Organisational Life

Man it's been a crazy start to the year. You too? I remember when you could ease back into work during January. It was pretty quiet and you could maybe organise your filing cabinet and sort out your inbox. Those. days. are. gone.     

Completely.

Lots of stuff has been going on at this start of this year. Work has been nuts and sometimes corporate life is shit, not so great, hard, shit. Sometimes I forget that the reasons that large listed companies exist is to make money. For shareholders. Not for employees. The problem with this is employees are the company. Companies don't exist without people working for them, creating value and bringing in the dollars. It's a balance and sometimes the balance goes a bit too far in the money making direction and too far away from the looking after employees direction. Sometimes there are good reasons, well sometimes.

Sometimes I have to be reminded of the good stuff and this happened last week. I attended a meeting where the leaders were passionate about getting the business profitable. I sat beside a leader at dinner where she told me about her successes with her team and I admired a leader who had the courage to sit with the tension of a difficult problem, listen to everyone's views and debates until we got to an outcome. These are the little things, no big things, that make organisational life great.

Last night Arran and I attended "hot" yoga, otherwise known as bikram yoga but without the license. I call it stupid hot yoga. Anyone who has done bikram yoga for 90 minutes in a room heated to 40 degrees knows it's not for the faint hearted. The heat puts the body under stress and makes yoga poses which you might have some chance of doing under normal temperatures really really hard. The biggest battle is with your mind. I find I have a running voice trying to calm me down so I don't get overwhelmed and completely panicked. Last night we only did a 60 minutes class which was okish but the best part was finishing and the great instructor. She was friendly and funny, intuitive and connected. She noticed I was actually in pain at one point and had some tips at the end for dealing with it.

I guess I'm trying to draw out some parallels between big organisations and stupid hot yoga. Big organisations can sometimes put you under stress and achieving things can be hard. It can be easy to get overwhelmed too. The trick is to make connections and notice the good stuff because this is usually the things that keep you going. I was reminded of this last week.