This video challenges individuals to view their daily work routine as an opportunity for continuous personal and professional development. Encouraging a mindset of being a “work in progress,” the author suggests considering the workplace as a learning environment or “dojo.” Drawing parallels with martial arts or dance practices, the workplace becomes a space to refine skills and confront challenges, with colleagues serving as teachers and sparring partners. By reframing work as a daily opportunity for growth, the video proposes the concept of finding one’s “mojo at the dojo,” urging individuals to embrace challenges as chances to become more fully themselves each day.
Transcript
Got a question for you. As a human being or as a leader or a parent or a friend? Are you a finished product or are you a work in progress? Now, I’ve asked that question thousands and thousands of times for many, many years. So far, I’ve never had anybody raise their hand and say, oh, I’m a finished product. I would love to see that sometime. The point is then, well, where do you do your progressing? You’re a work in progress. Great. Where do you do your progressing? Where do you do your learning? Where do you practice being more of who you are? And it occurred to me years ago that most of us are missing a fabulous opportunity to learn and develop into who we are, where we’re actually going to school. Or I like to say, going to the dojo. If you practice a martial art, you practice at the dojo. If you’re a dancer, you go to the studio, but when you go to the studio or the dojo, you’re going to practice to begin to master more and more of what it means to be in that particular practice, like martial art or dancing or singing, whatever it is. It occurred to me that when we go to work every day, we’re at work eight, ten, 12 hours a day.
If you could think of this as going to the dojo, what a fabulous thing that is. What if every day you’re going to work and your faculty is waiting, your sparring partners, your teacher, your sensei’s, all the things that you need in order to get better are waiting for you. Your curriculum is there, and that’s all the stuff you have to deal with every day. And these people that you have to work with are your teachers, your sparring partners, or your dancing partners, or whoever you need to have around you in order to grow and develop? Now in America, we have this thing called mojo. In the sports world, a sports team might say that when they come out on the pitch or out on the court or out on the field, if they have their heads hanging down. You say they’ve lost their mojo. It’s like their spirit, their liveliness, their reason for being out there. Or if they come out. The announcer says it looks like they got their mojo back. So mojo is think of it as your reason for getting up in the morning is your mojo. So I would just like to coin this phrase, what if you could find your mojo at the dojo? Which means what if you could become more of who you are every day when you go to work? Turn your workplace into a classroom, into a studio, into a dojo where you are practicing every single time a problem comes.
You’re not upset. You’re saying, oh, this is a great opportunity. This is what aikido in the practice of aikido. When someone attacks you, they’re your partner. They’re your colleague. Because in the attack, it’s forcing you or causing you to grow into the fullness to bring more of who you are, to bring the best that you have into this encounter. So that when this encounter is over, you’re both better at your practice, that you’ve become more. You’ve stretched and grown in that process. So I’d like to leave you with that phrase. What if you could think about finding your mojo at the dojo tomorrow, when you get up and you go to work, what is it that you need to practice to become more fully who you are? You can actually do it every day. Every day. And these wiser work videos are designed to help you step back and reflect on what’s happening at work so that you can actually find your mojo at the dojo.
