Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. And today we're going to be talking about peace at work. I know this is a big issue. I know it was a big issue for me. And so before we get started, Please consider like sharing and subscribing. As you know, this helps YouTube to get this content out to more and more people. And also please consider sharing with your friends and family so they can benefit as well. So as I was thinking about peace at work, I thought of the first thing I thought to do was define what work is. Now this helped me a lot. Because I was very emotionally invested in work. Maybe some of you can relate to that. But first I want to just define what work is. Work is actually an agreement that you have with a company or a boss or some entity that you are going to provide something, some kind of service, and they are going to compensate you. Which is your pay, right? And benefits. So compensation includes money and benefits. So it's a deal. It's a business deal. I just want to clarify that because later on that's going to help us if we are a little bit too emotionally invested in work. The second thing I have here is, have you ever made work more than that, than that agreement? So I was using the word emotional investment right now. So let's say from, I'll give an example for myself. So I was, I'm a nurse as you probably know, and I got my four year degree and I started working and then as the years and years go by. I felt like I was becoming more and more a expert in my field. I was getting very good at what I was doing. And so, maybe you can say naturally started getting a little emotionally invested in work. And I remember, I don't remember how many years ago it was, but I was meditating at the time, but I was up for a job promotion. And uh, I really thought in my heart that I deserve this job, that I had the seniority, the skills, the talent, that I was like exactly the right person for the job. I had the vision. It was a leadership position or management position. Anyway, I applied for the job and I went in for the interview and I thought I did great and I didn't get the job. And I asked my boss at the time why I didn't get the job and she proceeded to tell me how the other person who got the job showed up to the interview and how I didn't. And so at that time I was very upset and defensive and I wasn't able to take the feedback properly. But long story short, as we say, I was very upset and for many years, I would say five years. I suffered because it felt like a personal defeat. I felt defeated. How many of you feel defeated at work? What I want to talk about is peace at work, but I thought it was important to bring up, that's one example of something that could happen at work that could be very painful for us. I wrote a couple of things down here. What issues we could have at work. One is the work itself. So maybe I really don't like what I'm doing. It has nothing to do with the people. It has nothing to do with the, the situation or the, The boss or anything like that. It's the job itself. I just don't like doing this anymore and I wish I could do something else. That's one. The people is the other thing. Sometimes it's the people at work. Like I'm, I love my job, but I really have a hard time getting along with the people at work. The other one is the boss. Authority. And that was one of my things. One of my things was the boss and the other one was, later on I'm going to talk about advancement. Right? So advancement and the boss were my two things. And then the other one is the money. and the benefits. So the compensation, I'm not happy with the compensation for whatever reason. Maybe I'm not making enough money. Maybe there's not enough benefits. Maybe I need to support my family or maybe I think I deserve more money or something. I don't feel something doesn't feel right. So there could be many, many reasons why we don't feel good at work. So I want to talk about how to bring peace at work. And actually we're going to talk about the laws of karma again, which if you go back to episode eight, That's the red pill of karma where we talk about karma. And the main point about karma is to take responsibility for the situation and also for the feelings that I'm having. So I can tell you that after I didn't get that job, I was talking against my boss. I was frustrated. I was gossiping. That behavior I'm not really proud of right now. I was showing more and more why I, Couldn't be leadership, I guess, now in hindsight, but I was very, very hurt and I didn't understand why I didn't get it. You may have this situation in other areas of your job. Like maybe you can't understand why you're not getting along with the people or you can't understand why you're not getting a raise or you're trying to like the job, but something about it just doesn't feel right. So in the laws of karma, we talk about taking responsibility for my feelings and for the situation. And I would say the first step would be to identify what the issue actually is that you're having at work. I just gave a list of things that it could be. So let's say for me, for me it was that advancement and the boss. So my behavior was not good. I was very upset and I felt very powerless. And I started, like I said, gossiping and talking negative about my boss and the situation and so forth and to anyone who would listen and try to make myself feel better for not getting the job. That behavior didn't help, right? So after a while, I mean, I was meditating at this time and I knew that that behavior was not going to work and I needed to stop it. I don't think I did it for very long, but I stopped it. But the pain of that lasted a long time. I really needed to spend, in this case, it was years. So I had a lot of emotional investment. In my job. So wherever we have emotional investment and what does emotional investment mean? It means I'm attached. I'm attached to the outcome. I want things to be a certain way. I have a hard time, accepting things the way they are. If they're different than what I think they should be, that would be an example of emotional investment or attachment anywhere in life it's a recipe for Sorrow, a recipe for suffering. So I definitely had a lot of pain. It took me a long time, but what I did was I stopped acting out. So the laws of karma say I need to take responsibility. So if I'm talking about it with other people, I'm spreading, I'm doing more bad karma, let's say. So I need to stop doing that first. So wherever, if you're listening to this and you have a problem at work, one thing I could suggest right away that you can think about doing is stop talking about the problem. Like maybe if you have a safe friend or something that you want to talk about it with. But not at work. So no complaining, no bad mouthing anybody, no gossiping. That's the first thing. So that's what I'm doing is I'm bringing my attention inward now. I'm going to take responsibility for my feelings. Over that time where I had to reflect and see what was going on, I had to really go through and see how attached I was. Invested I was. I