“The purpose of life is…to show compassion and the will to help others.”
Albert Schweizer
“If you want to be happy, practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion”
Dalai Lama
This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges as a leader in organisations where the expectation is high performance and energy at all times.
To be compassionate is to feel deep sympathy for someone else, especially when they experience a misfortune, and to want to do what you can to alleviate their pain.
A major barrier to watch out for as a high performing Intraprenuer – especially when you a are a leader of leaders – is to establish close working relationships throughout the organisation. Ironically, the higher you progress in your organisational leadership, the expectation of being compassionate grows. It’s something to do with having a higher profile that increases the expectation that you will magically be able to show compassion as and when required.
At the team leader level, it’s more intimate – they want to know that you genuinely care. And it’s absolutely true that they won’t care what you know until they know that you care.
If team members know that their leader cares about them as a person, they are much more productive, are more likely to stay with the organisation, are able to engage better with clients and produce greater profits.
As a leader, this means taking responsibility for initiating activities that improve the well-being of their team members.
Corporate wellness programs have been around now in one form or another for almost twenty years, but one of the new and emerging opportunities is in the area of mental health. The statistics from my home country alone are sobering:
- It’s now estimated that one in five people will experience depression at some point in their lives, and that 45% of people will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. 2.
- 44% of workers identify issues in the workplace as a source of stress.
- A recent three-year study found over 80% of staff experiencing an intense working environment with very concerning levels of worry, chronic stress symptoms, distress and disengagement.
- It’s now estimated that high stress workplaces can have as much of a negative impact on health as passive smoking.
- More than 2 million people have a form of anxiety
- More than 1 million people are living with depression, with untreated depression resulting in more than 6 million working days lost per year.
- Only just over half of workplaces are described by employees as being mentally healthy, with untreated mental health conditions costing workplaces almost $11 Billion per year.
- This means that it’s highly likely that someone in one of the teams that you are part of suffers from a mental health condition.
With Gallup globally reporting that only 8% of people strongly agreeing they experience overall wellbeing because of their work, this clearly demonstrates that there is a large amount of ‘dis-ease’ in the modern workplace.
Although the numbers are sobering, this presents a huge opportunity for leaders to demonstrate practical compassion by incorporating mentally healthy workplace practices into their organisations. In my country, organisations like Beyond Blue are doing this with their “Heads-Up” program. But there are three other practices that can be incorporated into the workplace, where we can learn from Eastern practices.
Meditation: While some practices encourage the total emptying of the mind, there is a rich tradition of meditation that where the mind is engaged in active contemplation of a key word, phrase or subject.
It’s a little like the digestive system of a cow. Unlike us, a cow has three stomachs for processing its food. When a cow eats grass It chews, swallows, regurgitates, chews, swallows, regurgitates, chews and swallows. Each time the food passes through a stomach and back up again the cow “chews the cud”.
Meditation allows important thoughts and information to be stored and re-brought to our attention for further contemplation, or “cud-chewing” at a later time. It slows down the mind to focus more fully on what is before it, and frees you up to focus on other things while still consciously allowing the matter to be processed in the background.
Introducing meditation as a practice can bring greater clarity and focus when seeking to make important decisions as a leader when working on complex tasks that require sustained periods of higher order brain functioning. It does not require weekend retreats or hours to master the basics. Simply starting with one thought or idea and going through the process of active contemplation, then setting aside, and repeating the process will gently build meditation muscles. That’s not to say that lengthier time periods and deeper experiences aren’t of benefit. But it’s possible to start very small and build your capacity from there.
Ultimately, meditation encourages us to pause from constant activity, and makes it easier to embrace the second practice.
Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the act of being fully engaged in the present moment. We’ve allowed our western world to drive us into an on-demand, always “on” state. This ultimately causes “dis-connection” with our immediate surroundings as our thoughts are pulled into the past or pushed into the future.
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (or MBSR) is gaining credence as both a tool for psychotherapy and in corporate training curricula. Google is now offering one of its company programs, called Search Inside Yourself into the open business community which has evidence based mindfulness as a central tenet of its teaching. They believe that mindfulness is a foundational skill that underpins the inner factors of growth: self-awareness, self-management, and emotional skills.
Mindfulness serves to give our thoughts the gentle push required to put the energy from our thoughts and emotions into healthy movement.
Motion: Our working culture has become largely sedentary, contributing to Australia having the fastest growing rate of obesity in the world. This leads to disconnection from our bodies.
We’ve moved a long way from our hunter-gatherer days where our bodies comfortably travelled many miles each day in search of food. But we don’t need to run a marathon every day to gain positive benefits from movement. Similar to meditation, starting small with short breaks to take gentle walks where we pay attention to what is around us can help to create a positive movement of energy within our bodies. Attending tai chi is a safe way to learn to move the body.
There’s an over-abundance of information on healthy movement. But when it’s been reported that only one in eight people will make the necessary lifestyle changes when confronted with a life-threatening health condition, it’s not information we need, but inspiration. This is where the science of flow – or total engagement can come into play.
Most of us have experienced flow. It’s that dinner party with friends where you completely lost track of time because you were immersed in great conversation. Or that time you got so into work that everything else fades around you.
Steven Kotler in his book The Rise of Superman, argues that flow ”…directly correlates to happiness at work and happiness at work directly correlates to success. Research into the business world proves that happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31% and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of health and quality of life improvements.”
The science is now at the point where consumer devices will soon be able to go far beyond your basic fitness wristband and provide us with a way to capture what was previously a subjective experience and turn it into objective data. Organisations like the Flow Genome Project are seeking to take the experience of extreme sports and learn how to safely “mainstream” those peak performance states for the general population.
Good movement is ultimately what pulls us into flow and then encourages the positive cycle of meditation to contemplate and reflect again on our embodied experience.
This total experience enables us to operate from a strong and compassionate centre, which opens up the potential for stability to be created.