Troy Lamerton

Compassion for friends and foes

5 June 2016

My experience with compassionate leaders and leading.
Inspiring and guiding people has always been a fascination of mine. My favourite leaders / managers to work under were the people that took time to understand and appreciate the perspective of the people they spoke with. When someone comes to a compassionate leader with an issue, the leader always seeks to understand fully what the situation is and how it is affecting the person.
Once when I was leading others, my perogative was to quickly resolve issues by suggesting a course of action as soon as it looked like the right one. This meant I sometimes didn't understand the full picture and show that I cared by valuing the opinions of the people around me.

The multiplying goodness meditation felt the most real for me out of all the meditiations that have had me visualise others. It was difficult to remember all the instructions for the whole meditation. Like with a few of Search Inside Yourself's exercises, it feels like I am doing a directed meditation with only just enough direction.

Another meditation in this chapter was one that I feared would be a negative experience, and I put off doing it. But when I sat and visualised breathing in suffering, breathing out warmth and understanding, I was surprised. It was calming to imagine anxiousness and anger, just noticing the emotions and then breathing out with a sense of warmth. This Tonglen meditation has grown on me.

The last exercise in the chapter had me take the perspective of myself and someone in an argument one after the other. I used an argument where I didn't understand why the other person was angry, and was able to discover a more compassionate and unbiased way I could have dealt with the situation in retrospect.

While not all of the things, in Search Inside Yourself, are in line with how I understand people and the world, every chapter I learn or strengthen a valuable skill.