[00:01.8]
Hello and welcome along to Management Matters. I'm Fiona, your resident professional development coach, and I am here week in, week out, helping you to think differently about management. Management matters and why management matters.
[00:18.3]
This week's episode is all about busyness because I think we've arrived at this sort of interesting spot where everybody's busy and there's bonding in the busyness.
[00:34.5]
In fact, the busyness has kind of become a bit of a competition. I was talking about this with the lovely people who joined Strategy Hour last week, and one of them said, "Yeah, it's like you." We're all busy and you know if anyone asks how someone's doing you go yeah busy and then everyone else chimes in with oh you never guess though I'm busy with this thing and someone else chimes up, chimes in with well I'm doing that and I've got a sick child at home today. You know, it's like we've sort of turned it into a competitive sport about who's the busiest and I don't think it's all that helpful and I also think it's kind of a countercultural move to step outside of that competition, and that is the invitation today to step outside of the busyness competition and find a different way.
[01:37.4]
It's like because, I don't know about you, I think there's there's this real sort of funny juxtaposition. So aside from the competition about busyness, I think something else is going on here where we sort of, actually, I don't think that many people slow down enough to think about what they do want in relation to their busyness but I am somebody who has had the luxury of slowing down enough to think about what I want in relation to the busyness and I am happy being busy.
[02:18.7]
I'm actually great when I'm busy. I like to have enough on to keep me ticking along. I find my brain goes into, as I was talking about last time, my brain kind of goes off like finding things for me to solve if I'm not busy enough.
[02:34.1]
So I think there is a happy medium here somewhere, but I want for that busyness to feel in balance for me, and I want to be able to be a well-rested woman.
[02:51.5]
I think, like, oh, if I could just like give that to all of you to be a well-rested person and to have some balance in the busyness. What a joy! That would, that would feel like a completion of a life's mission, I think.
[03:09.1]
So how are we going to get there? How do we get to that place? Because I think if you have slowed down enough to think about it, or if you're literally just thinking about this live with me as you're listening to this episode, I think most people aspire to being, if not relaxed, at least people want to slow down.
[03:35.8]
I think there's a sense of aspiring to be sort of air quotes on top of things, whatever that means for you in your context and with your to-do list and priorities, objectives and all of the stuff. I think there's definitely we want to, at the very very least, back away from burnout.
[03:57.5]
I know lots of people. I did a workshop, I think, maybe 18 months ago, called Back Away from Burnout. Loads of people came to it. It was one of the most well-attended things I've ever run, because loads of people are in that zone, aren't they, of really being on the edge of burnout and spending mental energy worrying about burnout, which I think is a sort of interesting bit of metacognition to be worrying about.
[04:25.4]
The impact of all of your worrying, but that's for a different episode. So the kind of degrees of of this are edging away from burnout, slowing down enough to kind of take stock, being on top of things, and maybe, just maybe, we'd like to feel a bit more relaxed.
[04:48.3]
We'd like to be a bit more relaxed. And I think being on top of things, let's, I'm going to take that as the sort of median of, is it median? I don't know, whatever the the sort of medium range, the thing that most people are aspiring to, is feeling a bit more on top of things, because I think then you get the sense of satisfaction and sort of being able to stop worrying about burnout so much when you feel like you're on top of things.
[05:16.5]
I think it's really actually a countercultural choice. It's certainly a countercultural choice to speak about it. If you do get there, kind of it's risky to tell people about it because everybody's so caught up in this, the competition of busyness.
[05:36.8]
If you join a meeting and see people go, "Oh, how are you doing?" and you go, "I'm actually really great. Thanks. I'm having a nice time." It's like people don't want to hear it, even though it's what everybody's aspiring to. There is bonding in that busyness and in the competition and in the sharing stories about how difficult things are, and I don't think that's just in relation to the busyness.
[06:03.4]
It happens in all sorts of interesting contexts. Like this might be about to be an overshare, but here we go. When I had my daughter, I had a totally lovely birth experience, right?
[06:19.3]
And it's one of those things all the mums, all the like pregnant ladies, worry especially if it's your first time, you like sort of worry about what labour will be like, if you can cope with it, will you be okay, what if something bad happens.
[06:39.1]
You know, and all of that worry is like on the flip side of wanting to have a good experience. And I had a great experience. It was lovely. I did lots of preparation. If you have questions about that, email me.
[06:54.8]
Happy to chat more about it. I did loads and loads of preparation. Went into the labour experience very well prepared, and had a great time. Really good experience. In fact, the midwife was like, "Oh, can we bring the students in to see this?" because we've never seen anybody in, they, the students haven't seen anybody in labour this chilled out, and we'd love to bring them in.
