in changing or acting in ways that are authentic, honest, immediate, collaborative, and democratic, because to do so would invite a rearrangement of power relationships. Hierarchical, bureaucratic, and authoritarian organizational models permit—and in some cases actively encourage—role rigidity and hypocrisy. These organizations are unwilling to admit or examine their faults publicly. They discourage honest communication, suppress creativity, and undermine teamwork and self-confidence. In the process they put people to sleep.
In the absence of honest feedback and continuous scrutiny, these organizations desperately seek to defend and perpetuate themselves, causing them to undermine the values they publicly proclaim. They espouse creativity yet reward bureaucracy, conservatism, and defensiveness. They urge risk taking but celebrate only those who increase or preserve their financial bottom line. They call for change yet reward caution, stasis, and denial. They advocate equality but radically limit the possibilities for personal and organizational growth for those at the bottom. Is it any wonder that people fall asleep rather than wake up and risk their livelihood championing values that, while publicly proclaimed, are privately punished?
Where are the great examples of hierarchical organizations exercising courageous moral leadership? Where are the profound apologies, the honest confessions, the open admissions of error? When did a corporate CEO or government official last publicly admit wrongdoing without being forced to do so by an angry citizenry, a judge, or a prying press? How often are corporations balanced and truthful in their advertising, politicians in discussing the merits of opposing candidates, or CEOs in responding to allegations of financial or social wrongdoing? Examples of these dishonesties can be found in the newspapers every day and are apparent to everyone who is willing to acknowledge that abuses inevitably flow from the inflexibility and concentration of organizational power. If we want people to wake up and be honest with themselves, we need to honestly reveal what stands in their way within organizational life, act to overcome it, and model the behaviors we publicly advocate, starting with ourselves.
Every day, employees are punished for giving or receiving honest feedback to those higher in rank than themselves. Or their criticisms are passed through a maze of bureaucratic filters and rationalizations that diminish their effectiveness. As a result, many learn the virtues of silence and go to sleep.
Yet organizations that resist honest feedback or penalize employees for delivering it limit their own capacity to adapt, learn, and evolve. They reduce the desire of employees to expand their motivation, increase their skills, and make important contributions to their organizations. They shortchange themselves and those who rely on them.
Employees are then forced to choose among upsetting, ultimately ineffective strategies and to decide whether to fight back, quit, avoid, or accommodate and do what they are told. Few recognize that there is another choice: they can cultivate awareness and authenticity in themselves and others and work strategically to build respect for these qualities within their organizations.
Cultivating Awareness
Everything we do is mediated through our minds, which are immensely powerful, richly complex mechanisms that feed us massive amounts of information regarding our environment and internal activities, all in the service of surviving and succeeding. Our socially constructed minds, however, have the curious capacity to interfere with themselves, to deny disagreeable information, defend against new ideas, consider themselves unworthy, alter facts out of fear, anger, or shame, and confuse the message with the messenger.
Our minds organize our experiences into two primary categories: those that induce pleasure so we want to repeat them, and those that induce pain so we want to avoid them. We use language to focus attention and point our awareness, often with great precision, in the direction of things, ideas, feelings, and experiences that induce pleasure. Yet the thing that points is not the same as the thing it points at. For centuries, Buddhists have distinguished the finger pointing at the moon from the moon itself. Ridiculously simple as this sounds, many of the problems we face at work originate in a fundamental confusion between the observer and the observed.
In receiving critical feedback, for example, we often confuse the finger pointing at us with the person pointing it, and as a result, minimize, justify, or deny the behavior they are trying to call to our attention. We dismiss them by castigating their methods or intentions. We resist their efforts to communicate, and become unable to observe ourselves, evaluate the information they offer, or improve our skills. Human beings are not the only animals that give each other feedback, but we may be the only ones who judge, devalue, insult, berate, humiliate, self-aggrandize, and lie to each other about who we are. We defend ourselves to such an extent that we fail to recognize our true selves. At the same time, our success and survival sensitively depend on our ability to be aware and authentic, to discover what is taking place around and inside us, and to learn from the feedback we receive from others.
Ultimately, waking up means self-examination—not as narcissism, but as though it were feedback from an outside observer. It means looking at what keeps us from looking, listening to the reasons we are unable to listen, and becoming aware of the distortions we create in our own awareness. As we become more awake, we are able to spend more time in the present, reduce our preoccupation with the past and the future, and magnify our ability to recognize, accept, and learn from our mistakes.
Often, when we perform some routine task such as driving on a freeway or engaging in repetitive labor at work, we slip into a reverie and cease being aware of what we are doing. We operate on autopilot. Suddenly, a car swerves in front of us, or a machine breaks down, or the unexpected occurs. Immediately, we wake up, become aware of what we are doing, and tune in to our environment. Yet even then, many of us prefer to remain half-asleep or search for scapegoats, excuses, or places to hide. With awareness, we become better able to face breakdowns, take responsibility for them when they occur, fix them quickly, and avoid long-term damage. Sleepwalking not only dims our ability to foresee and fix breakdowns, it leaves us more vulnerable to harm and less able to recover afterward.
When we protect ourselves from information that could fundamentally alter our ideas about ourselves and the world around us, we defend a fragile status quo and in the process become weaker and more vulnerable. We become unable to move beyond the polished images we hope others have of us—or, strangely, even the tarnished ones we have of ourselves, including the one that we are unworthy or unlovable. We tell stories about who we are and what we could be, do, or have if it were not for other people’s perfidy or for conditions over which we have no control.
In the end, waking up is simply awareness. Awareness is openness to feedback, and feedback is information we can interpret in an infinite variety of ways. We have a choice. We can resist, deny, or defend ourselves against this information, or we can decide to learn from it, adapt, and evolve. We can use it to feel sorry for ourselves, or to castigate others, or to wake up and become stronger. It is up to us to attribute meaning, draw conclusions, and act on the information we receive.
Awareness is available to each of us at every moment. It exists only in the present. It is an intrinsic quality of mind that can move from place to place and increase or decrease in scope and intensity of concentration. It can take the form of a spotlight that identifies shifts in the foreground or a floodlight that emphasizes congruity in the background. Over time, it can be cultivated, exercised, and enhanced, just as it can be neglected, abandoned, and allowed to atrophy.
The first goal of waking up is simply to increase our awareness by maximizing our ability to use internal and external feedback, which consists of information we can use to improve our skills and performance. The second, deeper and more profound goal of waking up is to become more authentic, centered, skillful, and content with who we are as human beings. As Buddhist nun Pema Chodrun writes:
Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for
