Because Work is a Part of Life

In 2009 Smith College, a quaint liberal arts women’s college nestled on the edge of the Berkshire Mountains in Western Massachusetts, recognized the need for students to understand the intersection between work and life by founding the Center for Work and Life. As an alumna of the college, I was thrilled to learn that such a renowned institution would provide guidance on such  practical subjects as how to write emails to your professor, how to cook healthy (and affordable meals) and how to change a tire (and look good doing it).

It seems the College has experienced a rebirth of sorts. It has recognized that, while building our brains, we also need to comprehend the more pragmatic sides to life. In the eyes of the Center’s director, Jessica Bacal, there is a thing called work-life balance.

Jessica invited me to chat with students about the Power of Slow in late March. I was astounded at their hunger to learn that it’s really alright not to do everything at once. I was equally amazed that they thought they had to.

When I saw their relieved faces, I realized the Slow message is necessary for everyone. Whether in China, Korea, Australia or India, people of all ages are responding to its message to slow down. We are indeed on a slippery slope. All of us. And the good news is we’re in this together, which means it will take all of us to move beyond our hectic pace to a collective understanding of what the heck we’re all doing here anyway.

We weren’t born to race. We were born to help each other. So let’s start together by sending the message that it is alright to go at your custom speed.

And that message, dear reader, starts with you. Invite someone to walk a little slower today. Then tell me about it. We can all learn from each other as we tread this road called life.

Nagging Leaders Create the Greatest Stress

A recent Workplace Survey conducted in eleven countries by the global executive staffing firm, Robert Half International, found that your  boss can be a source of great stress. Duh? Not surprising, but the reason can often be attributed to a lack of management skills, not just to the fact that he or she may be a jerk.

Other stressors in the modern workplace include:

• increased workload
• too few people to handle the job
• unpleasant work environment (colleagues and office gossip)
• inappropriate pressure from the boss

It sounds to me as if the modern workplace could use a huge dose of slow.

First, it is no wonder that more and more people are stressed out, given the bare bones staff with which many industries are forced to operate. Then, consider placing someone ill-equipped in a position of power. Add too few resources such as time, money and personnel, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.

Management skills are something everyone can learn. Just take a look at this beautiful performance leadership matrix, developed by Dan McCarthy,  Director of Executive Development Programs (EDP) at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire.

Courtesy of GreatLeadershipbyDan.com

According to Dan’s nifty model, if you’re forcing people to take action, but it has no impact on performance, that’s just plain nagging (note to self: remember the next time you insist that your kids brush their teeth RIGHT NOW, that maybe it could wait a minute). If you’re asking for action and it does impact performance, that’s managing (if, say, it’s been a while since they brushed). No action, no impact ~ you’re on vacation. No action, BIG IMPACT ~ you’re an osterich leader.

Some may have more inherent leadership talent than others, but giving people the tools to do their job will place everyone in a better position. I’m a big fan of guided training; that is, offer up pre-assessment, the training itself, then follow up with a post-training assessment. Life’s in the details. That goes for work too. For all you HR folks listening out there: follow up is everything to ensure your return on investment (ROI) hit the mark. Would you throw money at something just to say you did it? Of course not! The same goes for training. It’s worth seeing what stuck and what didn’t.

Imagine being led by someone who knows less than you? Perhaps you are a technical wizard, while your supervisor made a move across industries to land the job above you.

Now imagine how you might become an invaluable resource to that person because you know your stuff. Your boss will come to you in a pinch. Being a go-to person places you in your own position of power. You are indispensible. Chances are he or she won’t toss you under the bus (or the boss?), as long as you’re performing.

And that’s the clincher. Performance depends a great deal on your office environment. If you can’t stand the people you work with, you are more likely to experience low levels of motivation. That’s when it’s time for an assessment of your own. What are you willing to live with? What not?

Mind-mapping your way to freedom

Many thanks to Psychology Today reader Kallin, who pointed me to this mind map, courtesy of LearningFundamentals.com.au. It beautifully illustrates how we can regain control of the things we do in the time that we have.

Happy Monday Morning, All!

Simple Ways to Slow - Courtesy of LearningFundamentals.com.au

Life’s Little Surprises

You wake up an hour later than you thought.

Your job description has been turned on its head.

The weather takes a sudden turn.

Change, and the way its managed, can impact our lives more than we realize. As I recently read somewhere, long-term success is not based on what you do right, but what you do when things go wrong.

Life’s little surprises hold a nugget of wisdom we often cannot see. The day I got up a full hour later than I had intended, I managed to get to the TV studio earlier than anyone else.

How was that possible?

It’s a little secret I am about to share. If you take it on, magic will happen. Wait. Before you turn the dial (or click the mouse), hang on. It is real.

