Food for the Business Soul
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” ~ Freya Stark
Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
~Josh Billings, columnist and humorist (1818-1885)
Many years ago, between my work as a therapist and my work as a life coach, I worked in a large public agency as a management trainer and performance coach. I taught managers how to work better with their employees, how to communicate with them most effectively and set performance goals that got the job done. In business, we have performance goals to keep us accountable to the Strategic Plan.
In everyday life we create our own performance goals to keep us accountable to our own life plan. A simple example that we can all relate to is, “I will perform eating better, by using XX dietary plan to maintain a median weight by October 22, 2008. We don’t always follow through, therefore, in business we have performance coaches, and in life we have life coaches.
As a life coach, I use a holistic approach, keeping clients nourished and connected to spirit.
What is lost to business is the nourishment that feeds us, and we long for a different job or retirement to get back to our true Self.
This was brought home to me one day as our organization got a new department head. I waited and watched as the new person settled in. One of our first conversations gravitated to values management, a hot term of the day that fizzled out over time. She let me know that she was “not what she did for a living” I thought this as an odd thing to say, since it is impossible to be disconnected to self for very long. I felt that there was a story there somewhere. I paid a lot of attention to her as she evolved over the 6 years that I worked there. (more…)