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The New Agreements in the Workplace
An interview with David Dibble
by Tim Miejan
David Dibble was living the American Dream. In 1980, he owned a successful company,
a big house, a jet-black, turbocharged 928 Porsche, real estate and stocks, and he
had a beautiful wife and two sons. But as he writes in the introduction to his new
book, The New Agreements in the Workplace: Releasing the Human Spirit, "I had
everything a man could want, but somehow I felt empty and lost." Alcohol and
other drugs only numbed the pain.
In his case, it took a powerful spiritual awakening to ignite his passion. His dead
grandfather appeared to him, and spoke to him. Since then, Dibble studied a number
of spiritual traditions. He walked the Toltec path with don Miguel Ruiz, a teacher
of Toltec wisdom and author of the bestselling The Four Agreements, and for more
than a decade, Dibble has taken what he has learned back into the workplace to help
instill unimagined levels of joy and productivity. That, he believes, is our destiny.
He spoke with Edge Life by phone from his home in California.
Are the underlying principles of The New Agreements in the Workplace based on
your experience of living the Toltec path?
David Dibble: Well, I would say the answer is yes, and also there are a number
of other paths and practices and other types of spiritual modalities that also have
come into play. Having studied Eastern teachings and Native American teachings and
A Course in Miracles, and having had gurus and all of that, what I found is that
almost anything that really resonated with me as true seemed to be the same, regardless
of what particular path we were going on. It might be languaged in a little different
way, but basically the teachings of the Toltec and Eastern teachings and Native American
teachings and the Huna, at their essence, are the same.
Share with us a basic understanding of the Toltec Way and why you gravitated toward
it.
Dibble: I gravitated toward the Toltec teachings for only one reason, and that
was because I had the good fortune to meet don Miguel Ruiz. Before that, I actually
had studied a number of different paths and had my gurus and teachers. For about
18 months, I actually had stopped. I didn't have any teachers and I wasn't reading
books, at least not that much. I was doing a lot of inner work. And then I met Miguel
-- and I was with him about five minutes and realized that he was my next teacher.
I also realized that he was a remarkable man.
How has his teachings and what you've learned from the Toltec path changed your life?
Dibble: I think it changed my life in that I went into an acceleration. I had
been on what you might call a spiritual path or the path of a seeker for about 10
years before I met Miguel, but my experience has been that when you start to work
with a true teacher, things accelerate. So what I experienced was that the path of
becoming a realized or enlightened being, which has always been my goal, was accelerated
in working with him. He also provided me with one thing, an understanding that really
shaped the work that we're currently doing in the workplace: the nature of how the
mind is created and what it's made of, and the role of emotional energy in creating
perception and in creating perception in the workplace.
When I could understand that, which was almost like a missing piece for me, then
I could see everything. I could see how it all worked together. That was the one
thing that I felt like Miguel taught me that really shaped everything.
When you speak of the role of emotions in the workplace, are you talking about
anger between management and workers, or a different way of being aware of emotion
in the workplace and how it affects the creative process?
Dibble: Actually, I'm speaking about the makeup of the mind when I speak about
emotional energy. It's a universal principle that the individual mind creates our
individual reality. And it turns out that the mindset of an organization, which is
the collective minds of all the people who work there, is shaped by the mindset of
top management. So what we're looking at are the thoughts, beliefs and memories of
the organization, which manifests as culture and drives behavior in the workplace.
Every thought, every belief and every memory is made up primarily of emotional energy.
It's the reason that we can't find the mind, because emotional energy has a higher
vibrational frequency than physical energy. We're trying to find emotional energy
with physical energy, with what we might call science, and, of course, we can't find
it because it doesn't exist in that reality.
There has been a tendency to not want to deal with emotion in the workplace. We've
wanted to keep the workplace left-brain, full of sequence and numbers and very rational
-- and yet, what drives an organization and what actually creates the results in
an organization is really emotional energy. The amount of change that takes place
in both an individual and an organization is directly proportional to the emotional
content of the experience.
Rather than trying to keep emotion out of the workplace, what we really look to do
is see if there are ways that we can work with it to actually accelerate the change
process.
Do you see this happening in corporations today.
