WHY SLOWING DOWN IS THE KEY TO GETTING MORE DONE

“We give away freely that most precious of resources – our attention – and in doing so; we cheat ourselves out of the gifts that are already here”

– Beth Kempton

Since the beginning of Covid-19, how many times have you heard yourself say - ‘After lockdown, I will start to take a breather’. ‘Once things calm down a bit, I’ll be able to take some time for myself’.

You have been saying that since April...

This magical place of calm has not shown up yet, right?

I know you have every great intention of slowing down but it’s just not happening. There is a fear of allowing yourself some space to take your foot off the accelerator because… what if?

• What if I am not as productive and fall behind?
• What if I become complacent?
• What if my boss thinks I’m slacking?
• What if I land up with more on my plate?

This commitment to slowing down is not limited to Covid-19. Don’t convince yourself you’ll be able to slow down once things have returned to ‘normal’. Most likely, it has always been like this and Covid-19 has shone a bright light on the pace you are operating at. Slowing down does not mean you don’t have to be productive or ignore your responsibilities. Slowing down means consciously inserting some space into your day so you can appreciate them. It is a mindset shift from stress and overwhelm to calm courage. So why even bother to slow down?

If you don’t deliberately decide to change, you will continue to miss out on the special moments in your day. You will have the mindset to get to the outcome and end goal without experiencing any joy in the process. Everything feels rushed and before you know it, it’s 5PM. But did you give yourself a chance to really enjoy the day or was it just another one to get through? When did you last think to yourself ‘Wow, I would love to repeat yesterday’?

This rampant pace is also a catalyst for dropping balls, missing key details and not taking time to think. You are ticking off items on lists but by failing to slow down, you are not giving yourself an opportunity to plan, reflect and be strategic. Ironically because it feels like you don’t the time!

By operating at such a frenetic pace, you miss the glaring holes that could be plugged to prevent the problem rather than this continuous firefighting.

Here are some practices you can implement right now to start savouring your days and make better decisions to get more out of your days:

Rethink your priorities

‘To get the right things done, choosing what to ignore is as important as where to focus’. - Greg McKeown

There is a false sense of how much time is actually available to us during this period. One thinks ‘I have the whole day to spend time on something because I have eliminated travel time’. When in reality, you are only going to get a few hours to yourself especially if you are a parent or looking after other family members.

In this limited time available, trying to get it all done will leave you exhausted and on the edges of burnout. However, taking time to plan and being incredibly deliberate about what you need to accomplish in a day, will move you in the direction of your goals.

Don’t fall into the false paradigm of more is better especially under these circumstances. You need to accept that sometimes getting out one good email or making one successful call is more effective than endless busy work.

In order to redefine your priorities, you need to take a step backwards and ask yourself:

• How do I want to show up right now?
• Who do I want to emerge as after lockdown?
• How do I want my family to remember this time?
• How do I want my family and colleagues to remember me?

When you really spend time on these questions, you realise what matters most is the experience you are creating for them and yourself.

This is why making time to redirect how you spend your time and course correct your current way of being is so important. Think about it...

• Do you have less quality time even though you are together 24/7?
• Are you really present during the kid’s bedtime stories and dinner conversations or was your mind in the proposal and tomorrow’s status meeting?

When you decide what really matters, you can give yourself permission to ignore what doesn’t.

Reframe how you see your goals

“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

- Thomas Merton

Being in the personal development world, I spend a lot of time working on myself. I meditate and journal daily and visualise about the big goals I want to achieve.

However, I realised that the manner in which I was approaching my visualisation was actually causing more stress and anxiety for myself.

In the book, Letting Go, David Hawkins says the way to think about our future goals is “Surrender the emotion of desire and, instead, merely choose the goal, picture it lovingly, and allow it to happen because we see that it is already ours”.

I had moved from the place of picture it lovingly to forcing it. I was over doing the process and it came more from a place of fear than love. I wasn’t enjoying the process of my work but rather focusing solely on the outcome of how quickly I can get there and criticising myself why I wasn’t there yet.

When I gave myself some space to identity what I was doing, I realised it was a means to control my world because of the uncertainty Covid-19 has brought. It was a false sense of control because we can never predict or control the future but I could control my thoughts about it. However, done to the extreme, this will be more destructive than productive.

The purpose of goal setting is about exciting yourself on a future possibility, not making the present miserable because you haven’t achieved it yet. The objective of visualisation is to create a future self that is so exciting and compelling, it propels you to make better decisions in the present.

The way I have changed my view is to picture the kind of work I want to be doing rather than a specific image to fixate on. If you obsess on one specific picture that ‘must’ happen, you don’t see the opportunities that present themselves because it doesn’t fit your mould of what reality ‘should be’. You have now created a solid map and anything that deviates from your map is perceived as ‘wrong’.