[07:21.4]
Obviously, if you know anything about sort of natural childbirth, the key emotion that we want to protect in that process is oxytocin and that is not going to be helped by having like five medical students standing around looking at you.
[07:39.8]
So my husband quite rightly said no, that was not okay. They could not bring the students in because that would ruin the whole experience. Anyway, maternity leave was a nightmare. All like you know, it wasn't all great. It stuff carried on after that, but the labour and birth experience were totally delightful.
[07:58.2]
Went really smoothly. Everything's great. Then I went to mother and baby groups and nobody wanted to hear about it. Isn't that weird? Even where though that's what everybody aspires to, the only thing they were up for discussing was sharing horror stories of the bad things that had happened.
[08:19.6]
So, I think we're in a version of that with busyness right now. Around the workplace, where people kind of are aspiring to having a good experience, but actually don't really want to hear from people who are having a good experience about how they got there, because they're too wrapped up in the process of sharing, bonding over the experience of busyness and being overwhelmed and that sort of competitive nature of sharing what you're coping, what we are coping with, what one is coping with.
[08:54.9]
So, I find that quite tricky and I think it then, once you realize that, it becomes a choice about whether you are happy to carry on in that vein or if you are going to choose a different existence and a different approach to work.
[09:16.0]
Now, I'm not saying that we're mysteriously going to make you less busy, or that we'll be able to make all of the work go away. Certainly not. Like, I'm not a miracle worker. I'm just a coach. But I think we can choose a different approach here, and yeah, so it can be really counter-cultural to choose to step out of that competition, and to be on top of things again with the air quotes, whatever on top of things means to you, is really countercultural because it requires you to bet on yourself when everybody around you is extremely busy and sort of, not sure what the right word here is, kind of languishing in that busyness.
[10:05.1]
There's a kind of not copingness happening inside of that. So it takes courage. Actually, it takes loads of things, right? Here, I made a, wrote them down the list of things I think it takes to exit that loop. Not that I want to overwhelm you with this list itself, but that it's a illustration of the territory that we might need to cover.
[10:26.3]
So it requires self-worth. You have to believe that you deserve to have a different experience. You have to believe that you deserve to have a different experience because actually you're somebody who's worthy of, you know, having your time respected, of betting on yourself, of keeping promises that you make to yourself, all of that stuff.
[10:50.0]
So self-worth, it requires a different expression of courage because you might need to set boundaries and then as you'll know from previous episodes, I'll try and remember to link up the boundary episode.
[11:07.0]
It requires, if you need to set a boundary, the boundary requires consequences and follow through. So you set the boundary, and then if something happens that bumps up against that boundary, you have to actually follow through with the consequence, which again requires a certain amount of courage.
[11:27.7]
Oh, I've wandered away from where I left my bit of paper with the list of what it takes. Hang on, nearly there. Boundaries, self-leadership, self-leadership. So self-leadership often involves vision. So you have to know what you're trying to achieve, which I think is part of is an interesting part of the equation where everybody's so busy bonding over the busyness.
[11:53.0]
Few people have taken the time to step back and go, "What do I want instead of this?" That's part of leadership: setting a goal for yourself, and then figuring out a plan to get you towards that goal, and then actually showing up and implementing, taking action on the plan.
[12:11.3]
Where are we at? Vision, yep, got that, and then congruence. So in last week's episode, we talked about congruence and the three parts that go into make up congruence is who do you think you are?
[12:27.5]
So your vision of yourself and who you are, how you think about stuff and what you actually do. So in this context, congruence is the meeting of those three things. They have to overlap in order for you to have congruence, which is the experience of peace of mind.
[12:45.8]
It's that feeling that your actions are lining up with, your thinking is lining up with who you think yourself, who you believe yourself to be, the stories you tell yourself about who you are. So, in this context around busyness, the who you think you are question might involve things like, "Well, am I worthy of being on top of things?" Oh, that might be painful for some people.
[13:14.6]
Who will I be if I'm not busy all the time? It's why a lot of people really struggle to relax on holiday because there's a question in their mind that they're not ready to attend to. Who will I be if I'm not busy all the time? And that can conjure up ideas about laziness and, you know, this sort of typical pattern of overworking.
[13:39.0]
Okay, so that's who do you think you are? Number two is what do you think about stuff? And so, in this context, we want to be thinking about what do you think you can do? Do you think you can actually achieve the things that are on your to-do list?
