Act without clinging
Put your whole attention into the work itself, not the verdict on it. Absorbed in the doing, there is less room for fear of the result.
Key takeaways
- In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells the paralyzed Arjuna: your right is to the action, never to its fruits. Act, but not for the sake of the reward.
- Performance anxiety splits your attention between the task and the verdict on it. Putting it all back on the task is both calmer and better work.
- Ask "what does this moment of the work need?" instead of "how will this go?", and let the doing be the point.
A warrior who froze
The Bhagavad Gita opens on a battlefield. The warrior Arjuna looks across at the opposing army, sees his own teachers and cousins, and falls apart. His bow slips from his hands. Every way it could turn out seems unbearable, so he can't act at all.
His charioteer turns out to be Krishna, an incarnation of God, and the conversation that follows has guided people through hard choices for two thousand years. One of its best-known lines is Krishna's answer to a man frozen by outcomes:
“You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions.”
The verse goes on: don't act for the sake of the fruits, and don't let that tip you into doing nothing either. The tradition calls this karma yoga, the path of action, and the ideal nishkama karma: action without craving for its reward. A little later the Gita gives its own short definition: yoga is skill in action.
Two jobs at once
When you are anxious about how something will go, you are doing two jobs at once. One is the work: the speech, the exam, the conversation. The other is watching yourself do it and scoring the result: "This is going badly. They're bored. I'm going to fail."
The second job takes attention away from the first, which is one reason nerves make people worse at the very things they care about. Krishna's advice is, in part, very practical. Drop the second job. Give the whole of your attention to the action, and let the fruit fall where it will.
Psychology has a name for the state this points to. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow: complete absorption in an activity, when self-consciousness fades and the work seems to carry you. People in flow aren't thinking about the verdict. There's no room.
This is different from accepting what you can't control. You might know perfectly well that the result isn't up to you and still spend the whole performance scoring yourself. Acting without clinging is about where your attention goes while you work.
Question 1 of 2
Halfway through a piano recital, Asha notices a judge frowning. What would acting without clinging look like?
How to do it
Before and during
- Before
Name the action, as precisely as you can: not "nail the interview" but "listen to each question, and answer it with a real example".
- Offer the result
If you pray, offer the outcome to God, as the Gita teaches. If not, say plainly: "The result is not my job today. The work is."
- During
When you catch yourself scoring ("this is going badly"), ask "what does this moment of the work need?", and give it that.
- After
Judge yourself on the action: were you there for it? Let the result be what it is.
Noor's talk
Noor is giving her first talk at a work conference. As she speaks, she keeps watching faces in the audience. Someone checks their phone, and she thinks "they're bored". She speeds up, loses her place twice, and spends the second half running through what her manager will say about it afterwards.
Question 2 of 2
Sources and further reading
- The Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2 (verses 47 to 50). Many translations; e.g. Eknath Easwaran (2007), Nilgiri Press.
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Finish the lesson
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