Introduction Bringing our Spirit to Work

Gotta Gotta

“Gotta gotta,” said the man,
“gotta do the thing;
gotta do before I rest,
gotta go and bring
the bacon home and gotta do
another thing you see,
gotta work before I set
my butt beneath a tree.”

“Gotta grind and gotta run,
but I know some day
I’ll have fun and live my life,
but I’ll never play
games and do the things I want
until the gotta’s done;
gotta gotta do the things
before I can have fun.”

Too often that poem is an accurate description of our work—a spiritless grind separated from our hearts, our desires, and the rest or our lives.

No matter what kind of work we do—white collar or blue, high-pressure or low, stimulating or boring, we are much better off when we do it with our whole selves—when we do not leave our spiritual selves at home. It is possible to foster and rely upon our spiritual natures so that our work is part of our lives, a place where we grow rather than deteriorate. Our work can be our biggest challenge, but it can also be our biggest opportunity to grow.

In the hurly-burly of our jobs, we tend to forget that external goals of success and internal movement toward spiritual growth are not mutually exclusive. As we extend ourselves outward each day into the demands and opportunities of our jobs, it’s important that we maintain and call upon internal qualities that provide balance and peace.

Our work is intimately connected to our dreams and our self-esteem. It is where we are highly critical of ourselves when we fail, and feel great satisfaction when we succeed. It is a place where unique and important spiritual growth can occur, and that’s what we are going to talk about in this section.

Beliefs and Goals

We each carry an entire portfolio of beliefs about work; about what it is and what it should be. Many of them come from our parents and from school (school was probably our first work place—a competitive environment where we were given tasks and rated for our performance—isn’t that a description of work?).

Two of our most pervasive and troublesome beliefs are that our work is the most important thing we do, and that our work is what defines us and gives us value.

The basic problem with those two beliefs is that they base our selves and our lives on externalities—our value lies in what we do, not who we are. They impoverish our spirituality, our emotional stability, and our interpersonal relationships. They may keep us relatively happy when things are going well, but they serve us poorly when we retire or lose our job or have a boss who doesn’t appreciate our performance.

Here’s a story that illustrates how these beliefs can strand us high and dry.

At the age of 50 I took early retirement, so I could write and paint and we could eventually move to the Southwest. At the time it seemed like the chance of a lifetime, an opportunity for freedom to do what I wanted to do, to follow my creative bent.

Before I retired I had a job and a title, and I got a paycheck every two weeks. I knew what my weekdays would contain; when they would start and when they would end, and I felt good in the evenings and on the weekends because I had worked hard and earned my rest.

After I retired, I'd get up in the morning, kiss my wife goodbye as she headed out into her busy day, then try to figure out what my day would contain, but there wasn't anything I really felt like doing.

Even though it was my dream I especially didn’t want to write or paint because I didn’t feel at all creative, I didn’t feel useful. I didn't go to work, I didn't earn a paycheck. I was a nonproductive person, someone without personal value.

I thought I had prepared myself for being retired, but apparently I was wrong. It was very odd to live in a world that said, "You lucky guy--you retired early and can do now whatever you want to do," while I was grieving for the loss of a 25-year-old relationship with my job.

Things are better now. My life is fairly wonderful and rewarding, but getting here wasn’t easy. I learned the hard way that when some of us who have worked most of our lives quit working, it is like a death of part of us. No matter how well we prepare, we need time to grieve.

I have adopted broader definitions of "work" and “myself”. I still work, but it does not involve a salary or a boss. And I am learning in my heart that the value of a person flows from who they are, not what they do. Including me.

As is true of the man in the story above, we often only question our beliefs about work when we have some wake-up call that forces us to examine our life. We lose our job even though we play by the rules, a personal relationship shatters because work for us was more of a priority than anything else, a health problem occurs and we can no longer keep up our frantic work pace.

There are many varieties and combinations to these teachable moments, but they all have one element in common - - they make us pause and reconsider our beliefs because something traumatic has occurred.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can evaluate our beliefs about work in a more preventive mode and begin to challenge some of the beliefs that don't serve us well, before trauma occurs or we just wear out. Healthy beliefs about our work life certainly won't prevent difficult times from happening. They will, however, provide us with more stable roots to help us weather the inevitable changes that are integral parts of every life.

