MBA Lesson 1: Choosing to do everything means choosing to be lazy. How to slow down with intent to speed up your career.

I grew up in an environment that valued hard work.

Time after time the hard work paid off. Studying harder meant better grades. Better grades meant landing betters jobs. Hard work in my jobs meant appreciation from bosses and quick promotions.

But then it all stopped. And I had no idea why.

This was around 7 years into my work where I had established my reputation at work. I was getting invited to meetings with the bigwigs and had work to keep me working hard and busy for years. I worked on more and more projects and the hours stretched well into the night.

But something changed. The hard work and the laboured results no longer meant predictable success in my career.

Having met many people in the MBA, I know this is not a unique feeling. The career rocket was firing all cylinders harder than ever, but yet it wasn’t getting any higher.

I was getting frustrated at work, and the frustration manifested as anger towards my employer, bosses, and ultimately myself. I know I am not alone in this as I brooded with my peers. The system is unfair and broken we moaned constantly to ourselves.

And then 2 meetings in my MBA changed my career.

One of the most transformative points in my MBA was getting a career coach. For me this was, Maite de Miguel Artaza . Up to that point, I had never ventured into being coached – I never saw the point. The MBA made it mandatory to attend 2 sessions, the rest were voluntary. So I gave it a try.

Maite had an uphill battle with me but like all great coaches they help to open new doors in me that I never thought existed. I had been running a million miles an hour in my career up to that point – through coaching Maite helped me slow down to speed up.

Slowing down:

Slowing down with intent means creating time to self-reflect on: where am I going, and how am I spending my energy in the next moment, the next month, the next year into achieving it?

Before my coaching sessions, slowing down felt like giving up. But I had learnt slowing down with intent is anything but that.

Slowing down with intent is incredibly difficult because it requires you to accept you have limited abilities. By being busy you can hide behind the work and not face into the emotions you’re afraid of.

• It’s easy to say yes to an extra project. You get to avoid upsetting the other person or carry the fear of missing. It’s much harder to say no so you can dedicate your energy to completing your existing projects to a high degree.
• It’s easy to say yes to redoing your junior’s work. You get to avoid having an honest conversation with them that could break their confidence and it would be faster to redo the work than to teach them. It’s much harder to be a mentor and provide feedback that will hurt in the short term but help them flourish in their career.
• It's easy to say yes to attending that extra meeting. You get to maintain your appearance of being dedicated and important enough to get invited. It’s much harder to delegate the meeting to a junior knowing they might be out of depth but it will help them and your team grow in the long run.
• It’s easy to say I’ll just stick it out for another half year. You get to avoid admitting to your boss that you haven’t been truthful on how unhappy you’ve been at work or their leadership. It’s much harder to have a candid conversation so you can find more meaningful work and direction at work.

How you can learn to slow down

Slowing down with intent is about being painfully truthful with yourself.

When you remove the busyness, you can no longer hide behind your emotions, you can no longer blame, you are left only with the choice to be honest with yourself.

This is a journey, it’s not a call for you to decline all your meetings from tomorrow onwards. Rather, start by writing your goals for the next 6 months (if you don’t do this already) and at the end of everyday recount what you did and how it ties in with your 6 month goals. If you did work that has no bearing on your goals, ask, why did you do it? If it was urgent and vital, be truthful and reflect if it really was that critical or if you did it simply to avoid a discomforting emotion.

Soon, you’ll develop a natural reflex before jumping into new work (at work or at home) to quickly ask am I doing this to avoid something or am I doing this with intent because it is delivering me closer to my goals.?

When you’re 7+ years into working in a corporate environment, your peers work as hard as you do, they will just be as talented as you are, and the same amount of grit. If they didn’t, they would have left. Proceeding onwards is not about working even harder, it’s about being able to slow down with intent to make the hard decisions. Your ability to consistently make the right hard decisions and follow through is the foundation of you making impact.

We can’t be all things to all people. We have finite energy, physical and emotion. While we will always want to be consideration, remember, other’s emotions and bad decisions are not our responsibility.