A study comparing the golf swings of top professional golfers with the swings of average golfers provides some useful lessons about doing, effort, and effortlessness.  This study shows three different rows, detailing their various golf swings.  The top row is that of a professional golfer.  The second row is of an average golfer swinging and hitting golf ball.  The third row is an average golfer’s swing when there is no ball. What is most compelling about this study is that when an average golfer is not trying to hit a golf ball, his/her swing is much more closely aligned with the swing of a professional golfer than when he is trying to hit a golf ball. When the average golfer is hitting a ball, his/her swing changes, for the worse.  It appears that when a golfer is not aiming for any result, but is just swinging, the golfer has an image of a healthier, more professional swing.  When it comes to a golf swing, trying, or striving can get in the way of the knowledge that is contained within the mind and body.

Lack of striving, by itself does not lead to an effective golf swing (or make you a better leader, or more focused, or present.)   Developing an effective golf swing requires study, practice, and skill-building, combined with a lack of striving.    This study, of golf swings, highlights and points to the effectiveness of awareness without extra effort.

Try this:  In the activities of your day, notice and experiment with this edge –

When are you just writing and when are you trying to write

When are just speaking and when are you trying to speak

When are just cooking or when are you trying to cook

Clear indications that you are not just doing an activity:

You are thinking about what you will do next, after the activity

You are thinking about and measuring the results of what you are doing

You are attempting to do more than one activity at a time

You feel strain and tightness in your body, as you are performing the activity.

To study business is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by everyone and everything.

This quote is amended from a famous Zen quote by Eihei Dogen, the founder of Zen in Japan in the 13th century. I’ve substituted the word business for the word Buddhism. Buddhism is a method or tool for studying the self and for waking up. It is just that — a tool. I believe that business, and art, and all forms of work can be tools for self-study.

To study yourself
What does this mean – to study the self? Why would we go about such a study? What would be the motivation? Dogen talks about “the uncertain world of birth and death” – everything about our births, and our lives and our deaths are uncertain. Facing unto impermanence is a reason to study ourselves. What is this thing we call being born; what is this act, this experience, this mystery we call death?

Discomfort and difficult and the possibility for transforming discomfort and difficulty are strong motivators for studying the self – as well as for making changes in how you conduct business. The possibility for living a life beyond just taking care of ourselves are the key motivating forces for studying the self. The acknowledgement that our way of seeing ourselves and the world is limited; that we look at the world through a distorted lens; the more we can open and clear this lens the more possibilities we have. We see the ways that we are not free and get glimpses of the possibilities of finding real freedom.

How do we go about such a study?
I think of meditation practice as the gateway or lever to this study. It’s like the practice of remembering what children know; renewing this connection with birth and death. Just stopping, becoming familiar with our minds and bodies; just practicing acceptance, curiosity, appreciation, and fearlessness

Meditation also provides a container – you just sit, in a particular posture in a particular place. Within this structure, there is much freedom. This is quite paradoxical. The practice of meditation is accepting whatever comes up – thoughts, emotions, fears, hopes, dreams – accepting our birth and death.

Curiosity – just wondering, opening, watching for what happens next, without expecting anything.

Appreciating, just being alive. Appreciating just this moment, this body, this breath, just strange creatures around us.

Fearlessness – seeing our fear, our tight spots, our shadow – and little by little, moving toward the fear; toward the darkness; being afraid and still stepping. Fearlessness is responding, from a place of real freedom.

How else do you study yourself? You pay attention to your emotions, your feelings your moods. You pay attention to your sense of identity. What are your patterns, your shadows, your nicely carved ruts. When Dogen says study, I think he means more than study, but to understand, penetrate, and transform.

To forget yourself
To study yourself is to forget yourself. What does this mean to forget yourself?
I’m concerned that many people may misinterpret what this means. I’ve noticed that many people are drawn to Zen, and use Zen practice as a way to avoid or deny the self, without fully plunging the depths. To oversimplify, there are two kinds of people – narcissists (basically lack self worth and center the world around themselves, as a way of overcompensating for this lack of self worth) and self-deniers (those who lack self worth and keep themselves in the background, as a way of overcompensating for this lack of self worth) Forgetting yourself means to reduce and transform the habit of lack of self worth. It means to reduce and transform the habit of acting from fear.