A good way to examine the appropriateness of our beliefs about work is to sit down and quietly try to think about what beliefs we carry about work and what our ultimate goals are—what really matters to us in our lives. Then we can lay our goals beside our beliefs and begin to get a sense of how our work beliefs support or are in conflict with who we want to be.

Because we want to get as clear a picture of our situation as possible, we don’t want to start with the assumption that our work beliefs don’t suit us at all, or even that because we hold tightly to the beliefs we discussed earlier, we are doing something wrong.

It may be, for instance, that believing our work to be the most important and defining part of our lives fit quite well with our current goals—our work may be our driving passion, or we may be at a time and place in our lives where we are willing to pour ourselves completely into and identify ourselves primarily with our work. So let’s start our analysis in a neutral space.

As we reflect on what we think and feel about our work, we’ll probably find that we carry a conflicting complexity of goals and beliefs—we believe that we should excel at work, but we want to spend more time with our families. We want financial and professional success, but we have a goal of more leisure in our lives. We would like a job that gives us greater personal satisfaction, but we don’t want to leave our current job because it pays well.

It is okay and inevitable that our goals and beliefs don’t line up perfectly—the modern world pulls us in many ways, and we only have so much time and energy. If we find, however, that the conflicts within us are extreme, this may be the time to make some decisions about what we want to change, keep, or begin releasing.

It could be that through this process we come to the realization that although a change in our work life is important to us, for one reason or another we don’t or can’t make the external shift. That does not invalidate our process at all. Our objective at this point is merely to increase our awareness of what we truly believe about and want from our work, especially as it fits into the rest of our lives.

Whatever the consistency or conflict among our beliefs and goals, our lives will be better if we can add to our systems some healthy beliefs that support our essential selves—beliefs that allow us to be more complete at work.

What are these healthy beliefs? They are basically mirror images of the troublesome ones we discussed above. Included are such things as:

*I am more than my job. My job is not what defines me. My personal value flows most deeply from my spiritual and personal growth, my relationships with others, the fact that my very life is a contribution to the positive energy of the earth.

*I expect my work to be as rewarding as any other part of my life. No matter how mundane my work I can use it to express my creativity, enhance my relationships with other people, and deepen my personal growth.

*Money isn't the most important thing in my life. When I am on my deathbed and look back on my life, the money I earned will not be on the list of the most significant things my life contained.

*The spiritual aspects of myself I bring to work give it meaning. They help me keep everything in perspective, and give substance to my connections with the people around me.

Marcel Proust says, "The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes." Our lives are greatly enriched when we develop and enhance beliefs about work that are rooted in the same principles that give the rest of our life energy and vitality. Here are some thoughts from someone who participated in a group which explored these orders. The way we see it is that business is a structure which evolved, for the most part, based upon the principle of leadership from the top down, and the expectation that all employees would dedicate their lives to the good of the company and to the good of business, in furtherance of their own retirement and the security and support of their families.

This has been the nature of work, and it has left much to be desired in terms of fulfillment of the individual. Looking to church or family for support, we suffered through our workplace, believing that was just the way it was, that work and spirit were separate. We simply left our spirit at home and did what needed to be done, without love, without thought for the opponents, and we were consequently rewarded by a system that served competition. Wealth and power were rewards to those who played the game well. The rules were clear; the system undisputed. Often the game seemed fun, if empty, and deal junkies became as real a phenomenon as drug addicts. But something is happening along the way. The world is changing and so are we. Separation of our hearts from work is becoming less and less acceptable.

Many of us are being awakened by physical health problems or are no longer willing to face the stress of work, no longer willing to hide behind tranquilizers and anti- depressants to get through the day. Others of us feel a deep longing for work that is more creative and meaningful. Maybe we have always felt these things, but never knew how to voice our discontent in an environment that scoffed at anything "soft". So we learned to pretend and in the pretending we became that which we did not want to be. It was required. It was admired and rewarded. But it was very incomplete.

 Whatever our work experience, white collar or blue collar, working in an organization or in our own profession or small business, many of us are searching for ways to more fully integrate our spirit into our work life. As the person above said, "We simply left our spirit at home and did what needed to be done". But now more and more, "Separation of our heart from work is less and less acceptable."
 

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