Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Work. So what's it all about?
It's great to do well in our job. It's great to continue doing well and to receive acknowledgement for our efforts. We work hard, give of ourselves to the job and hopefully we shall receive recognition by means of increase in remuneration. Now we can buy that new car, move to a larger house or flat, we can afford to have a child and provide them with a good upbringing, go on that fancy holiday, wear nice clothes.......more money brings many rewards.
Doing well at work also brings a sense of satisfaction, possibly a thrill of achieving success or completing projects or tasks up to or beyond expectations. We complete the tasks, high on imagination, low on cost and on time. We can roller-coast along, surf the 'feelgood' sensation, to achieve even more. In short, impossible tasks are no sweat and miracles, well we keep coming up with them, they just take a little longer. So we get promoted.
With promotion comes more responsibility, more money (whoopee), more challenges, bigger hurdles, higher expectations, so we work harder, acclimatizing to the dizzy heights of our new found stature and wealth and we still enjoy it, surfing on our own self-made wave of success. So we get promotion again, and this feels great. We enjoy more autonomy, more wealth, greater responsibilities but now it's a knife-edge between being exhilarating and fun to achieve the impossible every day and not enjoying the stress; we may even get worried that we will not achieve. As we cope with wider ranging responsibilities we may eventually fail in one endeavour because we took our eye of that ball while juggling six other big projects which all came in on time and as planned. But the one that other people saw as important, we may have let slip. Ooops. We drop a clanger. Now it's stress time. Next week or next month we're wary of not letting any little tasks slip. We prioritize our time, our team, we ration and budget the financial resource, we are not surfing now, but swimming in an ocean of challenges with limited resources to complete them. Rather than looking so far ahead and planning strategy, we fire-fight with tactics that weaken our defences and resources elsewhere. Now dropping balls, dropping clangers, our achievements are less frequent. We're now approaching middle-age, we're slowing down slightly but the challenges keep on mounting and there's a crowd of hungry young managers coming up underneath, snapping at our heels and between themselves, looking for the chance to take the boss's job. Now the job isn't such fun. This is not a happy scenario, but typical of many working situations. I know; it happened to me.
It seems a truth, that no matter how successful we become, most people get promoted beyond their level of competence. What was fun, eventually becomes no fun at all. It's stress and this has dramatic effects on our ability to do the job, our health, our family and social life. We may eventually get pushed to one side by up and coming management; we were once the shining example of excellence in achievement, but now debris at the side of the road.
One thing that teaching the Alexander Technique has shown me is that we are all very different from one another. We have different attributes, different skills, different sensitivities, different loves, hates, humour, patience, physique, weaknesses, intolerances, desires and abilities, socially, in recreation and at work. No-one is better than anyone else, we're just all different. And as an AT teacher, we work with the individual for their particular needs, strengths and challenges. We always help make the most of our situation. But the point is that we're all different, no better or worse.
For some of us, we can get stressed doing what other people find a breeze. Some people can run companies, talk to shareholders but they're not so good in other fields. Others may be great at story-telling, art, writing, but not so good in large groups. We may be fantastic creative thinkers, but not much good at counting sums of money and balancing books. Thankfully the world is made up of infinite varieties of wonderful people who are all able to do different things. The chief executive whose office is on the 21st floor can't do much without the lift engineer who has no difficulty in making sure the elevators work efficiently, or the postman who delivers the cheques.
What's it all about? Well, there are important issues in all this. Firstly, we surely want to be happy during our time here on earth. 'This is Your Life'. In our old age, let's be able to look back and say "I had a great time!" Secondly we want to be healthy....or maybe it's the other way around. There's not much else. You may say wealth brings happiness, but we can see a lot of very unhappy millionaires, getting divorced and even committing suicide. What we really want to ensure is that we can maintain happy, health qualities throughout our life.
We can help maintain these happy and healthy qualities for ourselves if we balance our abilities while also being realistic about what we can manage....healthily. There is no failure in choosing simpler tasks. Correction.....There is no failure. We want ensure we do not get promoted beyond our level of competence. This is key, because if we do, it sucks. It's a balance of working to have a great time, while having a great time working. It's a balance of earning enough to have a good living, but not pushing the earning boat further out than we can manage to row back in. It's finding that level where enough is enough. This requires a realistic outlook, humility, contentment, acceptance of our abilities. Of course we can always push for more; we may surf adrenaline for a while but it's not sustainable.
So what's the best thing to do? Well, I really can't say. We're all individuals with our own needs, desires and abilities. But acknowledge your achievements, small and large. Respect your own abilities, take pleasure in small things, take pleasure in big things; there is no difference, they're all just things and we should have pleasure in them. That's the point. In my mind it makes no difference if we make it to the top in our field or not, or whether we have great wealth or modest income. At the end of the day, we can't take it with us when we go. We leave as we came in, with nothing. But the time we have in between should be a happy one and a healthy one.
So what's it all about? I would say,,,,do what you love, and do more of what you love and then make sure you're doing more again of what you love, because happiness helps you be healthy. And if you've got health and happiness, you've got the basis of why we're all here. When you cease loving what you do, change to something else that you do love. That's what I did in my mid 30's. But what about wealth? Well it's my belief that the Universe will provide what we need, as and when we need it. This system has never let me down yet. :-)