[13:57.7]
Are you imagining the things on your to-do list to be harder or to take longer than they actually are or the length of time they actually will take. Now this is not new thinking. Seneca the Younger, who is a ancient Roman philosopher, was writing in like 40 AD, wrote, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality." So we need to consider that bit of thinking to create this peace of mind and congruence.
[14:27.5]
And then the third bit is, "What do you actually do? What do you actually do?" So, are you in motion with a plan that you trust, and then are you actually taking action and following through on that plan?
[14:43.3]
And thinking can be a very alluring sort of procrastination. I totally do this, right? I think up stuff. All the time, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm actually in action. I just feel like I've been taking action because I've been doing lots of thinking.
[15:01.1]
Often the thinking is a distraction from the thing that I really should be doing. And I find strategy hour to be a really interesting illustration of this because over the last 10 days or so 15 new people signed up to join Strategy Hour, so I think we're about 30 people on who have signed up to join Strategy Hour.
[15:26.3]
If you're not aware, Strategy Hour is my free weekly call. It's on a Monday during term time between 9:30 and 10:30 where you bring all of your stuff, like all the messy half-done action to-do lists and notes and everything.
[15:42.9]
We gather together all of your to-do items. Get things a bit sorted out and prioritized for the week ahead, and then set you off on your way to make that progress. 15 new people have signed up, and there were an existing however many, like 15-ish, already on the list.
[16:00.7]
Guess how many people actually dialed in for the call on Monday? Any guesses? Two. So out of the roughly 30 people who have like actively filled in their name and email address to join this call, where there is a scaffolding and a process and accountability to get yourself sort of on top of things, only two people actually showed up. So I wonder sometimes if you know there's that like what are you actually doing?
[16:33.7]
Are you following through on those plans that you make for yourself? I don't want to shame anybody about that. The point about strategy hour is, it's a drop-in session. So if you're not available that week, don't come. Just join the next one. So it might be that loads of people were busy on Monday, but, would surprise me if 28 out of 30 people all happened to be at a mystery meeting.
[16:55.8]
So, yeah, so we also are looking for congruence. So we need those three parts to be lined up in order to create that possibility of stepping out of the busyness as bonding and into something else.
[17:15.6]
If you are thinking, yeah, I do this actually. I'm in the mode of bonding over busyness and I haven't really ever slowed down enough to think about what it is that I want or maybe I have slowed down enough. To think about what it is that I want, but I'm not following through on that, and I am feeling really overwhelmed Firstly, you're very welcome to come to Strategy Hour and to actually show up for Strategy Hour.
[17:42.2]
It's totally free resource on purpose because I just really think it's useful for people to have that time at the beginning of the week to get the week's priorities straightened out, so then you don't have to do that bit of thinking every time you've got some space in the week.
[17:59.6]
If, however, the other parts of the, you know, if it's not just about making a plan, sticking to the plan, if there's other stuff going on for you, or if you've signed up for Strategy Hour but never actually come.
[18:17.6]
It might be that some coaching would be beneficial for you because there's a gap between what you intend to do and what you are doing, and I think that gap can be really beneficial to explore because there's probably a loop or a pattern happening there that might need some attention, so that you can step very intentionally, step out of that loop, get into action.
[18:42.2]
You know, might be that you need to start having some boundaries where you haven't practiced having boundaries before. Might be that you need to push back on some stuff. It might be that you need to move through procrastinating on things into that was weird pronunciation, wasn't it? Procrastinating.
[18:58.7]
Move through procrastinating so that you can get into action. If any of that's going on for you, then maybe some coaching would be a good option for you. Overall, what I want for you, actually, let's just imagine it for a second.
[19:17.6]
Just imagine for a second being a well-rested person. Oh, like you know that person that's like towards the end of your holiday when you've de-stressed a bit, you've like slowed your system down, and you're actually able to get some good rest, but before you start then the Sunday night worry about coming back to work.
[19:41.7]
Imagine spending more time in that vibe. Imagine feeling on top of things. Just you know like we're never going to get to the end of the list. I'm not naive about that. It's like the laundry cycle, all the dishes, dishes washing.
[19:58.2]
You know, you every time you show up to work, there's going to be more work to do, but just feeling like you're on top of it and like you can, match your energy to the flow of incoming items that need to get done. Imagine finding balance amid the busyness instead of competing with it.
[20:19.4]
Oh, feels good, doesn't it? Feels good to me. Alright, I'm going to leave it there. Thanks so much for listening, and I will speak to you very soon with another episode. Bye.
