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It is easy to eat without tasting, miss
the fragrance of the moist earth after
a rain, even touch others without knowing
the feelings we are transmitting. In fact,
we refer to all these ever-so-common instances
of missing what is here to be sensed,
whether they involve our eyes, our ears
or our other senses as examples of being
out of touch….
If we examine this phenomenon by simply
observing our interior and exterior lives
from time to time, it soon becomes quite
apparent just how much of the time we
are out of touch. We are out of touch
with our feelings and perceptions, with
our impulses and emotions, with our thoughts,
with what we are saying, and even with
our bodies. This is mostly due to being
perpetually preoccupied, lost in our minds,
absorbed in our thoughts, obsessed with
the past or the future, consumed with
our plans and our desires, diverted by
our need to be entertained, driven by
our expectations, fears or cravings of
the moment, however unconscious and habitual
all this may be. And therefore we are
amazingly out of touch in some way or
other with the present moment, the moment
that is actually presenting itself to
us now.
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Seeing from the ‘whole’ in
an organization may seem difficult, but
learning to be more attentive and genuinely
curious about the cultures we live in
and enact is the first step. Edgar Schein,
one of the most respected scholars of
organizational culture says, “If
you want to understand an organization’s
culture, go to a meeting”. Who speaks
who does not, who is listened to and who
is not, which issues are addressed and
which are ignored or addressed by innuendo
are powerful clues to how an organization
actually functions. These clues become
still more ‘real’ when we
pay attention to our own reactions. Schein
believes that we can always learn much
more about organizational culture through
careful observation and reflective participation
than from reading mission or value statements.
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An engineering firm’s management
team had scheduled its weekly meeting
at an offsite location. Just as the meeting
was about to begin, one team member stormed
in, mumbling something about being held
at a place and time that was inconvenient
for him. Noticing how upset he was, the
leader called everyone’s attention
to the sacrifice the team member was making
and thanked him for it. The effect of
that acknowledgment: no more anger.
A team expresses its self-awareness by
being mindful of shared moods as well
as of the emotions of individuals within
the group. In other words, members of
a self-aware team are attuned to the emotional
undercurrents of individuals and the group
as a whole. They have empathy for each
other, and there are norms to support
vigilance and mutual understanding. So
although the team leader’s gestures
may have seemed simple, often just such
an astute and seemingly subtle move can
do more to remove dissonance and restore
resonance than an action full of bells
and whistles.
Since emotions are contagious, team members
take their emotional cues from each other,
for better or for worse. If a team is
unable to acknowledge an angry member’s
feelings, that emotion can set off a chain
reaction of negativity. On the other hand,
if the team has learned to recognize and
confront such moments effectively, then
one person’s distress won’t
hijack the whole group.
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A common workplace image nowadays is a
man or woman, staring slack-jawed at a
computer, tapping and twitching at the
keyboard. Many of us could see ourselves
in that picture. Whether we are buried
in a newspaper or computer screen, glancing
at a handheld or watching television,
the scene is pretty much the same: a lone
person, staring at a device and poking
at it on occasion in some way. We have
quietly grown accustomed to engaging our
world as bits of information. We scan
printed words & pictures; watch TV
news people describe life; push buttons
to go to digitalized landscapes. Such
an approach to engaging work – indeed
our lives - has become common, at times
preferred. And the image of the lone person
mesmerized by the computer illustrates
a central risk to the modern workplace
and should come with a dire warning: Be
careful - information is addictive and
may make you unavailable to reality.
Of course, operating computers and managing
information is critical to contributing
at work. We all want to be facile with
such things. Information can bring tremendous
efficiency and scope to our lives, making
everything from governments to kindergartens
run more effectively. Vast access to information
gives us a formidable command of our world,
empowering us to accomplish more in one
day than our ancestors could in an entire
lifetime. But, when we substitute a digital
game for life’s rawness; collecting
data for genuine communications; sterile
digital dialogue for heartfelt human contact,
we can cut ourselves off from our world.
We anesthetize ourselves, distort our
sense of priorities and become unavailable
to others. One way to avoid this numbing
and addictive quality of today’s
technology is to Cultivate the art of
conversation.
Excerpted from:
Awake at Work
Shambhala Publications, 2004
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Listen to an Interview with the author
on “Awake at Work” on Embracing
the Journey with Karen Humphries Sallick.
Click
here to listen to the interview.
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Mindfulness or sitting meditation
is a friendly gesture towards ourselves
where we take time to simply be
and the mindfulness developed in the practice
naturally unfolds on the job guiding us
to Be Authentic, precise and
decent. Sitting down and being still is
at the heart of being awake at work. Yet,
such meditation can not be rushed or forced,
so we need not hurry; we can be flexible
with ourselves and our life circumstances
as we learn this practice.
To learn more: http://www.awakeatwork.net/about/med.html
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