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How often do we wisely choose our workplace?: Applying Buddhist principles at the Workplace

How often do we wisely choose our workplace?: Applying Buddhist principles at the Workplace

by | Sep 23, 2022 | Read, Work, finance, productivity

Editor’s note: 

Does applying Buddhist principles of compassion and kindness make you a walking doormat at the workplace? PJ Teh, a former Strategic Planning manager at EDB, challenges that view and gives us points to think about, in this mini-article series.

TLDR: We spend more than a quarter of our adult lives at the workplace. Knowing how to choose your workplace can either build or destroy your character. Choosing the right people, and culture, and asking the right questions is crucial!

Principles in the financial world and the Dhamma

The term Dharma/dhamma is something that brings up the mental image of a Californian long-haired hippy with incense and drugs, spouting free-love, with flowers in their hair. 

In reality, the term Dhamma is simply a set of conditionality or principles: this can be seen from how they are described, which are usually sets of conditionality i.e. if A happens, that allows B to happen, etc. 

So that is why in my mind, “Applying Buddhist Principles at Work” is the same thing as “Applying the Dhamma at Work”. 

Ray Dalio, a famous hedge-fund manager, who wrote a best-selling book “Principles” gives us further insight into the workplace. His book is about the principles he used to grow Bridgewater Associates into one of the largest funds in the world: that is a kind of Dhamma for hedge funds (and decision-making), with many overlaps with Buddhist Dhamma. 

Instead of ‘lazily’ applying the Eightfold Path and Four Noble Truths, I’m taking a first-principles approach to the Dhamma at Work, but without necessarily being MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). These are decisions and actions that anybody probably needs to act on, at work. 

These are my personal views on the matter, so please feel free to look at it differently. 🙂 

I should also caveat that these Buddhist principles might not make you rich or conventionally successful. But you will probably sleep well at night, and probably suffer a lot less, and be happier! 

The following decisions need to be made by anybody with regard to any workplace.:

  1. Choosing a workplace
  2. How to look at issues and matters, and how to decide
  3. How to treat people at the workplace
  4. How to conduct oneself

This article will cover ‘Choosing a workplace’ with subsequent articles covering the other areas.

Choosing the place where you spend a quarter of your adult work life

A workplace is an environment where your mind will be in, for a substantial amount of your life. 

A week has 168 hours: a typical work week takes up anywhere from 42 to 120 of those hours, which is 25% or more of your total time. That’s where your mind will be at. 

What happens at work also spills over to the rest of your life, shaping your mental state for your week. Hence, I think choosing a workplace is perhaps the most important decision to make.

So how should we choose a workplace? I have a few factors to consider.

1. Choosing the people

The first factor to decide about a workplace is the people you’re going to be working with. You become the people around you. 

This was so important, that Ananda (who was the Buddha’s personal attendant) was rebuked  by the Buddha for saying that the good friendship was only half the Holy Life:

When a bhikkhu (monastic) has a good friend, a good companion, and a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path. 

SN 45.2 Half the Holy Life

The same consideration applies to choosing our colleagues. 

Why is it so important to choose your colleagues carefully? This is because of anatta, or non-self: if there truly is a self that was fully in control, then the environment wouldn’t impact any individual. 

But precisely because anatta or non-self is true, we humans are influenced easily by the people and environment around us. 

Choosing the workplace, especially choosing the people you work with thus helps shape our own minds and conditions. 

2. How do I know if the culture is right for me?

Related to this, is whether the culture of the team and workplace you’re joining is a good or bad culture. How do you know if it’s good or bad? And good or bad, with reference to what? 

Choose a workplace culture with reference to your state of mind, and your progress on the Eightfold Path. 

If you go to a workplace and you end up having a lot of strong desires, that’s probably not good. 

Nothing below a five-star hotel

When I was working with a previous employer in finance, an ex-boss said to me “You know, PJ, I can never stay in a hotel less than five stars, and on a plane less than business class.”

I was horrified and asked why. She said, “because I am so used to this, that anything less is really uncomfortable.” 