It is called time abundance, embracing time so you have more of it. I literally did what was necessary instead of fretting about what I could or could not change. And the full extra hour of sleep kept me focused as I drove down the autobahn (at the speed limit!) without any distractions. No radio. No CD. No cell phone. Nada. I simply looked at the road and assured myself that I would arrive at the exact time I needed to. And wouldn’t you know? I did!

When your job takes a new direction, see it as an opportunity to learn something new. It’s a stretch, for sure. Change is merely the cause for bringing back into our awareness that things happen just as they should. We are reminded in those moments that uncertainty lurks just beneath our consciousness at all times. We work with probabilities. This or that will probably happen. We rest in the hope that it will.

The weather is a great example of how we have tried to harness the wind with our metrics and gizmos. Can we ever really know for certain whether things will happen as we think? All we can really do is raise the likelihood that they will.

One never really knows. And that is the beauty unfolding.

Life is full of little surprises. They are treasures wrapped in mystery. When we meet them with wonder, life takes on a fullness that can mend our broken hearts and restore us to whole.

Take a moment today to reside in that wonder. I bet you’ll be surprised at what you find underneath.

Weighty PhDs Tip the Balance

Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. Does being powerful make you well? Not always.

According to a new global survey whose US-based findings were released by GfK Custom Research North America, U.S. employees with PhDs were both most engaged (38 percent highly engaged) with the highest levels of stress about job security (30 percent), work-related stress (29 percent) and the teeter-tottering-est crowd when it comes to work-life balance (33 percent). The more you know, the more people come to rely on you to know it….and more.

Perhaps not surprisingly, those with master’s degrees worry more frequently about stress (39 percent) while their work-life balance seems less of a concern (25 percent) than their PhD buddies.

It appears respondents with less than a high school education were least likely to be engaged in their work, which comes as no surprise. Only one in four claimed they were highly engaged. Interestingly, age and industry played a large part in engagement levels as well. As I have written elsewhere about older workers, they tend to the most engaged crowd (35 percent were ‘highly engaged’).

The top four most engaged employees came from the following industries:

• construction (41 percent)
• professional & business services (34 percent)
• information technology (33 percent)
• public utilities (32 percent)

The least engaged came from the following industries:

• retail (40 percent)
• real estate (38 percent)
• public administration (38 percent)
• education (32 percent)
• manufacturing (31 percent).

Managers (35 percent) showed more engagement than the managed (21 percent) while those who manage managers showed the greatest level of engagement (60 percent).

I guess we really do like telling people what to do!

Knowledge workers and the ‘creative class’ are succumbing to the pressures of today’s world. We need to rescue ourselves by injecting slow and by setting an example for everyone else. Engagement is good. So is disengaging every now and then.

Sometimes it isn’t what or who you know, but how you do things that makes all the difference in the world.

When Reality Hits

The Power of Slow is about mindful living; When Reality Hits: What Employers Want Recent College Graduates to Know takes a good look at what it means to engage in mindful working.

The book is organized into twelve chapters that cover the gamut of corporate culture: from table manners to a firm handshake to my favorite topic, cell phone etiquette. In concise language motivational speaker and author Nancy Barry offers clear guidelines on the do’s and don’ts of work life for recent college grads.

Even for a veteran PR professional such as myself, I found her tips to be refreshing, sometimes even humorous and always respectful of the person she’s trying to help. Although some of it was repetitive (we know smiling in most cultures is an ice breaker, which she mentions a lot), what I appreciated the most was the can-do spirit she imparts to young workers.

She also offers helpful advice on how to deal with constructive criticism. She sees in everything an opportunity to learn.  ”[I]f someone is trying to give you feedback, resist the urge to immediately defend yourself. Listen to what they’re saying.” And we all know that saying “I take complete responsibility” is an effective way to stop your boss’s tirade and move on.

Her largest power of slow message can be found on page 13: ”Pace yourself…Work hard, but be careful about the potential stress if you work all the time…Technology has changed the way we work. Thanks to cell phones, BlackBerries and e-mail, there’s an expectation we should be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once you start working all the time, your colleagues and clients will come to expect it.” Later in the book she seems to offer contradictory advice by saying to ‘do what it takes to get the job done,’ but remember there is power in saying ‘no,’ which she also admits. Sometimes proper expectation management is the fastest road to success.

Be sure to take this book along for the ride. Whether a younger or more experienced worker, we can all benefit from Nancy’s message to remember to play while we work and that sometimes all it takes is a good homemade double chocolate chip cookie and a hand-written note to make all the difference in how our work lives unfold.

Work-Life Nation Looks at the Power of Slow

I had a great chat with Judy Martin in New York. Here’s what we had to say about work, life, and information overload.

Top Ten Work-Life Balance Blogs

Many thanks to MyLifeScoop for naming the Power of Slow blog one of the top ten work-life balance blogs!

