Coach Better by Smelling Roses

For the love of god, let's quit talking about being “crazy busy!” Sure we're busy, but lets stop competing for who is more crazy. The philosopher Hannah Arendt warns that?vita activa?turns people into?animal laborans. Meaning, active lives make us laboring animals.?We ain't mules.

Accepting the label "crazy busy"?is killing our capacity to pause and be present. In hyper mobility of crazy busy, we no longer linger. You know, stop and smell the roses, or pause to appreciate a colleague, or take in the full flavor of our lunch, or dwell on a subject and contemplate. And contemplation isn't a philosophical luxury, it's a competitive advantage.

As we buckle in and fly off to our days of hyperactivity, always on comms, and multitasking, we zoom right past moments of reflection. Throw in this mix a fierce focus on individual achievement, and you get a steady dose of driving self-criticism and gnawing self-doubt. Rather than cultivating mental well-being, we're contributing to mental meltdown - burnout and stress.

My colleague Reinhard Stelter writes that constant pressure to perform turns us into restless nomads, unstable selves losing our bearings. Instead, he writes, we can create and recreate?ourselves; this works through relationships that allow for a natural unfolding, and for our change to reflect our changing contexts.

Coaching gives the gift of reflective lingering; a sacred bubble of time to step off the racing conveyor belt of your day, and dig in for nuanced reflection, the kind of thinking that brings value and substance to thoughts and speech. Coaching includes goals/performance focus, and strengths-based, solution focus, and gets to professional and personal evolution.?

So when you’re coaching your people (and I really hope you are), slow the pace of the conversation and explore meaning, this will guide them to better understand their values in three domains:

• Existential meaning/values – what makes my life valuable and meaningful
• Creative meaning/values – what shall I do or create that is meaningful and valuable
• Situational meaning/values – what is meaningful and valuable about this experience (both pleasant or adverse situations)

Lingering with your direct reports is guaranteed to deepen your dialog, and discover new interpretations and possibilities, and these are doorways to improved performance and innovation. So,

• Create moments to enjoy the art of lingering in your own life.
• Linger in your dialogue with your direct reports.
• Give your attention to the meaning, values and self-concepts revealed in the people’s narrative, rather than just the path to goals, achievement, and solutions to problems.

You can always enjoy the speed of crazy busy, and take time to smell the roses.

In the spirit of leading and learning.