It was suffering for her, basically, because the financial industry had norms that were extremely expensive. And that’s when I realised that the industry was Super Samsara! 

That’s when I decided I had to leave because I also noticed that many of my colleagues and peers were not happy, not very healthy, and used their high pay to “buy happiness” outside of work, indulging in all kinds of expensive things. 

The layoffs happened

When we were laid off due to the financial crisis, I heard an ex-colleague had cash for only half a month’s worth of rent in her bank account, because she had spent all her income on spa packages, pedicure packages, gym packages, branded clothes, bags, drinks, expensive dinners, etc. 

So she was desperate to get another high-paying job as a banker, even though the market was flooded with retrenched bankers. 

My own state of mind back then was extremely unhealthy: strong desires, bad-tempered, and lacking sleep (I was working 90-120 hours a week). 

Even though it has taken ten years to get back to the base-level salary I earned in the investment bank, I still think it was the right decision to leave (or rather, to get laid off). 

The Buddha gave this advice on how to choose a place for a monastic: 

Buddha: Take another case of a mendicant who lives close by a jungle thicket. As they do so, their mindfulness becomes established, their mind becomes immersed in samādhi, their defilements come to an end, and they arrive at the supreme sanctuary. But the necessities of life that a renunciate requires—robes, alms-food, lodgings, and medicines and supplies for the sick—are hard to come by.
That mendicant should reflect: ‘…I didn’t go forth from the lay life to homelessness for the sake of a robe, alms-food, lodgings, or medicines and supplies for the sick… they shouldn’t stay there.

– MN 17 Jungle Thickets

This advice isn’t just for monastics but is applicable to anyone who is intent on walking the Path. 

What’s perhaps most interesting is the subsequent instruction from the Buddha. When your meditation, mindfulness and practice aren’t good, due to your environment,

That mendicant should leave that jungle thicket that very time of night or day; they shouldn’t stay there.

That’s how important the Buddha placed the effect of a place on one’s mind. 

Asking the human mirrors you live with at home

How should you apply this learning, if you don’t really meditate nor keep precepts? 

A simple way is to ask the people who live with you: are you becoming more gentle, kinder, and compassionate? Or are you becoming more of a pain in the ass to live with? 

That will tell you how your mental cultivation is going. If your workplace is causing you to be more irritable, have strong sensual desires, and crave more material things, then you’re probably in the wrong place. 

And if you see that a workplace is full of people with big egos, anger, strong sensory desires and material things, those workplaces are probably the places to avoid.

Wise Steps:

  • Understand the impact of colleagues on your mind and choose them wisely. Which of your colleagues improve your mind, and which do not? 
  • Check-in with the people you live with if your character has improved or worsened since you joined your firm; this is one of the best indicators of whether you chose the right place. What do they say? 
What We See In The World Is A Mirror Of Ourselves

What We See In The World Is A Mirror Of Ourselves

by | Mar 11, 2021 | Read

TLDR: Although we view others and ourselves as acting and speaking independently from one another, all of our speech and action are our own projections. Others are a mirror of our state of consciousness. 

This is a reflection piece as contemplated by the author based on the Buddha’s teachings. As such, it may not contain the truths as taught by the Buddha. The author hopes the reader takes away useful bits that may resonate and discard whatever parts that make no sense without any aversion.

In Buddhist psychology, the Buddha gave an insight into how we ordinarily experience the world. We are sense based beings and we experience our world through the six senses. They are – the senses of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch and mind. The mind is a sense base object because it comes into contact with the world of ideas dependent on the other senses. Mind in western psychology is the physical brain. It makes sense because the brain receives signals from the other sense bases to create an idea. However, the mind in Buddhism has been translated as awareness and consciousness. The translators of Theravada Buddhist suttas used the word, ‘citta’ in Pali. The word citta includes the mind and the heart. The Buddha did not point to the brain specifically as the mind. He was pointing for us to look at our consciousness. The function of consciousness is a state of knowing and in the teaching of the five aggregates, it seems that consciousness has been intertwined with the sense bases. 

