Many Hats, One Mind

The Shadows and Gifts of "Multi-Roling" 

"The hunter who chases two rabbits catches neither one." -Zen Story

Many of us “high-functioning professionals” are fond of our ability to “wear many hats”. We are drawn to shifting between roles — designer to manager, coder to carpenter — because it provides the spice of diversity, and keeps us from getting bored or stuck. We get to exercise different skillsets and interact with different people.

A close friend — the COO of a telecommunications company and a former executive in a global media conglomerate — can sometimes be found on the roof of his Los Angeles office building fixing the air conditioner. He’d prefer it if the air conditioner worked, but under the circumstances he jumps in with a smile because he’s the best person for the job in that moment.

We might call the wearing-many-hats phenomenon “multi-roling”, after the model of “multitasking.” From the standpoint of the heart-mind, multi-roling and multitasking are similar. They have the same shape, the same moves. They offer similar rewards, and present similar risks.

We are all familiar with multitasking. We rapidly shift between back-burner and front-burner operations, making progress on more than one thing at the same time. Multi-tasking is sometimes necessary and sometimes can even feel good.

Yet more often than not, we multitask even when we don’t have to. We do it out of habit, a neurotic tendency of the mind that does not trust ourselves or the world.

The consequences of multitasking are pretty well-understood these days: rapid context-shifting impacts the continuity of our attention and results in a lack of depth, which often results in poor execution and shallow understanding.

Multi-roling has the same pitfalls. I speak with many executives who rightly pride themselves on their ability to “wear many hats.” Most of them go on to say in their very next breath that they feel a lingering sense of being out of balance. They are not doing as good a job as they would like. They are sacrificing depth for breadth.

Our work culture continuously pushes us to spread ourselves too thin, to cover broad ground at the expense of giving full and complete attention to every matter.

Maximizing the gifts and minimizing the shadows of wearing many hats requires the exercise of One Mind. What does One Mind look like? You may not be be able to tell from the outside, but you can tell from the inside.

A story from a modern Zen Master illustrates this: the Master was at his table eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. His attendant noticed this and thought he had caught his Master out. After all, he heard the Master speak many times about the importance in Zen training of doing one thing at a time: when you sit, just sit, when you rake, just rake, when you brush your teeth, just brush your teeth, and so on.

So the attendant asked, “Master, you always instruct us to do one thing at a time, but here you are doing more than one thing.”

The Master replied, “No, I’m not.”

The attendant said, “Yes, you are, you are eating and reading at the same time!”

The Master replied, “Oh no, I am just doing one thing: eating and reading.”

The Master spoke from his inner experience of One Mind. Having spent years in training to cultivate a strong quality and depth of attention, he could do multiple things all within the same active field of awareness.

Most people who eat and read at the same time shift rapidly between their taste sense and their thinking sense, taking in the words and occasionally (if at all) tasting their food. But with One Mind, the Master was able to fully taste his food, feeling the texture and sensing the aroma of every bite, while he was also cognitively processing the newspaper.

The Master was able to say it was only one thing, because for him it was.

In One Mind there is no gap. The sense field, which includes thinking, is experienced as continuous in time, space and awareness. This is the lived reality for those of us who have cultivated their heart-minds in meditation. It is a deep, joyous way of being. There is a fullness of experience, which not only provides for a deep capacity and creativity, but neutralizes fear and worry by keeping a light shining on the dark corners of the mind where our doubts are prone to grow.

It is possible to bring One Mind to multi-roling. As you shift from project to project, from conversation or task to the next conversation or task, there must be no gap. You are relaxed in the present moment, and give your complete attention to your current field of function.

With One Mind, you move continuously and smoothly from one “hat” to the next. That means no anticipatory thoughts about your next task and no worrisome thoughts about your previous ones.

One Mind possesses a subtle strength, and is not so easily deployed. Many of us pretend to have One Mind when we don’t. But when we practice with our own full attention, along with the emotional triggers that often pull us away from Presence, One Mind stays with us for longer and more continuous stretches.

We can wear many hats, as long as we do so with One Head. That’s when things go really smoothly. And that’s the true quality of “high-functioning.”

You may not know it from the outside, but you can feel it on the inside.

- Paul Agostinelli, co-Founder
Tend