Surviving External
Pressures
by Dona Witten with
Akong Tulku Rinpoche
 Our business personas are a
special form of belief system. They are very real and solid to us and filled
with myriad preconceptions about what is "right" and what is
"wrong". When something occurs -- a criticism or a difference
of opinion, for example -- that contradicts our preconceptions, we
immediately react defensively. This defensiveness is the seed of conflict.
To make matters worse, this seed
gets planted over and over again. The boss screams at you, so you scream at the
first person who walks into your office, and that person in turn goes home and
screams at their family. There's a harvest of conflict. If your business persona
always has to be right, any attempt to prove otherwise is likely to result in
strong resistance. The more attached we are to our beliefs, the more solid and
permanent they are, and the more likely we are to be engaged in conflict.
By examining your conflict
patterns, you will begin to recognize that much of the anguish that you have put
yourself through could have been avoided by relinquishing some of the solidity
of your beliefs. This is not to say that you should now agree with everyone,
whatever their opinions are, or that you should accept criticism without
comment. Avoiding potential conflict situations, whatever the costs, can be as
much an emotional pattern of clinging and rejection as any other. But a
difference of opinion does not automatically need to become the grounds for
conflict.
Learning to Prevent Conflict
There are three phases in every
conflict: the beginning, when the potential for conflict first manifests; the
middle, when conflict is in progress; and the end, when conflict is abating.
Unless you're talking about invaders from Mars marching up the driveway
unannounced, most people can see conflict coming long before it actually
arrives. At least it should be possible to see conflict coming, if you're paying
attention. The conditions for conflict build over time. Often it's simple basic
likes and dislikes that become the seeds for conflict.
So your first task in working
with conflict is to pay attention to your likes and dislikes and explore their
potential for sparking conflict. You need to be aware that you have likes and
dislikes and that they influence what you do, say, and think. It is not just
your own likes and dislikes that you need to pay attention to. You also need to
pay close attention to the preferences of those you work with.
There are two tools for
accomplishing this. The first is to practice paying attention during daily
activities. The second is your morning and evening contemplations. During the
day, if you can calm your mind sufficiently, see the play of personalities in
your work groups. Pay attention to what makes people happy, what makes people
unhappy. In the morning and in the evening you should then be able to observe
the impact of these preferences on your own feelings. Are there people who are
beginning to irritate you? Is your work style beginning to irritate someone
else? Is there someone you are beginning to dread talking to? Is someone
avoiding talking to you? Why?
If you can maintain just a small
amount of diligence in regard to paying attention and taking time for your daily
contemplations, there is much which you can predict about the behavior of people
-- who will work well together; who will fight; who will be leaders; who
will prefer to be followers. There is a large body of literature and research
about personality types and team dynamics to draw upon to support your
observations. Without paying attention and your daily contemplations, however,
be warned that all the one-day seminars and motivational speeches won't do much
good.
Predicting how people will
relate to each other is one thing; changing the outcome of situations is quite
another.
Ending Conflict
The way you choose to resolve
conflict speaks as much about you as the way a battle is fought. Many people are
quite attached to conflict, liking the adrenaline rush, the sense of power --
especially if they win. They savor the memory. In some perverse way it makes
them feel alive. For others, the experience is quite the opposite. The very
thought of another conflict makes them sick to their stomachs. They will do
anything rather than go through the experience again. Nothing is worth fighting
for ever again. They will stay uninvolved from now on.
Both extremes are just that --
extremes. In the first case, the adversary continues to be punished; in the
second, it is the self that is punished. Punishment, however, has nothing to do
with conflict. At the end of conflict, there is an antidote that should be
foremost in the mind -- forgiveness. There are two people to forgive: the
adversary and yourself.
