Work-Life Sanity Blog

I learned how to cycle long distances few years ago when I was training for a charity ride that covered 170 miles over 2 days. 

One of the most powerful strategies I learned pertained to hill climbing.  Here’s what I learned.  While riding up a steep hill, don’t look at the top of the hill: it will overwhelm, frighten, and discourage you.  Stay focused on the immediate challenge: this pedal stroke, followed by the next pedal stroke, and so forth.  And notice the very local scenery: “Huh, that looks like wild Morning Glories growing there” or “Looks like gravel up ahead.”

This Hilltop Rule applies off the road as well.

When you’re working your way out of a demoralizing work backlog, stay focused on the tasks and goals for this week.  Don’t keep looking at the whole heartbraking list - ignore that hilltop - and stay focused on the immediate work at hand. 

If you’re managing a project that has 3000 moving parts and you become paralyzed every time you think about all that still lies ahead, stop thinking about all that lies ahead: think about this week’s work.  

This is not to say don’t step back regularly and survey the big picture.  You certainly want to be sure you’re going up the right hill.  You also need to revisit your time line and resource projections on a regular basis. But not every hour.  Not even every day. 

Some people need to view the hilltop regularly to get re-inspired: “It’s not about doing the (lengthy and ho-hum) calculations for this proposal, it’s about landing this contract and taking the kids to Disney World this year!”  “Yeah, the road is rough but this reasearch is making a difference in how  lymphoma is treated.”

But mostly, stick with the pedal strikes.  That’s how work gets done.   Cumulatively, the pedal strokes add up.  Miles are covered.  And every now and then there’s a downhill segment - enjoy it when you get one! 

The downhill road can be very bumpy, and the dappled sunlight makes it hard to see the potholes too far ahead.  So slow down enough to stay safe.  Keep your wits about you.  Don’t stop doing your due diligence.  You can still enjoy a downhill ride even with your brakes lightly engaged. 

• When riding up a steep hill, ignore the hilltop.
• Stay focused on the road immediately in front of you.

Why is it so hard to do so many of the things that are GOOD for us?  Why is the fast-paced, adrenaline-laced life so much more fun than the slower-paced choices? 

I recently had a string of body mechanical problems, resulting in 3 different sets of physical therapy exercises I was supposed to do twice daily.  These are slow, boring moves.   I don’t do them during a class, with music pumping and a teacher urging me onward, a setting that feels, to me, more “fun.” 

In fact, one of the injuries happened during a class with the music pumping and a teacher urging me onward: I over-reached, lifted too much weight during a weight training class and injured a muscle or tendon in my upper arm.  No big surprise.

But PT felt like a punishment, at least at first.  I couldn’t go to class with the other boys and girls.  I had to be home alone in my living room with therabands, counting 30-second intervals.  Ida wanna hafta do this.   Poor me. 

But truly, as I learned the PT routines and began to see some results, I started doing the exercises the way I’m learning to do yoga with my excellent teacher, Victoria.   Instead of counting or timing thirty seconds, I could now just breathe deeply into the exercise for the right amount of time, which I had internalized.  And by just breathing into the moves,  being in the moment, I entered a more meditative space, good for my head.

Victoria tells us, ”Don’t get greedy on the mat.”  What she means is,  don’t be overly focused on the external look of the yoga pose at the expense of your well-being.   Don’t be so greedy that you don’t honor your body’s limits today.  Instead, she teaches, at some point, go for the inner pose, be ok with what is, be willing to stop fixing, perfecting, trying to make it perfect.

It was greediness in my weight training class that got me injured.  I was greedy for the achievement of  lifting more weight than I was really capable of lifting without injury.

I’ve healed two of the three injuries.  My challenge now is to stick with the exercises for the third one.   And to resist greed.

About 10 days ago I had day-surgery on my hand.   I was NPO after midnight and scheduled for a 3:00 pm surgery.  Doing without food or water was no big deal, but no morning coffee?  That was hard.

