Tag: flow

How To Be Of Service

imagesI belong to a local food co-op, and for the privilege of buying really good food at reasonable prices, all members have to work there once a month. Although I usually whine about it before I actually head over there to do my evening shift, once I’m working, I often find it feels like the most useful thing I’ve done all day. Given that I have a “serious” day job as a lawyer for a human rights organization, that might sound odd. But honestly, stocking fresh apples or bunches of kale can feel a lot more real and productive than responding to e-mails, drafting press statements or monitoring Congressional or judicial hearings.

“As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell,” was Senator Tom Cotton’s memorable remark at the last Congressional hearing I watched, which focused on the fate of the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, half of whom are already cleared for release. Sadly, no amount of outrage I or anyone else expressed was going to change that he and many people in this country feel that way.

Maybe it’s the cold (or the new Republican Congress) that’s gotten me feeling defeatist about my advocacy work lately – it’s dipped below zero lately with the windchill factor here in Brooklyn – but I’ve been wondering a lot about what it means to be useful. I remember a yoga teacher once telling a class I was in that her purpose in life was “to be of service.” That’s stuck with me.

Of course, many people share that goal, and there’s lots of social science supporting the idea that helping others supports our own happiness. But that still leaves the huge challenge of figuring out how each of us can best do that. Where does our unique combination of talents, skills, interests and circumstances lead? Where and how can each of us be most useful?

The answers are different for everyone, and may keep changing over the course of our lives, but here are five things to consider as guidelines.

  1. Helping shouldn’t make you miserable.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to go down a path you thought would provide a real service that you then find you can’t stand. When I started out as a lawyer, for example, I was thrilled to get a job with a child welfare advocacy organization. We brought huge class-action cases representing hundreds of thousands of kids at risk of abuse and neglect around the country. What could be more noble? In reality, I spent most of my time in an office sifting through documents and regurgitating the same legal arguments over and over. I was miserable. It took me time, though, to realize that it’s okay to leave a “good” job that does “good” work if it makes you feel lousy.

  1. Your calling doesn’t land you in the poorhouse.

Some people can afford to do low-paying work that provides a service; others can’t. Taking a job that doesn’t pay you enough to support yourself and your family, if you need to do that, isn’t going to help anyone in the long run. Do work that not only provides a service to others but will sustain you as well.

  1. Your work allows you to take care of yourself.

In addition to providing others a service and you an income, your work needs to allow you the time and flexibility to take care of yourself. I see some people work so hard that between their job and their family responsibilities they end up neglecting their own physical and mental health. When you neglect yourself, you end up neglecting those around you. You can’t offer the best of yourself if you haven’t nurtured yourself in the process. In the long run, this is critical to providing a true service to anyone.

  1. You encounter a sense of flow, effortlessness or timelessness in your work.

The state of “flow” is achieved when “a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The point is that you’re so engaged in what you’re doing that you’ve stopped thinking about yourself, and stopped worrying about the past or the future. You’re just in the moment, doing what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel like “work” anymore, it’s just being. These are precious moments. I get them sometimes when I’m writing, or really connecting with a coaching client. Providing a service to others should provide you at least some moments when you’re totally engaged in that way – whether with another person, an action or a creation. Without that, it will be hard to sustain your commitment.

  1. You feel good about yourself at the end of the day.

This is key. A job may sound important when you describe it at a cocktail party, but when you look back at what you’ve done after a day’s work, how do you feel? Do you feel like you accomplished something, helped someone, participated in an important effort, or otherwise added something to the world around you? Or do you feel like you’ve just wasted your time? Pay attention to that. Providing a real service should feel like you’re providing a service. It may not (and probably won’t be) fun or fulfilling every minute, but after you’ve spent a chunk of time on it, you should feel like you’ve done and contributed something of value. If you don’t, think about that – and consider when you do.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, just a few things to pay attention to. And it doesn’t mean you have to immediately quit your job if your work doesn’t meet these standards. But it does suggest you may want to ask yourself what’s really important to you, and how does your life now support those things? How can it better support them?

And if you have any other guidelines you’d like to add to this list, please do! That’s what comments are for.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Power, Play and Hierarchy

40694-24568For anyone who questions rigid hierarchies and power structures or just feels discouraged or deflated by them, the book Walk Out, Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, is worth checking out.

“Walk Outs,” the authors write, are “people who bravely choose to leave behind situations, jobs, relationships and ideas that restrict and confine them, anything that inhibits them.” They “walk on” to “ideas, people, and practices that enable them to explore and discover news gifts, new possibilities.”  Rejecting rigid hierarchies and outworn notions of how things should be done, they learn and create new things.

The book traces seven projects in different parts of the world where individuals and communities created something out of what looked like nothing, relying not on outside expertise or a pre-designed plan, but on the dreams, ingenuity and creativity of local people joining together to build something they need.  I won’t get into the different projects here, which are really pretty amazing and worth reading about.  But I do want to share a few choice observations on power and hierarchy from the authors that could apply as much to a modern workplace in midtown Manhattan as to an impoverished favela in Brazil, the site of one of the projects described.

In physics, power is defined as the rate at which work gets done. This works fine for machines, but it has no relevance for humans. Yet many leaders assume that people are machines, that we can be programmed, motivated and supervised through external force and authority. This “command-and-control” leadership smothers basic human capacities such as intelligence, creativity, caring and dreaming.  Yet it is the most common form of leadership worldwide.  When it doesn’t work, those in power simply apply more force…. People resist the imposition of force by withdrawing, opposing and sabotaging the leader’s directives…. This destructive cycle continues to gain speed, with people resenting leaders and leaders blaming people.

This cycle not only destroys our motivation, it destroys our sense of worth…. It’s also visible in rigid hierarchies where people, confined to small boxes, can’t remember when they last felt good about themselves or confident in their abilities.

Power of this kind has a predictable outcome: it breeds powerlessness.  People accept the message they’ve heard so consistently, that they’re helpless without a strong leader. They become dependent and passive, waiting for a leader to rescue them, and their growing dependency leaves leaders with no choice.  They must take control if anything is going to get done.

What if solving a problem were instead approached as playing a game, write Wheatley and Frieze, and everyone with something at stake were invited to participate?

Games invite us to let go of our resignation and our sense of limitation – and simply to start dreaming, creating and imagining…. In the logic of play, people are invited to break rules, experiment, innovate, and be original…. Play returns us to a state in which we can see what’s possible–not what’s so…. We are inspired to experiment, to try out new ideas, to take ourselves a little less seriously. We do not have to conform to what we already know.

That’s the reasoning underlying the kind of leadership that leads to the stunningly successful projects described in this book.

It’s also consistent with new social science research showing that people perform much better and have far more energy for tasks they choose to do because the outcome matters to them, even if the task itself seems somewhat tedious, than for work they don’t really care about.  And people generally care far more about work they’ve chosen, using methods they’ve created, than work they’re told to do following someone else’s dictates.

All of this may seem obvious.  But it’s surprising how few leaders in workplaces consider this.  As I’ve written before, your boss may or may not be among the more enlightened leaders, but there are ways of setting your own goals and choosing your own means of accomplishing them that can go a long way towards putting you in the driver’s seat of your own work.

And if your job really doesn’t allow you that?  Then it may be time to “walk out” and “walk on.”

 

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting