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December 2007 Newsletter

‘Human’ Resources
Christine O’Brian

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience." It has been my favorite saying ever since I first read it attached to a yogi tea bag over a year ago.

The human experience is an easy one to understand. We eat, we sleep. We experience pain, hunger, thirst and we need to recharge. The spiritual part, well, that is the challenge. How do I have my spiritual experience when I am dealing with growing demands at work and home? That is the tough part.

And for those of us who are working in the human resource profession, what does that mean for us? How do we support others whose human experiences are surpassing their spiritual ones and even if we knew how, is that our role? How does it contribute to the bottom line? What metrics do we use to measure our performance?

For me the answer is to remember what attracted me to this profession in the first place. The people. The ones that complain. The ones that want more training and the ones that are “stuck”. We all know them and at one time or another we were in the same place. For me, they are my opportunity to exercise my spiritual flex. To be the trusted advisor that will offer an umbrella when they are standing under a cloud. More and more they are my opportunity to teach. And my opportunity to learn.

Is it part of my role along with performance management, mediation and recruitment? When my performance meets and exceeds, I cannot separate it from the rest.

The metric? I come and go with a smile on my face. The bottom line? We truly believe that people are our most important asset … and they know it to be true.