Lubna Samara

INTRODUCTION

"We are all born whole, but somewhere along life’s journey this gets lost in translation."

HOW WE SPEND OUR DAYS

We each have our unique talents, interests, strengths, and accomplishments that help us to find meaning and success in life. Making the best use of these resources not only helps us to achieve and be valued members of our community, but it also supports our innate human drive to grow beyond our boundaries and connect more fully to the world around us for a richer, more abundant, life.

This book is for anyone who is interested in putting more of their abilities and potential to work. Working through the book and workbook will guide you to gain calm, control, confidence and clarity to see a clear roadmap of your path ahead. It offers insights and practical steps that you can use daily to break through obstacles holding you back and boost performance and success at work. Whilst the book is tailored for people at work, it unfolds a wider perspective that extends beyond the workplace, fostering personal alignment and purposeful existence.

I’ve been asked why I aimed this book at people in a work environment when the concepts and exercises presented in the book would benefit any reader. I believe we are moving into a time when we’re looking for greater balance and fulfilment, not only in our personal lives, but also at work. As laureate Annie Dillard1 wisely put it, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,”1 and most of us spend a large part of our days at work.

Having worked in the corporate sector, I have seen and experienced many of the problems people face at work. As a leadership coach and healer, my clients have come from diverse cultural and societal backgrounds, and I am grateful for this rich experience that has given me insight into problems viewed from different perspectives. Whilst our problems are unique to each one of us, given our individual backgrounds, experiences, and abilities, if we look deeper, we see that in the workplace, whether you’re a CEO, a team leader, or team member, we share many of the same pressures, struggles, and desires for fulfilment.

This book is for you if you want to:

- Focus on being productive at work instead of draining your time and energy dealing with obstacles like office politics or self- doubt

- Enhance performance and make more of an impact at work

- Find meaning and sense of purpose at your place of work

It will also support you if you are a leader who is inspired to mentor and guide your teams to fulfil more of their potential.

We will be working holistically, taking into account body, heart, mind, and spirit, where the term “spirit” refers to our drive to align with our values, to live a life of purpose, and to elevate our level of awareness.

We each have a body, a heart, a mind, and a spirit, and we need to nourish every part of our being if we want to have a stable structure that withstands the knocks that life deals us, and one that also allows us to steam ahead unencumbered in the good times.

To some, working holistically may seem like a luxury when they’re struggling just to keep up with the pressures of their day-to-day life. However, this is exactly the time when you need to ask your- self: How many of us are suffering from what have become common problems like burnout, overwhelm, anxiety, loss of confidence, and depression, where it seems that nothing we do has much value or significance? Now imagine that you were anchored to your inner self. What would that mean to you, and how would your life be different?

If we want to know calm even in turmoil, we need to be more collected. If we want more harmonious interactions with our col- leagues, family, and friends, we need to hear our hearts better. If we want to achieve, create, and be productive, we need to be confident in who we are. And if we want to enrich ourselves during our lifetime and leave this world a better place, we need clarity to see our lives in a wider perspective.

All of these are very tangible benefits that help us to depressurise and bring improvements to our lives in the here and now. They set our day-to-day problems in a wider perspective that makes them manageable, allowing us to move forward with momentum.

Over the past decade we’ve seen organisations taking a more holistic approach and incorporating spiritual elements in their strategies, like values, purpose, and authenticity, to improve culture. They are also increasingly adopting servant or transformational leadership styles in which the leaders themselves become, in essence, coaches and mentors supporting their teams to achieve more of their potential. Many of the companies regularly named in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” now practice servant leadership and have integrated this into their culture.2 And more recently, these concepts have been filtering through to the work- force, with Millennials and Gen Z prioritising purpose even over an increase in pay.3

Since the late 1980s, when I was in banking, I have believed that the way to change the world is through the corporates and businesses, so I’m very pleased to see this trend. Imagine if more of us at work felt included and part of a bigger whole, aligned with the organisation’s values, and found meaning in what we’re doing. How would that impact us collectively? Most of us humans instinctively like to share kindness, paying it forward, and we also know that as we raise our awareness, we also positively impact other people around us; our science validates both these points, as we’ll see later in the book. Given that the best parts of us are contagious, imagine the ripple effect we can create to impact the world for the better.

