I think attitude can play a huge role in job and office dynamics. As a manager, I will hire / promote someone with a more positive,energy, upbeat, outgoing attitude over someone who is purely competent or skilled in what they do.

Why? The more positive a person is the more pleasant they are to be around. I want people on my team who not only contribute to the day to day operations of my workplace, but also make it a fun place to be. I’m not saying that skills, hard work, and experience don’t play into a factor, but I’ll be honest and transparent by saying that I rank soft / people skills and attitude equally or sometimes higher than skills and experience. I can teach people what to do, but if how and why they do the job is to have a positive impact on something greater than themselves, that I cannot teach and has to come from within.

Sure a hard worker and skilled person will get the job done, but their cynicism, dissatisfaction, jealousy, judgement, and comparison is not the kind of work environment I want to foster. There are more important things in life than what we do such as how and why we do them.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by John.

http://youtu.be/W3uLqt69VyI

Here’s how I differentiate between the following:

– Learning = False vs. True
– Judgement = Bad vs. Good

While there are objective and scientific proven truths, when it comes to judgement, Shakespeare said it best,

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

🙂

“less than” and “more than” are by-products of our society obsessed with self-esteem and self-worth derived from external sources and comparisons.

The remedy? I would say being open to even more rejection and disassociating yourself from it. Easier said than done I know, but imagine a life where your day to day peace of mind was not dependent on how others accepted or rejected you. It’s not pleasant being rejected, but it doesn’t have to spiral you into depression, self-judgement, self-criticism, or despair. It happens, you feel it, and you move on always knowing that that deep down inside you are a good person and deserving of love and affection.

My favorite scene from my favorite movie that encapsulates Buddhist wisdom in a nutshell: http://youtu.be/BYNElueJj_w?t=21s

“The trick is not minding that it hurts” 😉

Also try this: http://youtu.be/IvtZBUSplr4

• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by John.

This post got me thinking; why is that in the majority of posts about break-up we exalt the person who left us or who we left as being “the best,” “amazing”, “so awesome”, “so good”, “a god”, “a goddess”?

In reality, in the grander scheme of things, we’re all average. Over their course of their entire lives, I doubt it that anyone ever deviates too far from the median for too long on any measure we use to evaluate an individual. Therefore, objectively speaking, how can anyone be better than anyone else?

The person we’re with is usually “perfect”, but then you think to yourself, “Wait, a second, the person I was with last was also perfect at the time, is this person better than that person? Is the next person going to be better?” There’s even a social convention and pressure to speak highly of your current partner and talk about how better then were then your previous relationships. “Oh, she / he is so much better than the last person I dated. I don’t know what I was thinking with that one. I’ve got it all figured out now. This one is perfect.”

Look back at your relationships. Look all the way back to your adolescence and remember how many people you considered to be ‘perfect’, ‘awesome’. The truth is, none of them were. It was simply your mind playing tricks on you. Emotion guiding reason and the following story starts playing in your head, “If I feel so strongly about this person, then they must have been special. They must have been better the person before and there’s no certainty that I’ll meet anyone as good as them”

I’m beginning to appreciate how the mind begins to create what seem like “rational” stories in order to justify the feelings that we experience. It’s your mind justifying / rationalizing it’s actions and feelings. In short, it’s your ego being fed. Because, if you truly realized that the person was just like any other, objectively no better and no worse, your ego would crumble and rebel

“What do you mean I invested so much time and effort and emotion into something who was just average?”

That kind of thinking is unacceptable to the ego, so it exalts the other. It puts them on a pedestal in order to satisfy and secure it’s position and it’s own importance.

I think we simply meet people at different stages of our lives and depending on a given variables (interests, values, mental stability, willingness, physical attraction, etc) we’ll either connect with another person or we won’t. It has really nothing to do whether or not they’re better or worse than someone else because objectively speaking, they’re just average sacks of bone, liquid, and flesh just like anyone else. To think of them as better or worse than yourself or anyone else is a ranking game that we play to secure our ego’s position in a false and impermanent hierarchy.