Marc Lesser's Blog, page 31

Taking the Backward Step that Turns Your Light Inward

Several years ago I co-led a one-day Search Inside Yourself program for Google’s doctors and health care providers. My co-teacher was a Google employee whom I had trained as a Search Inside Yourself teacher. After introducing the topics of mindfulness and emotional intelligence, my co-teacher described the process of meditation as bringing attention to the breath, noticing distraction, and then returning attention to the breath. Then he used the metaphor that “meditation is much like going to the gym” – each time you bring your attention back to your breath, you are improving your ability to focus, like strengthening a muscle as you repeat this process again and again.

I thanked my co-teacher and said that while I agreed with this metaphor, it is also true that “meditation is nothing like going to the gym.” My co-teacher was a bit surprised. He smiled, looked at me, and said enthusiastically to the participants, “Well, that’s why we have two teachers!” Fortunately, we had a really good, trusting relationship, as I had been mentoring him for the past year, and he was not put off by my contradiction.

I clarified that going to the gym implies that you are meditating to get a result and that you expect a step-by-step improvement. This can be useful, and encouraging, and it can also be a hindrance to the real power and benefits of meditation practice.

Another approach to meditation is to completely let go of all reasons and rationales for meditating, giving up any ideas or hopes of improving or getting anything. Instead, as you meditate, see what it is like to just be quiet, still, and alive, just appreciating your experience, seeing yourself and accepting yourself as you truly are.

Here is what Dōgen, founder of Zen in Japan in the 13th century, had to say about meditation practice:

“The sitting practice I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the gate of repose and bliss, the practice/realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it. Once its heart is grasped, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains.

You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly.”

I love Dōgen’s poetic description of meditation, and his deep sense of knowing, speaking from the depth of his own experience. He is saying that, in meditation, there is nothing to gain or achieve; just this act of stopping, breathing, and letting go of everything breaks down and transcends our ideas of what practice is and what realization or self-actualization are.

In the Zen tradition, “take the backward step” refers to a deep sense of letting go and is the opposite of trying to gain something. It is a much-revered instruction for meditation practice, as it “is simply the gate of repose and bliss.” Of course, this might not be your (and it is not my) day-to-day experience of meditation. But why not? What gets in the way? Dōgen’s words are meant, I believe, to be aspirational and practical: they shift our assumptions regarding both meditation practice, and our lives.

The post Taking the Backward Step that Turns Your Light Inward appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Identifying Creative Gaps and Ground Truths

An excerpt from Practice #1 – Love the Work – in Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader.

The practice “Love the work” refers to answering the call of mindful leadership and developing a mindfulness practice in order to see more clearly. This sounds straightforward. Through mindfulness, our intention is to recognize change, recognize what is, and recognize our aspirations. We should expect to encounter and have to overcome some internal resistance, which is part of the process of seeing more clearly.

For instance, reality has an irritating habit of shifting and changing, totally undermining our hopes, dreams, and fantasies. When our ideas and plans collide with reality, reality generally wins, whether it’s the reality of our aging bodies and minds, of our mercurial emotions, of upheaval in the business world, or of the shifting priorities and feelings of other people, family, friends, and coworkers.

When this happens, we may not want to admit that reality isn’t going to meet our expectations, but we create trouble for ourselves if we do not. We need to see what is, or what the military calls “ground truth.” This is what’s actually happening, the reality of the battle or situation on the ground, as opposed to what intelligence reports and mission plans predicted would happen. The ground truth is what you say to yourself and closest friends about the reality of your experience, as opposed to what you want, or what you hoped or planned would happen, or how you’d like to appear to others.

For a moment, consider your “ground truth” in these areas:

Your well-being, including sleep, exercise, diet, and your state of mind: What are you experiencing versus your aspirations?
Your work: How’s it going? What’s the reality?
Your experience of your core relationships: Would you say you are satisfied or disappointed, and how?