In writing this book, I have included many of the major areas that we need for personal and professional growth today, while still retaining focus and momentum; these include improving positiv- ity, resilience, empathy, creativity, focus, connectedness, authenticity, and purpose. Working chapter by chapter, we’ll set off on a journey of growth to help you heal, balance, and energise every part of your being. In the final chapter we will write your story, your Hero’s Journey, to chart your transformation and plot a clear path towards a more fulfilling future.

As for my quest, my journey of transformation, it is in its own way a clear example of this type of story, and I’m happy to share with you a part of it below.

MY UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Ever since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by anything that seemed to me even vaguely esoteric or mystical. I was addicted to Kung Fu of Grasshopper fame in the 1970s, watched fascinated as hypnotists worked their magic on nervous volunteers onstage, and spent hours with friends as a young teenager reading each other’s minds and proving that ESP really was a thing. And, of course, the late-night conversations on whether ghosts were real or not, before going to bed terrified.

Growing up, I wanted to become a doctor or a human rights law- yer. I liked the idea of healing people, helping those who needed protecting, and putting away the bad guys. All seemed like good options to me. But my family and teachers decided that I was gifted at maths, and one way or another, I ended up studying that at university. I was fortunate enough to be offered a scholarship to continue my studies as a PhD student in maths, but the appeal of going out to explore in the big wide world proved a strong draw, and I went to work in Paris as an assistant mathematician in the exploration division of a French petroleum company.

After a year, they wanted to send me to work on an oil rig to become familiar with the technical aspects and get hands-on experience. This all sounded great in theory, until I found out that I would be stuck in the middle of the sea with three hundred men. I was a shy but stubborn twenty-two-year-old, and this wasn’t going to work out for me. Also, the environment at the office had become stagnant, with changes and plans for “reorganisation” casting shadows over our job security, and almost everybody on that floor of the building kept their heads down. The mood was low. In hindsight, this was my first lesson on “How Not To” in leadership and management.

I went back to university to study economics and finance as a related field I could potentially find a career in. After many months of receiving what felt like more letters of rejection than the number job applications I’d sent out, I eventually did manage to land in the dealing room of an American investment bank through what could only be called a chance meeting. Today I’d say that was synchronicity or the Law of Attraction at work.

I loved the hustle and bustle of the trading floor even though I had a hard time catching numbers and data, which were being shouted out by traders over our heads at great speed; the environment was high-energy and exciting. This was in the Gordon Gecko “Greed is Good” era, and my friends were fond of telling me what a waste of space bankers are. They had a name for us, which I won’t repeat here, but it rhymed with bankers. I hadn’t really thought about purpose at that time, and no one in the bank above the dealing room level ever visited us to give us pep talks or make us feel part of a bigger whole. I wouldn’t have known the CEO if he’d fallen in my lap. This was pre-internet, and brochures were reserved for the shareholders and customers, not distributed to the workforce. My friends’ comments did set me thinking, though: What purpose was I fulfilling in my role?

Having thought about it, I decided that we helped corporates with their liquidity so they could:

- Keep us supplied with goods and services that give us a better standard of living

- Take care of their employees who took care of their families

- Fund research and development so we could progress as a society

That was a pretty good purpose, I thought, and certainly good enough for me.

Around that time, the dealing room I was working in was rumoured to be in the process of being taken over with a lot of layoffs planned, heading back to the same situation I’d been in when I was in the oil company. It was during this time of potential upheaval at work that I had my first experience of consciously seeing a part of my own energy field. One day, after working out in the gym, I was running up some stairs to the third floor of a building where a friend lived, I looked down to check my footing and saw swirling white clouds down the front of my body. I found this experience weird, to say the least, but at the same time strangely familiar.

Coincidentally, my colleague Jane who sat next to me in the dealing room, was into the New Age movement, so she was a good person to ask about this experience. When I described what I had seen, or perhaps a better way to describe this is what I had "perceived," she raised her eyebrows, smiled, and said, “Oh those are your chakras,” and gave me a book to read.

I managed to push this event to one side and forget about it for a year, mainly because I’d never entertained the possibility that I may be spiritual. That was for monks, nuns, people with a calling, and maybe even for New Age “tree huggers,” but not for someone who was mainstream like me. Underlying it all, though, was a dis- tant sense of not being worthy to be called “spiritual.”

A year after I saw my chakras, I spontaneously saw my energy fields, like concentric fields around my physical body, complete with blockages. I’d been to a few counselling sessions to help me make sense of the changes I was experiencing in my work and per- sonal life, and a voice in my head told me this was a good thing to do, but “in order to move beyond the emotional dynamics hold- ing you back, you need to release them from your energy field; you need to let them go from your heart.”

