An Inner Journey of Ahimsa — 28 Mar 2022

A client I coach in Latin America was speaking about how he asks people to not bring emotions into play at work because the focus needs to be on tasks. When I asked him if he really believed that, he hesitated, and said he’s been trained to created different ‘boxes’ of various aspects of his life and organise them neatly. We then spoke about cultural intelligence and the idea of wholeness, and how traditional western narratives around achievement orientation do not quite honour all aspects of being human, when it comes to business management. Thankfully, organisations and practices are evolving on this front now and the boxes are breaking open, but a lot published management literature is still from western academia and it is force-fitted into cultural contexts that do not really resonate with it.

When we ignore local contexts and indigenous wisdom in the name of global ‘best practices’, the underlying cultural violence is deep, and damaging. People learn to be ashamed of themselves, their cultures, and their ways of thinking. In the process, workplaces foster colonisation. Of course, we dismiss it by calling it globalisation. There is a lot of ahimsa we need to bring into corporate organisations, to heal our world.

· What does ahimsa look like, at your workplace?

· How do we indigenise businesses, even as we tap into global networks?

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