In war and in life, there are always “gaps” between our ground truths and our visions of what we expected or wanted. Naturally, we ’d like to close these gaps if we can, but first we have to see and acknowledge them. So, one important practice for loving the work is to acknowledge where you are right now, where you want to be, and the gaps between these two. Doing this requires being curious, appreciative, and warmhearted with yourself while at the same time “staring,” looking directly at what is and what you want. This is an important, even paradoxical skill and practice: acknowledging the gaps between what is (the ground truth) and what you want, while at the same time appreciating what is without trying to change it.

In Peter Senge’s groundbreaking book, The Fifth Discipline, he calls these gaps “creative tensions.” He says that one of the most important skills of leadership is staying with these gaps instead of covering them over or finding strategies to make them go away in order to feel more comfortable.

Try this: Having considered your “ground truth” in several areas, identify some of your core or most critical creative gaps. In what areas is the difference between what actually is and your vision of what you want the widest? What are some ways you might narrow or even close those gaps?

What support do you need?

What skillful conversations might be useful?

What has stopped you from closing the gaps up to now?

What might you need to accept rather than change?

What is there to learn?

Identifying Creative Gaps and Ground Truths

An excerpt from Practice #1 – Love the Work – in Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader.

The practice “Love the work” refers to answering the call of mindful leadership and developing a mindfulness practice in order to see more clearly. This sounds straightforward. Through mindfulness, our intention is to recognize change, recognize what is, and recognize our aspirations. We should expect to encounter and have to overcome some internal resistance, which is part of the process of seeing more clearly.

For instance, reality has an irritating habit of shifting and changing, totally undermining our hopes, dreams, and fantasies. When our ideas and plans collide with reality, reality generally wins, whether it’s the reality of our aging bodies and minds, of our mercurial emotions, of upheaval in the business world, or of the shifting priorities and feelings of other people, family, friends, and coworkers.

When this happens, we may not want to admit that reality isn’t going to meet our expectations, but we create trouble for ourselves if we do not. We need to see what is, or what the military calls “ground truth.” This is what’s actually happening, the reality of the battle or situation on the ground, as opposed to what intelligence reports and mission plans predicted would happen. The ground truth is what you say to yourself and closest friends about the reality of your experience, as opposed to what you want, or what you hoped or planned would happen, or how you’d like to appear to others.

For a moment, consider your “ground truth” in these areas:

Your well-being, including sleep, exercise, diet, and your state of mind: What are you experiencing versus your aspirations?
Your work: How’s it going? What’s the reality?
Your experience of your core relationships: Would you say you are satisfied or disappointed, and how?

In war and in life, there are always “gaps” between our ground truths and our visions of what we expected or wanted. Naturally, we ’d like to close these gaps if we can, but first we have to see and acknowledge them. So, one important practice for loving the work is to acknowledge where you are right now, where you want to be, and the gaps between these two. Doing this requires being curious, appreciative, and warmhearted with yourself while at the same time “staring,” looking directly at what is and what you want. This is an important, even paradoxical skill and practice: acknowledging the gaps between what is (the ground truth) and what you want, while at the same time appreciating what is without trying to change it.

In Peter Senge’s groundbreaking book, The Fifth Discipline, he calls these gaps “creative tensions.” He says that one of the most important skills of leadership is staying with these gaps instead of covering them over or finding strategies to make them go away in order to feel more comfortable.

Try this: Having considered your “ground truth” in several areas, identify some of your core or most critical creative gaps. In what areas is the difference between what actually is and your vision of what you want the widest? What are some ways you might narrow or even close those gaps?

What support do you need?

What skillful conversations might be useful?

What has stopped you from closing the gaps up to now?

What might you need to accept rather than change?

What is there to learn?

The post Identifying Creative Gaps and Ground Truths appeared first on Marc Lesser.

Endless Changes

A short verse from Dongshan, a 6th century Chinese Zen teacher:

Not getting caught by it is or it isn’t

Do you have the courage to be at peace with it?

Everyone wants to leave the endless changes

But when we stop bending and fitting our lives

We come and sit by the fire.

It takes courage to not be caught by “it is or it isn’t” by liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting, good and bad, and right and wrong. We all want clarity, and of course some things are good and bad, and some things are right and wrong. And yet, how do we have the courage to hear other points of view, to not dismiss those who don’t agree with us?