I’ve just returned from taking a few vacation days in New York.   A friend came up from DC and we spent a day together.  I stayed over with another friend and spent a day with her as well.  Very fun, and a perfect getaway for me. 

I’m back to a  very full plate, much to do in a very short time.  When I have a crunch like this, I need to work more quickly than I’m comfortable working.   If I’m not careful, I can get very stressed by it.  I think it’s the discomfort that stresses me, not the work itself or the volume.  So this time I’m going to try managing the discomfort a little better, and I’ll see if that makes a difference.

How will I do that?  Well, one thing I’ll try is this: when I start feeling stressed, I’ll ask myself, “Are you stressed by the discomfort of having to work more quickly than you want?”  If the answer is yes, I think knowing that will help me keep it in perspective: I can certainly handle my own discomfort — it’s all up to me.  

Meanwhile, I’m excited about all that’s going on, including a cluster of teleclasses coming up at the end of the month.

One of the key skills I teach many of my clients is to recognize when they need help and how to get it.   

Being a coach keeps me honest: I really do have to walk the talk.  That means I have to recognize when I need help and then to get it.

My business is extremely busy right now.  Not so busy with clients that I am full, mind you – so don’t hesitate to contact me yourself about coaching or to refer someone else!   But extremely busy with the “back office” side of things.

My back office plate filled up incrementally with the following, probably TMI, which you should feel free to skip (go to “At some point,” below): 

·     I was interviewed for an internet radio show that’s airing next week, the publicity for which required that I create a Face Book page and bring on some fans.  

·     This blog, which had snoozed through the holidays, needed to become more active again. 

·     My trademark, the Getting Unstuck® Coach, was challenged by a company seeking my permission to use the same trademark for their training business, which overlaps with my corporate training work.  Some back and forth with them, a threatening email from their attorney, calls with my trademark attorney, etc. Yuck.

·     I’ve finished my ‘09 bookkeeping, but the forms that go to my accountant need to be filled out, which inevitably requires going over my data one more time, making corrections, etc.

·     I’m down to the last 30 copies of my book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: Restoring Work-Life Balance. So it’s either time for a run of another 300 of them, or time to migrate to a print-on-demand solution.  Investigating print-on-demand solutions means identifying the players, getting informed about each’s process and pricing, doing the compare and contrast, and making a decision.  Yuck.

·     Finish the profile of my business on Yelp.com and ask clients to write recommendations.  

·     Deal with my mouse, which intermittently stops highlighting. 

·     Write a formal proposal to lead a daylong work-life balance training for a tech company in FL.

·     Write an informal proposal for a keynote later this month.

·     Email the contacts I’ve been referred to at 2 magazines to inquire about writing a work-life column for them.

·     Send out an email to everyone I know to announce this blog and update people on my coaching niche: work life balance and productivity.

·     Schedule teleclasses for the end of February, and get the classes and registration info onto my website (now done) and into my February newsletter.

·     Write the Feb newsletter.  (You can subscribe here.)  

·     Update website: send requests to my web programmer and follow up.

·     Other stuff too.

At some point, I began to feel overwhelmed.  I worked longer hours, I tightened up my efficiency, I said no to non-work invitations.  I was barely making a dent in the list, and the overwhelm got bigger. 

And then I heard the bell ring and saw the light bulb turn on: I needed more help!  Duh. 

So I got help.   Lots of it.   Most of these items are still in process, and the list is ultimately my responsibility, but having other competent people working on some of the bigger jobs and getting back to me for input as needed is a HUGE RELIEF.   I am point person, not point-person-&-technician.  

If you’re at all like my clients or the people in my seminars, your initial response to “So I got help” may be something like, “Yeah, right, well maybe in YOUR life, but not in mine.”  Stay tuned for a subsequent post that addresses this. 

