Unit-2 Personal Ethics
Unit 2
PERSONAL ETHICS
Introduction - Meaning - Emotional Honesty – Virtue of humility - Promote happiness - karma yoga - Proactive - flexibility and purity of mind.
Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. They infuse debates on topics like abortion, human rights and professional conduct.
Personal ethics
It is a category of philosophy that determines what an individual believes about morality and right and wrong. This is usually distinguished from business ethics or legal ethics. These branches of ethics come from outside organizations or governments, not the individual's conscience. These branches of ethics occasionally overlap. Personal ethics can affect all areas of life, including family, finances and relationships.
The basic principles and values that govern interactions among individuals. Basically, ethics are your sense of right and wrong. Your morals and values that define how you are as a person are your personal ethics. On the contrary, how you behave and conform to the rules in a professional setting are your professional ethics .
List of Personal Ethics
- Emotional Honesty
- Virtue Of Humility (Personal Ethics)
- Promote Happiness
- Karma Yoga (Personal Ethics)
- Proactive
- Flexibility And Purity Of Mind (Personal Ethics)
1.Emotional Honesty
Emotional honesty means expressing your true feelings. To be emotionally honest we must first be emotionally aware .This emotional awareness is related to our emotional intelligence. It is our emotional intelligence, combined with the necessary learning, practice and experience, which gives us the ability to accurately identify our feelings.
Emotional intelligence may also give us the ability to decide when it is in our best interest to be emotionally honest by sharing our real feelings. There are times when it is not healthy or safe for us to be emotionally honest. In general though, I believe we would be better off individually and as a society if we would be more emotionally honest.
If we are more emotionally honest with ourselves we will get to know our "true selves" on a deeper level. This could help us become more self-accepting. It could also helps us make better choices about how to spend out time and who to spend it with.
If we are emotionally honest with others, it may encourage them to be more emotionally honest. When we are emotionally honest we are more likely not to be asked or pressured to do things which we do not want to do. We will also find out sooner who respects our feelings
2.Virtue of humility
Humility is the quality of being humble. Dictionary definitions accentuate humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness.Humility is an outward expression of an appropriate inner, or self regard, and is contrasted with humiliation which is an imposition, often external, of shame upon a person.Humility is being studied as a trait that can enhance leadership effectiveness. The research suggests that humility is multi-dimensional and includes self-understanding and awareness, openness, and perspective taking
Humility is considered a state of being, highlighted by your behaviour and approach to things. It's also considered one of the virtues of the human condition, along with kindness, patience, diligence, charity, temperance and chastity. Humility is often thought to occur in the absence of pride.
3.Promote Happiness
Virtuous behaviour contributes to moral excellence. Moral excellence can contribute to a happy life.Thus, being a moral person is essential to living a life of happiness. A person achieves happiness by possessing the dispositions (i.e., tendencies) to make the right choice at the right time in the right way.Morality applies to one’s personal beliefs and choices in life. Ethics is a set of rules that contribute to leading a moral life. We can view ethical behaviour as a pathway to achieve a moral life; hence, a happy life.
Benefits of Promoting Happiness
Happiness Encourages Employees to Work Harder
Happiness is contagious. It spreads if encouraged. A happy employee can make the work environment positive and can become a role model for his fellow workers. Happiness boosts your confidence and helps you focus better on work. Being happy at the workplace makes you feel invested in your organisation's goal and that is what encourages others to take their jobs seriously.
Happiness Increases Productivity
When you are happy, you like to engage more with others and that’s what makes you attentive and aware of the needs of the customer. This further adds to your experience and you perform better keeping the goal in your mind.
Happy Employees Are More loyal Than The Unhappy Ones
An employee who is appreciated for his work and gets recognized stays with his employer for the long term. A happy employee also willingly show up to work on time or sometimes early and do overtime too. A simple logic behind this is nobody would like to leave a place where he is enjoying the work and is getting paid and appreciated enough.
Happy Employees Are Healthier
When a person is stressed out, he won’t be able to work efficiently. Also, stress is a risk factor for various severe conditions that may force you to take leave and stay home for long. This would then affect the work in your office. Happiness keeps your immunity better and reduces the level of the stress hormone called cortisol. This means, it basically keeps you healthy and prevents you from draining your organization.
Happy Employees Are Risk Takers
Taking risks is what helps you grow and go out of your comfort zone to be successful. It is not a cup of tea and only happy and healthy individuals can take a risk in their lives. Business is no exception. When you feel happy, you are more likely to come up with new and effective solutions. You are also likely to take calculated risks that can take your company to new heights. Even if you fail, being a happy person, you will learn from your mistakes and open the door to unforeseen success. On the other hand, an unhappy employee always looks for safer options.
