When I am questioned about my ideas on transforming the American workplace, the words, “that sounds so new age,” always find their way into the conversation. A lot of the reactions to these new ideas about how we can work and play differently on this planet are a result of that stubborn, but doomed, belief in separation that humanity is shifting away from.
First, people are unaware that the human experience is a movement of passing through realms of consciousness, and consciousness is All That Is. Some call All That Is, “God,” some call It the “Eternal”; but it doesn’t really matter what It is called as much as it matters that we become aware that It is who we are. This is an awareness that many of the people who are considered “new agers” and “self-helpers” are talking about. They beckon and entice us to discover and embrace our power as physical expressions of this consciousness.
One of the favorite methods employed to assist in coming into this awareness is the observation of the relationship between beliefs/thoughts and experience. I use this same method in 16 Mondays to assist disenchanted employees to become aware of how their workplace experience is created from a belief system (thousands of disconnected and unrelated thoughts) not about the workplace, but themselves. The conditions, those things that employees tend to determine as the reasons why they are so unhappy—managers, supervisors, salary, tasks, co-workers—are all nothing but the physical support that is required for them to experience their beliefs. These conditions are created from the beliefs about who they “think” they are.
Second, 16 Mondays is categorized as a self-help book. But it is far more than that. It is a response to an epidemic of misery, one that affects not only 80 million employees in the United States, but families, communities and this country. It is a response to the suffering that is taking place in and outside of the American workplace. Employees hold the same beliefs about themselves in the workplace as they do outside of it. There is no separation.
Third, this epidemic of misery, or the epidemic of false beliefs, signals that the time has arrived to move out of the realm of one state of consciousness into another, one that is far broader and based on beliefs that will create another kind of experience in consciousness. If employers and employees can become aware of the why and the how of the experiences in and out of the workplace, it will certainly assist in making a smooth transition to an experience based on a higher stage of consciousness: a workplace that serves the highest good of all, business owners, employees, families, communities and the planet.
The idea of a workplace that serves the highest good of all life is an idea rooted in an expanded awareness beyond the limited awareness of working simply to pay the bills and put food on the table. While the new idea does not exclude our basic needs, it takes into consideration that we are far more than wage earners. This new idea is rooted in the eternal nature of who we are, and the divine purpose of our planetary life.
Finally, to argue against and dismiss the service that is being disparagingly and pejoratively referred to as “new age,” in regards to the call to transform, not only how business is conducted, but to end misery and shift how we live on this planet, is to engage, albeit unaware, in the continuation of business as usual and an avoidable collapse of the American workplace. To continue to address workplace misery with solutions formulated within the same belief system that created it is, in the words of A Course in Miracles, “insane.”
I have added an update to the 30-Day Workplace Challenge.
