Read an Excerpt
A PPROACHING THE CORPORATE HEART
By Margot Cairnes
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2011 Margot Cairnes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3403-9
Chapter One
A Heartfelt Quest Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning. J. H. NEWMAN
In the past few decades, organisations around the world have been re-engineered, reinvented and downsized. If you are one of the shrinking pool of people who still have a government or corporate job, you are probably now expected to do more with less. If you are self-employed or working in a small family business, you are probably finding that being a little guy in the land of the giants means long hours, hard work and a lot of resourcefulness; in small business, you have to do so many things yourself. Whether you work from home or in an office, alone or surrounded by people, it is likely that you feel a sense of loneliness and from time to time find yourself wondering if the money is worth the angst, the stress and the problems.
But who is to blame for what appears to be an increasingly depersonalised workplace? Is it heartless bosses, blinded by ambition and greed, or is it demanding shareholders who will transfer their investment dollars to more lucrative organisations if yours doesn't continue to perform at ever increasing levels of profit and growth? Perhaps it is the rate of technological change, rising customer expectations, increasing global competition or the always changing maze of government regulation?
All these things are part of current reality, but who said life was meant to be easy? Although we tell ourselves fanciful stories of times when life was simpler, easier and more stable, we know history is cluttered with wars, plagues and economic upheavals. Life has never been smooth for very long. Yes, we are currently experiencing an exponential rate of pervasive change, but even that has historical precedent. The Industrial Revolution was a time of social, political and economic transformation, similar in proportion to that experienced today. The French Revolution, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II and the advent of communism in Russia and China were all seismic upheavals. The truth is, people, when they come together, create communities, organisations and nations that are as complex, diverse and susceptible to change as they are themselves. While the features of our society and its places of work may change, the depth, diversity and intricacy of human nature does not. People go on being themselves, manufacturing all sorts of challenges for themselves and each other.
Of course, there have been times when, despite ourselves, things seemed easier. These times, however, are the exceptions—although this is not always the way we see it. We want to hold on to the 'good times', make them the standard, and see everything else as an aberration that we somehow have to 'fix'.
'I want things to go back to normal,' Peter was telling me.
'What did normal look like?' I questioned. 'I haven't felt normal for years.'
'Well, there was a time when it was like we were riding a wave. Work was easy to get. The company just kept growing. We could afford extra support and I had time to build up a whole range of interests outside of work. Then the wave crashed.' He paused.
'Actually, looking back, it was all an illusion—an historical accident, really. Now, we're still moving forward, but it's harder work, we have less cushioning. I feel more stressed, more narrow in my focus.'
'Normal', it turns out, is often an illusion. Even the scantest review of history tells us that change is constant. Sometimes it brings comfort, sometimes hardship. What is fascinating is that we accept the good times as the standard by which our lives should be led and others as 'problems' that need to be solved. So we race around looking for cures for life itself. We see the changing tide of experience as a series of hiccups interspersed with more comfortable periods to which we all strive to cling and constantly seek to return.
In other words, we spend a huge amount of time chasing an illusion, treating reality as a distraction that is somehow keeping us away from having what we want. We then spend a disproportionate amount of time attending to the symptoms of a disease that turns out to be the social fabric of life. Unfortunately, this keeps us from enjoying the richness, fullness and diverse wonders of the world in which we live. Always looking for ways to 'solve the problems' of conflict, change and fluctuating fortune that are the very material of life itself, we fail to experience fully and immerse ourselves in the wonders of the process of living.
Leadership guru Warren Bennis writes in Behavior Online Conversations:
Technologically we are very advanced but psychologically we are babes in the wood. We don't know ourselves or anyone else very well.
This is because we generally fail to look—we are too busy dealing with the inconvenience of living.
Could I possibly be suggesting that we should simply accept social problems such as the rate of crime, family and social violence, homelessness, unemployment and poverty? Am I picturing a society where people sit around like 'flower children', absorbed in their inner experience and ignoring important social Issues? Hardly. I'm merely saying that an instant replay of what we call the 'history of civilisation' tells us that people have been abusing themselves and each other since time immemorial. It appears that this is how people behave. So, if we want to move forward both individually and collectively, we had better get to understand people better and find transformational ways of working with our humanity.
