What’s most important?

Elizabeth Hamilton has written an intriguing short book, Untrain Your Parrot.

I have read the question she asked in Chapter 1 before about what’s most important. Yet, I appreciated her phrasing and broader perspective:

If you died today, would your obituary reflect your professed values? Or entropy: “She let the important things slide, and then she died.” The obituary question invites us to reflect on whether the things we consider most important are echoed in our use of time, money, and energy.

The question isn’t just “What’s important to me?” — which is likely to veer toward self-centered responses; it’s “What’s most important, from an all-encompassing, life-centered, or reality-centered perspective?” After all, life is life-centered rather than self-centered, unlike people.

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NOW

It’s a good day when we don’t need to be doing anything else than what we’re doing, when we don’t need to be anywhere else than where we are. On this day, our life is fine as it is and we are free from having to improve and instead, just engage it as it is.  ~ Jack Ricchiuto: A good day.

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Are you driving down the employee engagement road?

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. ~ John Carmack

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Many people would be surprised to realize that Chuck Norris is a student of Zen. 

He wrote the book, The Secret Power Within: Zen solutions to Real Problems. Here is a short paragraph from the book on gumption and trusting your gut instinct.

The self-confidence to do these things comes from discipline and learning. As you apply these to difficult challenges, you will acquire the personal strength to go on to other successes. There will be times when you don’t know what to do, when your head dictates one course of actions, your gut another. Which to follow? Always go with your gut. If this results in a setback, so what? You can be thwarted, but not defeated. You can be delayed, but not devastated.

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Our emotions can cause us to behave like wild monkeys. Our monkey mind can jump from emotion to emotion and before we know it the day is over and nothing was done and we leave work carrying a bunch of resentments. Over time employee engagement can seep away leaving us disengaged and dispirited.

Our emotions can derail us and cause us to disengage from others, our work, and even ourselves.

Teachings from Tibetan monks may help us overcome our discombobulated monkey minds. Here were 10 great lessons that MabelandHarry listed derived from Tibetan monks:

1. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson
2. Follow the 3 R’s: Respect for self, respect for others, responsibility for all your actions.
3. Spend some time alone each day.
4. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
5. Love as if you’ve never been hurt.
6. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
7. Once a year, go somewhere that you’ve never been before.
8. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
9. Don’t let a little dispute ruin a great friendship.
10. Open your arms to change but don’t let go of your values.

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Are you paying joyful attention on a daily basis to full employee engagement:

Pema Chodron has the following commentary in the book Always Maintain a Joyful Mind on awakening compassion and fearlessness:

In the morning when you wake up, you reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, you think over what you have done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion in the days that follow.

Can you dissolve the barriers between organizations, leadership, and employees to create employee engagement for all by opening your heart?

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