Now I get that hearing voices can seem a bit dodgy, but the fact is, when I’ve received these guidances, it’s hard to think of any other advice I’ve received that makes as much complete sense – it’s what I can only describe as distant parts of my own being becoming “illuminated.” Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re in your own house and start discovering new rooms that you weren’t aware were there? It’s a bit like that.

At that time, I also became aware of feeling like I’d spent a lot of energy climbing a ladder, but it was somebody else’s ladder, not my own. I had a lot of gratitude for everything in my life, but every time someone asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” my heart would sink. I saw myself as feeling grey and hollow inside, and this feeling was subconsciously attracting me to failing situations. I needed to break free of that.

What started as an interest very quickly turned into a passion. I started practicing T’ai Chi for a couple of hours every morning, meditating for another couple of hours in the evening, and reading voraciously whatever I could get my hands on related to this new field in my life. I read about esoteric disciplines, spirituality, philosophy, psychology, and mythology, and I went on courses learn- ing about NLP, CBT, and breathwork, amongst others.

I did that for around eight or nine years, but after a few months of starting on this path, someone stopped me and told me my energy was very strong and that I should start doing healing. My first thought was, “Nah, I’m a mathematician, I don’t do that.” Now, I happen to also pride myself on being open-minded, so I decided to go and at least give it a shot. Of course, I didn’t bother to do any- thing about it. A few weeks later, another person told me I should try healing. Slapped on the wrist and more than a little bit awed by how the universe was working, I signed up for my first healing course.

By the third session, I came out of the room feeling star-struck by what we could do with our minds when we applied it. It wasn’t so much what I picked up about other people’s energy that had impacted me as much as what other people in the course had picked up about my energy field – specifically, peculiarities that I had become aware of when I perceived my chakras.

I spent the next couple of years looking for a spiritual teacher to help me in my quest even if I wasn’t really sure what it was I was looking for. Coming back despondent one evening after yet another failed attempt, I sat down to meditate and thought, “What do I want from this?”

Now, I happen to believe that each one of us is loved equally and receives an infinite amount of guidance. Rationally, I thought this must include me as well. The guidance was already there in abun- dance, and it was for me to tune in to it, much like tuning in to a radio frequency.

My DIY spiritual journey started in earnest that evening, and I focussed my question – What do I want from this? Three aspects fell into place:

I’d become tired of feeling like my heart was getting dented by the slightest provocation at work, with friends, and in my private life. I needed to de-personalise, and it was up to me to take charge and change the map. Inspirational stories of beings like Buddha and Jesus, who had not only shown exceptional emotional detachment but who were even able to show kindness to their abusers, lit up my mind. I wanted to know peace.

At that time, I’d recently had a situation in my personal life where my head was clear on a course of action, but my heart was intent on going the opposite way. This brought up the questions: If I am one person why are bits and pieces of me in different places? Who is this “I”? I wanted to heal the inner division and get closer to my true self.

The last answer to come through was that I wanted to raise my lower desires, my lower will, to be in alignment with a Higher Will. I became aware that for some time I’d been perceiving a Higher Will – a level of existence where we’re all equal, where we’re all loved equally, and where we’re all in harmony with each other. Each one of us is connected to this level, and through it we’re all connected to each other.

As I started looking at this more deeply, I realised this has been written about repeatedly throughout millennia: the Taoists call it the Tao, the Buddhists and Hindus call it Dharma, Abrahamic religions call it Divine Will, and many know it as Universal Conscious- ness. I appreciated getting to this level of existence was a massive ask, but I thought that if I set out in that general direction, going as far as my road would take me, I couldn’t go wrong.

I believe that an aspect of any spiritual awakening is the powerful calling to serve, and it was no different with me. However, moving out of a career in finance didn’t come without personal cost. My father had lost everything twice in his life due to shifting Middle Eastern political maps, and we had come to the UK with precious little, so he was all about education and having a solid career to survive the unexpected traumas life throws at you. There’s no arguing this logic.

As they say, one path closes and another opens. Whatever else it was, this period of my life was a time of mystical exploration and learning, and of breaking boundaries between what we consider miraculous with understandings from a place of a higher logic.

At some point, a line of no return is crossed where faith in some- thing bigger than us gives way to experience. It is within and with- out. It is intimately kind, infinitely knowledgeable and ultimately Love.

I continue to be a devoted seeker finding my way home.

Lubna