How We View Our World

In our ordinary perception of the world, we come into contact with people and the environment. When it comes to our interaction with others, we sometimes think that other people make assumptions about us. We also think we are accurate accessors of other people’s needs and thoughts, and therefore they may need our opinions. In this way, we often come away in frustrations communicating with the vast majority of people who do not listen to us, just as we do not listen to them.

Although we think that whatever action or words we perceive is made independently by each individual, if we look close enough, what we see, hear, touch, smell or think in the world is but a mirror of ourselves.

We Cannot Perceive What We Don’t Know

Ayya Khema, a well-known German Buddhist nun who taught in the late 20th century, said we cannot see in another person what we don’t know or do not have within us. For example, when we see another person angry, we can see it is anger and something we dislike. That is because we know anger and we have it in us, and so we react to the person who is angry. 

We understand mundane affection, and so we see it as love and something permanent. She said we would not understand what we do not have. The unconditional love of an arahant is hard to understand and we wouldn’t know even if we stand next to him or her. That is because it is something we do not understand as we do not have unconditional love in us. We may only be able to perceive an arahant as quiet and reserved instead of lovable because we don’t know what unconditional love is. An arahant is someone who attained enlightenment in Buddhism. You can also call an arahant a saint.

Our Daily Interaction With Others

Thinking about what Ayya Khema taught, it occurred to me that this happens all the time. Our interaction with others is always about ourselves because we can only talk about and react to what is within us. 

For example, I was at a dinner with friends at one of their homes. This friend is a vegetarian, she does yoga and enjoys studying Buddhism. In my mind, she seemed to enjoy clean living. But she revealed that she still smokes, though only socially. I gave a look of surprise. She remarked that smoking isn’t a bad thing and does not make one a bad person. I was surprised she said that. That is because I never thought smoking makes anyone a bad person.

Earlier on, I had also encouraged the group of friends to practice what they learnt as opposed to mainly studying. However, instead of seeing it as a form of encouragement, they thought I was disparaging their form of practice. So you see, they said I was disparaging because they could not see or understand my sharing of the experience of spiritual practice. I, on the other hand, could not see or understand the pleasant experience they gained from intellectualising spiritual texts instead of probing it in real life. We simply were projecting onto each other what we know rather than speaking each other’s language.

In another example, my helper had been unwell with allergic rhinitis for sometime. Despite medicine from the general practitioner, she did not recover. She also did not want to consistently take the supplements I offered or accept my offer to bring her to a Chinese doctor. Again, I could not see or know her world and so out of frustration I made a comment that she is always sick. Right after making that comment, I realised I was seeing in her what I dislike – being sick. I was also saying only what I know in my world to her – being sick is not a good thing. I regretted my comment immediately upon realising what I had done as I seemed to be blaming her for being sick when it is normal to be ill.

Listening Is Better Than Speaking

These daily episodes made me realise that most of our interaction seems to be a futile business. We are always talking about what we know and consistently projecting ourselves onto another person. There seems not to be any useful speech except for sharing the dhamma and interaction for the purpose of completing tasks at work.

Listening is indeed better than talking. When we think, we think from our vantage point. When we speak, we push onto others only what we know within us and not what the other person needs.

Another thing that struck me is, we can really only be mindful when we pay attention even when speaking. I have not been totally successful in using speech as an object of mindfulness. When I managed to do it for a while, I saw that whatever that came out of my mouth is about myself. Other than that, I found that ordinary speech is a form of entertainment so that we can let the mind loose and rattle on. Ayya Khema also pointed out that only when we have let go of ill will or greed, then we will not react to others. That is because we do not have these tendencies in us anymore to recognise them in others.

Being with others can help us realise many things about the nature of our consciousness taught by the Buddha and his Sangha. When we can see the state of our consciousness, can we purify it by letting go of what makes us discontented and unhappy?

Wise Steps:

  • Experiment with the inanimate objects around you without labeling to find out how it changes your reaction.
  • Observe what you say and how you act in communication with others. Are the words you say truly what the other person wants to hear or is it just about you?
  • Instead of chiming in with your opinions, try to listen more and see if the interaction with others changes from your usual communication with them.