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
Photo Credit: Take Me to the Mountains by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortphoto/381351022/
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.
Photo Credit: What would Chuck Norris Do? by http://flickr.com/photos/ianmcburnie/306305661/
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:
Photo Credit: Monkeys in the Wild by http://flickr.com/photos/babasteve/28689448/
Thich Nhat Hanh has written a short and helpful book, The Art of Power. His writing was one of the first to introduce me to the concept of mindfulness – being present to who and where we are in the moment.
Without mindfulness we cannot experience high levels of employee engagement:
It takes training to master the art of living mindfully in the present moment. Everything has its own time — this is universal wisdom, not just Buddhist wisdom. You invest yourself one hundred percent in whatever you are doing in the moment. There are times when you have to discuss your work and business strategies. At that time, you invest one hundred percent of yourself into the practice of looking into the nature and difficulties of your business. If you are able to eat mindfully with concentration and spend time with your child mindfully with concentration, then, when the time for doing business comes, you will be able to look deeply into matters at hand and that time will be productive (p. 154).
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?
Photo Credit: joy by http://flickr.com/photos/tahbka/361509295/