Dibble: You see it happening all the time, because almost all the great changes
that take place in corporations take place out of crisis -- and crisis is defined
via the emotions. What might be crisis for one is not crisis for another, but what
happens is that the company goes down the road resisting change, resisting change,
resisting change. Then, in the changing environment, it finally finds itself in crisis.
That means there's a lot of drama, a lot of emotion going on, and then at that point
they're normally willing to do things they would have never done when things were
comfortable.
And I guess from an aware standpoint, the key would be to harness this emotional
energy in times when you're not in crisis.
Dibble: Actually there's even another step which is even more proactive. The
reason we resist change so much, both as individuals and organizations, is because
of the emotional energy that comes from fear. We look into the future and we project
potential futures, and, of course, it always looks much worse than it will probably
ever be. We dig in our heels and we say "No." We'd never want to face that,
and we don't want to change.
However, conversely, if we can shift that emotional energy that comes from fear to
the emotional energy that comes from love, we now can create tremendous amounts of
change without all the drama, without all the fear, without all the resistance. This
is the real magic. Now, we're not only accelerating change in the workplace, but
we're doing it from a place that's much more fun and involves much less resistance
than the old, fear-based ways.
What steps are required to move into that love space as opposed to fear?
Dibble: In organizations, I would just come out and say that the organization,
particularly leadership, has to be ready.
Love is interesting. It's subtly magnetic. If you go into an organization and the
organization is fear-based and you try to introduce the emotions that come from love
when people aren't ready, love brings up anything unlike itself. What will happen
is the fear will actually go higher.
So making the shift from fear to love is a case of self-selection, when a leader
or a company is really ready to take a next step. At that point, they'll be pulled
to this type of work and it will be very subtle. It's not like they have to be sold
or anything. They just realize, "Oh, gosh, I really need to do something and
I'm now willing to look beyond the standard ways of creating change."
Do you think that usually begins as a result of a personal experience in a leader's
life, and then it goes into the organization?
Dibble: Yes, I think it can. Most of the time, organizations really start to
change when the leader really starts to change.
For myself, I was a successful entrepreneur. I had a business and I was sort of rich,
and I had all the stuff, but my life was a mess. And then I had a very powerful spiritual
experience. Literally in about 10 minutes, my whole life shifted and I went from
what you might call a rather unconscious life to something that was more conscious,
more aware. I was literally a different person in that span of time.
Those events certainly can happen, but they are somewhat rare. More likely, what
we would see is someone just slowly going down the road and then one day they wake
up and they just notice that their life is lacking meaning. Or they have problems,
maybe it could be problems at home, problems at work, who knows, but there's just
something missing. And they say, "You know, there's got to be more to it than
this," and at that point they become open.
You talk about how the process of stepping into love begins with yourself.
Dibble: Everything always starts with us, with the individual. One of the things
that people might now be aware of all the time is that at our essence, at our core,
every individual is pure love. So it's not that we are necessarily going to be looking
for something outside of ourselves that we can step into. It's more a process of
doing, spending some time on the inner world and beginning to access that part of
us that's there for each and every one of us -- that place we get glimpses of from
time to time in periods of pure joy, or pure bliss, or that feeling of being very
connected.
Becoming aware of who we are.
Dibble: Exactly. We might say that that energy is love or light or however we
might define it, but in the end there is only this energy. That connection beyond
the mind that allows us to feel in that way is really the ultimate experience of
love.
You wrote that if today's leaders are not the masters of transformation, then
change will master them and their organizations. That seems to indicate that greater
self-awareness and mastery is required for leaders to succeed in these changing times.
Dibble: I think so. If you look in the workplace, and if you look in corporations
today, at business in general, what you see is that using the same tactics, the same
methodologies that we currently call leadership today, or management, is producing
diminishing returns. Literally, from a very pragmatic standpoint, it's much harder
to make money. It's harder to grow companies than it used to. You find that a lot
of times to make the numbers look decent that people have to play with the books.
What's happening is that leaders don't realize that people bring the creative energy,
the life force to the organization, and these old ways that basically make people
into things to be moved around on the P&L on the balance sheet, they're just
not working that well anymore.
As the numbers and the returns continue to diminish, we are heading toward crisis.