Today has been yet another lesson in slow. Even though it didn’t start off very slowly…

The alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., just as the church bells did. You see we live in a slow rural town in which the church still alerts the farmers when it is time to milk the cows. I took a long, hot shower, then accidentally dropped my liquid make-up on the floor. It shattered, then splattered, right onto the outfit I was supposed to wear for a TV commercial I filmed this morning.

Everything happens for a reason, I heard my inner voice whisper. I took a slow, deep breath, then did what any self-respecting wife would do. I woke up my husband to ask for help!

He got up to hand wash the spots off my white shirt, then iron it. I ended up dropping the shirt again, this time in the car. The great news was the production company opted for a different blouse (the one I ended up wearing), saying the white was too bright for the camera. Whew.

Sometimes the Universe is shouting, and we’re not listening. It was obvious my white blouse wanted to stay home. When we give it up to the Universe (God), we are trusting that what is unfolding is the perfect creation that was meant to be.

The filming went very well. The camera man smiled encouragingly, the make-up artist dabbed every now and again, and the director said, “Yup. Goose bumps. It’s a wrap.”

With the help of my new navigation system, I came home in plenty of time to congratulation my son on his super grade on his math test and to bask in the glory of the emerging sun.

How do you trust in the Universe when things don’t go according to your internal script?

ABC News calls The Power of Slow one of ‘best books’

A thousand thanks to ABCNews.com for selecting The Power of Slow as one of its ‘best books’ for the 2009 holiday season!

Thank you for sharing the love. Truly.

Do you want to know why I love libraries? They’ve joined the Slow revolution. From St. Louis to Prince Edward Island  to British Columbia in Canada many libraries now carry a copy of The Power of Slow. So go to your public library today. You might find a copy there! (And if not, there’s always your friendly bookseller around the corner! )

Either way, I guarantee you will never look at time quite the same way once you’ve read it.

Time-Swathing

We may bemoan the treacheries and time-sucking nature of the Internet, but it sure has introduced me to some of the most fascinating people on the planet. When used mindfully, the Internet offers buckets of useful (and not so useful) information. With technological advances such as web-based video calls (aka Skype), twitter and Facebook, we have raised our awareness of how entangled we all are with one another. In a way, the World Wide Web has increased our consciousness of oneness.

I stumbled upon…ummm… I digged…nope. Let me start again. I met a fascinating performance consultant by the name of Mark K. Petruzzi on twitter. the other day. He tweeted about me. I tweeted about him. And before you knew it, we were Skyping about God, spirit and work-life solutions.

Life can be that grand.

With more than 15 years in corporate training with IBM, CIGNA Corporation, and General Physics Corporation, Mark has spent over three decades in the study of expansive inner life practice and 25 years in the study of enhancing job satisfaction through employee self-actualization. In short, he takes a “personal value” approach to work. Ten minutes with Mark will tell you he enjoys working with individuals and small groups, in business or private settings, as he helps them enhance both their personal and work lives.

Curious about his view of time starvation, I tossed out a few questions to get a sense of his relationship with time.

“If you feel a paucity of time,” he told me, “you literally are compressing it. We have to start trusting others and ourselves more. We need to know our lives will work out. Our point of power is in the now. If you give in to fifty distractions at every moment, you aren’t really living.” You are, in effect, merely breathing. And that rather breathlessly! The basis of his work, like the basis of mine, is choice. When we live in a mindful state, we reclaim our personal power.

We talked about the nobility of pain and how we might very well be addicted to the ways in which we maltreat ourselves. If you run about being so ‘busy’, you might really be missing the whole point. Allowing our ego the space to dwell within us is a great first step toward diffusing its power over us. Mark refutes the notion of the ego being ‘all bad’. Like a houseplant, it needs care and feeding like the rest of our being. I tend to acknowledge its cry so it doesn’t get louder (any parent of an infant will tell you that’s the best thing to do, especially in the middle of the night!). Loving the ego fosters compassion for ourselves and others.

On the road to time abundance, we need to recognize there is more to us than what we do, own or look like (Mark says I look like Laura Linney. Now, if I could only act like she does!). We are whole beings. When we are one with time, we can wrap ourselves in it like kings’ robes. You might even call it time-swathing.

Mark offers Inner Life Practice* workshops including Choice-Level Living, Choosing to Stress Less in a Stress More World, and Bringing Your Spirit to Work. He is currently writing The Desire Engine, a book about reclaiming our personal authority, and developing an inner life practice that fuels our internal “engine” of expansion and purpose fulfillment.
 
I’ll be the first in line to buy his book. May the spirit of time abundance, and the miracles of everyday living, give you the oxygen to breathe more fully this day and always!

 *If you’d like to connect with Mark, he suggests you check him out on Twitter @INrLifePractice. You can also find out more about him at http://bit.ly/enlightened.