Work as a Spiritual Practice

In the last while, I’ve been delivering a course that I've written called Understanding Workplace Stress and Developing Resilience, which I was doing with Womens’ Aid workers in different parts of Scotland. The course content flows from my work working as a coach for 15 years supporting the resilience of leaders, working with teams to be resilience, supporting resilience in networks of organisations and working in a mental health organisation. Yet the depth of it comes from myself and my own understanding of what works, what is practical.

Above in the picture you will see a mind map of a whole book, Work as A Spiritual Practice, by Richard Lewis, written in 1992. Of course we now have lot more understanding from the development of neuro-science and from the fabulous growth of mindfulness. And i work in association with the Mindful Talent Coaching Academy and a whole range of colleagues who use mindfulness in their work. Yet I think it is both simple and complex to be authentically yourself at work and to handle the role and pressures that pull you away from being yourself. These can be the more subtle and more important long term factors that call people to come to coaching with me. Whether their coaching is about their leadership of their organisation and how they develop the whole organisation and their board, or whether their coaching is about I need to make a change in my career because i've ended up going in a direction that no longer feels right. Talent management is what we call it, but actually its not a swift thing and stress and resilience are the absolute core parts of this.

So we need to think about what we are doing in our organisations and in our lives. And it isn't just about work/life balance, it is about balance and we don't live in a very balanced world. If we choose to follow paths that interact with far too much social media on the weekends as well as the workplace during the week, we end up turning the wheel like a hamster, instead of having the sense of who we are and being in control. Knowing what your centre is, your why, is extremely useful.

One of the diagrams i find very practical is this one of plotting out your knowledge, your inner knowledge about how you know you are in the Panic Zone, the Strain Zone, the Stretch Zone and your Comfort Zone. You will find this curve helps you think about it, the diminishing returns that happen when your in the Strain Zone for too long, the way your brain switches off when your in the Panic Zone, because you are operating in fight or flight. Even in the Strain Zone where you are building up cortisol and the not being yourself, not being true to yourself. And i don't just mean your own self, i also mean the relationships, the connectedness to people around you, the people who share your values. If your straining you are probably not attending to connections. So your probably not attending to desire, vocation, yearning, the things that probably brought yourself and others into the organisation and the role. And yet we all need to strive. Human beings like to strive and the Stretch Zone is very good for us, but then we find ourselves stuck in the Strain Zone and its learning how to come out of the Strain Zone.

So work as a spiritual practice is at the heart of this. If we are not doing practices that connect us inside ourselves and outside ourselves then we are running a bit of a risk. And it is a spiritual practice to work and serve, to find ones purpose. Treating work as a spiritual practice is a great attitude, even if it as simple and quick as going for slow meditative walk at work. This is one of the exercises in the book, where you feel the ground beneath your feet, celebrating the joy and the complexity of how your feet and the ground meet each other as structures meeting working to keep us all solid. That kind of mindfulness exercise is a simple way of reminding yourself to stay connected every day.

While my coaching is very much about supporting the practical challenges that leaders face in their day to day of running their organisations, at the same time the work is deeper, around developing the longer term resilience practices that continue to ensure people bring out the best of themselves and those around them.

So enjoy your day, and do whatever spiritual practice you do today, at work, as part of work.

Contact me on 07786050893 or duncan@duncanwallace.org.uk for coaching or the training courses i run.