The reality of change can be daunting. When I’m teaching, I sometimes suggest that if you don’t fully embrace the reality of change, just look in the mirror. Is that person now, the same person I was looking at yesterday, last year, ten years ago. The reality of change is potent, mysterious, sacred, and freeing.

And, let’s all stop bending and fitting our lives. The last line in the verse, come and sit by the fire, I find as an invitation not only for rest and acceptance, but and invitation to act without anything extra.

I find so many practices in the midst of this short verse:

– letting go of dualistic, yes and no thinking

– leaning in to change

– finding effortlessness in the midst of effort

Our Guides Along The Journey

I’ve been enjoying re-reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, published in 1949, describing the similar archetypal path of humans, throughout time and across cultures.  The first three parts of this path are named as:

–       the call to adventure

–       refusing the call

–       supernatural aid

The first part of the human journey is to be called, usually unexpectedly to do something, find something, or achieve something.

The second part, is refusing the call. Often, we don’t want to answer the call – we are too busy, or it’s too dangerous, or we have other things to do.

The third step along the way, as described by Campbell is supernatural aid.  He uses this term to describe our guides along the way; the people that seem to almost “magically” appear to help us.

I’ve had so much help, from so many people. I don’t generally think of it as being supernatural, but this help and guidance is certainly usually unexpected and surprising.   “Even to those who apparently have hardened their hearts, the supernatural guardian may appear.”

This is an excellent topic to think about or write about. Who have your guides been?  And, who are you guides now, in your life?  In what way is your heart hardened, and in what way is your heart open?

Seven factors of cultivating freedom

The Buddhist tradition names what are called the seven factors of enlightenment.  Enlightenment is a fancy word for finding more freedom, real confidence, and emotional flexibility. These factors are meant to be practiced, not just during meditation practice but throughout daily life:

1. Mindfulness – awareness practice is the basis for cultivating more freedom

2. Discernment – this is the practice of seeing more clearly

3. Energy – making just the right amount of effort

4. Joy – cultivating an open, uplifting state of mind

5. Relaxation – staying calm in the midst of activity

6. Concentration – the ability to stay engaged, present, and focused

7. Tranquility – skillful engagement

Choose one of these practices and try it on this week.  How does it show up in your life? What is the resistance or difficulty? What supports you in this practice?

Practicing With Paradox

I have come to believe that embracing and responding to paradox — turning our assumptions upside down, expecting the unexpected, comfortably holding two opposing viewpoints at the same time, resolving conflicting requirements, and so on — is the key to waking up to ourselves and the present moment and discovering the right thing to do. Paradox is the doorway to insight, just as falling is necessary for learning how to balance on a tightrope. We all want more clarity, more ease, more connectedness, more possibilities, more compassion, more kindness. We want healthy relationships in order to thrive at our work and to be effective in all areas of our life. What is hard is knowing in any given situation what the appropriate action or response should be. We want the insight to know how to achieve all these things, but our vision and experience are limited.

There is an expression from the Zen tradition, “Don’t be a board-carrying fellow.” This refers to the image of a carpenter carrying a wide wooden board on his or her shoulder. The board blocks and limits vision, allowing the carpenter to see only one side of things. This expression is meant to caution us from thinking we see fully and clearly, when we see only partially. We are all board-carrying fellows. We usually just see the world from our ordinary, habitual viewpoint and neglect the mysterious, the profound, the obvious. If we don’t know or acknowledge that our viewpoint is limited, we will find it virtually impossible to gain the insight that allows us to respond in new, more successful ways. To become aware of our limitations, to achieve the insights we crave, we need to wake up.

Accepting the power of paradox is one of life’s ways of waking us up, shocking us into awareness, so we can find our balance again. Waking up can be cultivated, practiced, so that it becomes a way of life, so that it becomes our habitual approach to life. Then we may become as skillful as a tightrope walker, who lives on the edge of falling and yet (almost) always catches him- or herself in time.

