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Are Your Tolerances Too Tight?

What if you’re a surgeon and you sway from your tolerance during open-heart surgery? You could nick an artery. What if you’re a landscape architect and your contractor creates an unintended slope toward the house? Your client will be very unhappy when water pools near their house after each rain. Tolerance, or the “allowed” deviation, is not only vital in the function and success in concrete objects but also in intangibles like our mental health.

Let’s say a piece of machinery has to work within a 1/8-inch tolerance in order to operate properly. We, as humans, allow ourselves far less than the equivalent of a 1/8-inch tolerance. We’re confined by our expectations, thoughts and beliefs about our world; and when we stretch beyond them, sometimes we snap.

What if you have a whole workplace full of people who all have very tight tolerances in every arena in their lives. You do. This is the case in every workplace. We all come to work with varying expectations about how we should behave, how others should behave, what our company should be doing, how our team should be working, etc. Some of us conform. Some of us rebel. Either way, we have to work together with pretty tight tolerances.

What can we do to create an atmosphere that gives us relief from the cloud of dissatisfaction at work?

We have to create avenues for relief both collectively and individually. Among other things, CEOs have to make quiet or meditative spaces available and encourage their employees to use them daily. Individuals have to take control of their inner environments by finding ways to create calm which will, in time, loosen our tolerances. We cannot expect our coworkers and bosses and others around us to mold to our expectations. If our tolerances are tight and we chronically feel frustrated or, worse, helpless, we have to find relief. If you don’t have a meditation room to retreat to, push back from your desk, take a breath, take two, close your eyes, breathe. Or if you have to “walk it off,” take a meditative walk outside. Do this everyday.

photo source: mistergc/freedigitalphotos.net

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