Author Archives: admin

Discernment

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IMG_20140722_161443Discernment is the proper balance of Wisdom and Compassion. When expressed perfectly the wise thing to do is also the compassionate thing to do.

Wisdom in my mind is the combination of knowledge and perspective expressed. The older I gets the more I figure out that the best expression is often no-action. As they say ‘you cannot push the river’.

Compassion on the other hand is hard to put into words as it is grace that you are actually trying to define. Outside of actually witnessing it in action you can sometimes recognize it in poetry. It is easiest to speak to what it is not. The Victim – Perpetrator – Rescuer triangle comes up as a good reference to speak to.

Identifying with any of these is not compassion, it is known as idiot compassion.

Being the victim as to not cause problems is not compassionate. Allowing the Perpetrator to continue they’re abuse is an error that will harm others and cheats the perpetrator from growing.

Being the Perpetrator is fairly obvious. There is a thin line between holding someone accountable and victimizing them. The rule of thumb I learned in the workplace was that to be accountable they had to have responsibility and authority, which holds true in the world as well.

Being the Rescuer is where idiot’s compassion plays out most often. The Rescuer is most often righteousness in disguise. People do need a hand up, but as they say, teach them to fish. If rescuing is not in the moment, such as grabbing a runaway baby buggy, then it is very difficult to maintain.

The truth is that you are always victim, perpetrator, rescuer and taking action; that is being human. Being aware of this instead of operating blindly out of habit makes all the difference.

So with all of this in mind I ask myself what am I doing here. Yes I am trying to rescue a certain group in my community and here on LinkedIn. Yes to the majority here, as LinkedIn claims, I am a perpetrator of thinking outside of comfort zones. Technically I am a victim of censorship; however I fully expected LinkedIn and those that feed from the corporate structure to not like what I had to say.

I have no interest in wasting energy battling LinkedIn, there are other venues, so I will de-escalate my posts here and focus elsewhere. It is also clear from private messages that having you help me propagate this on LI is a lot to ask of you. I will post from time to time as things come up and to remind those new arrivals out of corporate life that there are alternatives.

If you wish to see more it will all be on www.fiveranks.org and soon likely be posted on FB to a page titled Corporate Rehab. Or follow me @PrajnaAbility on twitter for tweets of new postings.

May your life go well

 

 

 

 

Catch 22

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Temprod1

 

For some reason life is full of intractable – not easily solved or manageable – problems. The standard optimistic viewpoint on this is that it is for our growth, we will be given nothing we can’t handle, etc..

It also might just be the way things work, see The Root of Stress for a taste of the part we create ourselves. There is certainly the part we have no apparent control over as well, see 30 Blows.

In my practice we train with koans to find an appropriate response to situations that are not solvable by the rational mind. Such as, ‘What is the sound of one hand’, which you’ve probably heard of but with clapping added. Koan is an esoteric system, but one of the few tools that actually addresses this subject of meeting life head on.

This week I was presented with a life koan about this very blog. You see it seems LinkedIn would like me to:

‘modify my content to make it more in line with their professional network’.

This came right on the heels of another person from my old industry dying of a heart attack in his early 50s and as details were starting to circulate about the suicide the week before.

Corporate Rehab was started because:

people are dying from the lack of ability to deal with the end game of corporate life.

Wouldn’t the ‘professional’ thing to do be to acknowledge it?

I make no claim to be the most articulate or best council on this subject and would be happy to see the conversation and service expanded by others. However for now it is me and LinkedIn is the obvious platform. I will have to find a middle-way.

Much of what I have written so far is about looking inward which I know is a difficult step. For an easier first step may I recommend the book Everything is Workable .

If you are finding yourself out on a limb and feel like you have no choices … reach out to me, a priest, a minister, pastor a therapist … there is plenty of good living outside the corporate world view and it’s not that hard to find.

I hope this meets the censors criteria and sees the light of your screen.

May your lives go well

 

The Root of Stress

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Stress Pic

Stress manifests from one source and that is the maintenance of your story.

We each have a story of who we are.

You are not your story.

To complicate things you didn’t consciously create the story, much of the story you accepted from your family and the culture you grew up in without a thought. This is not wrong it is just how the self develops.

Stress develops when our story and reality diverge. The farther apart they are the greater the stress.

If we are successful at re-inventing our self as things change, life is fairly stress free. Most of us had a couple decades of career growth where this was true. We parlayed one story into the next, we were told and told everyone, we were growing. As the economy changed and corporate environment shifted, we found no motavation to re-invent ourselves in a direction we considered un-growth.

Our stories don’t accomodate being happy as the cheese guy at Whole Foods.

As an aside I chose this example because I know a guy who went from CEO to cheese guy and is quite happy.

Unknotting the psyche and psychology of the story and stressors is a long arguous process, it is much easier to just see through the whole story business. This allows the efforts you make to go toward moving forward on a new plan.

The goal of Corporate Rehab is to help you see through what is no longer serving you and empower you to write a new screen play where you lead the interesting and fulfilling life you desire.

May your life go well

 

Plucking Tiger

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straw2There is the following story in Zen:

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

No matter which field of life we choose, we encounter the tiger and sooner or later we find ourselves over a cliff holding on to a vine. Notice the story is clear to point out that he swung himself over the edge, likely feeling quite clever or victorious at the time.

So here he is, if he climbs back up, a tiger to face; if he lets go, a tiger to face. If he just holds on, over time the little mice will gnaw through the vine and again tiger to face.

It is easy in life to become so focused on the tiger and preoccupied by the mice that we never even look around and see the strawberry.  Let alone take the risk of loosening our grip to reach out, pluck it and pop it in our mouth.

The tigers and mice are a given as part of the human condition, by our age we have all witnessed death often enough to realize we are all just hanging on the vine. What is optional is how many strawberries we will pluck.

What are your tigers? What are your mice?

Have you plucked all the strawberries in reach?

What is that strawberry just out of reach if you loosened your grip a bit more?

May your life go well