🕒  3 min read

I'm composing this message from bed, where I've been lying for the last three hours, exhausted and with a headache. I was sleep-deprived last week and last night. In general, I get up early for work and regularly don't get quite enough sleep.

I had a talk with my boss this morning and alongside other concerns like my lack of responsiveness to others in the company, he'd expressed concern that we need to get a bunch of new dashboards for managing my team in place by tomorrow. I promised to get the dashboards put together and to improve my communication, and to set aside time to get to inbox zero on a daily basis. As the day passed working on other major projects, the afternoon finally brought time to tackle the dashboards. I already felt tired and over the next couple of hours as my headache overwhelmingly increased, I was forced to spend a couple of hours in bed, gently dozing off.

I woke up and recognized that I still needed to start working on these tasks. I began trying to prepare my mind to tackle them. It was then that I realized that I was seeing these as fundamentally unpleasant chores. I wasn't looking forward to doing them, and in fact they made me quite nervous. It was the dread of having to interact with people I might otherwise not choose to interact with, and to make requests of others. Even with the team that reports to me and are fully expecting me to manage them, I’m still very apprehensive about disturbing them, knowing they’re all busy. I also hold a dread of being seen as their “boss”. Since I had built mental images early in life of bosses as being uncaring and demanding work of people regardless of their feelings, I had over-indexed on aversion to bossing people around. In fact, management can be seen as a kindness.

In the book How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, she says that pain or negative feelings are fundamentally the mind's calculation that we do not have sufficient energy available to tackle the tasks at hand. If a set of demands feel like they overwhelm our energy reserves we will experience it as painful, whereas if a set of tasks feel like we have energy for them, it will not be painful. As an example, it’s often said that for introverts social interaction is painful, whereas for extroverts it is delightful. This is because socializing takes more energy for introverts than it does for extroverts. As much as I have trained myself to be an extrovert in many ways, I was not an extrovert in terms of my reaching out and wanting to manage my team.

That's a level of extroversion that I simply hadn't reached: delighting in the experimentation of coordinating a large group of people. Whether for tactical communications (answering questions about deals) or for strategic planning of a team's activities, I simply had not developed that delight in the activity deep in my core, and so I have avoided it. Even those who have great familiarity with managing small or large teams often do so at an emotional distance. Most management relationships have a tendency to devolve into using threats or incentives to control people, rather than building deep human connection and activating people’s intrinsic motivations.

I thought, “what a miraculous situation I'm in. This experience is a manifestation of the whole universe: the universe learning to become aware of itself and other phenomena around it; the gradual emergence of consciousness. What a miracle to be able to communicate with others. What a miracle to be able to provide guidance for my team. What a falsehood to think that I was actually in some way separate from them.”

We are all part of the same system, and I needed to find deeper joy in connecting with my colleagues, even if it was on things that felt cold and technical. These are all just topics for communication. Whether communicating about goals or metrics, answering questions, strategizing on a deal, or training others, every kind of communication is a miraculous, joyful opportunity to interact with others.

Some people might argue that it is impossible to feel a sense of love and wonder at work, a sense of connection, a sense of respecting and being respected, a sense of purpose, a sense of wonder and joy.

But if these deep emotions are not present in our working life, on some level we will feel starved. Just like a child will feel starved if they are emotionally neglected, even if they are well-fed. These simple, deep emotional issues need to be addressed. Otherwise, we will feel a profound and growing spiritual lack. We should work to overcome our child-like dependence on specific people, and also to outgrow that same dependence on our organization. But on some level, we will always be child-like and dependent on this vast world into which we've been born.

I turned my mind to the powerful instruction from the Buddhist teacher Atisha: “see all living beings as your father or mother, and love them as if you were their child.”

I meditated on a deep sense of joy and connection to my team and let that feeling gradually seep deeper into my nervous system. With time and training, I know I can reverse my ordinary self-centered attitude and replace it with a mind of love for all my coworkers.

As we continue to contemplate the deeper meanings of Flow Engineering, I invite you to reflect on your own leadership experiences.

INSIGHTS TO CONSIDER / REFLECT ON:

• Are there areas where you feel a sense of dread? How might you shift your perspective to find joy in those moments?
• The mindset of management as service: finding joy in the simple act of working together, in helping others grow, and in creating something meaningful as a team.
• The most challenging tasks are the opportunities for growth and connection: when we approach our teams with love and respect, we foster a culture of openness, support, and joy.
• Leadership is not just about guiding others—it’s about growing ourselves.

‍