How would you describe the workplace of 2019? Answers will vary enormously depending on your work culture and environment, but something that most of us will see is a sense of urgency, jumping from one thing to another and racing to keep up. Too many emails to read, people to get back to, projects on the go, influencers to follow, blogs to read (this one included!), changes in your industry to be aware of, not to mention how busy most of our personal lives have become. We live in an amazing time of abundance on so many levels, yet most of us are challenged to appreciate and enjoy it as we fight just to keep up.
Why? Because we’re all so ‘busy’!
Being “busy” has long been seen as a badge of honour. Clearly if you are busy you are contributing to your organization and community. Socially, we have a strong negative reaction towards laziness or those who don’t contribute.
And yet being busy takes a different toll. Busy easily becomes frenzied, distracted and stressed, making it hard to do any one thing well or to see new options. We are an inch deep and a mile wide. It is also hard to see what matters, and everything becomes a priority (which becomes an oxymoron). This frenzy leads to a body and mind in a state of fight or flight as you race to keep up, poor sleep, degrading health, frustrating relationships and not much fun.
Not to mention that we are likely to infect others with their own version of frenzy, etc. A stressed and busy leader will likely foster stressed and busy employees, whereas a leader with a calm presence creates space for others to slow down and focus.
Why Stillness, Calm and Focus Matter More Than Ever
If you watched Kawhi Leonard during the Raptors 2019 NBA playoff run, you saw it. If you read The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, describing what it is like to be a race car driver, you got a glimpse of it. If you have read about what it takes for an elite Navy SEALs team to carry out a mission, you have felt it. In all of these cases, be it the game, the race or the mission, things are moving very quickly and the stakes are high. So much so that, if those individuals allowed their brains to go into distraction mode or to overthink things, they would lose the flow of high performance, or worse, die! And yet, in this high speed, high pressure environment, these high performing individuals are calm and focused.
And this isn’t just about elite athletes and Navy SEALS. Observe an artist, musician, keynote speaker, interviewer, or just about anyone who is fully engaged in their work (and often very good at what they do) and you will see it. There is a sense of stillness and quiet behind the activity. There is a sense of calm presence and complete focus in the moment. Hopefully, as you read this, you remember a time when you yourself experienced this focus.
As Ryan Holiday puts in his recent book Stillness is the Key, stillness is “To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.”
Yet how often do you have a sense of this at work? In a meeting? In a conversation? It may be there at times, but it is far rarer than is ideal. In a world of speed, we forget that we have time to be still and how important it is to our best performance.
One of the reasons this is so rare is because we are all caught up in the race. We see most of our peers, friends and families running the same race and this way of living has simply become the new normal. When we are used to running fast, stillness feels wrong. It feels like you really are missing out, not keeping up, not busy enough, etc. And somehow within this race, we have all created an implied expectation that we are available and immediately responsive - all of the time. Crushing any hope of stillness.
What’s the Fix?
First, there is nothing wrong with moving quickly. It’s good to have a sense of purpose, have ambitious goals and feel the drive to achieve them. In fact, that is exactly what we are after. We can have a lot of movement, speed and activity from that place. Yet, there needs to be clarity and calmness behind it all and quieter moments between the movement. The calmness helps us choose where to place our focus and to control how we respond, while the clarity component makes it is easy to say “no!” to distractions that take us away from what is important.
Here are some tools that can help you:
1. Shift your mindset or identity. Try to see yourself as someone who carries a sense of calm with them, no matter what is happening around you. Pause between tasks or during transitions and see yourself (actually visualize yourself) moving through the next part of your day with a calm presence.
2. Strengthen your stillness ‘muscles’. Leverage the mindset shift you made in Step 1 and then practice slowing down at times so that you can bring more stillness, calm and focus into your next activity. Purposely pause before a meeting or conversation. Purposely create a sense of stillness before starting a hard task or activity.
3. Have a motto or slogan to keep you on track. Mottos or slogans are simply words or phrases that we say repeatedly to help regroove our thinking, making it easier to pop out of Autopilot and find the new behaviour. Simply saying the word “calm” changes how you engage in the moment. Or saying “there is space for this”, expands your sense of space and possibility.
4. Decide what is most important. Make one BIG decision to eliminate a thousand little decisions. Much of what distracts us and erodes stillness is giving our focus to too many things. Many of which are unimportant ‘noise’. Pausing to be clear on what is most important gives you clarity. This level of clarity allows you to say “no!” or "not now" to many of the distractions, freeing you up to have more spaciousness, stillness and calm for those activities you do engage in.
5. Practice. Practice not filling every moment of your day with stimulation. Our devices and technology allow us to fill our open moments with email, social media, news feeds, etc. Consume less and use the time to cultivate moments of stillness and calm. These aren't wasted productive moments, they are allowing you to be more productive when you fully engage in your next task. You can also practice journaling, meditation, walking with open awareness (just taking it all in) to grow your ability to be OK with stillness.
“The quieter you become,
the more you are able to hear.”
Rumi
This will definitely feel awkward or even uncomfortable at first. However, I challenge you to embrace the discomfort and aim to be different! You can still move with pace, but there is a clarity and calm behind it all. Those who do this are increasingly rare … and what is rare is often most valuable. Aim to take a different stand than those who are “busy” and see what becomes of it for you.
Conclusion
Here is a quick test to conclude. You made it this far and I thank you for your time. During the few minutes it took for you to get to this point in the article, how many distractions did you face? Did your phone buzz? Were you interrupted by email notifications? Or were you distracted by your own thoughts? Did you have the space to even read it in one sitting? Did you skim through trying to extract the nuggets as fast as possible?
If you didn’t feel stillness as you went through this, pause right now, take a slow easy breath, say something like “calm” or “relax” or “there is space for this” in your mind as you exhale and, for the next 15 seconds (even that will feel like forever), do nothing. Then with intention, finish reading the last paragraphs.
Stillness, calm and focus are not dirty words. Being busy is the dirty word! Our highest performance in any domain is found when we have the stillness and calm to see things clearly, rather than just simply knocking the task off the list. It’s about drawing upon the clarity, presence and agility to move very quickly when we need to. It’s about having the stillness and presence to genuinely connect with the people in our world.
How about you? What would your world look like if you brought more stillness, calm and focus to it? Please feel free to share your comments.
I teach people how to be more resilient, focused and connected to the people in their lives. I work with a wide cross-section of busy professionals, including CEOs, senior managers, lawyers, accountants, engineers, teachers, academics and mechanical contractors. To learn more about me and how I teach people to be more resilient, focused and connected to the people in their lives, please schedule a FREE consultation with me HERE.
If you are interested in taking a stand for more stillness in your world, I recommend books like Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday, Essentialism by Greg McKeown and Deep Work by Cal Newport to help you see past the noise and busyness.