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Despite what I have heard from others, it really is quite easy to find silence in this world. I’m not talking about sensory deprivation. That kind of experience is hard to come by. What I mean is that it is possible in the course of a normal day to achieve a level of solitude and relative quiet such that most intrusive noises are eliminated, even if it is just for a few minutes.

I find that time when my kids are in bed and my wife is off somewhere doing something important for our family that needs to be done. If I allow myself the luxury, I can find silence. In my newly established Man Cave, I can create this luxury a bit more readily, at least that has been my experience to date. All in all, it is possible to be someplace quiet.

Oddly, what breaks the silence is the inevitable chatter of the voice inside my head. It’s not a disembodied voice, some sign of mental illness. No, it’s much more pedestrian than that. It is, quite simply, me. My brain doesn’t chill; it just goes and goes and goes. I used to think the phenomenon was unique to me, but I have met enough people who get what I am talking about to know that most people have an inner voice that is constantly rambling. It wasn’t until reading Eckhart Tolle that I came to learn the nature of that inner voice.

Eckhart calls it “the ego,” and it is simply the part of your mind that is tied to the physical plane, to the world of form. You higher self, your TRUE self, is a consciousness that is apart from the ego. The ego is a series of thoughts and processes; consciousness is one’s spiritual, universal essence. When the world around us is silent, the ego grows uncomfortable. It is tied to the external world, so it needs to be grounded in external stimulus to keep a sense of itself relative to the rest of the world. So, the ego talks. It reminds of you of things that happened during the day. It comments on the temperature. It reminds us of all the things we didn’t accomplish today or that must be accomplished tomorrow. In the absence of outside stuff it creates inside stuff. That’s the nature of the ego.

In silence, we should strive to quiet the ego. If we can quiet the ego, our consciousness can take over. The words and the chatter distract from the true nature of our connection to the universe. It keeps us from knowing our interconnectedness to everything around us. They say that the universe is made of something like subatomic strings. How would we know? We’re too busy thinking about traffic tomorrow morning. Traffic will come, no matter how much or how little we think about it or worry about it. What won’t last forever is this momentary, conscious connection to the vibrations and energy patterns of this reality. It will slip away, eventually, as the details of surviving day-to-day take over again. Is it really worth sacrificing the potential to gain true insight into the nature of existence and reality just so you can sweat tomorrow’s weather?

Then again, I could be full of shit. Sure, but what if I’m not? Traffic or Transcendence?

Here’s a pretty difficult exercise. It is nowhere near as easy as it would seem.

Go outside. Take a seat somewhere that lends itself to inner reflection. Sit quietly, by yourself, and breathe deep. Allow yourself to feel the loosening of you muscles, your joints, your stress. Allow your mind to become clear and calm. Once you have achieved a state of mental and physical relaxation, begin to look around you. Take the world in through your eyes, your ears, your nose…experience the world around you using all of your sense. Now, look around again, studying everything in detail.

Try to do all of this without labeling a single thing.

Go ahead; try it. You will most likely find that you will hear your voice in your head labeling everything and anything you take in. It is one thing to know what a thing is when you sense it, it is quite another to know what it is and insist of calling out its name. I know, it sounds goofy. Just try it.

Let me know how it goes. I’ll tell you how the experience went for me.

Share yours, and I’ll share mine.

I was asked recently why I say “the Universe” and not “God.”

That’s a good question.

But it’s irrelevant. I’ve already ranted about labels in an early post. So, things being what they are, I get to choose my labels. After all, I’m the one doing the writing!

Instead, I would much rather focus on everything that I have to say up until the term “the Universe” is needed. Maybe I mean the physical universe. Maybe I mean the metaphysical Universe. Maybe I mean the poetic, philosophical Universe. Maybe I mean the spiritual Universe or the Supreme Absolute. Besides, depending on context, why not leave it open to interpretation? Remember, I don’t have the answers, I just have my answers.

My answers. My Universe. Yours, too. Everyone’s. Regardless of what we call it, I share it with you.

Reactions are funny things. They tell you a lot about you: what you really feel, what you really want, and how much you value or care for a specific thing. It is easy to experience a reaction and allow learned pathways to take over. These work both ways. You can let positive pathways take over, or you can let negative pathways take over. Either way, changes are that the facts of the situation are overlooked. Chances are attribution, wishful thinking, and pain bodies are at work. Instead of flowing with emotional reactions, it is probably a wiser decision to allow the emotion to run its course, uncover the truth about you, then leave you armed with information, calmed, and ready to respond consciously. Conscious, in-the-moment action is the kind of action which probably should always aspire to take. I believe it opens up many more positive potential outcomes. And it helps guard against bad decisions…or, shall we say, decisions with many more negative potential outcomes.