Paradox means many things and can be worked with and utilized in our lives in many ways. Many Zen stories embody or are steeped in paradox, and I use them often in my work, as I do in this book. Yet paradox can also simply be a startling, peculiar, playful, or unexpected observation that challenges our habitual way of thinking. It is asking, “What is this rhinoceros doing in my office?” It is the late anthropologist Gregory Bateson observing that spaceship Earth is so well designed that we have no idea we are on one. Here we are, hurtling through space at a million miles per hour with no need for seatbelts, plenty of room in coach, and excellent food. Imagine. Paradox is anytime you hear that whisper in your ear, “Wake up, the world is extraordinary. This life you take for granted isn’t what you think!”

(From Know Yourself, Forget Yourself)

 

Just Avoid Picking And Choosing

A coaching client of mine, a successful entrepreneur and scientist, once showed me his happiness assessment. Every day he ranked on a scale from 1 to 10 how he was performing on a variety of areas: work, relationship, spiritual practice, hobbies, exercise, and a few others. He would then calculate an average of these numbers to determine his daily overall happiness quotient. He showed me a chart he kept, tracking the daily rises and falls of this measure. It looked much like the Dow Jones stock market index, with its various trends up and down, seesawing between deep valleys and steep climbs.

I admired his effort to pay attention and measure his level of happiness. This can be a useful self-awareness tool. He used this tool to determine which parts of his life needed more focus and attention. You, too, could use this approach to provide a quick, daily snapshot.

But I was concerned that he was being aggressively judgmental and hard on himself. His numbers were obviously subjective; after all, he was his own judge, and a harsh one. I suggested that he also keep another version of his happiness index. For this version, I asked that, every day, he rate himself a perfect 10 in every category of his life: work, relationship, spiritual practice, hobbies, exercise. On this second chart no improvement is necessary, or even possible. It represents complete and utter acceptance of one’s life right now, in this moment. Complete appreciation, satisfaction with what is.

I hoped, by keeping both charts, he could practice fighting for change and complete acceptance. And that each might help inform the other. Too much driving change, especially when measured solely by judgment and criticism, can lead to a state of constant striving and result in emotional burnout. Too much acceptance can lead to passivity. The goal is not to find a middle spot but to be adept at both — fighting for change and accepting what is.

Zen teacher Joshu is often regarded as one of the greatest Zen teachers. He lived during the Tang dynasty in ninth-century China. Collections of Zen stories contain many of his colorful, playful, and paradoxical teachings. One story in particular is quite succinct, and famous, and speaks directly to the topic of accepting what is. This story describes how one evening Joshu addressed a large assembly of monks. He said: “The Ultimate Path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing.”

Of course, we are assessing, discerning, and “picking and choosing” all the time. We have to. I pick and choose these words. We pick and choose our goals. At the same time, Joshu is suggesting that we not fall into a trap when measuring, when we reduce the value of our experiences, and the quality of our lives, by preferring some things and not others, by pitting a “favorite” against everything that doesn’t qualify as a favorite.

I have the same ambivalence with the popular notion of a bucket list — the list of things to do or places to visit before you die. It’s a terrific idea for focusing your attention on how to change your life to do the things that really matter to you. But it leaves out acceptance and gratitude. Despite fighting for change, we should recognize that there is nothing lacking from our lives. Our lives are perfect in this moment just as they are. We should be ready to let go, to die today, with open hearts and a sense of profound acceptance and satisfaction.

I had lunch recently with my friend Kaz Tanahashi, a world-renowned calligrapher and translator. He is also one of the most content, happy, and productive people I know. Kaz travels throughout the world teaching calligraphy and leading Zen retreats. He told me that upon returning from his travels recently someone asked him, “What’s your favorite city?” What a strange question, he thought. He wondered: If he named a favorite city, then when traveling to a city he hadn’t named, would he enjoy this city less? He answered by saying, “There are things I like about all the cities I visit.”

Five Questions with Marc

In his new book, Know Yourself, Forget Yourself: Five Truths to Transform Your Work, Relationships, and Everyday Life, Marc Lesser – Zen student and SIYLI [Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute] CEO – examines five paradoxes that can help us better understand the confusing nature of life.

