Better Ways to Cope at Work Part 3

The current trends in the workplace have put greater pressure to produce, with longer hours, cut backs in hiring, and insecurity about long-term jobs. What these trends have in common is that they increasingly challenge the coping skills needed to make work fulfilling. When work and life go together, which should be a normal goal, you cope with challenges without being overwhelmed and stressed. You remain centered despite external pressures, and you are open to shifting circumstances.

This may sound too idealistic if you have a job where small chronic stresses are the norm and your day is largely spent reacting to external demands from other people. But the whole point of adopting coping skills is to take care of yourself from the inside out. If your mindset is to constantly chase deadlines, react to other people, and beat the clock, you can't reasonably cope. There is no time for the inner person and the security that only comes from knowing how to use the mind-body connection to your advantage.

First you have to value who you are inside and care enough to preserve the self from stress. Most people are not in charge of themselves. Their work is in charge of them instead. They take it as mandatory to sacrifice who they are for what they can accomplish. The two should come together.

Conscious living can make it happen. The more self-aware you are, the more you can achieve.

Achieving from within sounds alien to most people, and it's rarely presented as the best strategy for success. There's a strong social bias in favor of action where the focus should be on the awareness required to make action reach its goal. The more centered you are, the deeper your source for inspiration and creativity, the wider your vision, and the sharper your focus. These are the traits of success, and they are all inner traits.

Now you can see that coping at work isn't the same as putting out brush fires all day. It's an inner journey that teaches you to match inner and outer life. For every person who has heard of meditation, yoga, and stress management, only a fraction have adopted a lifestyle of inner growth that brings the expansion of awareness year after year. Meditation isn't about turning into a monk; yoga isn't about stretching and becoming limber. They are about establishing yourself in the self.

The self isn't a thing but a state of awareness, and even though you can find plenty of references to the higher and lower self, there is only a single self with many possible states. The shallowest state has little awareness, being reactive to external situations and prone to a restless search for distractions and the support of other people. The highest state is complete self-awareness, with mastery of inner and outer life. All of us find ourselves somewhere between these two poles, and at a certain point it dawns on us that awareness isn't a constant. It's dynamic and changing.

So the real question is this: who's in charge of the changes? Once you see that you aren't actually the author of your own story, naturally you want to be. Sacrificing your self to work, other people, and outside demands is the greatest mistake anyone can make. So take seriously the fact that your inner potential in your most precious possession and begin to look at how to fulfill your potential from the inside, not as a long range goal but as your purpose for getting up every morning.

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is The Future of God