overwhelm

March 20, 2015 by Christine

The Three Principles: A Different Kind of Approach to Wellbeing

There’s a problem with much of the wellbeing advice.

It’s this: it’s based on a misunderstanding of how things work. It deals with the symptoms of being out of balance, rather than allowing you to see that emotional, physical and spiritual balance is your natural state.

The philosophy that wellness is our fundamental nature isn’t new. It’s intrinsic to ancient Chinese and other traditions. It’s the essence of homeopathic medicine. But it’s being refreshed as a concept right now by a group of people I’ll call Three Principles Practitioners.

3Ps has an unusual history. A Scottish welder by the name of Syd Banks who emigrated to Canada had a series of powerful insights that caused him to quit welding and start teaching.

The story goes that he himself had felt far from psychologically well. He’d gone in search – as I guess so many of us do – for solutions that would help him feel better. But something a colleague said to him served as a kind of awakening. What he began to see that he was looking in the wrong places for answers.

Inside-Out

One of the first things he understood was that he’d been holding a completely wrong understanding of how things work.

He’d been working on the basis – as I guess we all do – that the world happens outside-in. That things outside us affect how we feel and what we think. But he saw that, instead, we ourselves are the creators of our experience.Which is not to say that shit doesn’t happen in our lives, but it’s what we then make of it that affects our wellbeing.

Let’s look at some examples:

An important client gives notice on their contract with you. The markets crash. Your son has a tantrum. You might respond with panic, depression, or anger; in part because that’s how you’ve been programed to respond by the outside world.

Traditional wellbeing or stress management advice will tend to focus on the event that’s “causing” your stress. It might offer you a mantra like “success lives in the land of failure” to help you get through. It might advise you to meditate to try to alleviate your depression. It might teach you relationship tactics for dealing with teenagers.

There’s nothing in essence wrong with any of this. It may even have a temporary feel-good effect.

But 3Ps thinking looks in a somewhat different direction.

See, clients sometimes quit. The market can be volatile at times. Children can behave as they will.

But the stress is not in the situation unless you choose to see it there. I know that it looks and feels as if it’s outside you. But it’s not.

We’ve just all been spoofed by an illusion of how things are for centuries.

3 Principles

Beyond this, Banks began to see that, underneath all the outcome-oriented psychology, all the personality theories, all the philosophies and religions are three fundamental principles.

What’s a principle?

Before we go on, let’s look at what we mean by the word “principle” in this context.

For Banks, a principle is a rule that always applies. We’ve come, through the years, and via the genius of certain key people, to understand other principles about life.

For a long time, for example, it was believed that the world was flat; that it had a finite boundary; and that if anyone was to go near that boundary, they’d fall off. You can imagine, back in the day, that if folks were moving around a lot, they may be a little preoccupied to make sure that they didn’t accidentally throw themselves into oblivion.

Greek philosophers in the 6^th and 5^th Centuries BC proposed otherwise. But it took Aristotle in 330BC to prove by observation that the earth was spherical. Now we take the globe for granted. That’s a principle.

Gravity is another example. The legend goes that Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree one day when an apple fell to the ground while he was reflecting on the forces of nature. This led him to explore that there’s a force required to change the speed or direction of a moving object. Today we accept that gravity is the principle that keeps us firmly on the ground; is one of the factors that allows planes to fly; and is what enables our planet to stay in orbit around the sun. Another principle.

I guess you get the point.

The world is not sometimes spherical and sometimes not.

Gravity isn’t sometimes in play and sometimes not.

And Banks introduced the three principles in this context.

Three Principles

So what are they?

Thought is a human principle. It’s always working through us taking form, often on the basis of what’s going on moment to moment in our lives.

We’ll most commonly recognize it as the mental chatter that goes on in our heads 24/7. But it’s also what’s behind the conclusions we come to about this or that.

You can look at what appears to be an impossibly busy day and interpret that as meaning you’re going to be stressed out. Or you can look at it as just a day with a lot to do. In the first scenario you may go through that day finding everything difficult and feeling unable to give anything your full attention. In the second you may choose to give your attention to one thing at a time. In the latter case, you may be surprised at what you get through and how you feel about it. In the former you may reach the end of the day feeling wrecked.