Being too prescriptive doesn’t allow you to see what else is possible. The advice I was given which I would like to pass on is to consider the term ‘direction’. I am walking in the direction of this specific area of my life and I am open to what presents itself on the journey. Maybe I was focused on going straight but a turn opened up to the right. If I am open to how the goal will unfold, then I am open to turning right and see where it leads me.

Why does this matter?

When you are striving towards a bigger vision, don’t let the pressure to get there in your rigid time frame cause you to motor through your days. Executive Leadership Coach, Brendon Burchard suggests we adopt the attitude of striving satisfied. Have a vision that you are working towards but acknowledge your successes and achievements now. See your actions today as stepping stones forward, not a waste of your time or insignificant.

Slowing down enables you to get clarity on your vision, on what you really want and often it is the simple things that bring us the most happiness.

Take time out to reflect that the goals you are working towards are in fact what you want and not what you think you should want. Perhaps a certain title sounds amazing on paper but what will that mean practically? If there is a bigger sacrifice on your day to day joy, then think carefully where you are aiming your ladder.

Set up an accountability system – with yourself.

“Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.” - Peter Drucker

For how many months or years have you sat on a Sunday evening, your birthday or New Years Eve and told yourself, “This is the day I make a change”?

Most of your day is about having a list of priorities for work and family which you work through diligently.

What about creating a new kind of list? One that will hold yourself to new standards to help you change your behaviour, triggers and patterns that no longer serve you?

Marshall Goldsmith, author of Triggers, suggests we set up daily accountability questions to make progress on goals that matter to us. These questions announce our intention of who we are striving to become and that by implementing active self-questioning daily, we can trigger a new way of interacting with our world.

Some example include:

• Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?
• Did I do my best to find meaning today?
• Did I do my best to be happy today?
• Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?
• Did I do my best to be fully engaged today?
• Did I do my best to have a healthy diet?
• Did I do my best to pause between activities?

When you have to face yourself at the end of each day and rate your behaviour out of ten, you start to pay more attention to your daily choices.

If you consistently get a three out of ten for finding meaning in your day, you will start to become more aware of the behaviours that need to shift to bring about the change you want.

“Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. If we make the effort, we will get better. If we don’t, we won’t” – Marshall Goldsmith

We are all instant gratification junkies and everything we want is a click away. When it comes to our goals and habits, we expect the same. Instant downloads of skills and streaming of new bodies so we can avoid the discomfort of doing things differently.

The daily questions remind us that change doesn’t happen overnight. It is micro wins done consistently over time that will create progress, momentum and ultimately change.

Don’t check your phone the first hour of your day

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man”. - Elbert Hubbard

When you alarm clock goes off in the morning, what’s the next step of action you take? Do you have a self-care activity scheduled for yourself or do you immediately log into Outlook, WhatsApp and start scrolling your news feeds and social channels?

If you chose the latter, this may be the reason you are working at such an extreme rate. This is a really destructive way to start your day because you are immediately putting yourself into reaction mode; setting the trajectory for the rest of your day. Working through other people’s urgencies, reacting to every ‘pressing’ mail that comes in ultimately leaves you overwhelmed and stressed.

Start the day by choosing yourself first and create some space in the morning so you can slow down and focus on what really matters to you, even if it is just 15 minutes. Establish the habit of waking up earlier and an additional habit will emerge – the habit of being nice to yourself and creating sacred time for daily acts of kindness to yourself.

You may need to stop binge watching Netflix until 11PM in order to enable yourself to wake up earlier. You may argue that TV is your downtime but consuming endless hours until late at night is not the best way to slow down. You may be sitting in one place but you aren’t giving yourself even five minutes to pause, reflect and course correct on what isn’t working in your daily schedule. It is a means to pause but you are probably sitting there thinking about everything that needs to happen that week and how you wish you had more time for yourself.

Have empathy

“It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. - Pema Chodron

Empathy is a critical skill to develop and harness through this time. It is taking a moment and thinking how others around you – including family, friends and work colleagues must be experiencing Lockdown. See the situation through their lens and point of view in order for you to understand why they are reacting in a specific way that may be out of character to their normal way of being.

Slowing down and taking the time to investigate your feelings and theirs will be the difference between constructively helping them work through it or launching into the default reaction of criticism, blame and threats.

My daughter wakes up really early around 5 am and one morning she wanted to wake up my husband who had had been up till late the night before. I snapped at her to leave him to sleep and she went off to her room. The next thing my son comes running to me in tears that she refuses to play with him.

