Today’s Karmic Workout: The Virtue Of Resoluteness

The Virtue Of Resoluteness Of God And Particles

Today’s Karmic Workout: The Virtue Of Resoluteness

Karmic Muscle Group: Committed Action
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Resoluteness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Resoluteness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the seventh virtue, resoluteness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about resoluteness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Resoluteness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. Resoluteness requires choosing a course of action and casting aside all doubt. Once a choice is made, all that remains is resolute action.
Make a list of resolutions that you will carryout today. If you are a smoker resolve that today you will not smoke. If you keep a diet, resolve that today you will not cheat. Today is the day that your choices and your word shall have absolute power. Whenever doubt or temptation arise in your mind, let pass like a floating cloud or chase it away, if necessary, like you might shoo away a pesky cat. Once you have chosen, the issue is closed.

Training Note:
Human beings rarely choose anything. They usually goad themselves with reasons or rationalizations. We almost never live in the space of “because I said so”. We are so used to servicing our temptations and going with the flow that the mental muscles that give us the power of resolution are usually quite small in most of us.

It helps to know what resoluteness is. It is not the outcome of an internal debate. In fact, you do not need to even consider a matter before resolving how you will relate to it. You can merely choose and take a stand. This kind of resolution is the ultimate personal power. To have your word be so powerful that simply speaking of an outcome is a virtual guarantee that it will happen, gives one access to becoming a creative force in the real world. Most us try to figure out if a plan or an intention is “likely” before we take a stand. A practitioner of the virtue of resoluteness chooses based on what he or she says will be in the world. Likelihood, probability or calculated risk do not enter into the process. The matter gets resolved and the mind casts off doubt like a samurai throwing away her saya (scabbard) because the battle will be the end all, be all of her existence.

Resoluteness is pure, focused, intention.

Resoluteness is the seventh virtue because it is the great leap into reality. Without resoluteness, none of the other virtues can find expression in the real world and remain useless thoughts in a hypothetical fantasy. Resoluteness, therefore, is where the rubber literally meets the road.

Karmic Benefits:

Stop Hedging Your Bet, You Are Going To Die Anyway: we think that keeping our options open gives us greater possibility. This is a myth. A person who stands at the crossroads is stuck and, while making no mistakes, makes no progress. Some people live their entire lives without taking a stand on anything. They become like jellyfish in the ocean and are swept away with the currents of circumstances. Human beings have the power of choice, but choice alone does nothing without action. Choosing powerfully requires resolution. What are you waiting for? You will be dead soon enough. Resolution is the act of committed living.
If The Voices In Your Head Are Allowed To Debate, Nothing Gets Done: certainly it benefits us to think things through. It is one thing to consider the facts and circumstances to find a path to effective action. It is another thing to be paralyzed by indecision. Doubt has many ways to weaken us. Sometimes we doubt because we do not know what is going on or because we were not paying attention. Sometimes we doubt because do not have a clear vision as to who we are or what we stand for. Sometimes we have to take the next step prepared only with whatever we have. After considering the best information available, we must choose and resolve that this is how it is going to be. If new information arises as we progress, we can choose again, changing a choice on new information is a different from not making a choice at all. At any given moment, all there is to do is give it our best shot, come what may. If you have done your best and find yourself mistaken, you are now at least clear how not to do it.
Nobility Arises From A Life By Design And Resolution Converts A Design Into A Reality: there is an old saying: “no plan, no progress”. This is true enough. Human life always follows a design, even if that design is an accidental haphazard bungle. Everything that happens arises out of the events and actions that came before. Human intention can influence these events, but no choice and no action is still an outcome. Even a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck is following a design, the design of no action, even though it is probably not a very effective one. When you consider how you can live your life and when you make choices based on operating principles, all there is to do is to resolve in your mind that the matter is settled. This does not mean that you cannot resolve something else later. You can always change your mind, but only after you have made up your mind in the first place. No choice is an outcome that enslaves one to his circumstances.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.