Could there be a greater miracle than to look through each other’s eyes for a moment?
— Henry David Thoreau
The Quality of Compassion
Your test results suggest that your desire right now is on feeding your own emotional needs and coming into some balance in relationships. While we don’t often think of compassion as an essential ingredient for the workplace, the pandemic has shown us just what a difference it makes when its present, and how much we suffer when it is not.
We heard the first responders praised repeatedly in the first year of the pandemic - their selflessness, their ability to go the extra mile, their willingness to hang in when people all around them were collapsing - we were rightfully grateful and astonished at how much care humans could take for one another.
And perhaps it was the stark contrast to this highly visible compassion that made workers decide not to put up with callous indifference and outright hostility at their own workplace anymore. Compassion was suddenly a value that we saw in action and we all knew that we wanted more of that kind of interaction in our work life and home life.
Does your work help or hinder you in living out the Quality of Compassion?
Compassion In the Workplace
Compassion in the workplace is certainly the number one concern being voiced by the millions of workers who have quit in the past two years. Visiting the “QuitTok” feed and listening to stories of some of those who quit may enrage you, leave you aghast, and certainly sadden you. The tales of workers who begged for time off to bury and mourn their family members dying of covid and were told to get themselves back to work or be fired, is indeed grim. You would think that basic human decency would force a more humane response, but you’d be wrong.
The standards of efficiency and productivity are held in such high esteem that requests to take time off for reasons like grief appear to be self-indulgent, a sign of weakness, something slightly un-American. So long as this attitude persists the Quality of Compassion will not flourish in the American workplace.
What is particularly troubling about this lack of empathy is that it coincides with a global catastrophe which has affected everyone, so you would think that a simple application of the ubiquitous golden rule would suffice to make managers and bosses more humane. The insistence on the “stiff upper lip” approach to deep wounds like this is a sign that the brutality of the workplace has been so internalized and normalized that it is not even seen as something to be dealt with.
From a soulful point of view, the insensitivity, uncaring, and even sadistic behaviors that are tolerated in the workplace suggest a vast inner wasteland – such as appear in the mythic epics – where the water of human compassion has been stopped at the source and the whole land is in crisis. If our inner wells have run dry, then we have no pity to offer, no tears to shed. We have become masochists, internalizing the brutality that has been visited on us, and adjusting our rationalizations to account for our cruelty. The current work ethic gives us ample room to hide from self-recriminations, after all, we’re “just doing our jobs and getting other people to do theirs.”
To actually learn and benefit from The Great Resignation, this Quality is the best place to begin, for from this will all the other Qualities take root and grow. In a very real sense, the Quality of Compassion is the water that makes everything else grow. Without it, the other qualities are just nice seed ideas.
When the Quality of Compassion is out of balance . . .
The burden of “emotional work” is something that falls unevenly on the workforce, with women taking the lion’s share of the difficult task. The burden of invisible - and unpaid - emotional work is often what holds work teams together through challenging times, and yet almost no companies take it into account and adjust work schedules or task lists to accommodate the extra contributions made by those for whom compassion is a natural reaction.
Unacknowledged emotional labor is one of the greatest contributors to stress and burnout at work. The first way to begin to address this problem is to make self-compassion part of your daily practice.
The second way is to make this invisible issue visible. It must become a commonplace thing to discuss emotional labor at the management level and acknowledge the value that is brought to the team by the person who always remembers birthdays, who asks about a sick relative, who knows that you just lost your nanny and may need some flex time, who bothers to learn good communication techniques so that delivering bad news is not a crushing blow, but a manageable disappointment. Rewarding those who do the work of compassion will be a win-win for the companies that try it.
Why Name these Qualities as Colors?
There are many developmental theories that look at human needs, motivations and fulfillment and arrive at a schema with seven stages or levels. The fact that there is so much overlap in these theories suggests is that there is something there which all these observant human beings have noticed. For this deep assessment I offer my own synthesis of these developmental theories, using seven simple colored blocks to designate the seven key challenges to human beings - those needs or yearnings that require our mastery in order to thrive and live into our full humanity.
In adopting the metaphor of the seven colors, I am following in the footsteps of author Christopher Hill who felt that the rainbow colors - as defined by Isaac Newton: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet - aided in an intuitive understanding of the 7-level Chakra system. It has become so adopted by the West that I use it for convenience - and for aesthetic purposes.
There are other metaphors which may feel more natural to you than the color spectrum, and I encourage you to find your own analogy. What I am describing as Qualities are purely abstract and can be associated with any color, texture, sound, flavor, and image.
