If you don’t enjoy your day at work, you may need to look inward for a solution
 

There’s a lot of concentration today, quite correctly, on the need for organizations to provide a more humane working environment. But good working environments don’t make happy workers all by themselves. You can lead a horse to the water, open its mouth and force its nose below the surface, but you can’t make it swallow.

I am not saying that people actually want to be unhappy at work, but employees are not blank slates to be written on; they bring their emotional and intellectual baggage with them to work, just as they take it home again.

Let’s take a simple example; you’re a middle-level employee of a large organization, arriving at work on a Monday morning. What do we get if we open up your head and look inside? First, there’s the row you had with your spouse last night; you have an uncomfortable feeling it might start again when you get home. Parking the car, you remember that it has a problem you really must get fixed this week. Hope it’s not as expensive as last time; you really can’t afford another bill like that. Going through the door, your stomach tightens as you also remember you have an objective-setting meeting with your new boss later in the morning. That sort of meeting is never fun. Finally, you arrive at your floor and see Smith, a person you dislike rather a lot, smugly admiring his new office suite. You can’t understand why he ever got that promotion, but the word is that he’s popular with senior management and will go far. You might even wind up working for him. What then? Should you leave? Who would employ you? And the first email message you come across is to call someone in the HR department as a matter of urgency—someone you’ve never heard of. Oh dear, what can that possibly be about?

Understanding your ego

So it goes on. In a way you are probably half-unconscious of, you’re tired, irritable and worried and you haven’t yet done a stroke of work; or rather, it’s not you who are worried. It’s your ego. In Latin, ‘ego’ simply meant ‘I’. It was taken over as a way of translating Sigmund Freud’s expression “Das Ich” into English. It means essentially the conscious, rational mind—the sense of self and individualism. It’s used in a rather vaguer sense in popular psychology, and in Buddhism it’s the thing that causes all our trouble and unhappiness.

Don’t be nervous or leave this article now. Buddhism is actually just a highly-sophisticated system of mental training, developed by practical people over thousands of years. What Buddhists say, is that your ego doesn’t really exist. What you think of as yourself—the person who is angry, upset, disappointed, hopeful, uncertain—is just a collection of noises in your head, patterns others have imprinted on you, and fears and fantasies about things that haven’t happened yet and probably won’t.

It’s not really you who are upset about Smith’s promotion, it’s your ego. You’re not really worried about answering questions on your expenses—your ego remembers the humiliation of being told off when you were a child. If you can still the chatter of what Buddhists call the “monkey mind,” you will find the real you underneath all that. Until you can, all this debate about multi-tasking is rather beside the point. You are probably ‘doing’ twenty things at once in your head, at a minimum, almost all of them negative and useless.

Are you here, or somewhere in the future or the past?

Notice that none of the events I’ve listed is happening right now. In fact, we are usually so obsessed with resentment of the past and fears about the future, that we forget that life is only a series of present moments. Unfortunately, the mind does not distinguish very well between things that are happening right now, and things that happened in the past or might happen in the future. So we relive events and anticipate events not only emotionally, but physically as well. In your head, you start running through what you are going to say to your boss and your throat tightens as though you were really there.

There is a simple cure for this; every time you have a though about the past or the future, if it’s negative, say to yourself: “I’m glad that’s not happening now”. Try it. You’ll be surprised. There are a few other things you can do also to still the chatter of the monkey mind, all extremely banal and none requiring any special equipment.

How to deal with your ‘monkey mind’

Sit still in your office chair for two minutes. I bet you can’t do it. Your mind is full of thoughts which have physical consequences. You start to think of Smith’s promotion and your jaw begins to clench and naturally you sit forward in your chair. If you can manage it though, your mind will be quieter when you have finished.

Take a document, any document, and read it through without your mind wandering. If your mind wanders, notice where it goes to. “It’s a report by so-and-so. Pompous idiot. I remember that meeting—or was it somebody else; wait, I think I’ve still got a record of that meeting in my notebook . . .”

Train yourself to sit motionless for five seconds when new e-mail arrives. E-mail exists for you, not the other way round. Slowly, the hormones of fear and excitement that your body naturally secretes, and you are only vaguely conscious of, will start to be produced less often.

Buddhists have always known that you can’t repress thoughts, and you can’t think of nothing. All the Zen arts, from archery to the tea ceremony, are designed to still and calm the mind and teach concentration by focusing on one thing. So think of one thing, and you will not think of many things.

Let’s take the most banal example imaginable; lunch. Do you eat a sandwich at your desk? Then notice the sandwich. What’s in it, what the texture is, what it tastes like, how many bites it took you to finish it. It’s not enlightenment, necessarily, but it’s a start.

When you give up the incessant mental chatter, when you learn to concentrate, you’ll not only work better, you’ll be happier.

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