Don’t let your goals get in the way of your Purpose.
- Aria Myoku
As my Zen community is well aware, I have been much occupied with vows recently.
Last Saturday two of my students took the Buddhist Vows with me in a ceremony called jukai. One of them was my longtime partner, Aria. We’re getting married on Sunday. (See my goofy selfie below.)
If you have ever done either of these things — taken religious vows or marriage vows — you know the energy and ease that comes along with committing to a deeper purpose.
Our culture has a respect for — if not always a deep understanding of — the language and spirit of Vow when it comes to our sacred relationship with our Self (True Nature, Spirit, God, Tao) and with Other (Intimate Partner).
But when it comes to the third sacred relationship in our lives — to our work-in-the-world — we are not very conversant.
The business community has paid a kind of acknowledgment to Purpose-informed work through the vehicle of a Mission Statement. But when it comes down to it, how many companies hold to their stated Missions when their short-term goals are compromised, let alone fundamental security or survival threatened?
Understanding Purpose has become a big thing these days. A few months ago in an airport, I came upon a Harvard Business Review “special edition” compiling all the studies and articles they had commissioned over several years relating to the benefits to corporations of articulating their Purpose.
Employee satisfaction, retention and wellness, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty … all sorts of indicators both quantifiable and unquantifiable are shown to be served by articulating and honoring your Purpose with integrity.
On a broader and more encouraging scale, the national Business Roundtable, including top Executives at major U.S. corporations, issued a statement last August redefining the purpose of corporations as “promoting an economy that serves all Americans.”
I appreciate these statements and studies, but also hope that professionals and the business community truly commit to exploring the deepest dimensions of Purpose. Purpose cannot be subordinated to professional or corporate goals, particularly financial ones. Goals must serve Purpose.
My Zen lineage founder Taizan Maezumi Roshi was asked once what persists after physical death. (Zen Masters often get this question, and have been known to answer in various ways.) On this occasion, Maezumi Roshi answered: “Your vows.”
It is a profound and even mind-blowing thing to contemplate. The truth it points to is that there is something bigger than the ups and downs of your life or career. It even goes forward after your life and career are (ostensibly) over. It transcends the survival of your business.
When you discern this “something bigger” in your work, and commit to serving it, your professional life is dramatically enriched. You can still have personal and professional goals, but they are subordinated to the deeper Purpose. Not meeting your goals is no cause for despair, and meeting them is not cause for overly exuberant celebration.
We think of both short-term and long-term goals. But once we open to Purpose, we realize that all goals are short-term. They play the Short Game. When you enter Vow and Purpose, you’re playing the Long Game.
The Long Game is much, much more fulfilling than any Short Game.
As my lineage elder Chozen Bays, Roshi discusses in her book The Vow-Powered Life, there are three kinds of vows: reactive, inherited and inspired. In my Zen@Work individual programs with professionals, I help them discern what types of vows are operative for them in their work lives. The more conscious and inspired the vow, the happier and more fulfilling your work will be.
Ultimately, this applies at the corporate level as well. When a company truly honors its stated mission, especially when it serves society and may compromise a secondary goal such as stock price, it has a far greater and better influence on the world and all beings, beyond its stockholders\ and its employees, beyond itself, and beyond its own time and place.
Such is the power of an inspired Vow in life and work.
I’ve enjoyed sharing these thoughts with you this morning, and hope you all have a great week. I don’t know if I’ll get to another newsletter this week as my wedding draws closer. We’re doing it via Zoom in our backyard!
As always, I welcome your letter, questions, comments and thoughts. Write me directly at paul@zenatwork.org. I am still offering a free Discovery session for anyone who would like to explore individual work with me. You can book with me at Zen@Work or send an email.
And please share this newsletter widely if you are called.
Be well!
Aria and me, a few months ago.