Leah Weiss - How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind

Contents

Contents

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HOW WE WORK . Copyright 2018 by Leah Weiss, PhD. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by James Iacobelli

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition MARCH 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-256507-5

Version 04172018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-256506-8

This book is dedicated to anyone who has had the Sunday blues.

A new Monday has finally come.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries.
Without them, humanity cannot survive.

D ALAI L AMA

A shoe repairman spent long, tedious days fixing peoples shoes. He worked seemingly endless hours to make a modest living, and over the years, he grew frustrated by the unrelenting monotony of his work and the struggle to make ends meet. His job felt like a dead end, but he lacked the resources and social connections to find his way into a more fulfilling or lucrative career. Eventually, he met a teacher who made some simple yet profound suggestions as to how he could bring a different quality of attention to his work fixing shoes. Figuring he had nothing to lose, the shoe repairman practiced these new skills every day, paying attention to his tasks differently, and in time, his experience of work was completely transformed. His job didnt change, but he did.

This man lived a little over a thousand years ago, as the parable goes, but his story has endured, and his predicament is relevant to many of us today. Partly because work is where we spend so much of our time and partly because of its nature, nothing provides more opportunities than the workplace for us to feel discouraged, disappointed, bored, overwhelmed, envious, embarrassed, anxious, irritated, outraged, and afraid to say what we really feel. Like it or not, aware of it or not, we feel things at our jobs, and how we feel at and about work mattersto us, to our families and friends who are impacted, to the quality of our work, and ultimately to the success of the organizations we work for.

This is the bad news that at some level we already know too well: work hurts.

A recent report from Gallup, the largest database of workplace research, offers evidence that the old workplace ways (annual reviews, forced rankings, outdated competencies) no longer achieve the intended results. The American workforce has more than one hundred million full-time employees. One-third of those employees are what Gallup calls engaged at work. They love their jobs and they make their organizations, and America, better every day. Conversely, 16 percent of employees are found to be actively disengagedthat is, they are miserable in the workplace and destroy what the most engaged employees build. The remaining 51 percent of employees are not engagedtheyre just there. These figures, I believe, indicate an American workplace philosophy that simply doesnt work anymore. One wonders if the countrys declining productivity numbers point to a need for major workplace disruption. Indeed, one of the top recommendations of the Gallup report is for organizations to Change from a culture of paycheck to a culture of purpose.

Another study, the 2016 State of Enterprise Work Report, showed that 76 percent of workers interviewed said the main reason they work is to pay the bills. Yet at the same time, 92 percent felt it was important for their work to be rewarding.

What many people dont realize is that these two goalsa paycheck and a sense of purposeneed not be mutually exclusive. And yet many of us are not engaged or worsetruly suffering. The paradox is that being mindful of our experience of our work, even to our dissatisfaction, disengagement, and ambivalence, is the first step toward turning it around. Indeed, paying attention to our feelings is the very definition of mindfulness.

Contemplative traditions such as Buddhism have long recognized the value of mindfulness. More recently, scientists have found methods to observe and quantify its benefits. For more than a decade, Ive been teaching mindfulness as a method for personal and professional growth, most recently at Stanfords Graduate School of Business, where I teach a course called Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion. That title may sound like what one of my students suggested when he asked, Is this going to be a bunch of hippie BS? Yet being mindful is a critical skill for young aspiring leaders, and among the personal attributes that fall under the category soft skills, a term coined in 1972 to capture the social and interpersonal capacities that are the foundation of our ability to effectively work with others. Hiring managers say that the most vital of these skills include communication, adaptability, creativity, and demeanor.

In 2015, the Wall Street Journal

The millennia-tested, evidence-based strategies I share with my students, and that I will share with you, allow us to view the work we do as an opportunity to practice mindfulness, purposefulness, and compassion. I offer these strategies not merely as coping skills or as a means of reducing stress and getting through another day at the office, but because they can enhance your experience of the workplace and of life.

Much like the pterodactyl whistle that announced the end of Fred Flintstones workday, today the old boundaries that delineate the professional and the personal (career and family, business and pleasure, even secular and sacred, as we will see) are neither realistic nor relevant to the way we work or would like to work. We all want our work to matter and want to matter to our work. Whether youre a corporate employee, a freelancer, a teacher, a health care provider, or a hedge fund manager, you probably want to care about your work beyond the time youre on the clock. While flexible hours are the most sought-after workplace benefit and can help engender more engagement, they also cause the boundaries between work and the rest of our lives to become more porous.

Given this reality, what can we do?

In the Tibetan language, heart and mind are expressed as the same word. Mindfulness practice, or lojong, is often translated as mind training, but I prefer to use the term heart-mind training, which keeps the heart in mind. The lojong system was popularized by twelfth-century meditation master Chekawa Yeshe Dorje, who recognized that integrated practice (that is, one that allows a student to practice anywhere, doing anything) would be a good fit for working people. With this approach, the teacher meets the students where they are: brothels, battlefields, schools, businesses, monasteries, even bars. (This doesnt mean the teacher recommends that the student