In honor of these five paradoxes, Marc answers five questions on his book, leading a happy and meaningful life, and how to thrive in the midst of the challenges of the work day.

 

What inspired the book Know Yourself, Forget Yourself?

My grand answer is that I feel this deep commitment to do whatever I can to relieve suffering in the world and to bring wisdom and compassion as much as I possibly can.

My more practical answer is: After my last book Less, my publisher asked me to write another book. And out of that came this topic of how we work with things that are contradictory and paradoxical in our lives. It led me down this path that I found myself really excited about, exploring how paradox can be transformed into insight and learning.

What is the power of the Five Paradoxes?

I started with maybe 10 or 15 paradoxical statements and whittled them down to be as efficient and focused as I could. I settled on five: Know Yourself, Forget Yourself; Be Confident, Question Everything; Fight for Change, Accept What Is; Embrace Emotion, Embody Equanimity and Benefit Others, Benefit Yourself.

I think when we pay attention to our lives, everything about it is paradoxical. How did we get here? What does it mean to be born into this world and to have consciousness? To discover our family and our life and our body, that’s all to me pretty mysterious stuff.

So it’s a way of bringing more awareness and understanding to our lives. It’s also a way to practice and expand our own worldview, perception of ourselves – who we are and what we’re doing.

How do you use these truths to cope with losses or setbacks?

Paradox is how we can embrace what our story is wherever we happen to be and how we engage with it and shape our lives. We don’t get to choose a lot about who we are, but we get to choose a lot about how we direct our attention.

I talk openly about how painful it was for me to be fired from [Brush Dance Publishing], which I started and ran for 15 years. A year before I left the company, I decided that it was time to leave. I walked in one day and felt that my heart wasn’t there and it was time for me to think about what was going to happen next.

That was a terrifying thought for me; I was very attached to the company. This was a company I had started from scratch and was really meaningful for me. We get identified with our work.

It was traumatic and painful for me to leave the company in that way – it wasn’t how I wanted to. I also felt tremendously successful as a leader and an entrepreneur. On the other hand, I learned so much from the process of leaving and it opened doors for me that allowed me to do what I’m doing now.

Eight years later, I’m back in the seat of running another organization, getting another shot at leadership and growing a company with SIYLI.

In some ways, those paradoxes come into play in the other losses in my own life: from the death of my parents to even the fact that my children grew up and moved out of the house.

What is the number one complaint you hear in your job as an executive coach?

Most of my time is spent bringing mindfulness and emotional intelligence into lots of organizations through SIYLI. I think the overarching complaint that I hear is too much to do and not enough time.

Everything else feels like a subset of that, the stress it causes, the lack of work/life balance, people feeling unconnected and a kind of loneliness even when they’re surrounded by people at work or surrounded by online communities. There seems to be a real lack of meaning and intimacy.

When I talk to people in their companies, it seems like so many companies are going through mergers or downsizing or growing quickly, and don’t know how to handle change.

What is the key to happiness in the workplace?

I wish there were a key. I think we all want these same things: we want to be healthy and happy; we want to take care of our families; we want to feel more freedom and less fear.

In some way the quickest answer is: Resilience, flexibility and seeing the good in others. I think there is a lot of unhappiness when we don’t see that people actually do have good intentions. I talk about this in the book: The goal is to become really familiar with our own story, our own worldview and to make it wider and more flexible.

Someone this morning said to me, “If you want to do something quickly, do it by yourself; if you want to do something long-lasting, do it with others.” We all work and live in the world with others, so how can we do that both effectively and passionately? It’s not enough to just be effective without compassion and it’s not enough to be compassionate without effectiveness. Another paradox to think about.

Living Beyond Right and Wrong

Beautiful poem by Zen teacher Ryokan, from the early 1800's Japan:

What was right yesterday

Is wrong today

In what is right today,

How do you know it was not wrong yesterday

There is no right or wrong,

No predicting gain or loss.

Unable to change their tune,

Those who are foolish glue down bridges of a lute.

Those who are wise get to the source

But keep wandering about for long.

Only when you are neither wise nor foolish

Can you be called one who has attained the way.

(translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi - from Sky Above, Great Wind)