Dhamma Wins: Retaining Equanimity in the Workplace

Dhamma Wins is a series of articles where I’ll be discussing how my practice has affected my life. Sometimes I feel like it’s important to keep in mind how this practice affects me, so that I can draw on these experiences in future.

One of the most key Buddhist teachings is around the concept of impermanence and retaining equanimity in the face of change. Everything is transient, and all is subject to change. This is most often thought about on a macro-level, such as life events, deaths and emotional states (both positive and negative). It gives us a sense that the attachments we hold to things, or people, or states of being are time-limited, and as a result, shouldn’t be held so deeply — everything changes, right? However, impermanence is also relevant at a more micro-level, if we’re able to retain equanimity in the face of change, be it small or large, personal or non-personal, then we can begin to pave our way towards non-attachment.

I’d like to share with you a story of how I was able to use this teaching in my workplace, to give myself a clearer head under stress and use this non-attachment to recover from a pivotal moment in our work.

Yesterday I had a tough day at work. To give context, you can think of my office as a standard business office, complete with internal politics, an ingrained drive on revenue, and results focused workflows. My role there is more a support role; I don’t contribute to revenue or profit/loss directly, but I’m there to facilitate the function of our business processes.

As a team (of 8) we had spent the last two weeks preparing to begin a new project. We had spent a significant amount of time on specification of the project and doing administration and creating a project backlog to support us throughout the duration. Yesterday, in an impromptu meeting, our superiors told us that we were now going to look at something completely different. This, as you can imagine, demoralised the team, everyone felt somewhat lost, like the work we’d been preparing over the last two weeks was now worth nothing. We would have to start the whole process over again for a different project now.

Without trivialising, this was a charged subject for many of the team members who had a real passion to deliver the original project. I too counted myself amongst those members, the disappointment was felt across the board.

However, my reaction to it was somewhat different to that of my colleagues. I was able to treat these difficult changes with equanimity — something that I’d never been able to personally demonstrate. My practice has enabled me to retain clear-headedness in the face of such change, thereby mitigating the emotional distress that this change caused.

My ability to retain equanimity was not born of indifference to the project (I was just as passionate as others), but instead came from an acceptance of the reality of our world. Change is everywhere, and I was successfully able to use this notion to reach a sense of acceptance with our fate as a team.

That being said, I wasn’t completely unattached, nor did I feel no suffering. It was however, a marked improvement when compared with how I’ve felt in the past under similar circumstances. I was able to bypass the worst of the dukkha that this particular situation surfaced, but I wasn’t able to be fully on the side of non-attachment and equanimity.

This is just one example where I have been able to experience, first-hand, the real-world benefits of the Dhamma. The Dhamma has always been purported to instil a sense of wisdom about the reality of the world, but here I can see how it affects the decisions I make, and the path I take in my work life, as well as my personal life.