Lifescape

“The basic root of happiness lies in our minds; outer circumstances are nothing more than adverse or favourable”
Matthieu Ricard, (2000).

I’m beginning to wonder whether managing stress, standards, risk assessment and the promotion of passive version of wellbeing run the danger of taking the life and energy out of our lives and workplaces. So rather than talking about managing stress or even promoting staff wellbeing, maybe we should start talking about joy at work? That might shake things up a bit, because if we open ourselves up to joy, then we inevitably open ourselves to more negative emotions too! For as the Buddhist poet and teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, wrote: “One who strives for Enlightenment must expect to encounter terrible obstacles: anger, desire, mental confusion, pride and jealously”, (don’t worry, I’m not going for Enlightenment at work just yet, but don’t let me stop you trying!).

What after all do stress and wellbeing mean anyway? What do we really mean by this in this world, our cultures – in work and life, in the dimensions of mind, body and soul? By seeing stress as the problem, we trap ourselves in a kind of physiological and cultural prison of the three ‘F’s (fight, flight and sexual reproduction). So how can go beyond this to reach our potential, to live and work in ways that are (as James Hillman might put it) psychological in nature, and therefore living out our calling in the world? That is, a life that is based, not on what makes us the same as each other in our limbic system, but the potential we have to become fully ourselves as individual human beings in relation to each other and the world we live in. This is, in part, as much about our wholehearted engagement with work that is right for us, as it is about stress management and symptom reduction.

Not that long ago ‘stress at work’ was a bit of a creature of myth – you could either believe in it or not. For some, stress was just something that people who couldn’t cope with work used as an excuse for not doing it – a trade union-inspired trick to justify inefficiency, incompetence and absence. And for others it was a terrible monster at the heart of organisations caused purely by bad and vindictive managers: the inescapable result of our work-obsessed, capitalist culture (believe me, I’ve heard and read both views expressed many times without exaggeration). Now, as a result of the patient work of researchers and practitioners over the past few decades, and more recently the development of the Health and Safety Executive’s Stress Management Standards, stress management is right at the heart of things! Stress is finally ‘in’ in the UK.

As a ‘stress management professional’ I should be celebrating; but I think something is being missed. Stress we know, is both a psychological and physiological phenomenon, and there’s plenty of really good work about the ways in which stress can make people ill. However in the sense that we use it today – ‘stress’ is a increasingly cultural – becoming more and more defined, not by its role in mediating the mind-body relationship at a basic level – but in what we can do to escape stimuli, and what happen to us when we get trapped in the state of what our mind makes of circumstances. As Robert Sapolski has shown us, it is modern human beings who get stress related diseases – zebras don’t get ulcers. Nowadays being free from and managing stress has become an environmental risk assessment exercise on the one hand, and a preventative, ‘opt-out’ lifestyle choice on the other.

In my work and practice, I’m more interested in the relationships between the dualisms of life – mind and body; motivation and success; work and play; individual and organisation; personality and culture – and the calling of the soul. No matter how much we might adjust our workplaces to manage the stress risk – there are some basic, intuitive and research based truths:
* that individuals come into work with complex psychological patterns, motivations and life experiences;

* that hard engaging work can, if it is the right work, can be one of the most fulfilling experiences a human being can have;

* that some people are temperamentally suited to some activities and roles– including work – and others are not;

*…..and we all have a personality, with individual strengths – and when work matches these we will be happy, motivated and fulfilled.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s lifelong work on the phenomena of ‘flow’ – shows that this authentic, optimal human condition is central to personal happiness – and therefore to the success of the organisations they work within. When we are challenged, and we have the skills to meet the challenge – we are in the ‘zone’. And when we are motivated by our fundamental calling and values, and THESE meet the challenge – happiness results.

Peter Senge – whose Fifth Discipline book revolutionised management theory and practice – takes it further. Recently he and his collaborators have shifted attention to the profound, authentic changes that can take place when individuals and their organisations work and learn together at this deeper level, a phenomenon they calls ‘presence’. These approaches recognise the depth and complexity of human beings and the system and places they live and work within.

So presence and flow are, for me, more fundamental than stress and wellbeing. I think my main concern is that approaches to stress management and wellbeing at work are starting to run down well-worn channels and become mechanical. In this way of thinking, if we fix this conditions (as set out in the HSE’s stress management standards) – or we learn that personal wellbeing ‘skill’ (resilience, relaxation and the like) then we can prevent the problems that stress brings.

Which is fine up to a point, but we know this not to be wholly true – again our experience and intuition tells us that we take our ‘selves’ into work, just as we take work home. And we know that individuals make a big difference – a new energetic leader, or an jaded old ‘jobsworth’ can, just be being there, heat things up to boiling point, never mind all the safeguards and standards we might have in place.

This approach is truly ‘risk assessment’ and reduction – it brings our organisations in line, keeps them level and calm, aims to avoids volatility and change. Yet we also know that the best organisations are often unpredictable – even chaotic – but ultimately the most creative and embracing of change. These workplaces are demanding, frustrating and contradictory and often evoke great ambivalence. They can make us as angry, disappointed and sad, as they can sometimes inspire intense loyalty or motivate and make us happy. And so they are deeply human places.

This, then, is the wellbeing puzzle, and it poses some fundamental questions, namely:

* how can we bring life to individuals and organisations and make our work organisations places where we are willing to take risks?

* how can we reach further into ourselves so we can feel contradictions and conflicts as positive, potentially developmental and profoundly human?

* how can we to dig below the surface of both individual psychology AND the undercurrents and archetypes of our organisations and workplaces;

*….and ultimately, how can we begin to experience and recognise what needs to happen to enable us to feel joy at work!