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Every national or church holiday celebrates something important, draws attention to some important element of history, faith, people and the country. Either we celebrate them thoughtlessly, or we live them and identify with them, or we treat them as time off from work and time with the family, or… that’s it. How?
Why do I deal with this topic when I deal with business, advising management boards and leaders? Because every leader needs to have a clear worldview on most topics. He must have clear convictions with what he agrees with, with what he disagrees, with what he believes and what he doesn’t. He must be able to talk about it and he must have clarity of vision and strategy. Even if a topic does not interest him, he should have a clear position: I don’t do it, it is not important to me.
The worst attitude in the case of managers, leaders, leaders is the so-called the trap of suspension, i.e. a feeling of uncertainty, not deciding which way to go, what to watch out for, what to communicate. The better we want to be a leader, the more we need to be clear in mind and decide clearly.
On the blog twice a year, I bring up the subject of the spiritual dimension. With many of my clients much more often, because it turns out that many people in business also need to find themselves in the non-material world.
From my observations it appears that social topics such as holidays are for many a moment of uncertainty. They are an example of a lack of clear conviction. We wish someone a happy holiday even though we do not treat a given day as a holiday. We celebrate Easter, even though we are not Catholics. We break the Christmas wafer on Christmas Eve, even though we don’t go to church.
The more uncertainty there is, the more hypocrisy and thus a sense of inconsistency in life. Therefore, the first thing I wish you these days is to make yourself, your beliefs and world view consistent.
In the Change Value Process (CVP) we say that as a leader you must always take care of three areas: Mentality (i.e. worldview, beliefs, attitudes), Communication (i.e. way of speaking, message) and Strategy (i.e. vision, action plan, goals) , strategic management).
For some leaders, the holiday is a time of testing – whether they know how to be consistent with their values and beliefs – if they are Catholic, are they not ashamed of it, if they are atheists, then whether they are ashamed of it. If they are in the middle, do they know where they are and are they comfortable with it.
Of course, many people don’t think about Christmas or simply treat it as a free moment and time with family. After a few days, they return to work.
There are also those who irritate church holidays because they are angry with the church or the state. They treat it as an artificial institution that manipulates people, and holidays become a pretext for political disputes and family quarrels about who is right.
I grew up in a Christian, Catholic family that went to church every Sunday. I have two grandmothers, both parents, two sisters who already have their own children. To this day, together with Kamila, we are the only family members who are not practicing Catholics. Fortunately, we have never experienced family indoctrination.
In 2006, I stopped having a need for church apprenticeship. Over the years, dealing with psychology, discovering more and more an integral and holistic approach to life, I realized that everyone can find their own way. I discovered that the most important thing in spirituality is discovering yourself, understanding yourself, the meaning of life and the joy of life. The rules of religion in the world are supposed to help people in this, but they hinder many of them.
The moment of the wedding in 2009 was an interesting event in this respect, because we wondered how, being non-Catholic, how to approach a church wedding. We did not feel pressure from the family, we did not feel our own pressure and great need, but nevertheless we felt that it was worth it. On the one hand, because it is a tradition, on the other hand, because we felt a greater depth of marriage in the church than in the office, because we wanted the wedding to be a spiritual dimension.
We did not have a vision then to get married on a beach in a meadow and create our own ritual that would be more than a 5-minute oath in the walls of the office. When deciding to have a church wedding, we treated it not as a church wedding, but as a ritual that helps to feel the spiritual dimension in a holistic approach. Someone conservative may judge us as blasphemers, but that was our way of finding our faith.
In fact, it was only after 2013, when our son was born, that we started to work out how to fully approach the spiritual dimension, how to make it all coherent, how to educate our son in the future about faith, holidays, death, life, How to answer the questions: Does God exist? Does evil exist? What’s after death?
What about all of this?
I believe that every person must find their way in everything. Find a balance between living in a society with a given culture and history, your beliefs and your path, which he discovers year after year.
After many years of reflection and experience, I discovered for myself the interpretation of, for example, Easter as a time of joy in life, gratitude for life. The moment when I remember even more about what life is, why it is, what it is for. All symbols: egg, chicken, bunny, yellow tulips, the waking up spring – all this reminds you of life, birth.
I used to live according to church ritual. Later, rejecting these rules, I went my own way, but I had a problem with finding myself coherently during Christmas or Easter. Well, there was even a time when I felt bad about the fact that I don’t go to church on Sunday.
In psychology, we call it an internal conflict: on the one hand, there were thoughts in the head “go, you have to, everyone walks”, on the other hand, “I don’t feel it, I don’t need it, I don’t believe it”. There are plenty of people of this type of internal conflict. The task of a man, and a leader in particular, is to constantly eliminate internal disputes in our psyche, and more importantly: to make ourselves coherent. The less we have doubts, the more consistent we are.
This affects the strength of peace, confidence, clarity of vision, and the power of a true leader.
Therefore, during this period, I wish you the future and present leader:
- consistency in your beliefs and values
- as few internal conflicts as possible
- not feeling guilty that you are or are not a believer
- sense of yourself, sense of your worldview
- gratitude for life
- joy every day
- feeling myself
- discovering your own dimension of spirituality
And finally I want to relate to what spirituality is for me.
Spirituality is:
- discovering the intangible dimension in life
- appreciating the smallest elements of life
- gratitude for the smallest elements of life
- mindfulness to the smallest elements of life
- deep trust in life
- deep self confidence
- accepting that we can’t control everything
- searching for the deep meaning of life
- freeing yourself from emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, hurt, guilt, regret, shame
- feeling God not as a person, figure who rules, but as a higher energy that fills everything
- discovering a higher wisdom that is incomprehensible to most people but is palpable
That is why every evening, and sometimes in the morning, for myself and my son, I repeat the ritual, our mantra, a prayer that sounds like this (when I speak to someone I use the words “you are”, when I speak to myself I use the words “I am”) :
- I am here and now, I am here and now, I am here and now
- I am attentive, I am attentive, I am attentive
- I am open, I am open, I am open,
- I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready
- I am safe, I feel safe, I am safe, I feel safe
- I am loved, I feel loved, I am loved, I feel loved
- I am valuable, I feel valuable, I am valuable, I feel valuable
- I feel at peace within, I feel at peace within, I feel at peace within, I feel at peace,
- I have strength, I feel strength, I have strength, I feel strength,
- I have joy in me, I feel joy in me, I have joy in me, I feel joy in me,
- I let go of what is unnecessary and not mine, I let go of what is unnecessary and not mine,
- I admit what is important and mine, I admit what is important and mine,
- I allow myself what I have not allowed myself to do so far, I allow myself what I have not allowed until now,
- I accept what I have not accepted so far, I accept what I have not accepted so far
- I trust myself, I trust life, I trust higher wisdom, I trust myself, I trust life, I trust higher wisdom,
- Thank you, thank you, thank you for…
- I forgive, I forgive, I forgive…
- Sorry, sorry, sorry for …
- I love, I love, I love…
Of course, I think that everyone can create their own version of a mantra, a prayer that will allow them to discover themselves, feel themselves, understand themselves, and thus discover, feel and understand life on dimensions other than the everyday home, business.
And I wish you this!
Humanly I wish you: a happy egg, a crazy chicken and a moment of breath.
