How does Yoga relate to Project Management
By Rod Hutchings MAppSc MAIPM MACS RegPM(MPD)
The number one tenet of becoming a successful project manager is raising your own awareness of what you're doing and managing. To that end, Yoga helps project managers and team members be successful.
At an individual level, Yoga improving self-awareness/management, concentration, equipoise, tolerance, the ability to take calculated risks and plan long term.
Yoga philosophy of life, is not restricted to just asana and pranayama, it is a path of all-round development of an individual: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Yoga helps improve ones internal process of managing one's body, thoughts, intellect, emotions and spirit. Moreover, improving your ability to overcome emotions like anger, jealousy, greed, ego, and undue attachment.
Patanjali defined yoga as a technique of mind control. Vashishta said yoga is a skilful strategy to calm down the mind.
Both managers and yogis are expected to remain steadfast in situations both favourable and unfavourable. In the most-quoted verse 48 of chapter two of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises: “Being steadfast in yoga, O Arjuna, perform actions, abandoning attachment, remaining unconcerned as regards success and failure. This evenness of mind is known as yoga.
A manager is required to use authority. But unless authority is combined with dispassion, the result can be contrary to expectation.
Today's project manager is required to have qualities of a good leader — ability to construct a creative vision and capacity to have trusting relationship with large number of people with whose help this vision is to be fulfilled. A project manager with clarity of personal goals and calmness of mind can only be an able manager. This is where yoga helps.
Man is in the first part of the word manager, thereby indicating the need for man-management as the most crucial part of management. As Swami Anubha-vanandji puts it, management is an intuitive art of relating yourself with various stakeholders in a company such as staff, customers and suppliers.
Yoga teaches us the art of treating every human being as a form of the divine. Use of higher consciousness in dealing with people is sure to result in better motivation and loyalty among stakeholders.
There are certain key differences between western management concepts and yoga-based management. The former starts with the premise that a person remains inactive unless propelled by action through motivation — money, position or recognition.
Yoga-based management starts with the belief that every individual is divine by nature and the purpose of yoga is to bring out this divinity.
Any individual, by nature, wants to do good work but unsuitable conditioning may prevent him from doing so.
Commitment in the true sense can only be inspired for a cause bigger and better than self.
Western management philosophy puts primary emphasis on competition, while in yoga way, the emphasis is on collaboration and individual creativity. In the West there is greater emphasis on goal achievement for the firm, while in yogic management, success of the firm is an inevitable by-product of the holistic goal of making this world a better place to live in with the spirit of yajna. In the former, karma is an input which can be hired, while Indic philosophy focuses on duty as one's dharma.
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