The prior post, “Bluffer’s Guide to Nondualism,” explained the nondual mindset. One which eliminates separation between one thing and everything else.
Beyond interesting to think about, nondualism is a path towards professional results.
Here are 4 upsides to adopting this philosophy of life.
High Performance Culture
The strength of any organization can be measured in its strength of relationships.
For example, employees stay or quit because of their boss. It is one of the top nine reasons cited in this 2020 study, along with lack of progression and lack of teamwork. The study points out that 43% of employees would return to their former job if their leader was replaced.
When leaders adopt a nondual mindset, they see their employees no differently than themselves. They exist in the mind as fingers on the same hand.
When team members feel that they are a part of the whole, they experience a sense of belonging. Belonging is a necessary achievement in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow is famous for his study of human motivation.
Team members also move faster with greater confidence. Stephen M. R. Covey calculated productivity gains from this Speed of Trust (2008).
When we create a healthy environment, where people can grow as individuals and as a community, we not only attract talent. We retain them, too.
Because loyalty is not something we purchase with compensation. It’s something we earn with empathy and organizational self-care.
More Resilience Operations
When we see supply chain, financing, partners, and innovation hubs as a single ecological system, we cultivate durability.
An adaptive system like the brain shows us how this works. Functions which are diminished in one area can be re-grown in another area. This tolerates damage from unseen forces without interrupting total function. The brain operates in parts and as a whole.
With a nondual mindset, we operate in the same way. We shift functions inside and outside of organizational constructs or legal entities. It fuses micro economic and macro economic disciplines into one model of understanding.
Beyond the tactical advantages, there are also strategic possibilities with the nondual mindset.
It enables foresight into the market shifts before the spark catches flame. Because economic, political, environmental, societal forces, and customer preferences are viewed in one weather map.
And with foresight, change is made easier because being prepared for disaster pays off.
Lastly, the nondual mindset decouples our dependency for a fixed state.
We spend less energy preserving the status quo because we are not attached the way things are. Nondualism understands Creative Destruction in the way that farmers know that after the Winter there is Spring.
Attention is managed accordingly.
Insightful Leadership
Author of Good to Great (2001), Jim Collins, advises that Level 5 leadership is a shift away from the ego of the self to a larger goal. It is a reframe from personal needs to a more holistic entity.
It is also a doorway to introspection into leadership, as Benjamin Laker would invite us to do.
When we take a nondual approach, we avoid the trap of the victimization mindset. We take on the responsibility for how we show up. We see our own shadow projected onto others as C.G. Jung suggests.
We translate losses to learnings faster. The cause and effect move from something on the outside to something on the inside.
Challenges which test our character serve us. Events which appear to delay progress to goal are no longer considered setbacks. They present opportunities to fully realize what we are capable of.
They are simply episodes in how the play unfolds.
So when we want to change the world, we change ourselves. Leo Tolstoy thought so. So did Mahatma Gandhi. And Viktor E. Frankl.
Thus the authorship of the future becomes our own doing and not a fate we suffer.
Purpose-driven Focus
On the plateau of material success there is often an emptiness. Like thin air, it is difficult to breathe.
That is because the external validations no longer work. They no longer trigger the dopamine response.
Suzanne Gelb Ph.D., J.D. suggests that is because our material success outpaced our inner growth.
The nondual mindset helps us to reconcile this condition. There is a collapse between the outer and the inner world. It is re-contextualization of the situation.
It is also a door to refactor our energy towards the community. To work for the benefit of others. Realized gains become the capital for philanthropy.
Moving towards this mindset reconciles the desire to make money and the desire to make a difference. As they are not contradictions.
Occupation and vocation exist in a superposition: in the same place at the same time. Two possibilities equally true.
The Japanese term for the convergence is Ikigai.
With a sense of purpose, meaning finds it way into all effort.
With meaning comes productivity: quality; quantity; and efficiency. As if this were the last time we do something, we do it to our fullest ability. And recognize commercial results along the way. $9000 per employee according to Maggie Wool from BetterUp.
Outside of commercial results, there is a more fundamental advantage.
This shift in thinking is a move towards the Wisdom mindset.
It is a door towards living a more meaningful life. One without having to sit on a cushion, or in a pew, or on a mat. It is living that deeper meaning at every moment of every day.
The Visual8 