And Your Career?

from The Long Haul by Judith & Herbert Kohl, a biography of Myles Horton…

A long-range goal has to be something for everybody. It can’t be a goal that helps some people but hurts others…I once said that I was going to start out on a life’s work. It had to be big enough to last all my life. And since I didn’t want to have to rethink and start over again, I needed to have a goal that would at least take my lifetime. After making that decision, I never thought of doing anything else, because I knew that I could just hack away on it, and what little I could do would take my lifetime.

Spirit and Emotion at Work

If, in the workplace, we trade our time and effort for pay and benefits, where is joy? craft? art? If, in the workplace, benefits are being cut, how much more the collision?

I only have passing knowledge of a place where some very powerful benefits have been chopped and the workforce has a lot of resentment. The benefits will probably not be reinstated and their loss has created a lot of emotions that keep looking for a place to land.

We have been removed form artful work for so long, we have forgotten that the rewards are in the work itself. Art happens when the whole self gathers and begins. The reward is in the doing and in the realization that “I did that” or “We did that together.”

The reclamation of emotion, spirit and meaning in the workplace is a vital task, yet our scientific methods have discouraged frank expression and discussion. Feeling anything at work is either taboo or for sissies.

Breaking the dependence on external rewards will begin when a little risk-taking occurs and emotion, energy and spirt become topics of discussion. If those discussions are rocky and stop and stutter, stay the course. Leadership is the art of recovery. Rephrase. Reframe. Approach these topics in a different way.

…and read Dick Richard’s Artful Work for support.