Instead of launching into the usual blaming mode, I slowed down and realised what had happened. I asked her if she was cross with me for snapping at her about waking her dad and she said yes. I explained to her, she is allowed to have her ‘cross’ feeling but it isn’t fair to take out the cross feeling on her brother. Next time she has a cross feeling, she can come to me to talk about it.

She understood what I explained to her and the next thing, they went off to play. She left the situation understanding her feelings better and how to deal with it when it happens again. All because I took a minute to slow down.

Take a pause before responding

“The right word may be effective but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause” – Mark Twain

Covid-19 has provoked every emotion on the spectrum available to us. And even having empathy can still leave you feeling frustrated, annoyed and out of balance. When you can feel yourself getting a bit heated, it is vital to insert a space by pressing the mental pause button.

Brendon Burchard, author and trainer, has a wonderful approach and says ‘Ask yourself – how would my higher self-respond right now?’ It gives you the distance to move into mindful responding rather than out of control reacting.

We are all a little on edge right now. If you receive a rude email or WhatsApp message – slow down. Do not respond immediately.

You will say something you regret and you can never take it back. Give yourself a few hours or even a day to cool off. When you can respond from a place of fact rather than emotion, you can re-engage the conversation clearly. And best to do it telephonically than text or email. Now more than ever is the time for real connection.

I know it’s tough in the moment, especially when you are stressed and overwhelmed. You can actually outsource this pause to technology – set an alarm to go off throughout the day reminding you of who you want to be. Think about those trigger moments in your day like doing homework, kids teeth or before a courageous conversation. It is a way to interrupt your default pattern.

The objective is to set a daily intention of how you want to show up for your family and loved ones. I set an alarm every day for 6PM reminding me to be patient, kind and nurturing. Because at that time of the day, when I am tired and they think it’s funny to play games at teeth time – I need a gentle nudge to remind me of what really matters.

Choose your words

“Words are free. It's how you use them that may cost you." - Anonymous

The mind is a super computer and will do what you instruct it to do. Marissa Peer, author and psychologist, tells us that one of the rules of the mind is that “Everything you feel is the result of just two things: 1. The pictures you make in your head. 2. The words you say to yourself. Your mind does not care if what you tell it is good, bad, true, false, healthy unhealthy, or right or wrong, it accepts and acts on your words regardless”.

I started to consciously ‘thought watch’ myself and I have a bad habit of saying ‘I’m going to quickly get that done, let me hurry and check this email before lunch’.

By using these words, I kept subconsciously putting myself under this false pressure.

Think of yourself as a diffuser but instead of beautiful and calming oils, you fill your diffuser with words. Are you using words like choose, want, happiness, joy… or are you loading your diffuser with words like ‘rush, stress, must, should, need to, hurry’?

This permeates through the house and affects not only your moods but everyone around you as well. Start to become more aware of the words and phrases you are repeating throughout the day and if they are not serving you, switch them out for more positive ones.

Embrace play

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” - George Bernard Shaw

A powerful way to slow down is letting yourself play. If you have kids, it is the most wonderful thing you can do to force you out of reaction mode and into presence. I realised I had to learn how to play – you assume it’s an obvious thing to do because you were once a kid.

When it came to a ‘doing’ task like Lego or a puzzle, I could sit and enjoy that with them no problem. But then my daughter asked me to play dolls. I literally had to ask her how to play, what was I meant to do? How did the game go? I found it really difficult to get into a mode of ‘being’. The ‘doing’ was no problem – there are rules and a roadmap for those activities.

It sounds so silly but I was worried about doing it wrong. Where is the check list of how I am meant to do it? We are so task driven with bullet points and to-do lists and stuck in the box checking mode. We don’t allow ourselves to just be.

Play doesn’t have to be games with kids. What are you doing to create some fun for yourself every day or on the weekend?

Are you giving yourself space to do something frivolous with no outcome attached to it?

It could be games with friend’s online, board games with a loved one, a sport, adult colouring?

Author and time management expert, Laura Vanderkam says that time perception turns out to be all about memory. ‘The more memory units we have from any span of time, the longer it appears to be. That’s why the first day of a vacation somewhere exotic seems so long. Your brain has no idea what it needs to know in the future, so it’s remembering all of it. All these memories make the time expand.

The opposite is also true. When time isn’t memorable we don’t remember it. When too much sameness stacks up, whole years can disappear into memory sinkholes. We have no answer to the question “why is today different from other days?” and so the day is forgotten’.

By giving yourself permission to play, you will naturally slow down and build in special time to appreciate the days and break free of the continuous grind. This is how you create memories – it is in the out of the ordinary things we do that makes a day stand out to us. During the limited resources and locations available to us during this time, think out of the box. A weekday evening picnic or breakfast in the back yard would be out-of-the-ordinary.