This topic of choosing how to react keeps coming up.

Conversely, I can take things I learn at home and apply those to work. For example, through the Love and Logic Institute, I adopted the following:

Six Ways to Help Your Children Remain Open to Discipline

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Focus mostly on our children’s strengths rather than their weaknesses.
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Smile at them as often as possible. If your eyes light up when they enter the room, they will take note.
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Write them little notes that tell them how much we adore them.
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Greet them each day with a hug or a high five.
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Make sure that they overhear us talking about how much we love them.
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Deliver our Love and Logic with great empathy, calmness, and sincerity.

While I am not an avid practitioner of all six right now, my goal is to balance them better. When I do engage in any of these, I see the results instantaneously. For example, my oldest loves notes. It’s been a while since I’ve written him one, so that’s a mental note for myself. However, when I do write them, he keeps them. A simple sentence or two is enough to make his little heart glow. Similarly, I smile at my boys every chance I get, and I always get a smile back. It lets them know that I love them. I’ve experimented on them and stared without a smile. This has the expected effect on them. Their smiles disappear. They stare back, wondering what’s going on. Inevitably, they ask, “What?” So, a simple look is a powerful, non-verbal form of communication.

I’ve taken those six principles and modified them for the workplace. I shared them with several of my peers…more than once, actually. They look like this:

Six Ways to Help Your Employees Remain Open to Coaching

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Focus mostly on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
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Smile at them as often as possible. If your smile when they enter the room, they will take note.
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Write them notes that tell them how much we appreciate them.
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Greet them each day with a hug or a high five. I recommend a genuine greeting. (Hugs from me don’t go very far here.)
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Make sure that they overhear us talking about how much we appreciate them.
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Deliver coaching with great empathy, calmness, and sincerity.

See? It doesn’t take much to learn a lesson at home and apply it at work. And vice versa.

So, do I really believe that leading people is just like parenting? No, I don’t. However, I do firmly believe that there are many similarities, and, more importantly, I believe that what I learn either at home or at work can be used either at home or at work.

The simplest example goes like this. I get frustrated at home. I raise my voice. My kids feel bad when I do. It affects their motivation. I raise my voice again. My wife asks me, “Do you talk to your team like that?” Begrudgingly (and not always instantly), I concede to her point. If I can’t get away with something at work, why on Earth would I feel like I can get away with it at home, with the people that I love more than anything else on the planet? I’ll take that up a notch, too. It’s not that I can’t be a belligerent ass at work. Rather, I choose not to be one. Even in this kinder, gentler workplace, there is plenty of belligerent assness to go around. I made the choice, though, that I would not be that kind of leader. At work. At home, there’s a different set of rules at work. Interestingly enough, some of those rules allow for ass-like behavior. And the results? Not so great.

Sometimes, we refuse to take what we learn in one setting and transfer it over into another. And THAT is precisely my point. It’s not only OK to do that, I would argue that it’s advantageous AND prudent to do it. Why? Because the 10,000-hour rule applies here. Remember that? It’s the rule that states that, in order to become a master at something, the average person must practice that skill for approximately 10,000 hours. That comes out to about four hours a day, every day, for ten years. So, logically, if I practice assless parenting and assless leadership, I will effectively remove most traces of assness from my approach to dealing with people in tough situations in about five years.

Something else that I learned by being a parent is that kids prefer to not be yelled at, to be fed, to be clothed, to be entertained, and to be loved. It’s not rocket science, yet it’s hard to do at times. You get so caught up in “you” that you forget about them.

The same exact thing holds true for people at work, particularly if you’re in a leadership role, formal or informal. And you run the same risk of allowing all your “stuff” to get in the way of being there for your co-workers. If you’re a leader, you’ll find that the formula for success is pretty much the same as the formula for success as a parent. Instead of all the not-yelling, the feeding, the clothing, the entertaining, and the loving, the people you work with want to have meaningful work, want to be respected, and want to pretty much be allowed to live a fulfilling life without threat of losing their livelihood. That’s pretty much the environment you should aim to provide. Again, not rocket science.