The crisis, of course, will be defined by the individual business, by the individual
minds of the leaders. But the general trend is definitely that way and it appears
to be accelerating. So, one way or the other, we're heading toward a point where
people are going to have to take a look at how they're doing things -- and hopefully
they'll make different choices.
What does the phrase that is on the cover of your book, "Releasing the Human
Spirit" mean to you in the workplace and how can it be achieved?
Dibble: If I were going to say that there's a certain vision to which we will
aspire, it would be the release of the creative human spirit. And the release of
the creative human spirit is really a lot like these instances where people have
experienced their mind stopping, being totally aligned with the creative flow of
the universe, and each and every human being and every organization has that in them.
They have that ability. The release of the creative spirit would mean the release
of our full humanity, our full creative process, in the workplace. This is a dimension
and a modality for creating value in the workplace that would be considered, by today's
standards, a miracle. But it's actually not a miracle. It's actually the way it really
is and the way it should be.
We just live in the alternative dream that things are not that way.
Dibble: One of the many things A Course in Miracles talks about is that miracles
are normal and that it's only the fact that we're in many ways shut down and constrained
by our old beliefs that keeps miracles suppressed. We might say that it's the same
as the suppression of the creative human spirit that exists in us. It's just our
old beliefs about things that are keeping us from flowing out in a very natural way,
that, in the big picture, is really much more natural than what we experience today.
Are the ideas in your book something that can be applied in workshops in the corporate
environment -- and how well received do you think that would be?
Dibble: The answer is yes. We've been doing this type of work for about 14 years
now, but we've been ahead of our time. It's not necessarily a good thing to be ahead
of your time, but what we're seeing now, for maybe the first time, is that companies
are coming forward and are saying, "Yes, we're interested. Explain this to us.
Will you bring this in. What can we do?"
We have taken what we would call spiritual principles and put them together with
systems thinking, with quantum physics and with best business practices, and then
put them into a language that corporate America can not only understand, but accept.
So when we do a workshop, it doesn't matter whether you have people who are somewhat
jaded. It doesn't matter if you have left-brain thinkers, or if you have people who
are what we might call "stuck." An energy that's very subtle is generated
and it creates a transformational experience. This is the acceleration that we're
talking about and creating the buy-in for change.
A powerful idea is repeated in your book, "When in doubt, be authentic and
love some more." Why isn't this practiced more?
Dibble: Because people are not aware that their mind is running the show. I think
if we were much more aware of what the mind was up to and we could make choices,
we would choose love more often. But when the mind is running the show and we're
basically taken along for the ride, we don't have any choices. It's just action and
reaction.
The media is very powerful in maintaining the current system as it is in business.
Dibble: The media is asleep. They also are run by fear. They have to print the
stuff that will be accepted. If you look at the media in general, what you have is
an addiction to fear, and you also have an addiction to non-awareness. In other words,
they don't choose these things. There's no decision about should we run "this
or that." The "this or that" is: Should we do this thing that's based
in fear or this thing that's based in fear? And oh, by the way, should we run the
feel-good lost puppy story, which we always do somewhere in here so it looks like
we're somewhat balanced.
The media, just like the rest of the dream of the planet, is also asleep for the
most part. It's running on automatic with no choices.
It's pretty clear, particularly by the end of your book, that you are an optimistic
person, that we are going to wake up eventually.
Dibble: I am.
Do you see that happening down the line.
Dibble: I absolutely see that happening. If you watch the TV and you look at
all of the other media, you would think the world is coming to an end. Of course,
we've got many, many fear-based problems on the planet, both in business and elsewhere.
But at the same time, there is so much that represents the other side of the polarity.
I see things happening in business, I see people showing up, I see connections being
made that I would never have seen even 10 years ago. I feel that this is probably
due to this acceleration that I feel we're experiencing right now. Love is now starting
to make its move and it's not seen by fear, which in some ways is even more polarized.
We are making tremendous progress, and the champions, the pioneers, the early adapters,
the Cultural Creatives, they're showing up in larger and larger numbers. So, I'm
very optimistic. I believe that it's possible we might even see the transformation
of the workplace and, who knows, maybe even the world in my lifetime -- and I'm no
spring chicken.
For more information on David Dibble and his work, visit www.thenewagreements.com
Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life magazine. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free
1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgelife.net
Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved. |
| Dec 2004 |
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