The day’s demands are no different, it’s how you thought, and hence felt about them that creates the differing experiences.

On that point, thinking and feeling are two sides of the same coin. If your feeling is off somewhere, the genesis of your upset will always be some off thinking.

Feel anxious? You’ve got some anxious thinking somewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with feeling anxious, by the way. Anxiety is part of the human condition. But sometimes it’s just worth asking yourself where in your thinking your creating it.

Consciousness is another principle. It’s that moment by moment by moment quality of our lives that gives us the experience of being alive.

But most of us don’t spend our lives in the present moment. Far from it, we live thinking of things in the past: aching back to times that felt happier; replaying conversations to wonder what would have happened had we said something smarter; looking at how things played out on a particular occasion to gain some indication of how they’ll play out this time.

Or we’re way out there in the future: the ambitious goals we want for ourselves; upcoming events and how we’ll be at them; holidays and retirement and how different life will be then.

People often paralyze themselves with anxiety about what might or might not happen in the future.

“What if I do this and it doesn’t work out?” is a common thing I hear from clients. I tell them they’re getting ahead of themselves. They’re not in that future moment yet. They’re here now. If they stay present and pay attention to their own wisdom, they’ll know what to do in the moment. Won’t automatically mean that future-stress goes away. But it does help just to know that if you trust the flow of life, things have an uncanny way of taking care of themselves.

Speaking of which…

Mind is the third and the universal principle. It’s the principle that knows that there’s a greater intelligence than us at work in our world. Some people call it God, others Spirit, or just the Universe. It’s the force behind today’s solar eclipse, for example. The force behind the existence of life. The force behind the unfolding of everything from flowers to the shape of our lives.

In all the noise and through all the chatter, it can be difficult to listen to and to hear mind. But it’s there working in any case.

Why share all of this?

I’m sharing all of this with you because sometimes the wellbeing advice becomes just another part of the noise. It can become another set of things to do when you’re already busy enough. From a 3Ps perspective there’s nothing you need to do. Our systems, it turns out, are self-correcting. All you need is bring your awareness to how things are working and you’ll have whatever insights or discoveries you need to realign. That alone is a refreshing thought.

Like we said last week, wellbeing is a place to come from. Not a place to get to. Like our creed says, wellbeing is our natural default position.

And I wonder, what changes, and what become possible for you as you hear that?

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 13, 2015 by Christine

Wellbeing: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

Stress levels are on the up.

Recent surveys show that 54% of Brits have rising stress levels, and that 8 in 10 US workers are feeling under increasing pressure at work. Many of us, it seems, are so consumed by what we’re doing that it’s affecting our health and happiness.

Not surprising, then, that talk about wellbeing is also in vogue. At a macro level ill health and less than great productivity affects the economy at a time when it’s still getting back to pre-recession performance.

And while all the high-level, organization level stuff is interesting to me, I’m more interested here in what you, as an individual leader, entrepreneur or creative can do to support your own personal wellbeing. Because, the way we look at it, it’s fundamental to your ability to innovate, compete and perform at your best out there in the world.

If you don’t nurture it, I’d argue, you’re under-performing. Indeed you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.

Wellbeing

But what is wellbeing? So, the Oxford Dictionary puts it this way:

The state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.

I’d go a little further than that.

Way I see it, wellbeing is a measure of how you feel about your life. It’s a holistic thing that has deep roots in all areas of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

If you Google the word “Wellbeing”, you’ll come up with about 52 million results. Look at a lot of the key articles and they’ll talk to you about the tools you can use to help you in your quest for wellness. Of course, so many of us are so keen to improve our wellbeing that we’ll try all kinds of things. A lot of them are not sustainable. Here’s why:

So much of the advice is written on the assumption that wellbeing as a place to achieve; something you can work towards if only you follow this or that anti-stress tactic.

But what if that was wrong?

What if wellbeing is something we already have? A place to come from. Our natural preset position. A state you can nurture and enhance.

Regardless of your current health or happiness, just notice how it feels to consider that you’re already okay. That there’s nothing you need to do or to fix in order to be well. Take the pressure off yourself to try to be well, and just be well already!

