On Building Compassion

During the Adizes Institute annual convention, Prof. Rajendra Sisodia, leader of the Conscious Capitalism movement, commented that to manage with the heart, with love, which should be the future of management if humanity is going to survive, it is not enough to have mutual trust and respect. These variables are necessary for love but not sufficient. One needs to have compassion too, to care. This provoked the question: how does one develop caring? Not all people do.

A longtime Adizes supporter, Costas Petropoulos from Greece, in his comments to the blog, challenged us by asking, why should we care? In personal life, one can see the need for caring, but in business, business is business. Why should we care?

I believe because we cannot help it. Caring is not a process that takes place in our brain, processing a cost-benefit analysis. True caring comes from the heart. You care because it hurts us to see another person in pain. Other people’s  pain is our pain. And that is what a true friend is. Francis Bacon said that a true friend is one who doubles your happiness and halves your sorrow or pain. Because their pain is your pain, and their happiness is your happiness. A friend is like an extension of you, attached to you. In Hebrew, a friend is a “haver,” which means someone you are connected to, so you cannot escape feeling their feelings.

If I care because I cannot escape caring, why are there people who do not care?

Jack Zwissig, a world-renowned coach, said the factor that causes people to block compassion, to block expressing love, is fear. They might feel it but do not practice or exhibit it because of fear. I was one of them, as I reported in my memoir.¹

I closed my heart during the Holocaust. I saw the people I loved with all my heart being sent to their death (they were all burned alive in Treblinka). For 75 years of my life, until I succeeded in opening my heart, I denounced the existence of love. I was scared to feel because loving was dangerous. Those people would die.
 
To love can be painful. It might not be reciprocated. Being rejected by someone we love hurts. It works if one does not expect anything in return. In the Jewish religion, or perhaps the culture, support for the poor, the sick, and the feeble should be done anonymously, if it is to be considered a righteous deed. Love should be like breathing. You just breathe because if you do not, you will die. If you live without love, you are the walking dead.

Speak without offending,
Answer without defending,
Live without pretending, and
Love without depending.

Is a passage I found helpful on the internet. We are vulnerable to getting hurt when how we feel depends on how the other person reacts.

May be this happens when we do not love ourselves enough. If we do, whether we are loved or not is not as critical. We still have love. It is people who do not love themselves and have to depend on the love of others to feel good about themselves, who suffer.

To develop love, compassion, and care, start by caring for and loving yourself. Next, deal with the trauma that makes you scared to love or be loved. You are not starting from zero.

We are born to love. Look at a baby. It needs love and shows it.

People who show no compassion or love do not mean they are incapable of love. They love something. They need to. It might not be for people for the reasons described above. Some have compassion for animals. Some for objects. They love their car, cat, or dog more than themselves. Some have compassion for their clients and will do whatever it takes to make the clients successful (that was and still is me). Some sacrifice their life for a country. They care. They have compassion for the flag, for the anthem. They might care enough to be willing to sacrifice their life for what they love. The challenge is to expand love from objects and activities to people. This happens after removing the trauma, after learning to love ourselves first.

The late Guru Chariji, of the Heartfulness Mission², said that love is like a muscle. The more you practice it, the stronger it becomes. To develop compassion and love, we should evolve to care for people as we care for whatever else we love. With no fear just start…

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1.  The Accordion Player, subtitle: My Journey From Fear to Love, A memoir available on Amazon in the US. Available in Serbian and soon in Russian and Hebrew. For inquiries, see publishing@adizes.com.
2. For more on Heartfulness Meditation, see Heartfulness.org.

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