason in the workplace are workplace safety and industrial relations, where the long-term welfare of everyone who makes up a workplace is considered and acted on.
Can wonder be useful in our work? The international mindfulness expert Ellen Langer described novelty as the key to a mindful existence, and this means seeing things as if for the first time. It can be wonderful and also productive to experience all aspects of our lives as brand new, including our working lives. In order to do anything beautifully, joyfully and truthfully, we need to be enthusiastic, we need to love and we need to experience wonder.
It’s possible for us to spend our entire working lives dragging our bodies and minds out of bed and into their place of employment, and then dragging them through the same weary and repetitive actions that we dragged them through yesterday. It’s also possible to get out of bed like we are getting out of jail free and see the wonder in both our work and the people with whom we work. It’s possible to have either of these very different experiences in the same job and on the same day. To remember the wonder of life, and of our working life, we need to let go of our ideas about our jobs and just do them—wonderfully.
A practical example of the potential work-related benefits of wonder is the working life of the spectacularly dysfunctional hotel owner Basil Fawlty in the classic 1970s English TV show, Fawlty Towers. This show was actually, surreptitiously, a mindfulness training guide, of course, and it was based on the intrinsically funny as well as educational situation of someone who doesn’t like people, or serving them, working in a job where it’s extremely difficult to avoid both. Basil Fawlty gloriously displayed all of the seven deadly mindless work sins in his job as a hotel manager by simultaneously lacking self-knowledge, unity, truth, awareness, service, reason and wonder. A wonderfully instructive thing about Basil Fawlty is that he could have made his life work much better for others and himself by forgetting his life’s stresses and remembering its wonder. Any job, any life, is wonderful if we can remember to experience it and its opportunities in our natural state of wonder.
As well as the seven general working principles of mindfulness listed above, there are also seven important and valuable specific ones. These principles underlie key practical techniques that help us to achieve and maintain mindfulness at work.
Have you ever noticed that when things go wrong at work it’s often because they started off wrong? Maybe we were in such a hurry to get things done that we forgot to listen to our instructions. Maybe we were in such a hurry to get an amazingly good result in the future that we forgot to attend to what we were doing right now. There’s a saying: ’More haste, less speed’, and this means that we can accomplish things at work more efficiently and more quickly when we are really focused on what we are working on. The key to our job success isn’t what we do in our job but what we do in our preparation for it. Stillness is a vital part of mindfulness and it’s a portal to inner calm and focus as well as to outer success.
Reconnecting with our natural stillness during our work is as important as starting our work in stillness. Most of us informally practise mindfully pausing and reconnecting with the stillness that underlies all activity, whether we notice it or not. This informal practice can involve stopping work to have a cup of tea, or possibly something much less good for us. These pauses between activities are natural and necessary and are the working equivalent of punctuation in written prose, and without pauses our activities will blur into eachother!
This principle might seem obvious but just because something is obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We can easily forget to finish what we’ve started if we are tired or distracted, and if we forget to work until we are finished it’s hard to stay mindful. It’s easy to be seduced by our greatest tempter—our minds—into thinking that we can finish our task another time, and it can be easy for us to accumulate drawers full of ‘another times’. There’s a principle known as ‘the last inch’ (or ‘the last centimetre’ in many countries!). This principle refers to how the last part of our job can be the hardest, but this is often its most important part, our real working rite of passage. The sporting equivalent to the last inch is the last or championship lap, which is often the most challenging and the most vital.
It’s very easy with any job we do to just do what we think needs to be done, or what we would like to do, or what we think somebody else would like us to do. It’s important, however, for us to stay focused and awake and connected with others enough to do what needs to be done. The key to doing what needs to be done is to really listen to the people with whom and for whom we are working. This means being open to the possibility that what they really need isn’t what we think they need.
This doesn’t just mean allowing our tools to do their job without straining to achieve a result through them, it also means allowing the people with whom or for whom we are working to do their job. It’s easy for us to lose so much consciousness that we see others merely as vehicles for our speeding egos. Recognising and letting go of this thought pattern can be liberating—for us and others. To do this we need to trust that the working truth is enough, and that we don’t need to help it along by trying so hard that we strain our working relationships. Allowing the natural results of our efforts to blossom without forcing results or snatching at them can be a powerful exercise in workplace awareness and acceptance. Optimally expressing our nature through our work often means allowing others to optimally express their nature through their work.
This principle is the working equivalent of keeping our eyes on the ball when we play sport, so that we don’t drop what’s important to us. If we can focus our attention on the point where our bodies and minds make contact with what we are working on, then we will truly connect with what we are doing and work harmoniously. Working optimally requires our full-focused attention to be on our task and working optimally also develops our full-focused attention. You might like to try an experiment. Do some work that you would probably normally avoid, such as washing some particularly dirty dishes or dogs, or serving something to somebody that you would rather throw at them. Now try doing this same task with your attention fully engaged—really feel the dish or the dog, or really hear the sound of your disagreeable customer’s voice. Is it boring or objectionable or second rate? Is anything boring or objectionable or second rate if we give it our full attention? Try doing a working life experiment and find out!
If we are digging a ditch or performing intricate open-heart surgery it can seem like we are doing what we are doing. It can also seem like the result of doing what we are doing is vitally important or that we really need to please someone or avoid failing, for another day at least. This idea of feeling caught up in what we are working on, and attachment to its results, actually makes our work harder than it needs to be, resulting in suffering. We are essentially the observer of a mind and a body that does the work, and this deep working reality doesn’t just apply to the perhaps apocryphal three out of four council workers who lean on their spades observing the fourth worker work! This deep working reality doesn’t even just apply to the perhaps apocryphal highly paid CEOs of major companies whose profits improve while they are on leave. This deep working reality means that our habitual preoccupation with the rewards of our work causes us to lose our working focus, which leads to inefficiency and disorder.
Our deep essence doesn’t have a separate identity and therefore doesn’t really have anything to work for or against. Working effectively and truly and happily means working for love and to meet needs, and not working for reward or results. Work rewards come naturally when we are non-attached and focused on our job, and when we are not stuck in the anxious ideas of reality that our minds superimpose on reality.
We don’t have to work as Boxer the work-life unbalanced horse worked in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: harder and harder until we end up packed off to the glue factory by our sadistic and ungrateful employer! The Bhagavad Gita is a great philosophical book from an ancient wisdom tradition that is also a mindful work manual. It’s an allegorical story about an ordinary guy and god setting off to work in a great battle, as a metaphor for all of our lives and jobs, even if they aren’t quite as glamorous. The main message in this life manual is that if we work without attachment to results then we are working our way to freedom rather than to tyranny. If we let go of the fruits of our actions and just act—truthfully and joyfully—then we will be free of the uncertainty of never knowing whether our work and life results will be good or bad, and we will be free of the selfishness that comes from an attitude of ‘What’s in it for me?’ What’s really in work for me and for others is a naturally wonderful opportunity to do what we love, and to love what we do.
• Less can be more. When we are conscious enough to stop and consider what we really need to be doing in our work we can work a lot more efficiently, productively and enjoyably.
• Our work is greater than the sum of its working parts. We will work better when we are mindful enough to realise who we really are and why we are really working on what we are working on. We are all working on being the best that we can be ... together.
• Things often work out well at work if we just let them be what they are and not want them to be what they aren’t.
• Whatever it is that we are working on, if we do it with our complete attention and acceptance then we will do it mindfully and we will do it well.