Several people have asked me about why I applied the Project-Transform method towards enhancing spiritual growth. Spirituality has always been a large and enjoyable aspect of my life. Spiritual growth represents an ongoing opportunity to deepen the experience of my relationship with God and discover new ways to respond to that relationship. Despite the joy I felt in pursuing spiritual growth, I became increasingly uncomfortable about the disconnection between my spiritual and my business lives. I kept asking myself the question: “How can I improve my spirituality during work hours?” I read many books, such as Brother Lawrence’s The Practice and Presence of God, that discussed how to combine spirituality and work. Yet my work as a project manager and process improvement director did not seem to lend itself towards spirituality. Then one day I had an “aha” moment when I realized that there might be a different approach for satisfying my desire to link work and spirituality. Perhaps I could use the expertise gained at work to improve my spiritual growth?
I wondered whether a goal of improving my spiritual growth could be managed in the same way that I managed my business and personal goals. I experimented with a process to optimize my spiritual activities and spiritual growth. More specifically, the process was designed to identify and mitigate obstacles or distractions that were negatively affecting my spiritual growth.
As I used the process, I quickly realized that many of my routine activities served as distractions from optimally performing spiritual activities. In some cases the activities themselves, such as surfing the Internet, were distractions. In other cases, my inefficiencies in executing the activity were wasting resources that could be applied towards spiritual activities. As a result, I expanded my focus into a process improvement approach that assisted me with funneling all of my activities and thoughts towards spiritual goals while improving my ability to reach those goals.
In time I began successfully sharing the process improvement approach with clients and continually refined the process based on lessons learned.
I wanted to really understand why the Project-Transform Method worked so well. So I decided to use my graduate level Psychology classes to build an academic foundation to support the process. I used the material from each class, as well as getting feedback from my professor’s, to continually refine the method. It is amazing how much help it has been to have PhDs helping me solidify the method. As part of the ongoing refinement process, I wrote a psychology graduate thesis to explore and articulate the application of a process improvement approach to spiritual life.
Currently, I am working with a publisher to expand the Project-Transform method into a published book. The writing process is helping me to refine the method and I have been pleasantly surprised at how many new insights I have received. I am going to modify the process so that I can capture these insights into posts and more easily share them with my friends and clients.
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Is the SGP something that you came up with or is it widely used? Sounds like you have a real interesting take on the relationship between business or one’s work life and spirituality- I would love to hear more! Just in thinking about it for a few minutes, there are many skills that we have to develop for our jobs that we never seem to use for ourselves. Thanks for the post!