That framing kind of changes everything.

Nurturing Wellbeing

From that place, then, we believe there are 4 ways in which you can enable and support your wellbeing. They are:

Develop a few core practices that enable wellness. These could be as simple as limiting the amount of coffee or alcohol you drink each day; observing routine bedtime and waking up time; drinking a couple of litres of water a day; avoiding sugar.
Develop your consciousness about the quality of your thinking. Thought, as we’ll find out, is one of the fundamental principles of life. It’s a never-ending stream that flows through our brains. That’s a given and, at core, it’s not the problem. The problem is then what we think about our thinking, and the affect that has on us at a feeling level.
Create some basic habits and rituals to keep your wellbeing a priority for you. This moves wellbeing-supportive behaviors from the realm of chore, to the realm of routine and therefore makes them things you do automatically.
Reframe what it means to you to be successful. Many professionals have big ambitions. No harm it that. But sometimes we attach conditions to our ambitions that make these once laudable goals toxic and therefore stressful to achieve.

If there’s one of these that weighs more heavily than the others, it’s the point about thinking. We’ll be digging into this, and saying why in the weeks to come. So make sure you don’t miss the subsequent articles by getting your name on our VIP email list here!

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 6, 2015 by Christine

Wellbeing: Without It Nothing Works

There’s a lot of buzz around the business community these days about wellbeing, thanks in particular to some high profile names like Arianna Huffington, whose recent book “Thrive” invites us all to “redefine what success means in today’s world”.

Which is fine. Except that many of the senior people I speak to find it challenging, to say the least, to have the kind of calm happiness that Huffington seems to suggest is possible and be successful in their jobs, or in their businesses.

Ask people what’s going on, and you may hear about the pressure people are under, now that the global economy seems to be in upturn, and businesses are striving for growth again.

But while there’s no doubt that the overwhelm monster is bigger than it ever appears to have been (at least in my lifetime), I think if we’re honest with ourselves, that whole success vs wellbeing conundrum has always been an integral part of being a professional in whatever capacity.

So, what’s the solution?

Well, that’s what we’re going to be discussing over the coming weeks.

In particular, we’re going to be exploring:

What is wellbeing?
“Thrive” aside, why is it really getting press right now and why should you care?
What are the ways in which people attempt to create wellbeing? What works, what doesn’t and why?
What new thought, if any, exists about how to create it.

Health warning!

You should know that this is one area that particularly excites us here at Livingston Towers. We’re both keen gym goers and exercisers, and are very mindful of what we eat. Our personal philosophy is, like the title of this post says: without wellbeing, nothing works. At least, nothing works well. Not for us. It’s that simple.

We know too that this runs counter to how many business people think. For so many, work comes before absolutely everything else. And most folks have good intentions around wellbeing, but for the most part the real action on it is relegated to some short-lived New Year’s resolutions, or to a couple of weeks pre-holiday exercise blast to get in shape for either the ski slopes or the beach.

Last year I took my own interest to a whole new level, doing what I called at the time The Wellbeing Experiment. In fact, I wrote about it over the course of several months on my old and now defunct blog. The experiment sought to answer this question:

What becomes possible in my work and life if I upturn the apple cart and put my wellbeing first, rather than – as we all tend to do – marginalize it to some after work, or when I have the time to think about it concern?

The results for me were staggering. What I’ve realized in essence is that wellbeing is our natural default position. In other words, it’s what comes through when we take all the physical, emotional and spiritual blockers out of our way and allow nature to do its job. I’ll say more about all of this in the weeks to come.

Meantime, I’d love to get your take on the whole wellbeing thing. What does it mean to you? How do you help yourself achieve it? What gets in your way?

PS: Don’t miss this important series. Make sure you’re on our VIP mailing list for updates and invitations by signing up here!

March 25, 2013 by Christine

5 Ways To Tame The Overwhelm Monster

It’s everywhere.

Smart, professional people hurtling through life at break-neck speed, overwhelmed by just how much you have to do. And feeling in an almost permanent state of exhaustion.

Waiting for the weekend, or your next holiday to catch up on sleep and re-energise.

And maybe you do.