was so upset that it took a long time for that to fade. I ended up staying in the job because I wanted the job. The job I had was fine. I wasn't going to leave the job. It was a very stable job. So the other thing is once you start taking responsibility for your feelings, you can start looking, discerning, and deciding what you need to do about the problem. So in my case, I wasn't going to leave the job. I stopped bad mouthing everybody and I decided, look, keep quiet, do my job now, work out my feelings, and then if there's another opportunity to change or another opportunity, maybe I'll go for that. Turns out a little while later, there was an opportunity and I ended up going for the job I'm in now and I've been in for eight years and I'm very, very happy in this job. So it worked out fine. Let's say you have a situation with the people at work or the boss at work. How do you deal with that? Again, same principle, however I'm behaving, if my behavior is adding to the problem, I need to stop that. Let's say I have a habit of being reactionary or being defensive or something like that when I'm with people. Maybe I need to be quiet. Maybe I need to stop doing that. The first step is to withdraw, to bring myself in so that I can deal with my own feelings. I have found that This method that I'm talking about right now, and you can go back to, I think it was episode six, which is the five steps to courage, where it talks about this process of bringing my attention in, discerning and deciding, making a different decision and being able to change a situation. So. One of the ways to get peace at work is to start feeling empowered and being able to know that I can make a change. I can tell you that I have changed every single aspect of my job to the point where I've been able to create a department. Without a title. So I don't have a title. I don't have like that job that I went for. I didn't get any of that, title or status, let's say, but I was able to be in a department where I was like the first one in the department and I'm able to train everybody. I was basically able to shape the department the way I wanted it, which was what I thought leadership should be anyway. So guess what? I got to do what I wanted anyway. This is a secret, by the way. I feel that peace at work comes from first being able to identify what the issue is for me. Acknowledging and validating my own feelings, my own wants and what I feel like I want or need. And then, Seeing what I can change, what I can't change, what decisions I want to make, and then I can also create what I want. I can also say that my relationships with the people at work are fantastic. And I did that. I did that by changing my own attitude by, I don't want to just say stopping being negative, but by taking care of my feelings and figuring out what I need to change, I was actually able to change the relationships. This is a very big deal because if we keep reacting the way we used to, we keep on getting the same. Reaction back and that certainly was the case for me. No matter what I did before I kept on getting the same response I didn't get the job. I didn't get the whatever I felt like I wanted the people I wasn't getting along with or they didn't understand me or something like that So we can make changes So when you can't make changes on the outside, you can make the changes on the inside. So again, stop, gossiping or saying negative things, work on my own feelings and then make those decisions for myself. I can tell you that even then you're going to start feeling better because you're being empowered. A lot of times we feel bad because we're disempowered, but I'm going to say nothing outside you can disempower you. I know we don't believe that, but it's true. Nothing outside of you can disempower you. We can always bring back of our attention to our feelings, figure out what we want, figure out what we can change and what we can't, make decisions and start aligning the situation with the way I really feel. So it's really about making peace with yourself. I know psychology has talked about this before, you know, like yourself, love yourself, take care of yourself, make peace with yourself. I want to say on the field, it's not so easy, especially at work. Work can be a place where we're very emotionally invested. We put a lot of time into it. A lot of times we've been through training, we've spent many years, we've done education and so forth. We've given to the to the company or whatever we're working for. So we've actually invested. Sometimes it's not so easy to just say, Oh yeah, I'm just going to be happy now and be peaceful. I think we need to take a look at how we feel really about what's going on. The other thing is, like I said, we can create what we want. So in my case, what I really wanted was the opportunity to make an impact. On my job. That's what I always wanted. But I thought that you had to be a manager to do that or be in leadership to do that. It's not really true. I can make an impact where I am. And it turns out with this new job, I was able to make a really good impact. And I'm very proud of the way it is now. And I feel really good about my job. I know I'm saying it, it's weird because to say, I feel really good about my job. I hope a lot of you already feel that way, but if you don't. Understand that following those laws of karma and the introspection and looking and seeing how you feel and figuring out what you really want and really value and what you can change and what you can't, you can start inching the situation to the way it feels good for you. Then there's peace at work. And where is the peace? The peace is in me. Nobody else changed anything. It was me that changed. Then the other secret is once you change, the situation changes. Then we say the karma is finished. Like the negative karma is finished. You know, part one way, one of the ways you know it's finished is when the situation changes. So the peace is really the contentment of myself that work is reflecting what I really want. So I'm going to stop there. I. I know it's like a principle thing. I gave an example. If you want to, take this down, like write a couple of notes if you're having trouble at work. I'm going to say sometimes leaving work is not the answer, sometimes it is. Sometimes confronting the situation directly is the answer, sometimes it's not. But if you follow your heart. I'm going to say if you really follow your heart and give yourself a chance to figure out how you feel, feel your pain. I had to feel my pain, believe me. You have to go through that so that you can get to the heart of what you really feel and what you really want. When you follow your heart, then you have peace. Because you're at peace with yourself. So I'll leave it there. Remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And I hope that you all get something out of that. When we get better, the people around us actually get better too. Service is very, very important to understand that we're all connected. And as I get better, everyone gets better. So until next time, take care. Um, uh,