'Oh,' I've been told, 'that's easy for you to say, Margot, but do you realise that people are just too busy, too tired, to do any more than cope?' It would seem that fatigue, depression and a deep sense of loneliness are endemic in our places of work and throughout society in general. Stress-related illnesses, relationship breakdowns and a sense of powerlessness seem to be the order of the day, as they were of a good many yesterdays.
Reality, it turns out, isn't always the way we would like it to be. Living is full of ups, downs and sideways—bumps, glitches and trials. Nowhere would this seem more so than in the workplace, where most people feel controlled by external factors and continually under pressure from customers, shareholders, bosses, unions, colleagues, markets, suppliers, employees and, increasingly, technological innovation and information overload. At work, people are frustrated by organisational politics, daunted by ever increasing workloads and always feel under threat of retrenchment and redundancy due to slipping performance or some external change or strategic restructure.
I have found that this is exactly why work is such a wonderful learning place for personal, emotional and spiritual transformation. In the workplace, simply functioning at some kind of human level is so challenging that it becomes almost impossible to ignore the many facets of human interaction and personal expression. Moreover, because it is imperative that we produce something tangible when we are in the workplace, there is incredible incentive to face reality full on and then transform it into measurable outcomes. Work has provided me and many of my clients with the stimulus, challenge, incentive and support to move to higher levels of personal aliveness and relationship and material success. This may seem paradoxical given the dehumanising terminology that abounds in the workplace: people are referred to as 'human resources' who can be 'upskilled', 'multiskilled' or 'reskilled' (a bit like reprogramming a robot), and 'outplaced' when they are no longer needed. However, we don't have to let our circumstances define who we are.
While Victor Frankl was interned in a Nazi concentration camp, during which time he was starved, beaten and otherwise mistreated, he decided that he did have choices. His captors may have had control over how he was treated, but he had control over how he reacted to the reality of the situation in which he was placed. No matter how bad or how good we judge any situation, we always have control over how we deal with it—this is the secret to personal freedom, joy and peace of mind.
Comprehending this possibility requires a special kind of intelligence. Accepting reality in all its shades and nuances, and then working with what is, in a humanising and personally transforming way, is not a path for the lazy or dull. Nor is it for the timid or apathetic. Transforming experience on the emotional, spiritual and material planes requires commitment, energy, time and application. It also requires considerable skill and a willingness to look at things differently. If you choose to revolutionise your world (and quite likely the world of many others if you take this path), you will find that life will go on doing its own thing regardless. You, however, will experience this as an exciting, enlivening, joyous and rewarding journey. Not that this means it will be easy. Adventures worth having are rarely without danger, challenges or difficulties: that's what makes them so memorable.
The Hero's Quest
There is a lot of literature about the heroic journey. Master myth scholar Joseph Campbell has popularised myths such as that of Ulysses and has derived from these myths the archetype of the hero's quest.
The hero's quest is the search for the best that is within us all. It involves viewing and participating in life in new and enriching ways as we delve into the depths of our own being and come to terms with our own psyche—befriending our private demons, learning to accept and work with our own limitations and developing our deepest human potential. Heroes achieve this by gaining self-knowledge as they pit themselves against a series of real tests, challenges and hurdles that take them beyond what is currently known.
The heroic journey is always highly personal and unique. Robert J. Holder and Richard N. McKinney, remind us in their article "Corporate change and the hero's quest" it is not possible to replicate the journey of any one else; trying to do so diminishes your chances of success on your own quest. The heroic cycle involves a separation from the mundane as the hero passes through a series of trials and initiations (usually mysterious and involving deeply based personal transformation) before reintegration into the world that he or she has left. The world to which the hero returns has rarely changed radically; the heroic quester, however, having seen new lands and having transformed him or herself so fundamentally, experiences life, even the mundane, in a very different way.
