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A Picture of Peace
There was once a king who offered a prize to the artist who could paint the best picture of peace. Many artists tried, and the king looked at all the pictures. After deliberating for several days, he had narrowed down his choices to two. He had to choose between them.
One picture was of a calm lake. The lake was a perfect mirror for the peaceful mountains that towered around it. Overhead, fluffy white clouds floated in a blue sky. Everyone who saw this picture said that it was the perfect picture of peace.
The second picture had mountains as well. However, these mountains were rugged and bare. Above them was an angry gray sky from which rain was falling. Lightning flashed. A foaming waterfall tumbled down the side of the mountain. This certainly didn’t appear to be a peaceful place.
But when the king looked at the picture more closely, he saw that behind the waterfall, a tiny bush was growing in the rock. Inside the bush, a mother bird had built her nest.
There, in the midst of the rush of angry water, sat the mother bird on her nest. She was the perfect picture of peace.
The king chose the second picture. “Because,” he explained, “peace is not only in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. Peace is in the midst of things as they are, when there is calm in your heart. That is the real meaning of peace.”
Four Steps to Finding Peace amid Turmoil
These four harmonizing principles of peace and balance can help you clear your mind during even the most chaotic times at work or at home. They can be especially helpful to leaders who are striving for the highest levels of success.
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Increase Balance in Your Life
Achieving balance takes effort and discipline. Balance is important for everyone, from top executives to line employees and those working in the home.
Sometimes we get so caught up in our work that our personal lives suffer, and sometimes personal problems can overwhelm us to such an extent that we are no longer effective in our work. We may not be aware that our lives are out of balance until a great deal of damage has been done or things have skidded out of control.
Shallenberger offers a simple assessment called the Circle of Peace and Balance, which divides our lives into six areas that need our attention and consistent care. When each of these six areas is properly cared for, it’s like balancing the wheels on your car to keep it running smoothly.
The Circle of Peace and Balance
Rate yourself in each area on a scale of 1 to 10. A rating of 1 means that you haven’t given that area any attention or you feel that it’s been neglected. A 10 rating means that things couldn’t be better in that area of your life. Let’s take a look at the six areas in the Circle of Peace & Balance:
- Physical & Emotional Health: This might include the amount of exercise you get, your overall sense of well-being, your stress levels, the quality of your sleep, and whether you have a healthy diet.
- Mental Health: Are you working to develop and cultivate your mind? Are you constantly building your knowledge and staying mentally sharp? This includes exercising your brain and maintaining a positive attitude.
- Financial Health: Most people who are financially sound follow wise practices in handling their money. They maintain a balance between what they earn and what they spend. They have savings plans. They also avoid debt, invest wisely, maintain emergency reserves, and provide for their retirement years.
- Security & Safety: When you focus on living a secure and safe life, you don’t take unnecessary risks. You prepare for the future, ensuring that those you love will be protected if anything should happen to you.
- Social Life & Relationships: Consider the quality of your relationships with your family, friends, and coworkers and with those in your community.
- Spiritual Health: When you cultivate a tenderness and sensitivity toward others, you feed your spirit. The same is true when you help those in need, treat others as you would like to be treated, and generally try to make the world a better place.
With all these elements in place, the Circle of Peace and Balance resembles a wheel with six spokes. Each spoke of the wheel represents one of the six areas that are critical to maintaining balance in your life. After you’ve rated yourself, connect the dots. If you have a nice balanced circle, congratulations! However, most people rate themselves high in some areas and not so high in other areas. When they’ve connected the dots, the circle is not perfectly round; it is slightly out of alignment.
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Increase Your Peace through Meditation
Research has shown that taking a few moments during the day to relax or meditate can return significant dividends in your performance and effectiveness.
What do you envision when you think of meditation? Meditation can be as simple as pushing back from your desk in the middle of the day, taking a couple of minutes to visualize a relaxing image, breathe deeply, and open your mind to reflect on positive thoughts. Even the U.S. Marines are studying meditation techniques as a way to focus and energize their men and women in the field.
Meditation can be a powerful tool to use anywhere, but it can be especially effective in the workplace. You can do it in a couple of minutes or you can take longer, depending on your preferences and your timetable.
It’s a little ironic that meditation is most useful at those times when you are stressed out and under the gun—those times when you feel that you have no time to spare. How do you recognize when it’s time to step back for a few minutes?
