Friendly Reminder: Click the blue text above “FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting” to learn more about marketing and distributor internal management. Excerpted from Borisen Books' "Oubo Wisdom: Good Management Relies on Cultivation" by Zeng Wei.

A boss once complained to me: "I talk to my employees about principles every day, at every meeting, but it doesn't work. Mistakes that shouldn't happen happen every day, and people who shouldn't leave leave every day. When employees want to resign, I order HR to do half an hour of ideological work every afternoon. But frustratingly, employees still resign, and the next day even more leave."

Managers do a lot of persuasion and education, but the results are minimal because they don't know that managing people requires managing their hearts. Let's discuss how to manage people's hearts from the Buddhist perspective of "feeling, thinking, action, consciousness." These four are not parallel; they are hierarchical.

"Feeling" is the most direct level. When we feel pain, comfort, or discomfort, these are direct sensations. What governs feeling? Feeling is governed by thought. If you think something feels good, it feels good; if you think it feels bad, it feels bad. If you are a practitioner, you'll believe me: when you feel uncomfortable, your thoughts are at work; don't think your feelings are so real. In fact, if your thoughts change, your feelings change, and discomfort changes.

I am a person who practices meditation. When I first sit on a stone, I often feel uncomfortable, but later I let it be, and after sitting for a while, the discomfort disappears. Why? Because my "thinking" stops, and when it stops, the uncomfortable feeling disappears. This is my real experience. So, feelings are governed by thoughts.

What governs thoughts? Thoughts are governed by habits. Why do you think this way? Why does he think that way? Behind all this, habits are at work. Just as a tailor immediately evaluates a person's clothes, a barber notices the hairstyle, and a shoemaker focuses on the shoes. Their attention and thoughts are closely related to their life habits. People's behavioral habits and routines dominate their thoughts, which in turn control their feelings. These are the three levels of "feeling, thinking, action."

What governs "action"? It is governed by "consciousness." What is "consciousness"? In Buddhism, it's called "Alaya-vijnana." "Alaya-vijnana" is a Sanskrit term with no direct Chinese equivalent; it's similar to subconsciousness, experience, or common sense. Therefore, feelings are governed by thoughts, thoughts by habits, and habits by many latent things accumulated from our past.

Managers often hope to change subordinates and employees from the level of thoughts, which is the usual approach. However, if we try to change people's thoughts and feelings, we only touch the surface and it's easy to revert. For example, yesterday a person wanted to quit smoking, so he said smoking is not good (changing thoughts). Tomorrow he can't quit and doesn't want to, so he says, "So-and-so smoked and lived a long life anyway" (changing thoughts easily reverts).

If you change a person's feelings, give him money today and he's happy (changing feelings); don't give him money tomorrow and he's unhappy (changing feelings also easily reverts). Happy one moment, unhappy the next, it's hard to change a person long-term.

If we start from the so-called subconsciousness of "Alaya-vijnana" (changing experience and common sense), it takes a long time, even decades.

So, where is the best place to start? Start with habits. Behind thoughts are habits. Changing a person's habits doesn't take long, but it is practical and effective.

What is the key to changing habits and routines? Habit change must rely on repetition. Habits are not formed in one go, so changing habits cannot succeed in one attempt, unless a major disaster makes someone suddenly realize.

Therefore, changing habits requires repeated and persistent effort.

How to achieve repetition and persistence? It relies on our own cultivation. Only if we don't have bad habits can we change others' bad habits; only if we have good habits can we cultivate good habits in others.

If you don't practice hygiene yourself but ask others to be hygienic, others will stop after cleaning a few times, and you'll be too lazy to remind them because you can accept it—you're like that yourself. So, if business owners, supervisors, or senior managers don't do well themselves, aren't good enough, and still want to change others, it's useless. The biggest challenge in management is fighting your own habits.

Whether management is good or bad doesn't depend on how much knowledge you have, but on your cultivation. If your cultivation is sufficient, the people around you are easy to handle; if not, they are difficult. Laozi said: "My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice; yet no one in the world can understand them or practice them." This means the Way is simple, but there are too few people with virtue, so knowing the Way is useless, and they won't act. The true Way requires people to practice it personally, which goes against human habits. Going against habits and practicing personally makes people uncomfortable, so they stop at knowing and cannot act.

The root of management is changing habits, and changing habits depends on self-cultivation. So, in the end, management is a hard task. I lead this consulting team to be a practitioner of management, not a intellectual of management.

Management has nothing to do with knowledge; management is about cultivation.

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