Championing a better working life

Most of the disappointments that employees experience in the workplace stem from their attachment to views, opinions, thinking or positions, believing that they are connected to these, while actually they are not. Their ideas become the lenses through which they perceive the events of their work life. No doubt the machinery of perception each has developed has served them well for the most part, guiding and supporting them at critical junctures. However, the burden of adhering to set patterns of perceiving while they grapple with the drama and minutiae of every working day can be limiting and an invitation to misery. When employees are convinced that things must be a certain way and they are not, they suffer. When their line managers refuse to act in the way they think they should, they suffer. When they don’t get what they expect from their organization, or when they get what they don’t want, they suffer. The workplace, a microcosm of life in its entirety, is rife with opportunities to march straight into suffering. What they need to explore is whether their dis-ease really derives from the workplace itself or instead from how they apply their default ways of perceiving the challenges they face at work. The mind tries to force any situation it meets into its favorite ways of perceiving and will react with dis-ease when it faces resistance. It can be difficult enough to be open-minded toward a co-worker, for example, but it is even more difficult to be open-minded toward oneself. Employees need to be aware when they find themselves falling into an old or familiar pattern when dealing with the challenges in the workplace. They need to stop and examine what is actually going on, notice the emotions that have bloomed, notice what stories their mind is generating that make the body tense and inflame its emotions and recognize the potentially explosive negative charge generated by their thoughts and emotions. When they accept that it has arisen, then they need to make the decision to be in control of it instead of being controlled by it. Ali Al-Aradi, Dubai