Work-Life Sanity Blog

What it boils down to is learning to to recognize when we are running on empy, to NOTICE IT, to identify it as a valid cue, and then to do something about it.  This requires remembering that being completely fried is not a healthy state of being on any level, and it’s our responsibility to ourselves (and to all the people and projects that depend on us) to get UN-fried.  To replenish, restore, recharge, renew . . . so that we can once again live our best life, which includes doing good work, having good relationships, and experiencing some level of happiness and well-being.

“Time off” doesn’t have to be a luxurious 8 days completely out of the office with no checking email, like I took the last week of June.  Time off can be dinner with a friend, reading a novel over the course of a month, or stepping away from your work for a moment to feel the ground under your feet and take a couple of deep breaths. 

I’m currently in the midst of a growth-and-learning episode with this dynamic, learning it at the next level.  I passed Time Off the Treadmill 303 some time ago, but this is Time off the Treadmill 400, and it’s challenging.  I’ve apparently been running on empty.  I only know this because I am CRAVING more time off, even after taking some very high quality time off last month. 

This is unusual for me.  I’m usually a cheap date when it comes to taking time off.  I can’t remember ever wanting as much time off as I have this summer.  I am choosing to trust that this is a real and valid need, and I am allowing myself much more time off than usual.

My oldest behavior, from years ago, was to respond to wanting time off by berating myself for being so unmotivated, grabbing myself by the collar, and saying to myself with authority, “Get back to work.”  And I did.  (Though I came to see, ultimately, that in that state, my work was inefficient and uninspired.)

My newer behavior illustrates some of what I’ve learned (over oh-so-many iterations):
    a. to notice without judgement my experience of desiring time off
    b. to consider it valid
    c. to investigate how soon I can responsibly take some time off,  and do it 

So I’m taking another week off in August. My business is generally quieter in the summer months than during the year because there’s less training and keynoting.  In past summers I’ve used this “quiet time” to do more writing, catch up on back office work, and develop marketing plans for the coming year.  I’m not going there now.  I’m just allowing myself the time off the track. 

While taking this much time off is out of my comfort zone, it has felt so compellingly right that I am choosing to have no doubts about it.  I have questions, such as when will I catch up on all this back office work?  I allow myself to tolerate having no answer for that.  My inner “Driven Woman” is hungrily, greedily, hopefully wondering if this “fallow” period will give rise to a new book.  I’ve learned to just let her do her thing but not let her dominate the conversation. 

I recognize that as a self-employed person I can take time off more easily than an employed person, but then again there are costs to it, such as not getting paid for vacation days.  So please don’t use my self-employed status as a way to disregard what I’m saying here: “Well sure, SHE can take time off because she works for herself, but I can’t just do that, so I’m blowing off everything she says because her situation is just so totally different from mine.”

There is always a way to take some time off, whether it’s a day or an hour or a minute.  So if you too are craving some time off, find a way to take some!

Lower a standard, re-negotiate an agreement, take a vacation day or a vacation, get some help with a project so you can create more open space for yourself, eliminate some non-priority items from your master list — whatever it take, get what you need. 

If you don’t need time out right now, remember this for when you do.  And enjoy your current state of not having this need!

Here is a simple summary of what I’ve been saying.  I’m calling it The Fallow Law:

The Fallow Law:

• Being completely fried is not a healthy state.

• Like letting a field go fallow regularly to keep it fertile and healthy, you have to give yourself time off in order to stay creatively fertile and emotionally healthy, both of which are precursors to living your best life.

I hope you will use it to support yourself in getting un-fried when you need to. 

If you find that you consistently do not replenish, restore, recharge, or renew . . . perhaps a short round of coaching is in order.  It’s possible that what’s called for are bigger structural changes than you have been willing to look at until now.  It’s also possible that more regular time off the track is all that you need.  Whatever it is that keeps you from getting what you need, I encourage you to take a stand for yourself and get some help.

I had a very rich experience recently.  I was visiting my then-8-week-old grandson at his home in Philadelphia.  I had almost two whole weekdays (just the days, not the evenings) as his sole caretaker.   It was a gift to have this much time with him. 