We so often think that happiness involves things being different. We believe we will be content when a relationship changes, we get a new job, change our place of living or acquire another material possession. The hero knows that we can each be happy here and now. The difference isn't in the world in which we live, but in how we see that world. The great gift of the hero's quest, as heroes discover through the trials of their adventures, is the hero's own mental, emotional and spiritual essence.
Once we have found our own true selves, everything is different. Happiness, joy and contentment are no longer elusive, they are our everyday companions. It's not that the lives of returned heroes are easier, smoother or less challenging—on the contrary, living the everyday life well can often be the greatest challenge of all. However, heroes, blessed with knowledge of their own essences, now see what was once 'mundane' as an enriching part of their personal journeys.
The hero's quest is always into the unknown. It is an uncertain, highly experiential odyssey; one that requires exploration rather than planning. The key to success is to trust oneself on a radically deep inner level; this connects us to others and to reality in a new and transforming way. On this level, we hear the call of our own true destiny, which pulls us out of the mundane and entices us to go in search of all that we can be. Organisational scholars Holder and McKinney tell us:
The quest is both a spiritual and a physical process. The spiritual dimension involves an inward renewal. This inward change directs the creation of the physical change.
This is why work provides such a wonderful arena for an heroic journey. Many people, through contact with the New Age or mystic teachers, have engaged in involved inward journeys. Therapy also can lead us into greater awareness of our inner being. However, the most powerful transformations occur not while you are sitting quietly in solitary splendour, nor even when you share your deepest secrets with trusted others, but when you take the learning from these personal experiences and put them into action, working with them in some physical form. As our work demands action and tangible output, it is the perfect venue for anchoring our personal shifts into reality. This makes work a spiritual as well as a physical experience. It makes work the stuff of heroes.
In their confronting and challenging book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura discuss how therapy has largely resulted in the separation of the realms of personal experience and social action. People sit around in their millions at support groups, sharing their personal experiences, giving and receiving advice, but doing very little to change the reality of the society in which they live. I constantly hear reference to the 'me' generation, which I take to mean those people who have become fascinated by their emotional and spiritual process while remaining disconnected from the world around them. This not only robs society of the valuable input from caring and aware people but it also robs people of an opportunity to anchor their personal journeys in social and physical reality. It's a bit like the theorist who is unable to make practical use of his or her knowledge.
Some years ago, faced with more work opportunities than time, I recruited a number of people to help me. I realised that the work I was wanting these people to do would require them to use the full range of their emotions, spirit and mind, so I chose people who had a history of spiritual growth (one had been a swami), emotional development (they were all trained and experienced in some therapeutic field) and intelligent endeavour (they all had higher degrees). What absolutely stunned me was the incredible difficulty these gifted people had in putting their years of study, spiritual practice and psychological training to use. It was as if they had separated their personal development from the work they did and were unable to Re-establish the link between how they operated in the world and the commitment they had made to their personal being.
Actually, as a society we have made an art form of separating who we are from the work we do. This unfortunately has robbed our work and, in many ways, our lives of meaning. Reversing this process is not straightforward or easy. It is, however, possible—but not through the means we normally associate with either work or social interaction.
I am the grateful recipient of some ten years of higher education. I have studied science, business, education, economics, politics, psychology and philosophy. In all these disciplines, I managed to excel in the opinion of those who graded my work. However, all those years of training have faded for me into a colourless blur. While I do remember the excitement of discovering and discussing new ideas, I also remember the flatness of living for years in an intellectual realm. I may have been developing an insightful, analytical mind, but I was also losing my spirit.
Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen in The Spirituality of the Body tells us that the link between the mind and the body (which he claims houses the spirit) is feeling. Feelings were absolutely off-limits in my academic training. I can remember being ridiculed at business school for being 'too subjective' when I dared to interpret leadership situations through the filters of my emotional experience and reality. It was made very clear that emotion and business were never to meet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A PPROACHING THE CORPORATE HEART by Margot Cairnes Copyright © 2011 by Margot Cairnes. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
