Durban – It is better to be criticised at work than to be ignored because if your boss doesn’t notice you, you are likely to distract your colleagues, get sick and lose interest in your job.
So said Dr Deepak Chopra, who addressed throngs of eager disciples when he spoke in Durban on Thursday night.
The international wellness speaker and best-selling author drew a capacity crowd to his presentation at the International Convention Centre, where he spoke about the spiritual life and how to maximise human potential. If a worker was ignored, their rate of disengagement rose by 45%, he said, “and within six months you get sick”, but if they were criticised, “your rate of disengagement goes down to 20% and your health improves, which means humans beings would rather be criticised than ignored.
“When you are ignored, you do not exist. But if your boss notices you have one strength, your rate of disengagement goes down to less than 1% and everything improves.”
Chopra said people were spiritually connected to the person they sat next to and those people had an influence on their emotions.
“Unhappy people actively disengage (and discourage) their colleagues at work. That means a person is not only unhappy, they come to work with stress and tension and make other people unhappy.”
He said that could be corrected by creating “an ecosystem” in the office where the boss found out what people were good at, and then “complemented them” with other people who were good at something else. “When we create that ecosystem then things happen, job satisfaction improves, productivity improves and health improves.”
He said South Africa was 89th out of 140 countries in the world in well-being.
“Only 17% of the people in SA are thriving… The remainder are either struggling or suffering, and when suffering reaches more than 50% to 60%, major crises occur – traffic accidents, hospital admissions, crime and social unrest.”
He said this could be corrected by paying attention to this ecosystem and making sure people were able to use their skills.
The Mercury