Last November I was in Singapore speaking at a Conference on Rewards at Work. The aim of the conference was how best to retain what are termed ‘highly engaged staff.’ Staff retention is quite a challenge for many American and European companies and the Human Resources departments of these companies devise complex reward packages for staff members who are successful (think one million euro bonuses!). What was interesting is that few of the companies appreciated that the most powerful means of gaining staff loyalty is the enhancement of relationship – where the positive culture of the workplace comes out to meet you at its gates. There were several Japanese business people at the conference and they boasted that in Japan that they had no staff retention problems and had no need to resort to expensive incentive packages! 

I spent a fascinating weekend in Killarney at a very special and innovative Conference on Mindfulness and Palliative Care. The idea of such a conference being held in Ireland, even within the last five years, would not have been envisaged. There were interesting speakers at the conference, most notably Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Jon Kabat Zinn, author of several books, most notably Fully Catastrophe Living. Our own Tony Bates also brought a special presence and maturity to the conference as did several other Irish speakers.

In a previous article I wrote about the unspoken secret that each individual is a genius and the huge fears we have around the expression of our genius. A second unspoken secret is that ‘what arises in me is about me’ and any attempt to voice that truth can be responded to with considerable hostility. Of course, such hostility is a revelation of the inner world of the person who is being aggressive, a reality that could be dangerous to voice for the person being authentic.

In 2006 CNN reported that prescriptions of anti-psychotic drugs to American children had increased five-fold between 1995 and 2002. Children as young as two years are being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful drugs. Even more recently Marcia Angeli wrote in the New York Review of Books on her concern about the financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric profession. She wrote that ‘we are now in the midst of an apparent epidemic of bi-polar disease in children …. with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis between 1994 and 2003.’

Responsibility emerges when I recognise that no matter what response arises in me, the response is about my own interior world and is not caused by the students’ (or other people’s) behaviours. In many ways, this reality provides great hope, because it is not within my capacity to resolve the students’ or colleagues’ or parents’ challenging responses, but I have all the resources to understand and take charge of my own responses. Helping the student is a separate issue to resolving my own annoyance and entails creating a safe and supportive relationship for the student to examine his own troubling responses and to take due responsibility for them.