We’ve been exploring the following leadership attributes from my reflections in Australia this summer;
Presence
Present Moment = Wonderful Moment
Slowing Down
Attention and Listening
Honouring Self, Others and the Place
Gratitude
Compassion
Solitude
Over the next weeks, I’ll expand a little more on each of them.
This week we’ll look at compassion. I first of all draw your attention to the work of Karen Armstrong and others around the Charter for Compassion, www.charterforcompassion.org
That said, I for one find it very difficult in my busy life to be ‘compassionate’ all the time, to try to care, and be concerned with everyone from the guy on the street begging for change, to the parents who seem completely oblivious to their screaming toddler in the restaurant. And I certainly have stories, as I’m sure many of us do, of staff who appear to take advantage of sick and family days, and we frankly start to assume that they’re ‘faking it’, or somehow ‘less than’ a star performer who is never sick.
And then I met death. We actually, really and truly, honestly, do all die. No one gets out of this alive. I’ve met people in recent months, including in Australia, who told stories of losing a spouse at forty and having six children to raise alone, a sibiling dying of cancer and not being able to mend the estrangement , a lover dying of AIDS, and having to pretend that they were ‘just roommates’ as both hearts were shattering like glass.
There is a rabbinic story that says, if each of us were to take our troubles and each of us make a coat out of them, we might then hang them up on a coat rack. When we took a step back and looked at all of the coats of trouble, we’d go back and take our own troubles back.
It may have been because I was on my own in my travels, that I could sit in a café, or restaurant and simply people watch. What began to happen was that I saw people through their ‘coats’; what would make that person snap at their seat mate like that?, why would that person not say please or thank you to the server? why would that well dressed man walk right on by the person begging on the street? And suddenly, it began to make more sense to think of them through their coats of trouble. We’ll never know another person’s story completely, but we might assume that their troubles are at the very least as sad as our own. As someone said in a workshop I was facilitating last week, ‘you know I sometimes hear a person’s story, and I think, I’m just so impressed that you actually got out of bed this morning, because I’m not sure I would have.”
And then I began to see that my life, for all of the pain and trouble, was in fact a pretty wonderful gift. I loved and was loved, even in bad times, I had strength and health, and the financial wherewithall to go to Australia, to name only a few of the surface points. Given these gifts, the only possible response I could imagine was compassion. Now that’s not to say that I’m compassionate all the time, but that’s the direction we need to head towards. Perhaps for example, I might start to actually smile and acknowledge the guy begging for money, and to say, “sorry, nothing on me today, but hope you have a warm place tonight”, or something similar. Or perhaps, rather than rolling my eyes at the parents’ lack of attention, perhaps I might revel in the sheer joy of life as a 3 year old, and have a few laughs and smiles for the kid, and his or her parents.
And at work, I might actually find myself compelled to ask after the health of an employee using a lot of sick days, not because I’m prying, or because I’m managing our corporate health benefits, but because I simply care about the health of another human being, and their coat of troubles.