PRACTICE 1

LOVE THE WORK

Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.

— J. D. McClatchy

One of the first times that I co-led a Search Inside Yourself training at Google headquarters in Mountain View, we had participants practice what we call "mindful listening" — where one person speaks and the other person just listens, without asking questions or interrupting. This is a way of taking the awareness involved in meditation practice into engaging with another person. Just listening, with your full attention, can be a great gift and an important skill in cultivating healthy communication. Whenever I instruct participants, I suggest that the person speaking experiment by being willing to risk not knowing what you will say; perhaps even surprise yourself by what you say. Taking turns, each speaker is to address or answer two questions: What brings you here today? And what really brings you here today? Each person gets a few minutes to speak, and then as a group we take several minutes to debrief the exercise, to discuss how it feels to just listen and to speak without interruption.

At that early training, I could not help but notice a young woman in the back of the room wiping away tears as she spoke to her partner. As each minute passed, her sobs became more pronounced. When everyone finished, I asked the group how they felt. What was their experience of bringing meditation into speaking and listening? The young woman who had been crying was the first person to raise her hand. She offered to the group that she was an engineer and was surprised at the depth and intensity of her feelings, which arose as she expressed why she was here at this training, and then why she was really here. The questions helped her remember what first attracted her to meditation and mindfulness practice as well as the loss and sadness she felt by how busy and distracted her life had become. During the mindful listening exercise, as she was speaking, she touched something deeply inside herself, and she felt cared about. She felt seen as a person and not just for her role. This feeling, of being seen and valued, was something she yearned for, as was proactively cultivating more connection and appreciation in her work and relationships.

INSPIRE, ASPIRE, AND CONSPIRE: BREATHING TOGETHER

It is no accident that "love the work" is the first practice of a mindful leader. The work of mindfulness practice begins with love, with deep caring. Love is where body, mind, and heart come together. Love is more than an idea and more than a feeling.

"Love the work" is an instruction that is surprisingly practical; it can help us to overcome obstacles in many situations. What we love we pay attention to in ways that are palpably unique. Our task, our "work" in any given moment, may seem difficult or boring. It may involve many contradictions, hindrances, and setbacks. When we approach it with love, we see what's important and embrace difficulties as part of the process, as necessities to be overcome. Love is the ultimate, most powerful motivator when taking action or relating to others, but it is a particularly powerful force when it comes to the practice of becoming more yourself, seeing with more clarity, and not being fooled by the illusions of deficiency or separateness.

There are many types of love. The kind I'm referring to here is much like the first step of the hero's journey as described by Joseph Campbell, which he names "the calling." The calling represents a profound shift of attention, a shift in one's way of being in the world; the calling asks us to leave the ordinary and pursue the extraordinary. In Campbell's words:

The call of adventure is to a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

Answering the call leads to a heightened state of awareness and of purpose. The hero seeks something of ultimate importance, which means achieving "super human deeds" in the face of real danger (those polymorphous beings and unimaginable torments). In stories, the hero usually travels to a magical, dreamlike realm, but the calling really represents a transformation in the way you see your role, your purpose, your situation, and the stakes.

Loving the work is this kind of calling. It asks us to approach leadership, our work, relationships, and all parts of our lives with the transformative motivation of love. This kind of love emerges from a deep place within and inspires us to risk and reach for what's most important.

The word inspire comes from the Latin inspirare, which means to breathe into. Love is something that is breathed into us and something that we bring our breath to. From inspiration comes aspiration, which also comes from the word breathe. Loving the work is aspirational — our aspirations, the things we yearn for and long for, are our ultimate goals, the aims of a lifetime. They form a deep intention, an enduring promise or vow, that continues to motivate us even when we complete certain tasks or fail at others. In Buddhist practice, there are two primary vows that express "the call," or this type of inspiration and aspiration:

Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them.

These two statements, these vows, are inherently contradictory and impossible. The calling of love doesn't care. In fact, love is drawn to work that is difficult, even seemingly impossible. Love welcomes a challenging path, a path that seems impossible. After all, in many ways, we are impossible beings.

I often describe the work of meditation and mindfulness as a conspiracy, a word that literally means "breathing together." Meditation might sound like a solitary activity, but it is not, just like answering the call of mindful leadership isn't a solitary pursuit. That is, our aspirations and inspirations rely heavily on conspiring — so that we are all breathing together. So that we all conspire to support one another to become more ourselves and to help heal one another and the world. To me, this type of conspiracy embodies the culture that Peter Drucker suggests is all-important.

EXPLORING VALUES: WHAT DO YOU LOVE?

Ask yourself:

What inspires you?

What really brings you alive?

What do you aspire to?

What is most important to you?

What do you most love?

In The Leadership Challenge, a classic, bestselling leadership manual first published in 1987, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner interviewed US Army Major General John H. Stanford, a highly decorated military leader who...