Searching For the Waters of Antiquity

“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.

During that time I observed a quiet, sensitive, and somewhat thoughtful person, evolve and change. I watched someone detach from a set of belief’s that drove her life. Detaching helped her feel more comfortable in the short run. Although she was not fed by her new beliefs and while she played her cards to her best advantage, her success was short lived. Which begs the question, are you what you do? Would you be happy with your answer?

We all want to feel successful in our work life and the way to ensure this is to create our own performance goals that are consistent with our core values and belief systems. In this way, we attract like minded people and situations that harness the pure potentiality of business power. So, what if we work for someone else? What if they drive goal setting?

Then manage those goals by communicating why you feel the way you do about a particular objective. Support your business environment to the fullest by advocating for what you believe in. At core, we work with people that are pretty similar. If you are uncomfortable, then perhaps everyone is too. Work the process by managing down, and selling up. Always keep spirit at the table with you, even in the board room. That means to feel the power of Source backing you and an attitude of gratitude for each day. The more you do this, the more the Law of Attraction works with you. You get back what you send out to the Universe. Allowing all of Self to be present in our work life, we blossom in intriguing ways. The Universe then provides what we seek.

You don’t know how you feel, you say? Easy enough to find out just ask yourself and of course then listen to what you have to say. Your higher consciousness always knows the way. When setting a work related goal, go through the usual set of strategies: Is the objective time limited and measurable? Can it be broken down into steps that can be managed step-by-step and task-by-task?

Have you communicated with the other important people involved and do all of the stakeholders agree? How are the stakeholders getting organized and does everyone agree on who will be accountable for the results within each step of the process? Now that you have the usual business steps in place, the next important step and the one left out as a rule is to check your intuition.

Test your Internal Core Beliefs
*How do you feel about the goal? Does if feel right?
*Does the methods needed to get the job done fit your personal values?
*Would the important people in your life (not attached to work) agree?
*Does the goal in general work for the business and environment you are in?

The last question is a gem in the Organizational Development business. Many people refuse to “call it like it is” preferring the more vague politicking and side discussions to the direct challenge of full team discussions. They let the powers that be flounder, not sharing their expertise for fear of reprisal.

So who folds? Everyone, including us, because we have not stepped up to the task, not allowed spirit into the work world, not allowed energy and information to flow. Consequently we constrict our work world view, as we might constrict other parts of our life. Ultimately, we know when we are in flow, because everything becomes easy and effortless. The bottom line is that we are all connected to the whole. What we send out we get back in a cosmic loop.

So allow the loop to come full circle and provide a work world of pure potentiality and abundance. Managing those team efforts with cosmic clarity produces work goals and solutions that bring prosperity to our communities. All of the intuitive questions above help us to see past the concrete and intellectual goals that drive us, to connect to our core values, to what we believe. Play your hand well by completing the cosmic loop, feed your business soul and open to full work prosperity.

Posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 12:36 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.