For me, much about this experience was remarkable.  First, I had cleared my plate completely and was able to be undivided in my attention to him.  My clients knew I was checking email and phone only in the evening, and I was otherwise on vacation from my professional life.  I had no meals to prepare, no errands to run, no one really expecting anything from me.  Life was very simple: it was just about the baby.  And there was no rush.

When my own children were little, even when I was working part-time, even when I knew enough with my second baby to take some maternity leave, there were always competing demands for my attention: my work, the house, meals, my husband, the other child, etc.  

Spending this time with my grandbaby, I had no competing demands, and there was no need to be in a hurry.

What a joyful experience — to be fully present, in the present, with this new little guy.   Granted, being with one’s own first grandchild is a very special, off-the-charts experience.

But so was being undivided and in the present.

It reminded me how much there is to be gained by being fully present to whatever I’m doing, whenever possible.  It reminded me how stressful it is to multi-task– even to just mentally multi-task.  And how in contrast, just being here now, wherever and whatever “here” is, is actually a qualitatively different experience.  And a better one. 

Since returning from Philly I’ve been able to bring some of this consciousness with me.  It’s helped me be in less of a hurry all the time.  It’s also helped me be more singleminded about what I’m doing.  When writing this post, for example, I’ve been able to just work on the post, rather than also feeling pulled in other directions.  

Sometime today or this week or this month, I encourage you to give yourself the gift of just doing one thing at a time.  Have a taste of being here now.  Even if you’re just clearing your desk or composing a simple email, I suspect it will feel better than it usually does.  If you try this while being in conversation with someone, I suspect the shift will be even more palpable.   

Moments of being here now and not rushing can serve as little oases where you can refresh.

Just posted at this link: An interview with me about work-life balance, on Suzanne Blake’s Energy Talk Radio show, Manifesting Money and Career.  Suzanne is a gracious and intuitive host.   Listen in to her interviews with other experts as well.

Fourteen years of coaching professional women have taught me some of the most prevalent patterns of imbalance and the interventions that can restore a sense of well-being and sanity.  

I don’t mean to sound facile about these solutions.  The details are always unique to the individual and difficult for her to see from within the experience.  Moving forward generally happens very slowly.  I don’t believe in a happily-ever-after kind of unconscious happiness, but I passionately believe that some kinds of suffering can be alleviated. 

Here are two patterns of imbalance — experienced as unhappiness — I’ve witnessed with my clients, my friends, and myself, and the course corrections that can make a difference.

1. Feeling out of control, overwhelmed, powerless.  The solution for this  generally involves:  

·     naming it as such, and thereby differentiating it from the feelings of despair, failure, and self-loathing that often accompany it

·     taking back control, increment by increment, wherever possible, by renegotiating agreements, selectively jettisoning obligations, re-prioritizing, and whatever else it takes

As a result, the individual regains firmer ground and some level of control in her life, and feels back in her own power again.  

2. Feeling drained, exhausted, depleted, even sick. 

·     Here too, the place to start is with awareness: name it for what it is, and separate it out from the sense of shame, emptiness, and failure that people often feel as a result of no longer having enthusiasm or passion FOR ANYTHING.  The no-enthusiasm-for-anything syndrome often shows up in people who are very drained and exhausted.

·     Generally what’s also called for is serious rest, recovery, and replenishment which often means cutting back somewhere in order to make room for this. 

In my experience, once people GET that this is what’s going on, that it’s not about personal failure but rather about personal depletion, the reframe is very empowering and they quickly figure out what to do.  They often need support thinking through the pragmatics of it and then implementing it.  Cutting back is particularly difficult for women with a habitual pattern of pleasing others.

As the depletion and exhaustion are replaced with a sense of being nourished and re-charged, at least some of the unhappiness recedes, leaving a generally happier camper.   And a more effective one.

Adequate self-care often results in greater effectiveness, across the board.  This ripple-out effect often surprises the individual, who may feel ”selfish” in administering the self care (often as a last resort).  But it does make sense.  Who’s likely to be the more effective manager, parent, or creative problem-solver: the person who’s exhausted, frazzled, and running on empty or the one whose batteries are charged and whose focus is unambivalent?

