Are you willing to take that pause?
Halfway through the Summer, my coach called me out. She observed that I keep saying I want a slower Summer, and yet nothing about how I was going through my Summer was slow. It stung. And she was right. My days were filled with so much, that I barely had time to sit and just be with my own thoughts.
And this is how insidious the urgency and busyness culture can be. We can say we want rest. We can say we want to slow down, but when it comes down to it, we resist slowing down and resting. Thankfully I had someone to call me out on my lack of integrity with myself, and I could come back to my intention and move through the last weeks of Summer at a much slower pace.
In THRIVE we explored how our brains can get addicted to busyness, urgency, and chaos. Yes, you can get addicted to being frazzled and overly busy. One of the participants observed that she feels incredibly powerful when she can get a lot done and check things off her to-do-list. She feels powerful when she is efficient and well-organized. We equated it to a kind of Mad Scientist mode we can get into.
In this state of frazzled busyness (i.e., the Mad Scientist mode), we get shit done. Often being able to accomplish a lot of things that were on our to-do-list can make us feel powerful. It can also create the false illusion that we are moving forward and making progress. Additionally, we get to avoid the discomfort of figuring out what we truly want, because we don’t have to slow down to consider whether we are accomplishing things that truly matter or will matter five years from now.
I know for myself, I used to keep myself distracted, so that I didn’t have to sit with the discomfort of what wasn’t working in my life. Additionally, I got to stay confused and unsure about what I actually wanted, because it was so hard to say out loud what I wanted, or give myself permission to go after what I truly wanted.
Yet, even though there can be a tremendous dopamine rush from being efficient and getting things done, and even though it can be a really powerful avoidance tactic, it does come at a cost. Here is what the participants to THRIVE shared that they do not have access to when they are in a state of frazzled busyness:
- They don’t have access to their Higher Selves and their own wisdom.
- They disconnect from their feelings. Sometimes we choose to stay busy, so we don’t have to feel our feelings. It means we don’t have access to how we truly feel about certain things, or to what we truly want in any specific situation. Feelings are such powerful indicators of what’s important to us, or what we really want.
- They are also unable to access any physical sensations in their bodies. This way, we can exhaust our own bodies, and burn ourselves out without even realizing it, because we merely dismiss the signals from our bodies that are asking us to slow down or stop.
- They only have access to practical or tactical thinking, but not necessarily to conscious thought / Higher Self / deeper wisdom.
- When we are frazzled and busy, we lack presence and attention. We miss what’s right in front of us. We don’t see the human or the relationship in front of us that we might be harming in the name of efficiency and getting shit done.
- In a state of frazzled busyness, we break connection and we are unable to truly relate to others, or build truly connected and supportive relationships.
- We also lack compassion for both ourselves and others.
The cost of always being busy is heavy. And even though we get shit done, we often end up getting the “wrong” shit done. In the words of Robert Holden, “The fast society has now become the manic society.” And this absence of intelligence and wisdom, is costing us our relationships with ourselves and others, our health, and even money wasted on things that don’t really matter all that much to us – all in the name of being more efficient and moving faster to “get there” (wherever “there” is).
Our non-stop speed ethic can easily blur our vision. We lose touch with our own values and intentions. An unwillingness to slow down, means we are also moving through life without a clear vision of what we want, who we want to be, and what matters most to us. And as Robert Holden put it so aptly: “Without vision, we can confuse:
Speed with Progress
Adrenaline with Purpose
Urgency with Importance”
Vision must always lead the pace, otherwise we are simply fast-forwarding to nowhere in particular. I feel like this short video by Ginny Clarke summarizes it beautifully.
The most successful people have learnt the value of slowing down and making time for reflection. Those who are called to lead know that what others depend on them for, is not how much they get done, or how efficient they are, but:
Their ability to access their wisdom,
Create a powerful vision that others can align with,
And the compassion and presence to build relationships that are real, authentic, and supportive.