In a recent conversation with several people about blogging, I realized that I’ve been making things unnecessarly difficult for myself by requiring that my blog posts be about 500 words long.   Of course I’ve read other people’s posts that are shorter, but I never made the connection that mine could be shorter too.

I know I’m not the only person who makes things more difficult than they need to be, but I’m the one I know the best. 

For a long time I thought that work was supposed to be hard.   If it wasn’t hard, it didn’t count, I thought: it wasn’t worthy somehow.   Once I became aware of that thought pattern, I was able to see that it didn’t serve me, and I started the process of learning how to allow things to be easier, which is turning out to be a lifelong process. 

This is iteration number 99 of “it doesn’t have to be difficult.”  My posts at this blog can be be as long or as short as they need to be.

I’ve had the privilege over the last few years of working with some fabulous women who were living the transition from management to leadership.  I say “living the transition” rather than “moving” because it’s much more of a process than a singular event.   It’s a paradigm shift that happens over time. 

Here are a few of its elements:

1. You laser-sharpen what you say and write.  In E.B. White’s words: “When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”  More succinct communication is often the result of :
     a) better grasp of the bigger picture, fuller understanding of exactly what to communicate and why
   b) greater courage and power to speak the truth and stand behind it
   c) less time/tolerance for fuzziness.

2. You replace your old M/O of “I have to do it all myself” with the understanding that you have to have more help.  Doing it all yourself is not a model for leadership; it’s a model for burnout.  

3. You delegate day-to-day management in order to regularly take yourself to 80,000 feet to see the big picture.   This is particularly true if you are coming from an operations function.  You can’t re-think strategic mission at the same time as worrying about whether there will be enough chairs in the room for the Big Meeting (and wondering who’s on that?).

4. You start contributing at a higher, stronger, more strategic level because you stop wasting time feeling “less than,” second guessing yourself, and feeling like you have to justify your seat at the table.  You ARE at the table.  You start knowing you belong there. 

5. You ask for what you need, knowing that what supports you also supports others and the work you are all doing. 

6. You stop tolerating bad behavior; you redress it.

7.  You get more help. 

8. You start trusting our own questions.   You get them answered, either by finding them out or by convening the conversations that will create them.

9. You become willing to see yourself as a more powerful person. It just stops being a big deal.  You grow into it.

What have I left out?

Would you like to take a look at one company’s bold and effective response to employees’ changing needs for flexibility over the course of a working lifetime?  I have a fascinating book to recommend: Mass Career Customization, by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg. 

Benko and Weisberg write about how their company, Deloitte, has implemented a very new approach to flex.   

Deloitte has long been a standout leader in creating policies and practices that accommodate people’s needs for myriad forms of flexible work.  They started down this path many years ago as a means of stemming their costly turnover rates, particularly for their most talented women.  They were losing highly talented women from the partnership track at an alarming rate, mostly during the years when these women had young children.    Deloitte became the poster child company for family-friendly policies, and they reaped phenomenal savings in dollars and morale by dramatically increasing retention across the board. 

Now they’re taking it to the next level by implementing a broad system of customizing employees’ schedules and workloads a year at a time, based on the employee’s needs.  They call this dynamic “mass career customization” (MCC) , and this is the book that tells the story. 

Deloitte is normalizing the need for flexibility: it’s no longer seen as an accommodation or a one-time need that will evaporate at some point (and the sooner the better!).   Rather, Deloitte is acting as if anyone could need an  unconventional schedule or workload during any or all of their working years, so better to be nimble enough to roll with these needs rather than lose the employee.   The result is a robust and committed workforce with extraordinary capacity.   Because the company benefits, I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future.

According the Professor Myra Hart of Harvard Business School, ”With an MCC approach, corporations are not saying, ‘I want only your good years or the years in which you can make a maximum contribution.’  Instead, corporations are saying to  employees, ‘We really want a lifetime contract with you.’  This is a very new approach to employee retention.”

