These days, it is very stylish in the world of professional development to have a morning routine (which of course begins with meditation practice), to contrast busy with productive, to focus on deep work, to scoff at social media and email, to adhere to rules for focused success in a distracted world, to extol the icons of efficiency who have exacted maximum output with minimum input, to achieve a pseudo-state of enlightenment in your administration of business (and self) that you simply refer to as "elegance."
Did you notice that I used a Sanskrit word in the title of this post?* Yeah, I'm down. In fact, I am writing this post at my stand up desk, shoeless. Who wears shoes in the office anymore? All the busy people, I am sure.
I am quick to run with quotes like: "We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity. This potent mixture of job ambiguity and lack of metrics to measure the effectiveness of different strategies allows behavior that can seem ridiculous when viewed objectively [e.g. email] to thrive in the increasingly bewildering psychic landscape of our daily work."**
That sounds sooooo good. And I'll admit, I do everything listed above. Not to be stylish, but because it works for me.
Pause.
Okay, that is not entirely true. It does work for me AND part of me likes to be seen as stylish.
This part of me constructs such a work identity and faces it outward to be seen as sophisticated, worldly, game-changing. This is my egoic self lifting up my merits: I pulled myself up by my mental bootstraps, clearly you have not. I am smart. I am thriving. I am unique and superior.
I have an uneasy relationship with my egoic self. When I look in the mirror, I question why I do things like write these blog posts, present at conferences, speak up at meetings. Do I intend to contribute something meaningful to the conversation, or do I intend to show off before the eyes of others? Am I trying to strengthen the greater good, or am I trying to solidify my sense of self?
When I am at work, I'll be honest: it is both, at all times.
I don't really know what to do with that other than to recognize it and own it.
I have read Eckhart Tolle (of course I have) but I don't really think it is wise or possible (for me at least) to extinguish the egoic self. That leaves three choices: cage the ego, feed the ego, or work with the ego.
Let's return to the idea of speaking up at a meeting. To cage my ego, I would say nothing at all in order to deprive my self of any satisfaction. If I fed my ego, I would say something to impress others to make my self feel intellectually superior. If I worked with my ego, I would say something that reflected my highest abilities, recognizing my sense of self-satisfaction while owning my limitations.
To work with the ego is to be in a state of tension - the warming energy of confidence and the cooling energy of humility. To work with the ego is to recognize and own your self, as it is in the here and the now. To work with the ego is to know your self as part of a whole human being, a dynamic and everchanging flow of energy, of contradictions, of hopes, of fears, a finite being with infinite dreams.
Well, that all sounds good anyway.
* I did set out to write about prana and focus, but this post took me a different direction. I do still want to explore this topic. Maybe next time.
**Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
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