Learning to Apply Right View and Right Conduct to Your Decision Making

THE Dalai Lama and consultant Laurens Van Den Muyzenberg have collaborated in The Leader’s Way to fuse Buddhist and Western philosophies to address responsible leadership.

In order for a leader—“one who makes the right decisions”—to make the kinds of decisions that “generate a better quality of life for themselves, their organizations, and everyone else affected by those decisions,” they must learn to “understand more clearly what happens in their minds and the minds of others.” This involves two concepts they introduce as Right View and Right Conduct.

The Right View has to do with action based on the right intention and the right motivation. It means taking into account that nothing that exists is permanent, nothing exists without a cause, and every cause has many effects.

The Right Conduct is the endgame; to take action that serves the needs of individuals and organizations. The right conduct should always align with your stated values and principles.

The application of the principles of Right View and Conduct is made better by training your mind to be calm, collected, and concentrated in all circumstances.

When the mind is disturbed by anger, jealousy, hate, impatience, fear, lack of self-confidence, or negative emotions about things that happened in the past, it is wasting valuable time that instead should be used for constructive thinking. The purpose of training the mind is to maximize its power by focusing it on the decisions that matter.

Meditation or reflective thinking plays a big part in training the mind. A Harvard study cited in the book compared brain scans of meditating and nonmeditating people and found that meditation had seemingly enlarged the part of the brain that regulates emotion, attention, and working memory.

They discuss ways of developing your thinking to improve your performance, the performance of your organization, and for acting responsibly in our interdependent world. One important pattern emerged: “one should celebrate joyful events while not becoming too attached to their meaning, either in the present or as a predictor of the future.” The danger is in seeing success as permanent. Right View and Right Conduct is a process that always needs to be renewed.

To make calm and collected decisions, they recommend asking yourself four questions:

1. What is the reality, and is it a problem?
2. What is the cause of the problem?
3. What do I want to achieve?
4. How can I get to the goal?

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:54 AM
Permalink | Comments (0) | This post is about Problem Solving , Thinking