See a thing as it is

A challenge can invoke fear and uncertainty, and you can meet it with stillness. It can be difficult and complex, and be reduced to simple steps. It can take over your life, and you can choose to give it the attention it deserves. It can color your experiences, and you can give it perspective.

It's not the characteristic of the challenge that makes it hard or unclear or burdensome, it's how you approach it. The difference between reaction and action is a subtle shift in how you take in the moment. The subtlety does not go unnoticed though, because the success of getting through the challenge at hand relies on it. Resolution is not a matter of time, but of viewpoint. 

Why the best bosses are sometimes bossy

The word "boss" literally means "a person who exercises control or authority", but how do we often interpret it? Does the word itself give them control or authority? For example, in the case of a colleague getting promoted to be the boss. Does she or he now have control or authority over your work? Perhaps, if you view her as capable. If you don't, there's angst. 

What mental model do we apply to a boss? Some people like being told what to do. Others prefer a facilitator. And others only require rare oversight. The control or authority we attribute to a boss is the control that she or he has over us. 

What if you are the one that gets promoted to being the boss? Knowing how others perceive you matters. You can set the tone, but not everyone is listening to it from the same frame of mind.

As a leader, you have to know when to put on the right hat. A boss must exercise control or authority over oneself, one's emotions, one's reactions, one's judgments. It's not just a position of responsibility but also one of accountability, because all of sudden you get to make decisions others don't. Respect that others give you that respect.

Why change is good

I and others just keep on living with the momentum of high school, college and graduate school behind us, accepting the decently-paid jobs that come our way to solve problems we're trained for, but don't necessarily question.

It's when we start questioning the problems themselves that the reasoning starts to falter. Why do we practice law and sell real estate and go to a 9-5 the way we do? Why are we such avid consumers and upholders of individual freedom? So much of it is cultural conditioning that we become self-aware of when we travel to another country, sometimes another state. It becomes clear that norms can be very different and we're surprised by the strange nature of other cultures. What a self-aggrandizing idea! I bet people visiting from other cultures have exactly the same reaction. So there's another layer to combat, the inherent ethnocentrism that emerges when we encounter not just different looking people, but a whole another set of rules we're not prepared for. It's like going through the 5 stages of grief, first there's denial and then anger and eventually we evolve to acceptance. We get the travel bug, spurred by not just wanderlust or a desire to escape, but to be renewed by our surroundings.

What if we could be renewed within our own cultural context? Major change usually occurs when we change our environment or our thinking. Travel ushers the former, but what creates the possibility for the latter? Self-awareness doesn't happen in a vacuum. We often think of meditation as an escape within ourselves, when it is in fact exactly the opposite, it is complete awareness of our present moment. That means we hear, see, smell and accept everything around us as it is. It's almost a hyper-sensitivity to our natural and unnatural surroundings.

The awareness of nature in itself is fascinating, because it can be very limited in an urban environment, but all of a sudden you see a beautiful tree swaying in front of your apartment building that you completely missed! Or you'll be walking in a hurry to a meeting and be stopped by pigeons doing some kind of mating dance in front of you. It's surprising that you could have missed it lost in your thoughts about what you're going to say, do, and think in your next face-to-face.

Nature is constant movement. Trees are never as static as they may seem. Life is happening around us, just asking us to witness it. It makes sense that our awareness sees that movement when we work simply to build up our senses.

What's even more fascinating is how aware we become of our unnatural surroundings, or rather the cultural mores that condition our minds daily to guide our thinking one way or another. If we're truly paying attention in the moment, we can immediately see the effect an advertisement has on us, its repetitive nature seeping into us hoping we'll think of the brand when we go to the store. We start noticing people's ticks and responses and our ticks and responses to other people. We hear the news differently, the intonations that exaggerate and polarize. We notice art in a way we never saw it before, seeing the incontrovertible evidence of the artist's life experience and emotion and reaction to the world embedded within a simple painting. We start seeing through things, not needing the environmental shift to notice how we live and why we live. The acknowledgement of our unnatural surroundings also becomes a constant as we shift to an instantaneous mental acuity of where we are and why we are.

How will we change otherwise?

How to be your best self

I thought about bringing my mental energy to a situation this morning and realized, why wouldn't I also bring my body and spirit to it as well? It's confusing sometimes to lead with a part of yourself. It's strange to think the rest of it will just tag along.

When you're working out, how much are you using your mind? When you're hard at work, is your body involved? And where is your spirit in all this? Everything is at play all the time, we've only falsely compartmentalized it because I suppose compartmentalization makes it easier for our body/mind/spirit to focus on one part of that trio. Which is kind of strange if you think about it more granularly. If you can never be without your body/mind/spirit and you choose one to concentrate on, then what's being toned down? Your whole being, right?

You're deciding to exclude one or multiple parts of yourself (or perhaps you don't consciously realize that's what you're doing) with yourself. It's not an oxymoron because by taking a part of yourself out of commission, you've diminished your being entirely. Can you actually direct your chi?

I'm not sure how Bruce Lee would have answered that. He comes to mind(/body/spirit) as the most famous example of someone who could truly control the energy inside of him. At 5'7", 140lb, he could bench press 400 lbs and propel people 10 ft back with a small gut punch. But was he directing his chi? Or was he suffusing his entire being with it?

I believe this is why so many spiritual teachers (at least those that don't aspire to some greatness from their followers) refer to the being as body-mind, or simply as an entity or self. There is much inherent confusion about who is in the room, who showed up, what they're looking for, what incentive drives them to do what.

The questions people ask are self-concerned, not necessarily selfish. They don't necessarily want something to the detriment of another or just because they seek instant gratification, but they are trapped in their self. A conglomerate of emotions and experiences they constantly mull over.

When they say, how can I get rid of these distracting thoughts? How can I be at peace? The first thing that must be defined is this "I". Unfortunately, in the settings that this question emerges in, primarily Eastern ashrams, or Western spiritual centers, this comes off as woo-woo and is easily dismissed. The question though is much more literal, much more analytical than that.

Who is it that wants to be at peace? Who is having these distracting thoughts? Is it the mind? Is it the spirit? Is it the pain the body feels or the frustration the mind interprets or the weight that burdens the spirit? Where's the connect and disconnect? What part of you must you get rid of, change, re-imagine, to be yourself?

How much of yourself must you trim to be a better version of yourself? This is a fair question when you're thinking of it from the perspective of a fragmented self - creating a difference between body, mind and spirit. There are character traits that we dislike in ourselves and wonder if were to eliminate them, would we be better people? Laziness, procrastination, selfishness, etc. We imagine who we would be if we didn't have these traits. How much better we'd function in the world, and how much people would appreciate us more. Whether it's self-help, a psychiatrist or a spiritual guru, we go and seek a solution to eliminate these traits we perceive to be negative.

The question always comes back to the origin, the source of the problem. The root cause. Why do you have this trait to begin with? Who has it? Where did it come from? Does it exist in a vacuum? Is it a part of your culture? Are you lazy without others being more relatively active? Perhaps what you're trying to accomplish is very difficult? Not beyond your reach necessarily, but complex in its own right?

No man is an island. It's not a saying just to preserve a sense of community, it's a fact. We exist relative to our environments. Even if we hermit ourselves away, we're still not free from the place we inhabit. Our being, our self, our body/mind/spirit is always involved, all the time. There's no separating these parts of yourself. Your whole being is trying to separate itself then, and to what end? Eliminating a character trait you dislike is something you have to deal with in its entirety. Don't approach a problem halfway with a part of yourself. It just creates more fog. Go to the root always.