Forgiving adversaries means
dropping the conflict, both physically and mentally. Most people have heard the
following Zen story, but it bears repeating. It is the story about the two Zen
monks who approach a river. They will need to ford the river on foot. At the
river bank there is a young woman who wants to get across but who doesn't want
to get her dress wet. She asks the monks to carry her across. One of the monks
gets angry and refuses. The second says nothing, picks up the woman, and carries
her across. As the two monks continue their journey, the first monk who refused
to carry the woman continues to fume about the insult. He complains to his
companion, `"How could you do that? How could you carry that woman?"
The second monk turns to his companion and smiles. "Are you still carrying
her? I put her down back at the river."
Everyone is carrying young
women, young men, two-ton gorillas, elephants, and heaven only knows what else
on their shoulders. In working with conflict, we must learn when and how to put
down the burdens. The burdens are the grudges, bad feelings, and resentments
that result from conflict -- especially when you lose. Conflicts don't
end when the last blow is struck. Even before the war is over, the next, bigger,
stronger campaign is being plotted.
Conflict takes a lot of energy.
A failure to forgive means being locked into a cycle of violence. And like the
monk who couldn't put down the young woman in his mind, it means that energy
will be expended in keeping the fight going. So conflict is expensive. In a
practical sense it means that employees who spend all their time engaged in or
plotting wars are not productive employees. They waste not only their time but
the time of everyone around them in their personal battles.
Even when you blame yourself
completely for it, conflict still takes a lot of energy. Self-blame, guilt, and
rejection can be equally expensive of energy when pointed inward. One of the
expenses when you blame yourself is the energy put into trying to make things
right again. There has been a mistake and things need fixing, but even with
superglue they will never be the same. Rather than going forward, a great deal
of time is spent trying to fix the past. Trying to make things right again
implies an unwillingness to accept your own fallibility and the fallibility of
others. It is difficult to acknowledge that mistakes have been made.
The Sadness of Conflict
The sadness of conflict is that
everyone has to live with its outcome. Conflict changes relationships. This has
to be accepted. It is essential to the process of forgiveness. There are two
techniques in particular that you can use after a conflict to help regain your
emotional balance, forgive yourself and your adversaries, and get on with your
life.
The first is a contemplation
that you can do in the evening, or some other time when you want to work with
it. Its theme is very simple and it goes like this:
We all want to be happy, each
and everyone of us. What has just happened between ourselves and someone else
is because of this. We wanted to be happy. Each of us, in our own way, tried
to do what we thought was necessary to be happy.
If you feel now that it was you
who was misguided, then you should try to feel some satisfaction that you had an
opportunity to learn something that you didn't know about yourself. Perhaps now
you have a better understanding of what makes you happy and what doesn't. You
should ask yourself, "Is this something that I could have learned some
other way? Is this maybe the only way that I could have learned this
lesson?"
The same can be said of the
lessons that your adversaries have learned. Even though they may have
experienced a great deal of pain, was this best for them in the long run? Was it
best for everyone involved?
If you can, make your thoughts
toward others kind thoughts, based on the remembrance of your own struggles and
the pain. Conflict is a shared experience of pain. Use it as an opportunity to
develop your empathy for others.
When conflict is not positively
resolved for everyone concerned, your feelings should be those of regret and
compassion. Your adversary may not have learned valuable lessons; perhaps you
have not learned lessons as well. In this case, you are both likely to repeat
the same patterns of misery over and over again. It is not a very happy thought.
Not something to rejoice about.
 This article was excerpted from the book:
Enlightened Management: Bringing Buddhist Principles to Work by Dona Witten and Akong Tulku Rinpoche.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Park Street Press, a division of Inner Traditions International. ©1999. http://innertraditions.com
Info/Order this book.
More books by these authors.
About The Author
 AKONG TULKU RINPOCHE is the president of ROKPA, an international relief organization. Visit ROKPA's website at http://rokpa.org. The author of Taming the Tiger,
he is the founder and director of Samye Ling in Scotland, the oldest
Tibetan Buddhist center in the West. Visit the Center's website at http://www.samyeling.org.
DONA WITTEN is a management consultant for Ernst and Young and has
served in similar roles for major companies such as IBM and Cadbury.
Other articles by these authors.
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