The beauty of seeing all this is that it allows you to release yourself from stress. When stress leaves you, your physical well-being improves dramatically. You don’t need as much rest. You’re naturally more optimistic and hopeful. You look forward to the day!
Your direct reports will be grateful. Wouldn’t you be if you were them? If you were an employee, what kind of manager would you want? One who looked forward to her day? Or one who was always stressed?
We recall a recent coaching session with a young IT worker starting with this question, “How stressed does your manager get?”
“It’s off the charts.”
“And what does he do with this stress?”
“He takes it out on us.”
How much relaxed and happy productivity will emerge from that employee?
* * *
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
—Carl Gustav Jung
* * *
As a hands-off manager you can be different. You can start your day centered in the peaceful, present-moment awareness of infinite possibility. And that’s because you no longer imagine all the things that are going to go wrong. There is no “wrong” way in which things can go. They’re just going to go where they’re going to go. There’s no more judgment about what’s going to occur. This allows you to be much more in the moment.
Notice that all the challenges you’ve faced that you judged negatively at the time ended up contributing to your strength and growth. The “bad breaks” all eventually contributed to your understanding. When you get enough time and distance to see the big picture, you almost always see this.
“When I was getting divorced I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” a company engineering manager named Brent said. “But looking back…it was the best thing. The very best thing.”
All these “bad things” that happen at work have helped us mature and become more understanding of how to run this business well. And it’s “bad things” that can open up this eventual spirit of acceptance. So how “bad” were they? Did we really need to judge them at all?
We are not saying to take a passive attitude. This is the opposite of passive. It’s an active embrace of what is. It frees up energy that had previously been trapped in internal conflict and distress. You are ready to act sooner. This is the path of action. It’s only passive when you imagine it. It’s active when you use it.
Manage agreements, not expectations
You’ve seen the energy toll taken on stressed-out managers. They are trying to manage their own chaotic universe. They are constantly being pulled back and forth between expectations and disappointments. How much energy is left over to create agreements? How much energy is left to innovate? How much energy is left to bring people together and forge new understandings? Practically zero. Stress has taken the energy away.
Non-judgment opens you up to respond to situations in creative ways. You don’t have to settle for anything mediocre. You can change all the things you want. Only now you can change them in a spirit of cooperation instead of a spirit of opposition to the way things are.
Just for today, don’t try to fix the world outside. Get busy evolving the world inside. You’re working on the joy and freedom that arise when you practice releasing yourself from judgment.
Judgment will always come to your mind now and then, but now you just let it pass through without clinging to it or believing the judgment to be the truth. It’s not the truth. It’s just a passing stressful thought. As the clouds pass, so can your thoughts.
Life is not so much about what’s going on but how we’re choosing to interpret it. When someone greets you with, “What’s happening?” a more accurate greeting might have been, “How are you judging what’s happening?”
It’s the ultimate in self-terrorizing stress to believe a passing thought that says something “shouldn’t have happened.” When in fact it happened! Was it God’s first mistake? Was it the universe making a wrong turn? Or was it just as it was supposed to have happened for your benefit and learning?
Soon you alter all your thinking to be about you and your interpretations, instead of the “bad” and “wrong” and “unfair” things that have happened. Soon you realize that your job is not to fix the external world, but rather to beautify the internal world of spirit and mind interacting all day. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”
Huge, practical benefits arise from this managerial approach. Your people will be eminently more comfortable with you when you accept them the way they are. They will be so much more trusting of you. Now their interest will turn to doing great work for you, whereas before they were playing victim to win your sympathy. Your people want to tell you the truth, particularly when they don’t fear being reprimanded for telling you something you don’t want to hear.