4.Karma-Yoga
Karma Yogis practice unselfish action as a form of prayer. They act according to dharma (regarded in Hinduism as a cosmic law underlying right behaviour and social order), without expecting to gain anything from it.Karma yoga is the spiritual practice of "selfless action performed for the benefit of others". Karma yoga is a path to reach spiritual liberation through work.Karma yoga diminishes the ego and helps to dissolve any sense of separation between self and other. Acting in this way is believed to purify the mind, and it is considered the most virtuous approach to service.When we truly unite with our karma, we eliminate egoism, hatred and jealousy from our hearts and replace it with love, joy and compassion.
Principles of Karma Yoga
- Have the Right Attitude: What you do is not important – it’s about how you do it. Work is worship.
- Separate Motive from Action: Motives require attachment in some form and attachments stem from desires, which are rooted in our egos. Let go of your ego! Realising and understanding the danger that ego-driven decisions pose is a helpful step on your way to overcoming it.
- Do your Duty We all have duties in life. Some are given to us (duties as a citizen of society, a child, a sibling etc.), others we have chosen (duties as a partner, friend, employee etc.). Do your duty with enthusiasm and attention.
- Serve Yourself: The most important duty we have is the one towards ourselves. Only once we have taken care of our own well-being, we can help those around us.
- Do Your Best: Whatever you do, do your best. The Law of Karma states that everything you do today is reflected in the future. Loving the work you do prepares a firm foundation for tomorrow
- Forget About Results: Work for the work’s sake and forget about the results. Devote yourself to the action – the journey is the goal.
- Respect the Consequences: Step back, observe and accept consequences as they come. Respecting the consequences of a result and again doing karma with the same enthusiasm means respecting God’s offerings to Karma Yogis.
- Follow the Discipline of the Job: Every job requires different levels of time, energy, patience, concentration and experience. Learn us much as you can.
5.Proactive Ethics
To embrace ethics as proactive, please consider these reflections as a foundation for ethics training.
- Ethics needs to focus on action and not behaviour. What this means that in being proactive, the purpose is to clarify what’s negotiable and what’s not, what’s acceptable and what’s not . To deal with behaviour is an “after the fact” issue, which again falls into the compliance arena.
- Being proactive in ethics then really justifies action and not the behaviour. By this it mean by being proactive in establishing guidelines before an issue arises, creates a proactive framework that is the cause and reason for justification of an action. If guidelines, without explanation or training, are imposed after an action takes place, i.e. behaviour, there is too much room for interpretation, arguments, etc., which can cause some very serious
- Being proactive in ethics means acknowledging the gap between “ought” and “is”. This gap is an ethics “gap.” “Ought ” is the reason and the motivation to strive to be proactive as opposed now “is.”
Proactive ethics sets the direction, establishes guidelines of accountability, creates a positive environment to keep the organization at the forefront of true business ethics.
6.Flexibility and Purity of Mind
Flexibility
Flexibility is a personality trait that describes the extent to which a person can cope with changes in circumstances and think about problems and tasks in novel, creative ways.Flexibility, or psychological flexibility, as it is sometimes referred to, is the ability to adapt to situational demands, balance life demands, and commit to behaviours.
In work environment Psychological flexibility has been found to improve mental health and absence rates. A mediating variable is job control which suggests that people feel they have more psychological flexibility when they have more control over their jobs.This is likely due to workers feeling less restricted by what they are allowed to do and more empowered to solve a problem.The study demonstrates the power of psychological flexibility in the workplace as psychologically flexible workers have better mental health and job performance Allowing workers more job control would likely increase work productivity as it would increase the workers' psychological flexibility.[ In leadership studies, flexibility, defined as "the ability to get along with different groups and adapt to the demands of many organizations," is one aspect of portability, or the ability to acquire skills and move from one company to the next.
Flexibility helps to improve health as studies show that the ability to cope and be flexible was positively associated with improved psychological health. Flexibility reduced depression, anxiety, and stress.
Purity of Mind
Purity of mind is the absence of waste thoughts and unwanted thoughts .In simple terms, to conquer the mind, keeping it clean and free of impurities caused by sinful thoughts. He who strives to do this is sure to find success, and above all peace while dealing with day-to-day activities.Anger, hate, prejudice, greed, lust, pride, fear, negative thoughts are a source of impurity of mind.The impurities of the intellect are cleansed through the process of self-examination, or knowledge of self. The mind is purified through mindfulness and meditation on one's intent, feelings, actions and its causes.
Purity of mind helps in understanding the situations and people better and so respond to situations in a positive and constructive way. Purity frees the mind from being slavery to materialistic senses and helps in better decision-making for the self and others. Purity helps in enjoying every moment of life and fills the mind with peace, happiness, bliss and unconditional love. Purity helps in seeing all situations with detachment and so enjoying every situation with peace, happiness, bliss and unconditional love. A pure mind is able to bring positive changes in others and situations as a person with purity of mind does not enter into conflicts with others and are able to accept others as they are.
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