I sometimes teach meditation instruction at ZC in SF. My favorite part is when I take people downstairs to the mediation hall. I realize that I need to teach people the forms for entering the hall, and I need to show people how to put their hands together and bow. Wonderful to teach people and watch people put their hands together. There is a very formal structure. Place your palms and fingers together; hands are one hands width from your nose. Bow from your waist. This is the practice of studying yourself and forgetting yourself. Are you completely self-conscious, or are you absent minded.

Forgetting yourself means to be fully present. Responsive, flexible, within the container of rules – in improv, the rule is accept all offers. In Zen practice, the rules are do good, avoid harm, help others.

To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things
A better translation is intimate – close, connected. In Zen almost every place where you see the word enlightenment, try replacing it with intimate.

To study yourself and to forget yourself is a paradox. Paradox – a statement that appears false, impossible, or contradictory, buy may, in fact be true.
I’m a Zen priest and I’m an executive coach
I’m shy and an introvert, and I’m energized by speaking
At work, I’m completely myself, and I’m playing a role.
I’m careful and slow, and decisive and quick.

Here is what Rumi has to say on the subject:
Why do you search, futilely, for a loaf of bread
When there is a bakery on top of your head?

Here is what Suzuki Roshi, from Zen Mind Beginner’s Minds has to say:
When you become attached to a temporal expression of your true nature, it is necessary to talk about Buddhism, or else you will think the temporal expression is it. But this particular expression of it is not it. And yet at the same time it is it! For a while this is it; for the smallest particle of time, this is it. But it is not always so: the very next instant it is not so; thus this is not it. So that you will realize this fact, it is necessary to study Buddhism. But the purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and forget ourselves. ….When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties.

In preparing for an entrepreneur ship class I’m teaching in a few weeks at UC Santa Cruz Extension, I was remembering that I began Brush Dance, thinking it was an environmental products mail order catalogue. I had studied the mail order business while getting my MBA degree and was excited by this business model (this was the late 1980’s.) In our second year of business, I noticed that though 90% of our marketing and nearly all our focus and energy were aimed at growing a successful mail order business, more than 50% of our sales were from stores and other mail order catalogs. Reality (i.e. our customers) seemed to have a clearer sense of the business than my idea of the business. We then spent the next year to two years transforming the business, from a mail order focus to a wholesale focus – our revenue doubled every year for the following five years…

This is a lesson that I continue to learn from – as a coach, a facilitator, and in relationships.

I was recently facilitating a retreat of CEO’s that was billed as a Zen retreat. This was a terrific idea, except that this particular group of CEO’s was not very interested in meditation, or Zen… I had to find out what they were interested in, what the issues were, and what really mattered to them, in that moment. This REALLY was a Zen retreat for me – needing to let go of my ideas and show up for what was actually needed.

My 19-year-old daughter recently left me a copy of the book Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, asking me to return it to our local library. I picked it up to return it, on my way to run some errands, and instead began reading. I read the entire book (which took about three hours) and I felt moved and joyful. What a gem of a book! It was written in 1922, following the end of World War I. I had not read it since I was in my early 20’s.

In the last chapter, Siddhartha, an old and somewhat content ferryman, is asked by his lifelong friend Govinda for some guidance in his seeking. Siddhartha replies, “When someone seeks then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing. He take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking…But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal… In striving toward your goal, you fail to see certain things that are right under your nose.”

A perspective that Zen practice brings to business is to embrace and attempt to penetrate the paradox of seeking and finding. Without doubt, strategy, planning, and disciplined execution are essential aspects of growing a business. I encourage some coaching clients to establish a weekly ritual of reviewing customers, prospects, product offerings, as well as financial results compared to financial projections. I suggest reviewing tasks and projects for the week and looking at goals for the upcoming quarter and through the remainder of the year. This is an important process of seeking, planning, as well as understanding your business.

Finding requires a different perspective and can be developed through other types of activities. Finding means being alert, aware, flexible and responsive. Finding is best performed with a “soft” mind – a mind and body that are open and ready for whatever might happen. Mindfulness practice and meditation practice are ways to develop our ability to widen our capacity for finding.

In many situations we must simultaneously employ our seeking and finding minds. When we are driving, we usually have a clear route and destination mapped out. However, at the same time, we need to be responsive and flexible to other drivers, road conditions and a multitude of other factors – often factors that we could never have anticipated.

In business, and in our lives, we can easily fall into a rut of seeking, and ignore the importance of finding. Many great new product and service ideas result from finding – discovering and seeing a need that exists that is right in front of us. And, finding joy, happiness, and appreciation in our lives is often the result of finding what is right in front of us, right now, right here – in the midst of our messy and impossible lives and world.