Soul-destroying.
I first heard this term uttered by a former boss.
He was referring to things that were going on in our organization.
Hearing it, I was deeply relieved. I wasn't alone. Or crazy.
Our boss was an admirable person and a light; kind, fair, honest and bold.
During most major change projects, our team would feel gut-wrenching angst.
Working at the top of the organization and often in some capacity for those projects, we got to know more than we often wanted to know.
Senior leaders did their obligatory dance of engagement through town hall meetings, inviting ideas and concerns with sober attention, pointing staff to online Q & As, then executing what they had planned all along.
This posturing and other behaviours wore us down.
Like coarse, 40-grit sandpaper across skin, eventually it bled, formed a scab, bled again, got infected, kept opening and reopening, and eventually seeped toxins into the collective heart and brain.
The soul does not tolerate this kind of offence.
When we humans repeatedly put ourselves in situations that hurt us - whether emotionally, physically, mentally or spiritually - it reverberates in every cell of our being.
When values get stepped on, hearts get crushed.
Often we are the ones who step on our own values, too afraid to leave, to move, to ask for what we want in our jobs, relationships or other affiliations.
We are full of smoke-and-mirror excuses to stay stuck.
Call to Action
Have you noticed how often you hear people use soul-sucking or worse, to describe how they feel about their work, their bosses, their workplaces?
They get depressed on Sunday nights, dread Monday mornings, rejoice on hump-day and dream of Fridays.
More like a prison sentence than a life.
Unnecessary pain for a life too precious to waste.
It would be easy to focus on leaders exclusively, to believe they are the key to change.
But shaming, blaming or worse yet - waiting - solves nothing and renders us helpless victims - and that is a lie.
We always have a choice to change our inner perspective or outer reality.
Picture each of us committed to entertaining lovingkindness and compassion, encouraging ourselves and others to tap into inner wisdom.
Expect unbridled innovation when joy and collaboration flood the system.
This would make leaders of us all, responsible for our state of mind and actions.
The intention to create this way of life spurs movement in that direction.
If we deliberately created systems, processes and endorsed behaviours that produced happy, fulfilled and creative people at all levels, we would feel a palpable difference in meeting rooms, surgeries, factory floors and especially homes.
Imagine if in addition to performance reviews we included soul reviews, where the emotion and spirit of people mattered as much as how they did their jobs.
With more people taking on responsibility for improving relationships and workflow, each drop of effort would fill buckets and buckets.
We have to step into the unknown which really means stepping into service, stepping into the gift, stepping into the thing that can happen that’s outside of ourselves that we don’t know how to make happen. ~Charles Eisenstein
Every drop of water would gather into our well by living into and asking ourselves:
Who do I have to be and what do I have to do to nurture the individual and collective soul of this workplace? Of this world?
Holding this inquiry through its uncharted gestation period might yield surprising results sooner than we think.
This is a call-to-action for leaders and people at all levels of any organization, tribe or community, to stand for something bigger than conformity, status quo, hopelessness and cynicism.
Pay attention no matter how often you hear Be the Change.
It starts there.
It's not all or nothing.
It's one drop - each of us - at a time.
We need all of us involved.
To focus on peace, soul and heart.
To stay open, present and willing to explore, creating possibility and magic.
Our souls already know how.
Living from Our Souls
One by one, or in a group, we can do this. Find out how here.
Appreciation
Thank you Giovanna Capozza, permission-facilitator and divine vessel for the world's best work.