If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for your work or your kids.

It’s a no-brainer, but we all forget sometimes.  The nagging, unresolved, unfinished stuff rolling around in our heads saps our energy.   It keeps us from being as effective as we could be because we’re not fully focused on what we’re doing.   For the same reason, it keeps us from enjoying our lives as fully as we could — we’re just not all there for the good stuff. 

Recent findings in brain research reveal that multi-tasking is not an efficient way to work.    Being preoccupied with one thing while doing another is a kind of  multi-tasking.  

While I’m writing this blog post, I’m also thinking about an extended conversation I’m having with my husband.   The background noise of the conversation clogs my writing process and slows me down.  I would be well served to either finish the conversation with him or table it until some specific future time.   If I were to do that, all the energy currently tied up in it would become available to me.  I certainly could use it.

Since finishing the conversation is not an option right NOW, I’m going to plan to do so (or at least resume it ) this evening when we’ll both be home and not working.   Making this decision should open up some bandwidth for me.  I’ll report in at the end of writing this post.

Meanwhile, I want to offer some anecdotal evidence for the point I’m making.  

The nagging, unfinished business under the surface for an accounting consultant I know was that three people on her team were not performing their jobs to the standard she thought was appropriate.  She wasn’t addressing it in any way other than fretting about it. 

Once she articulated it as a problem, she could address it proactively. For each of these employees, she drafted the specifics of what needed to change and initiated conversations with them in which she made it very clear to them what she expected and that this was not optional in any way. 

While she had had prior conversations with them about performance, she felt she had been too vague and general.  This time around, she was absolutely clear. 

The result was that two of the employees immediately started performing to the standard and have been doing so ever since: problem solved.   The third one required training and supervision to perform to the standard, and this training and supervision is currently underway in a structured, scheduled, and monitored configuration.

The secondary results are that the consultant: 
1. no longer feels preoccupied with this issue and has more focus and energy to do her work
2. is pleased with the work she did as a manager
3. is thrilled with the better work that her two employees are doing
4. will have an easier time doing this the next time it comes up in her professional life (and alas, it will)

My bottom line advice is to NOTICE what’s sapping your energy, what’s rolling around under the surface, what’s stressing you.  And then deal with it. 

And yes, I have to say that my own experience of writing this post improved once I decided I would resume my extended conversation tonight.  That allowed me to essentially drop it for now, and that was a good move.

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.

It seems to be Annual Review Season in the lives of several of my clients, so I’m thinking a lot about this subject.

I’m a huge believer in self-acknowledgement in general.  But at annual review season, even moreso. 

Even if you work for an organization that does annual reviews REALLY, REALLY well (and that’s maybe 1% of organizations), and even if you get a REALLY, REALLY great review this year — it’s just not enough acknowledgment.  Why? Because other people don’t know HALF of what you do. 

They’re not there with you on ordinary Tuesday mornings when you navigate a treacherous conversation with an extremely disgruntled client and you somehow manage to turn things around through your listening skills, your relational skills, your technical skills, your integrity, and your sheer endurance.  No one but you even KNOWS what a great save that was and what it required of you!  

But YOU do, and if you were writing your own annual review, you’d get something into it that acknowledged this contribution: the net result, and all that went into it.

No one knows that when you reviewed your notes “one last time” the night before your meeting last week, you came up with a strategy change that would make it a much better meeting.  You went with it, staying up til all hours to make all the other changes your change would require.  And what happened?  To all your staff, it appeared to be just another one of your usual good meetings.  No one knows the degree to which you go the distance. 

But you do.  And if you were writing your own review . . .

So here’s the drill.  Write your own review, for your eyes only.  Acknowledge not only your results, which is the only thing that most people  (including you?) see, but also your behaviors and your personal qualities that are part of the way you work.  

Here are some examples of behaviors that deserve to get acknowledged and rarely do:
You take the time to write a carefully worded email when called for.
You realized you were working inefficiently and took steps to clean it up.
You got timely advice from HR (and followed it) regarding a direct report with performance issues.

