LIving a spiritual lifestyle

Editor’s note: Chris Lowney, author of the books “Heroic Leadership” and “Heroic Living,” is a former Jesuit seminarian and a former managing director of J.P. Morgan & Co. The New York writer is in Spokane today to speak at Gonzaga University’s graduate school commencement. The ceremony begins at the McCarthey Athletic Center at 4:45 p.m. Here are some of Lowney’s insights, taken from “Heroic Living” and from an interview Tuesday with feature writer Rebecca Nappi.

In investment banking, I unfortunately fired many people in the course of two decades. I often saw people who only discovered at that traumatic moment that their whole identity was their work. One of the lessons? People have to make sure they aren’t living “outside in” but “inside out.”

It’s a human tendency to create your identity and your sense of worth by outside standards, by comparing yourself: I’m worthwhile because I have an important job or because I make more money than the next guy. The rug can get pulled out from under us because we are giving control of our sense of fulfillment to an employer.

Instead, people need to build up themselves to live inside out. Their sense of what makes their life worthwhile has more to do with values they take pride in. For example, excellent work or being a kind person or a just person or whatever becomes the yardsticks by which you can measure your life in ways you can control.

Great managers make tough choices that direct effort and talent toward a limited number of objectives. “Not many things but much,” according to a Latin proverb. Modern life is such that we’ll be pulled in different directions. It often ends up that we’re just doing a lot of things.

We love our kids and want to make sure they have everything – the music lessons, the sports, tutoring. We can get so wrapped up in all these many things we forget the essence: to show our love for the kids. We need to focus on why we actually wanted to do something in the first place.

Fifteen years ago, mentioning “spiritual” in the context of work was the goofiest kind of thing. Now it’s not quite mainstream, but it’s more acceptable. We all need to ponder the profoundly spiritual nature of what goes on at work. Every company has value statements and in many places, it’s a total crock. It makes people cynical, because people see these values in a brochure, and then they are treated like animals.

People don’t get their values from a corporate values statement. Big, complicated places succeed only if we put the organization ahead of ourselves and our ego. We work together. We care about our customers. We care about people who work with us. It helps the bottom line, but we don’t act that way only because of the bottom line, but because we draw on beliefs on how people ought to operate.

We recoil at the word spiritual when it has to do with work, but when you think of the attributes that drive very successful, bottom-line companies, those attributes have a spiritual basis.