You should be able to recognize when you’re starting to get task saturated in your own job, so that you can make adjustments to calm yourself, clear your mind, and prioritize. You probably know the feeling—for example, when e-mails start piling up, the deadline for an important project is approaching, and your spouse calls to ask if you can pick something up on the way home. It’s that feeling of being overwhelmed.
Whether you are a CEO, a midlevel manager with many responsibilities, or a parent who is scrambling to keep your family afloat, you can find yourself stressed out when there is too much going on and too little time to deal with it.
When you feel overwhelmed by a myriad of responsibilities that require immediate attention, physically or mentally step back, close your eyes, control your breathing, and establish your priorities as your mind clears.
Once you’ve been able to calm your mind and determine what’s most important, then you can reengage with your activities without the stress and panicked feelings that come with task saturation. Once the most important things are under control, you can add responsibilities one at a time until you are comfortably doing everything that you need to do.
The goal of these relaxation methods is to improve your performance. You can’t become your best when you feel that you are under siege and when things feel completely out of control.
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Laugh Often
Laughter and a sense of humor are infectious. The sound of laughter is far more contagious than a flu bug and, unlike the flu, when laughter is shared, it bonds people and tends to increase their happiness.
Laughter triggers healthy physical responses in your body. It strengthens your immune system, increases your energy, reduces your pain, and relieves stress. Humor can lighten your burdens, brighten your spirits, inspire hope, connect you to others, and help you stay focused. Well-placed and tasteful humor helps create a constructive environment.
If they are applied at the right time, laughter and a good sense of humor can change a tense situation to one that is more inviting and relaxed. Humor can completely change the tone of a meeting so that the participants can put things into perspective more easily and move on to a positive solution.
Given its many positive benefits, laughing easily and often is an extraordinary force for good. A strong sense of humor can help you reduce stress, overcome challenges, strengthen relationships, and enhance your physical and emotional health. Humor gets you to a better place—one where you can see the world from a more relaxed, healthy, positive, enjoyable, and balanced perspective.
Cultivate laughter and a tasteful sense of humor. Have fun. Laugh with friends. Tell jokes. See if you can change stressful, counterproductive situations into happier, more positive situations through appropriate humor.
Self-deprecating humor is a wonderful tool for relaxing people and engaging them. Let go of defensiveness. Express your true, best, good-natured feelings. All of these behaviors can lead to greater peace.
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See Yourself in a Positive Light
This is really about being as good a friend to yourself as you are to others. One of the greatest ways for you to find or maintain peace and balance is to accept yourself, love yourself, and see yourself in a positive light. This isn’t about being complacent or ignoring your flaws or deficiencies. You should always strive to become your best, and that requires seeking new levels of awareness, empathy, and accomplishment throughout your life.
Studies have found that for most people, 70 percent of their thoughts are negative. Too often, our thoughts about ourselves are negative and self-defeating. There are proven methods for replacing thoughts that can hinder your success with thoughts that can empower you.
There is a fine balance between staying motivated to do better and being so self-critical that you become immobilized. So here are a couple of powerful tools to help you stay focused on the positive aspects of your life: self-affirmation and positive self-talk.
Practice Self-Affirmation
Your subconscious mind can store millions of thoughts and ideas, but the conscious mind can think only one single thought at a time. Remarkably, you can choose which thoughts influence your actions. You’re probably familiar with the adage, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Your thoughts affect your decisions, and your decisions determine the quality of your life.
A self-affirmation is a positive, uplifting phrase that you can repeat to yourself throughout the day—possibly at least 20 times daily—for encouragement and self-motivation. When you use self-affirmation, you teach your conscious mind to focus on that phrase and that mentality.
Practice Positive Self-Talk
Positive self-talk is a close cousin to self-affirmation. This tool helps you feel the way you want to feel. It’s also useful for reducing stress and finding peace even in the middle of mayhem and chaos.
You can control your response to feelings; you are the captain of your emotions. When you choose your responses carefully, you establish a level of control that allows you to become your best in everything you do.
Positive people put out positive energy and draw others to them. No one wants to work or hang out with negative, critical, and complaining people. This exercise is a great one for breaking out of negative moods and shifting into a more upbeat attitude.
Your mind and body can feel only what you allow them to feel. If you dwell on the negative and bitter, then those feelings will persist. Take charge. Replace those feelings by putting positive words out into the world.
Live in Peace and Balance
Viktor Frankl was spot on when he said: “Indeed, the major obstacle to you achieving the outcomes that you hope for in life are your thoughts.” You are the master of your fate. Finding peace and balance during the journey, both personally and in your organization, leads to greater health and happiness and an increased capacity to sustain excellence and fulfillment.