Buddha's Office by Dan Zigmond

Author:Dan Zigmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Remembering to Breathe

LET’S SAY YOU’RE DOING EVERYTHING WE’VE TALKED about so far. You’re meditating. You’re paying attention. You sleep well and eat well and exercise frequently. You tell the truth and argue honestly. You have wholesome goals and make a healthy effort to achieve them.

And you’re still having a bad day at work.

This happens. I have bad days. You have bad days. Even the most experienced meditators I know have bad days.

Oftentimes, bad days come down to some sort of misunderstanding, what Buddha would call a delusion. One of Buddha’s lessons was that things are not always what they seem. Our mind plays tricks on us. Sometimes our mind makes things look better than they really are. At work, I think the mind usually makes things look worse.

In my job, I try to distinguish between two kinds of problems, which I call real problems and fake problems. A real problem, quite simply, is one that, if not solved, will cause something bad to happen. A fake problem, on the other hand, is one that you can ignore without any real negative consequences.

This may sound like an obvious distinction, but once you start trying to categorize problems at work this way, it’s amazing how many problems turn out to be fake. For example, a common problem for many people on the job is the hunch that a colleague or boss doesn’t like you. That never feels good, and often causes us a lot of stress. It feels like a problem that needs to be solved. But ask yourself: What happens if you don’t solve it? Unless this alleged dislike is causing actual conflict and interfering with your ability to do your work, you can probably just ignore it. You don’t need everybody to like you, even if that might feel good.

At larger companies, you’ll sometimes hear concerns over things like two people having the same or very similar titles or two teams have the same or very similar missions. This can create tension, and sometimes leaves both sides feeling threatened, even if they rarely get in each other’s way. Another common issue is two different ways of doing a certain task, or disagreement over the right format for some sort of meeting or report. Surely consistency is better, right? Perhaps. But faced with such a situation, I often ask myself what will happen if I don’t do anything about it at all. Quite often, the answer is nothing.

People bringing fake problems to me at work will often underscore their urgency by explaining how long the problem has persisted—perhaps weeks or months or even years!—not realizing that this is evidence of the absence of any real problem. If a situation has existed for months or years without negative consequences, it’s probably not a real problem. And if the only consequence of not solving the problem is that it will still exist a month or even a year from now, that’s yet more reason to doubt that we have to solve it. A problem that gets no worse in a year is probably not much of a problem.

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