Here are examaples of personal qualities to be acknowledged:
You’re reliable, dependable, diligent, and hardworking.
You have high standards and you know when not to be a perfectionist.
You have a great sense of humor.

When you write your own review, be sure to ackowledge your results, behaviors, and personal qualities.  You might consider writing one for work and one for outside of work.   And you don’t have to wait for once a year.

In the Preoccupations  column in today’s New York Times, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes that what women executives do to unwind is . . . NOTHING.  They lust for “chunks of empty space — no expectations, no agendas.” 

It’s not just women executives, I would add.  Any over-scheduled, busy professional would do well to use this strategy for re-charging her batteries.  I use the word “strategy” intentionally, because for most intensely busy people the prospect of doing nothing is complete anathema.  But when understood as a strategy for restoring one’s sanity, it’s more easily considered. 

In today’s post on her Profitable Consultant blog, internet marketing specialist Dianna Huff writes about her own experience regularly ”doing nothing” as a break from her work (as a marketing professional, entrepreneur, and advisor to profitable consultants).  She says the impact of taking such a break is that “I usually come back to the ‘real world’ refreshed, relaxed and focused.”

If you don’t regularly give yourself the gift of a real break like this, you’ll feel some guilt when you start.  But don’t let that keep you from starting.  Start small, with just a few minutes at a time.  It might feel boring at first, and you might be racked with guilt.  But tough it out; it’s worth it. 

“Doing nothing” not only re-charge your batteries, it can also put you into a state of receptivity to your own intuition and creativity.  Albert Einstein said something that applies here: ”The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” 

The truth is, you are not ACTUALLY doing nothing when you are “doing nothing.”  You are simply stepping out of active ”doing” and “thinking” mode,  and that allows other parts of your brain and your being to kick in, in the background.

IN the opening chapter of The Art of Possibility, Roz Zander writes about a life lesson she learned on a white water rafting trip.

The rafting company put people through substantial training before going out on the water.  One key element of the training was “Toes to Nose.”  When you fall out of the raft into the thrashing water, they were taught, bring your toes to your nose and look for the boat.

Toes to nose keeps your feet from getting caught in the rocks below and brings you to the surface, where you can grab an oar or rope from the boat closest to you.  The trainer drummed this mantra into people’s heads til they rolled their eyes.  It had to be completely automatic, he said.

During the actual rafting trip, Roz was thrown into the roiling water.  The sudden shock of cold water, the absolute roar in her ears, the darkness of being submerged!  In the midst of massive sensory overload and the adrenaline rush of mortal crisis, she remembered and executed toes to nose.  Presto!  She was suddenly at the surface, visible to the instructor on the sweeper raft, who pulled her out of the water.

There is great value in having a survival mantra such as this for your everyday life. When crises and demands pile up and you are suddenly underwater . . . it can be a lifesaver to have an automatic instruction for yourself.   The instruction has to be simple enough that you remember it when you’re completely overloaded.

For a software engineer with a work crunch at work and approaching finals in her MBA program, the mantra she finds most useful is “‘Good enough’ is good enough.”  This simple slogan helps her manage her shrill inner perfectionist, who wants perfect results on all fronts, 24/7.  In real life, that’s neither an option nor a requirement.  For example, she doesn’t really need to ace her finals.

An executive director I know recently recognized how drained, miserable, and resentful she is of all the other people she takes such good care of: her staff, clients, board, and husband.   Her new survival instruction is, “Take care of yourself too!”

For an investment banker who takes work home every night but doesn’t do it, much to her own growing panic, the directive that makes a difference is, “Do what you have to do first.  Then do what you want.”

In a post-event interview, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was asked, “How did you feel after you doubled the triple axel?”  She responded (and I paraphrase), ”I’m trained to go right on to the next move.  I don’t have the luxury of thinking about what I just did.  I just moved on.”

I personally am benefitting from ”Just move on.”  There is always time for analysis later, if that’s appropriate.

So . . . what’s your life-saving mantra, and in what situations does it serve you?  Consider drafting a candidate or two to test over the next 6 weeks: simple instructions which could offer you some safety when you get bounced out of the raft.  See if you can come up with your own “toes to nose” to deploy into the New Year.

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.