But, too often, these times get used for preparing for the next onslaught. And then there’s your constant companion, your smart phone, happy to interrupt you or to enable you to interrupt others if something “urgent” comes up.

It’s not that you don’t love your job. But that you have times of wondering whether it’s going to be this way forever.

You don’t want things to be less exciting or interesting. But you do want to feel less out of control.

You know how I know this?

Because I’m you.

My wake up call

“You are depressed.”

I sat there opposite the nice doctor and burst into tears. I was working all the hours God sent, trying to keep up with all that was demanded of me, and keeping myself afloat on a diet of chocolate, coffee and wine. I was looking like I’d aged ten years in less than twelve months, and I’d put on more than a stone in weight.

Most alarming of all was that my drinking habit was getting out of control.

I woke up one morning and had no memory of how I’d got home the night before. That’s when I knew I needed help.

I had no clue what “help” might actually look like, but I figured a good starting point was my GP.

I imagined I’d walk in and tell him I was drinking too much, in the same way I might tell him I had tonsillitis, and he’d give me some prescription or advice that would sort things out. All very business-like, and I’d go away happy.

I hadn’t anticipated he’d ask me why I was drinking so much, nor that I’d start unravelling when explaining just how out of control my work and life was.

All I could do was just sit there and go with it.

“It’s not healthy to be working the way you are,” was what he said to me. “It’s making you ill. You’re using drink as an escape. We need to get you some help.”

Back then, I’d never done any form of counselling or coaching. I was the boss. I referred staff to these services. I was aghast that I might need some myself.

But the doctor referred me to a wonderful psychologist with whose help things began to change.

How keeping yourself too busy messes you up

Truth is, when you’re a professional, your work means a lot to you, and you love being plugged into it. You love to feel it needs you; that you’re indispensable. That you make a difference to it.

All these little interactions – the email and text exchanges; the voice messages; the IMs on the intranet – they can become impulsive. And they can give you a buzz. To our brains, they can be like little alarms.

Thing is, our brains can’t discriminate between one form of alarm or another. It reacts to them all in flight or fight mode and by dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream. Adrenaline’s function is to keep us alert. We can become very “adrenal” and get caught in a vicious circle where we need lots of stimulation in order to be able to stay that way.

But too much of it over too long a period wreaks havoc with our blood sugar levels. Which in turn messes up lots of things from our ability to metabolise fats and our heart health, to our brain chemistry and our outlook on life.

Its impact on me was to cause me to become depressed.

My doctor prescribed anti-depressants, which at the time I gladly took. But I didn’t want to be a long time user and knew that I needed to sort out my experience of always being overwhelmed.

I’m going to tell you the 5 key things that have worked for me in taming that monster.

Before I do, you should know that there are 2 core principles underlying all of these.

Understand that you have choice

“I’ve got client work to do.” “I have to get back to a colleague on something.” “I just want to hear back from someone on a proposal and then I’ll stop working.”

I tell myself these things all the time.

But if you want to be feel more in control, and – dare I say it – more balanced in yourself, they’re signs that you’re, at least for the moment, hooked in.

The reality is successful people, who are also healthy, understand that they have choice and they exercise that choice consciously every day.

Yes, you have to engage with your boss, your clients and your colleagues. But who is pulling your strings? You or them?

You HAVE TO be the first person to respect your life and your choices, otherwise how can you expect others to respect them?

Get clear about your personal boundaries

Exercising your choice means getting very clear for yourself about what your boundaries are.

In other words, what is and isn’t okay for you?

How long will you work every day? What compromises are you prepared to make, and what not? What’s a “yes” for you, and what’s a “no”.

You might not yet be clear about these things. That may take some time, exploration and, frankly, getting it wrong on more than a few occasions.

You may have to open your eyes in a new way to the forces at large in you, and in your company culture, that play their part in inviting you to feel overwhelmed.

Managing your boundaries means developing a bit of personal toughness. Some assertiveness, if you will. Walking out the door at 6pm. Leaving a call unanswered to the following day, if at all.

When you do this at first, colleagues may look at you a bit oddly. Or make a bit of a joke. Don’t worry. Keep going.

Is that difficult? It can be.