Shelly Lazarus, Chairman & CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, writes, “Finally, a book recognizing that the needs of today’s knowledge workers are far from a women-only issue. Mass Career Customization provides an incisive analysis of what’s really happening on the talent front and a comprehensive approach of what to do about it.”

I can’t say it reads as fast as fiction, but it’s a great read.  You may think you’re reading fiction when you see what’s going on at Deloitte.   Check it out.

Some of my best work happens when I am not working. 

In preparing to launch this blog, at the end of the summer, I wrote some very rough drafts of possible posts.  I’ve learned to trust the process of getting ideas on paper first, however incomplete or awkwardly expressed, and editing later if the ideas still hold.

The extraordinary essayist Anne Lamott uses a technical term for this: the “shitty first draft.”  

But something big was missing for me with these drafts.   I didn’t have a sense of the whole blog.  I wasn’t sure who exactly was writing – my private self?  my coach self?  I couldn’t possibly massage the drafts into posts without knowing the larger gestalt.  I was stalled.

Then I had the immense luxury of a day with no appointments and no pressing deadlines.  The only item on my calendar was “blog.”  I spent the whole day reading blogs, thinking about blogs, conceiving of my blog.

I thought about blogs while I went to the farmers’ market and bought wonderful fruits and veggies.  I thought about blogging while I drove home, unpacked it all, and then cooked up a storm.  I roasted yellow peppers. I poached chicken breast (I know it’s not a vegetable). 

I made a chicken salad with the chicken breast, the roasted peppers, calamata olives, the sweetest little yellow cherry tomatoes you could ever meet up with, gently sauteed zucchini, and maybe another veggie  or two.  I tossed it with a Dijon vinaigrette I quickly made and refrigerated the whole thing, to be served later on a bed of greens. 

I also made a pureed zucchini-leek soup with lemon, coriander, and a small hit of red pepper, and chilled it.  And I cooked 8 ears of fresh sweetcorn (still at the season’s peak), 3 of would be used at dinner-for-two and the rest would be used over the next 2 days, one way or another. 
 
While my hands were busy with all this good chop-wood-carry-water kind of work that I truly enjoy when I enjoy it, my mind was in deep background, thinking about blogging.  I don’t think I said anything out loud for 6 hours.  The dinner, at least, was going to be good, I thought, whether or not I ever launch this blog. 

But what started to emerge, by the end of the day, was a concept for my blog, a location from which to speak.  I couldn’t have said at the start of the day that that was the missing piece, but as it began to emerge, I recognized it as something I had been lacking. 

When I returned the next morning to my “shitty first draft” of random, roughed-out ideas for blog posts, it no longer looked disjointed (though it still read like a sfd). 

The behind-the-scenes conceptual work I had done while chopping and cooking veggies now provided a framework for containing most of the ideas in the drafts.  I knew which ones to throw out and which ones to keep. I understood where I woud be coming from, to write this blog.  I was no longer stalled. 

Trusting the process is sometimes, in E.L. Doctorow’s words, “like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

If you wait until you can visualize the whole journey, you’ll never get there because you’ll never take the first step

If I had made myself spend the day at the office, I would still be stalled. 

Tapping into your deepest wisdom and creativity most often happens indirectly.  You can’t access those parts of yourself with your mind in cognitive, task-list mode.  When you engage in activity that leaves your mind free, you open up the possibility of hearing from those deeper parts of yourself.  “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next,”    Jonas Salk wrote.

So give your inner task master a day off now and then.  And trust your own process.

My adult daughters have been on my case to learn to text.   Since they text daily as a matter of course, they say it would just be another easy way to be in touch with them.  A compelling argument.  Eventually, compelling enough to convince this recovering systems analyst and technophobe to learn to text.

I was writing my first text to them when somehow the unfinished text got sent off before I finished.   Emily, CEO of a clean tech company, was driving with a potential investor to a meeting when she got my text, which she read immediately.   She told her driving companion that her mother had just sent her first text.  “What did it say?” he asked.  She answered, “5.”