What home bound adventure will you plan to stretch the experience of time?

Develop mindfulness of emotions

"This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically. If you can truly know yourself, you will begin the journey of transformation". - Deepak Chopra

Think back to when you made a bad decision – you lost your temper, emailed the wrong person, hit reply to all when you were not meant to.

Now think about your emotional state at the time.

A great acronym to be aware of the most dangerous states is HALT - hungry, angry, lonely or tired. When you are in one of these states, do the immediate step to fix the problem.

What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” However It takes an awareness of the state first before you know how to respond appropriately.

Start to pay more attention when you are stressed and flustered and ask yourself ‘is this the best state to write that mail? Get out that urgent quote? Have that courageous conversation?’.

Mindfulness is not just about cultivating an awareness of your emotions but also an awareness of your triggers. Your trigger could be a time of the day, a specific activity, a person who usually gets you stirred up. Mindfulness enables you to identify the trigger before you become emotionally reactive.

William Ury, author of ‘Getting to Yes with Yourself’ provides a great strategy to dealing with these triggers and emotions. He says we need to go to our own private mental ‘balcony’. The balcony is a metaphor for a mental and emotional place of perspective, calm, and self-control.

Ury says, “This is the point: whenever you feel yourself triggered by a passing thought, emotion, or sensation, you have a simple choice: to identify or get identified. You can observe the thought and “identify” it. Or you can let yourself get caught up in the thought, in other words, “get identified”.

How do you practically do this? Ury suggests the following approach:

‘Imagine sitting at a kitchen table. As each familiar thought or emotion such as anxiety or fear, shame or pride shows up, I offer it an imaginary seat. I have learned to welcome all customers, no one excluded. I seek to treat them as the old friends or acquaintances that they are. As the kitchen table fills up, I listen to the free flowing conversation of feelings and thoughts because naming them neutralizes their effect on you and helps you to maintain your state of balance and calm. As soon as you name the character in the play, you distance yourself from him or her.

This simple practice of putting a little space around our thoughts and emotions enables us to experience them with a detachment that frees us from the compulsion to act them out.”

When I start an online training session, I use a tool called ‘A Minute To Arrive’. I invite all the participants to take a deep breath and bring themselves into the room. It is the invitation to let go of the day’s activities, irritations, stresses and give themselves permission to be fully present in session. Try inserting this practice into your day before each activity; it is a way to press the reset button and check in with yourself.

Practice contentment in the moment

"If you don’t have time for things that matter, stop doing things that don’t." — Courtney Carver

I know this sounds very Zen but hear me out. If you don’t consciously manage your mind, it will manage you.

This is an opportunity to reconnect to loved ones as well as ourselves. I was doing some writing this morning and my son asked if I can help with his homework. I put the laptop away and we sat together chatting while he did his work. I made a conscious decision to practice contentment by reminding myself ‘I get to…’ I get to sit with him and spend quality time together.

The alternative is frustration and annoyance of all the things ‘I could and should be doing’ and he would be left feeling rejected. There is nothing easy about this time – it is filled with real stresses and uncertainty. When you can slow yourself down in the moment and create a default thought of ‘I get to’, you are reminded of what is really important.

By developing the art of contentment, you are training yourself to practice happiness in the moment. This practice becomes a secret treasure map to hidden nuggets you may have otherwise missed. For example, when I doing my sons teeth the other night, I was focusing on getting to the end of the process so we could move onto stories and bedtime.

In between finishing brushing and floss, he decided this is a great time for a chat. Previously, I would get quite frustrated because I just wanted to finish and get on with it – I was tired by this point in the day as we all are. I reminded myself ‘I get to’… and really enjoyed the chat we were having instead of rushing it. We landed up having a special discussion and he shared some important thoughts with me.

Now, it has become an almost sacred time in the day where he really opens up to me. Don’t motor through the day to get to the end of the task but slow down and relish in the process.

If you are writing a book or learning a new skill, don’t force your way through the process. The real wisdom comes from the day to day challenges, developing the skills and learning about yourself in the process. Notice the default thoughts that arise? Pay attention to how you navigate the challenges. This is where true growth happens.

Conclusion

Slowing down seems counter intuitive to your reality. It feels like it will create more pressure and it’s a luxury at this point. But take a moment and think how you will feel if you don’t.

• What moments will you miss out on?
• What relationships may be affected?
• How is your health going to suffer?
• What is it costing you financially and emotionally?

Each day is made up of micro choices; instead of deciding where to spend your time; decide where you want to invest your time.

Ultimately, it is about making the choice to do today in happiness - everyday.

Here's to slowing down to make more space for yourself.