Personally, I think the not-yelling, the feeding, the clothing, the entertaining, and the loving also works wonders with your co-workers. None of them will admit to it, of course, but bringing donuts to work with some coffee and milk is a good way to get people to chill out, laugh together, and pretty much be entertained. It goes a long way towards making their work a little more palatable, and it just might help them find some fulfillment at work.

My kids and my co-workers: human beings looking to live their lives, getting a little help from me along the way. And donuts.

I love observing my children at school. I wasn’t supposed to go today, but this damn sinus thing I’ve been struggling with for the past few days kept me at home. Incidentally, I am still trying to figure out why I allowed my body to succumb to whatever it is that’s taken hold inside of me. It’s obvious that I’m avoiding something. I’ll have to ponder that some more.

The thing I love about watching them is the pure joy I feel when I see them going about their lives, completely independent of me. That means that my children are capable of life without me in it. I know, I know. That sounds morbid. But that’s not how I mean it. What I mean is that my wife and I are successfully raising little people who will grow into big people who will go off into the world to…I don’t know…make it a better place? My dad has said for years that he is proud of the fact that he and my mom have improved the human race with each successive child they have raised. I always thought that was a sweet thing to SAY, but I didn’t understand what he MEANT until I had my own kids. A lot of things your parents said make a heck of a lot more sense once you have your own. Funny how stuff like that works.

When I look at my kids and see them performing perfectly well in their world, I feel peace. A lot of it has to do with the school itself; Montessori schools are dedicated to precisely that kind of independence. Still, this process happens for everyone who has children. Although we are warned over and over again, we tend to forget that our children act differently at home than they do at school. So, when they get all needy and whiny, I probably worry more than I should. If given the opportunity, they can be their own little people at home, too. It’s just that the dynamic inherent in the parent-child relationship sort of undermines that a tad, you know? Even with that, the child lets you know when the time has come to take another step back and give freedom a little more room.

For example, my oldest complained about dinner the other day. It was too spicy or something like that. He asked for a different dinner. I told him, “Sure. Go fix something.” He looked at me as if I had just told him it was time for him to become a man and bring down a deer with his bare hands. “What?” he asked, still unbelieving. “This is your dinner,” my wife said. “If you want something else, you are more than welcome to go find something in the ‘fridge.” So, to shorten the story, he made himself a mean little sunflower butter and jelly sandwich. He was so proud of his creation, that he had one of those ear-to-ear idiotic grins. He sat down so confidently at the table. I smiled at him, he smiled at me. He ate his dinner without a word of complaint.

When I have the chance to watch them at work in their own world at school, where I am the outsider, it gives me peace for their future. They will undoubtedly suffer many hardships and relish in many victories, just as I have, and just as my father did before me. And just as my mother did, too. My brothers have experienced the same. My wife, and her sister. My brother’s wives. And so on.

The point is that they are growing each day. It is a joy and an honor to watch them do it.

Of course each individual life has meaning. We feel the the presence of meaning in our lives. Sometimes it’s just out of reach. Other times, you get a glimpse of it. Regardless, if you just stop for a moment and listen…feel…smell…taste…allow yourself to become aware of your very life force…you know that your life has meaning. You are more than the gooey matter that makes up your body. There is something more there. Each one of us serves a purpose, and our purpose goes beyond reproduction.

Our ability, as a species, to forget that gets us into so much trouble. It is easy to disconnect from the value of each individual life that being reconnected can be jarring. I like to think of myself who does a pretty good job of keeping that perspective. That said, I am human, of course, so I forget. “Slumdog Millionaire” is one of those rare movies that reminds you.

My wife asked me as we left the theater, “Did that deserve to win ‘Best Picture?'” I said that I thought it did. I was a bit hesitant. Today, I am much less hesitant. Any time a film makes you think with such compassion and love about people who are suffering on the other side of the planet, I think you’re walking away from a film that deserves some recognition. So…yes, I think it deserves “Best Picture,” not because it’s a huge moneymaker but because it’s a profound, compelling film.

If you are on the fence, go see it. I think it’s worth the price of admission.

Why are there billions and billions of people alive on this Earth? Why do so many life in such horrid conditions? What’s the point? I don’t get it. There has to be more to each individual existence than the biological imperative to reproduce.

Doesn’t there?

That’s what I’m thinking after watching “Slumdog Millionaire.”