But it’s the only way.

Putting that all into practice looks like this:

1. Create every day your way

This seems unimaginable when you’re on automatic pilot and fulfilling a diary full of calls and meetings that have been set up by others.

But if you want to assert choice in how you will do your work so that you calm the overwhelm, you need to find 5 or 10 minutes at the beginning of each day to decide what you want from it.

How do you want to turn up for yourself and for the world today?
What will you do today that furthers your key objectives?
Who will you serve today?
What do you need not to do today?

Leave off checking email, text or social media until you’ve done this, so that you can get ready for your day in calm, and without already being bombarded by thoughts of other things you “should” do.

2. Switch things off

One of the traps we can all fall into, me included, is to be constantly “on”. So, you’re in the middle of an important conversation, or you’re thinking through something important and there’s a ping or buzz as an email, text message, or call comes through.

You immediately get distracted and need to know both who it’s from, and whether it’s important.

Either way, you’ve succumbed to the alarm, dumped another load of adrenaline into your system, and added to whatever chaos is out there in your world.

To rein things in, switch email off in the background of your computer when you’re working on something that deserves your full presence. And your phone off, whenever you’re with someone to whom you want to give the experience of your undivided presence. You know, like your partner, friend, child, direct report…

3. Decide how much time you want to spend working

One of the great things about technology is that we don’t need to be in offices all the time in order to be working. Mobile telephony allows us to be, well, mobile and to work virtually. I love that.

But the downside is that the boundary between work and the rest of our lives can become blurred, meaning we can end up working all hours of the day or night.

When was the last time a business colleague sent you an email at midnight? Or at 5am? When was the last time you sent an email at that kind of time?

If you want to feel less overwhelmed by work, you need to create some cut-off for yourself around when it’s okay for you to work, and not. And then exercise it that way.

For example, I figured with my consulting job that I’d work late two nights a week – on the nights when there were team meetings or team dinners.

The rest of the time, I finished in good time to get myself to the gym, and still have time for a healthy dinner. I deliberately did not check email or voicemail on these evenings. Which meant I began to start feeling a lot more refreshed on a daily basis.

The fear is that you’ll get less done if you dare to take this approach. My experience, and the experience of folks I coach around this, is that the opposite is true.

4. Figure what else you want life to be about and go do it

When I ended up at my doctor’s door, and started talking to my therapist, I began to understand that work was my life and my life was work.

I was holding some big, deep-seated resentments about lots of things, from never having enough time, or energy, to get to the gym, to having no social life beyond the pub time I spent with work colleagues.

As I said above, part of my kissing overwhelm goodbye, was deciding to make the gym important and carving time out for it.

One of my clients some years ago decided that writing was important to him and found a way to create an afternoon a week where he took himself off with his Moleskin and just wrote.

Another client decided that good old family TV time was important for him and re-created his entire way of working to enable it.

5. Calm your system down

While there’s much you can do around how you behave, these things will have limited effect if you keep overloading your system with caffeine, chocolate, alcohol and other stimulants.

Once I knew that alcohol was a crutch for me, I gave it up for a while.

But the coffee thing I find much more difficult. What I do now is allow myself 2 good coffees in the morning and then that’s it for the day. You might want to take a similar approach. If you need something in the afternoon, try a green tea. Or even just one regular English Breakfast tea.

But being a bit more measured – without necessarily being perfect – on these things allows you to sleep better and for your poor old adrenals got get a bit of a rest. Which just allows you to become more resourceful and on top of your game.

The bottom line?

Do something

You know, reading this is well and good, but if you really want more balance, you have to make it happen for yourself. No-one is going to give you permission, and all the signs are that more and more people are burning out from the overwhelmingness of professional life.

It will almost certainly take you time. I put some of the key things in place immediately I confronted my own overwhelm and felt much more in control within a month. But it took a good six months after that, if not longer, to really feel that I’d cracked it and that I was still doing a good job.

But it’s worth the effort. I can still have times, as I’m sure we all can, of feeling there’s just too much to do. But for the most part, I’m calm, happy and far from overwhelmed.

What about you? When do things seem crazy for you? What do you do to tame the overwhelm monster?