Author: Selena

I decided at some point last month to post every week. Writing – and sharing what I write – is still new for me. Turning it into a habit will likely take a few months. Current behavioural science provides plenty of wisdom to increase the chance of this happening. Piggyback on an existing routine. Make it frictionless to do. And build in a dopamine hit when it’s done.

Despite my routine being disrupted (in the nicest way possible) these past few weeks while I’ve been on the road, I’d set everything up so that I could keep that weekly commitment. I posted on schedule the first week. And then the second. But by the third week, I was feeling uneasy. What’s more important here, I was asking myself. Is it spending the next couple of hours communing with my screen so that I can honour my commitment to myself (me, my, I)? Or is it being fully present with people I love and care about deeply, most of whom I seldom see? Using the language of character strengths, do I need to activate Perseverance, or Love?

This is, of course, like so many things, a false dichotomy. It’s not, and rarely is, a case of either-or. And Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or the Buddha’s noble eightfold path, to name just two wisdom traditions, remind us to be weary of dogma, of clinging rigidly to extremes.  

Here, Perseverance was pushing me to maintain a streak. I decided to privilege Love, trusting that Perseverance would get me back on track once I was back at home. On the spectrum ranging from pushing through with my weekly commitment no matter what… to giving up at the first hurdle, I found the right balance. Not for everyone, and not for all situations. Just for me in this precise context.

How do you find the right balance in striving for your goals?

What are these virtues that according to Aristotle make us a good person?

Aristotle and his fellow Greek philosophers are of course not the only ones to have pondered this subject. We tend to notice the differences between our traditions and cultures. But viewed across the span of human history, the work spearheaded by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson in the early 2000s is showing increasingly that it does make sense to talk about “ubiquitous, if not universal” virtues. And here they are:

Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence.

If, like me, you’re interested in the breadth of thought traditions that they researched and the subtleties that lie behind these words, I highly recommend their book, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. They’ve also done a tremendous job making their work accessible to all via a free, online, and – importantly – scientifically validated survey.

Character strengths are the ways in which we manifest these virtues, showing the best of us. They are ways in which we think, feel or behave that benefit ourselves and others. For example, my top three are Honesty, Love and Hope (I’ll share my bottom three another day!). These correspond to the virtues of Courage, Humanity and Transcendence, respectively.

What are your character strengths?

As part of what a friend calls my post-corporate-life rehabilitation, I’ve been exploring the concept of business with purpose. Its raison d’être, or reason for existing, as expressed eloquently by Francophones. And I’ve come across a phrase that seems to pop up more and more frequently:

Business as a force for good.

There’s a lot to unpack in those six words. But let’s start with… good. What does good mean? Good for whom? By whose compass?

I remember telling my sister anxiously when we were growing up that I must be the bad one. There’s one in every family and it had to be me. Compared to the rest of my family, I felt overly self-centred, judgmental, possessive, condescending and uncompassionate.

Reflecting on this recently, I was intrigued that my instinctive sense as a child of what it meant to be good or bad was based essentially on character traits. Studying the works of great thinkers through the ages wasn’t part of my formal education. Discovering Aristotle’s Ethics as an adult, I was fascinated by his conclusion that possessing virtues is what being a good person is all about. And that exercising those virtues is what makes a life worth living.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the questions I asked. What I can say at this point is that the common thread in everything I do is to become a better person, and to use that to more effectively make the world a better place. It is – I am – a work-in-progress.

What does it mean for you to be a good person?

One of the reasons I left my corporate job was that I felt increasingly disconnected.

As the years went by, I simply couldn’t get on board with the idea that the ultimate purpose of my work was to make more profit for the organisation. That what was valued, above all, was efficiency, optimisation, productivity.

These are things that I value too, and that I can do. But as I became a manager and learnt to navigate the web of processes and systems in the organisation, I was faced with situation after situation in which what I felt instinctively was ‘right’ wasn’t the prescribed option. My approach to changing the culture from within wasn’t effective. Drained and depleted, I left.

A few months later, commenting on one of my posts, another classmate from the altMBA introduced me to Parker Palmer’s deeply moving work on the undivided life:

Sadly, most of us learn early on that it’s not safe to be in the world as who we really are with what we truly value and believe. […]

But then there comes a point in life when that divided life, that gap between who we really are and the face we put on for the larger world, becomes painful. […]

We have to find some way to try to close that gap. To build a bridge between our own identity and integrity as adults, and the work that we do in the world [so that] not only will we become more fulfilled in the work we do, but we’re much more likely to serve the people we want to serve better.

I was reminded of this several weeks later, reading Melinda Gates’ succinct advice to today’s young women:

Seek out people and environments that empower you to be nothing but yourself.

What does living an undivided life mean for you?

Something I’ve relished these past months about not being bound to a corporate job is that it’s naturally allowed space for me to explore thoughts that seem interesting.

I mentioned in my previous post that Seth Godin featured large in 2019 for me. Participating in his altMBA was such a life-affirming experience.

The basic structure is: read a prompt – discuss in a small group – post your response – comment on the work of others with empathy and generosity. And on one of those posts, a classmate left this comment: “I was introduced to a concept by my teammate yesterday called purposeful curiosity from a book called Working Out Loud.”

Interesting, I thought. I noted it down as yet another resource to explore once the workshop was over. (It was life-affirming and intense.)

If I were still in a corporate job, I suspect from past experience that that scribbled note from over 4 months ago would still be languishing in my notebook.

Instead, I looked it up, ordered the book, actually read it, and then thought: time to start a Working Out Loud Circle. I roped in my husband and my sister and we completed the 12-week cycle just before the end of last year.

There are so many things I love about what John Stepper has gifted to the world with his compassionate, actionable, step-by-step approach. If Seth Godin planted the seed in my brain for this blog, then John Stepper nurtured it beautifully. To the point that I am actually typing that I want Working Out Loud to become a habit for me this year.

As I prepare to go back to working in an office in the coming months, I will intentionally carve out space for my brain to wonder freely. For unplanned fortunate discoveries.

How are you inviting serendipity into your life?