5. A personal case study: How MSI is learning from our newest client.

The job satisfaction report posted on Tuesday January 5th was personally very resonant with us. I look back to my blog in October where I announced our new association client. We were so excited that there were so many opportunities for improvement. But “others” didn’t see it that way. They liked what they were doing things and saw no need for any of these “so called improvements”. In fact they were more than a little incensed that we would have the audacity to suggest there were such needs despite all the evidence to the contrary.

We could use this as an opportunity to become part of the disengaged and disgruntled (and to be honest we have had our moments) or we could be grateful for the opportunity to learn from the experience. It is important to differentiate here the lessons we are learning. In the past they would have been lessons about who to trust, what situations to avoid and how to deal with that certain type of person, but these are merely symptoms. We could cover them up, avoid them, deal with them harshly, medicate their presence from our minds, or use a hundred other crafty coping systems. In the end we would find there is no end. Life will bring another person, place or thing just like the last. We would find no respite from the insults we must endure because they do not come at us, they come from us.

I expect there are some of you reading this now who would like to, as a client I had been working with for several months last summer said, “punch me in the face”. I promise these ideas are not intended to insult or criticize in any way. They are intended to give you skills to be happier and more productive every day. I do not want or expect you to believe them from the outset, but encourage you to study them, experience them. I am not the creator of these ideas, they have been gleaned from my studies of scientists, social and business leaders, spiritual teachers and my own experiences. I was not raised in a particularly religious home, and my passion for science from an early age made me search for cause and effect in absolutely everything. These ideas have become personally credible for me through an iterative scientific process. Each idea has been expressed in many different ways from highly respected resources. Everything in this world and beyond works in interconnected systems of which none of us is set apart.