Spiritual Musings

The times we live in are incredibly challenging. Around the world we experience polarization, violence, social injustice, and are facing an existential climate crisis. My 85-year-old friend Ian Mitroff, whose workplace spirituality research was mentioned earlier, is also the founder of the field of crisis management. Ian says the state of the world is the worst he has seen in his lifetime. He and I, and our colleagues in the Management, Spirituality, and Religion Division at the Academy of Management share a belief that any collective solution to these challenges must have a spiritual basis.

The essays in this section are mostly stories about challenges and opportunities I have faced that have invited me to stretch and grow spiritually in the context of these systemic global challenges to humanity. I share them here in the hopes that they also invite you to stretch and grow spiritually. This section offers several exercises and spiritual methodologies that invite deeper reflection. This deeper reflection has the potential to shift our ways of interacting and relating to others that move toward greater interconnectedness and away from a consciousness of separation (Tsao et al., 2019).

For example, the essay on Compassion offers the “Just Like Me” exercise that can shift your perspective on someone in the workplace that causes frustration or even fear. The essay on Divine Reading describes the four steps of the Christian practice of lectio divina, and how that might help us with workplace dilemmas and challenges. The essay on From Fear to Love offers a metaphor from business leaders on how to move from the “crucible of anxiety to the chalice of change” bringing a sense of the sacred into the most difficult decisions. The essay on Polarity and Spiritual Intelligence offers a model called Polarity Management that helps with unsolvable problems.