Samskaras in Corporate Life
About the topic
This article explores the subject of conditioning, motivations, and actions within corporate life. There are common samskaras that are a part of corporate life that drive behavior and compromise our awareness
What are samskaras?
Samskara is the concept that explains how or why you know or do almost anything you do. How you perceive the world around you. They are behavioral patterns that repeat. The tendencies that are programmed into you. This includes your actions, and especially those that feel automatic, and conditioned. This also includes the patterns of your mind and the chain reactions of thoughts that seem to happen on its own.
Samskars can also be described as stories.
A common set of samskaras in the workplace revolves around your drive to make money. It’s the reasons you have for needing or wanting to make money. For example, you may of the need to make money in order to put food on the table for yourself and/or your family. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable drive for any human being. On the other hand, you may have the drive to make money so that you can buy something you keep seeing in commercials, like a new car, or tropical vacation. Both of these things are behaviors that are programmed into us.
There are other samskaras in the workplace, besides the ones that revolve around money. Conditionings that you should be aware of. Your motivation to receive a promotion or gain a higher status. Or maybe it’s your need to be in the spotlight, or the star of the team.
What is wrong with samskaras?
Samskaras can cause you to things that are out of alignment. They can cause you to have behavior, that when observed in retrospect, doesn’t make sense. They cause you to cling to behaviors that don’t serve you and the people around you.
Psychology has explored this kind of behavior with research. A psychologist in the 1890’s, Pavlov discovered that dogs could be trained to salivate after the ringing of a bell. In his famous experiment, a bell would be wrung prior to giving the dog food and this would be repeated many times. Dogs usually salivate when they see food, but Pavlov’s dogs would start to salivate, in preparation for the food, as soon as the bell was wrung.
The experiment got interesting when the bell would be wrung without giving the dog food. Pavlov would keep wringing the bell. What Pavlov observed is that the Dogs would still salivate almost endlessly with the expectation that the bell would bring them food.
The need to make money or achieve higher status isn’t 100% bad. You need money to live and higher status jobs often earn more money. Money gives you freedom. Many studies have shown income is correlated with happiness but to a limit. These limits differ from person to person depending on their purpose. We need a purpose for the money we make. The motivation to make money becomes bad when we become a slave to it.
when we have lost that purpose and make money for the sake of making money, or for pleasure
Maybe we need to buy a car or get a house, but then we get the car and the house. Then what? So often, we see people on an endless quest to make more and more money. Endlessly salivating for more.
To what extent are you going to be slave to the story?
To what extent does the
You can help other people with me
Most of the samskaras described above are selfish. They’re about you. They take your focus off the work and direct it towards you and your needs. This might not seem bad but imagine a person who spends more time thinking about getting a promotion than thinking about their actual work. Someone like that might not have the motivation to fix something that needs to be fixed, because their promotion doesn’t depend on it. Imagine not looking for a missing person because the family isn’t offering a reward?
Within work, it’s easy to forget the duty or purpose of the work. This job itself, and why it exists. The things you agreed to do. It’s easy to lose sight of the work when you have the whole company in mand and your place in it.
References
- https://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-and-the-Machine
Pavlov, I. P. (1897/1902). The work of the digestive glands. London: Griffin.
Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world. Andrew T. Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi10.1038/s41562-017-0277-0 - https://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-and-the-Machine
- Pavlov, I. P. (1897/1902). The work of the digestive glands. London: Griffin.
- Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world. Andrew T. Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi10.1038/s41562-017-0277-0
