You Don't Need Another Mala

At one of the multinational companies where I worked, I was hired to take over my manager’s role in Italy, while he moved on to oversee all of Europe. Instead of first understanding what the new role actually required, he kept doing exactly what he had done before — only on a larger scale. The same meetings, the same decisions made in the same way, the same pace, now applied to a territory ten times larger and ten times more diverse. He never understood why things weren’t working, even though several colleagues tried to explain it to him.

He was fired a few months after I left.

I don’t think it was a question of competence. He had done his job in Italy extremely well for years. The problem was that he kept standing in the same place, reacting in the same way even when the input had changed, while the ground beneath him had changed completely.

From there, everything he saw — the people, the numbers, the delays — looked like a problem to be solved with more effort. More hours. More control. More of the same.

Never with a different question.

I thought of him again while reading an article by executive coach Dave Schoof, one of my wonderful teachers, who tells an almost identical story about one of his clients.

Schoof makes a distinction I find incredibly valuable, and it’s the same one I make whenever someone asks me which stone to use or which ritual to follow: the problem is never finding the right tool. The real question is whether you are truly present, in your body, while you use it.

The Mala Doesn’t Tell You Where You Are

A mala does not solve anything on its own. What matters is the relationship you build with it, one bead at a time.

What the mala actually does is much more modest. It gives you something to hold while you still don’t know what to do. One bead after another, one breath after another, a gesture your fingers know by heart even when your mind feels lost. And that gesture — precisely because it is familiar, repeated, and safe — makes you slow down long enough to notice where you are before rushing toward the next action.

It gives you a few more seconds of presence before you respond. And when you are lost, a few seconds of presence can be worth more than any strategy.

My manager was simply running faster. He still had only his old map, just enlarged. And an enlarged map of the wrong place is still the wrong map, no matter how carefully you study it.

Stop Before You Move

If you are going through a major change — a new role, a loss, something that asks you to begin again — the right question is usually not, “What should I do?” It is simpler, and more uncomfortable: Have I actually stopped long enough to feel what is happening, or am I simply repeating an old gesture in a new situation?

This is not a question you solve by thinking harder or faster, and intelligence is not the issue. You need to slow down. Breathe. Feel yourself inside your body again.

One breath.
One bead between your fingers.
One knot at a time.

You do not need another mala. You need to stop long enough, with the one you already have in your hands, to truly see where you are.

I explore this more deeply — how a repeated gesture can become a point of steadiness — in The Path of the Mala.