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.

When E-mail kills…

My dear friend Guy sent me a link to a story on InternetNews the other day. It addressed the spate of suicides and suicide attempts at France Telecom (a key brand of Orange) in the last year (22 with 13 attempts).  The CFO of the company, Gervais Pellissier, admitted that 24/7 connectivity, thanks to contemporary hand-held devices, has increased employee stress levels exponentially. The very telecommunications industry that spawned our hyperconnectivity is the very one to meet its own demise.

“When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home. When you were back home, work was out,” he said.

Work was out. Done. Finished. And now people are finishing themselves off as they realize twenty-four hours a day is not enough. Somewhere along the line, people forgot that every business is comprised of people, not just machines.

I claim we have an abundance of time, but we need the heads of corporations, such as France Telecom, to realize there is also a limit to our availability. Just because I have 24 hours a day doesn’t mean the company owns it all.

Ironically, France has the most vacation days in the world. Yet people are ill-equipped to handle the expectations our 24/7 world has placed upon them. We need to return to a state of civility and normalcy in which our time-off is our own.

Just because we can answer the phone at midnight doesn’t mean we have to. I plead for more sanity in our workplace.

Enough is enough.

Work-Life Nation: Success, Serenity and Significance 24/7

Take five minutes to watch this incredible report by Judy Martin on the new workplace. It’s a stellar reminder of how many possibilities we have to live the power of slow in all we do with flexibility, trust and a value system in place.

Digital Drama

The veiled powers of slow were at work once again today.

Actually, it started yesterday when I decided to spend the morning with a friend. Her husband had just moved to China for a six-month assignment. I thought I’d cheer her up and invite her for a power walk in the sunshine. Afterwards, we shared a cup of coffee and lots of laughter. As I bemoaned about what a shame it was to have to spend the rest of this beautiful day indoors working on my presentation on time abundance, she replied,

“You can do it when the sun goes down!”

It seemed just the right thing to do. Why not? I’ve been so productive lately. After all, it was Sunday. In a rare moment of putting off the inevitable, I decided to live a little ‘seize the day’. Why not invite the kids on a bike ride to the local outdoor café instead?

My daughter decided to stay home so it was just the three of us.

My husband tends to take the long way around, to enjoy what he calls ‘the scenery’. Mind you, I had power-walked 7 KM just an hour before so trampling up and down steep hills on my mountain bike felt like a personal stretch.

But no matter! I had new vigor and vim. I was committed to getting fit and staying there. We took my cell phone just in case our daughter needed us.

Again, I delegated my gadget to my husband, fulling trusting he would keep it safely tucked in his pocket. We called our daughter when we got to the café, then set on our way to return an hour later. Somewhere in between calling her and coming home through the woods, the cell phone was lost.

I didn’t realize it until 1 pm today. I looked high and low for it. It was nowhere to be found. My biggest concern was the TV production company was supposed to call me tomorrow on my cell phone. So I contacted them via email to let them know they’d have to call my land line with the production details. I also called customer service to get the phone blocked. They promised to send me a new card rerouted to my old number in three days. Essentially, other than the device itself, I had only lost 72 hours. But in essence, I had won so much more.

I dug out my old cell phone that had a pre-paid card in it. It would have to do.

As I talked to the cell phone service on the phone, I realized I really never liked my newer, fancier cell phone that I had bought on eBay. Oh sure, it had all the fancy wizardry you can imagine ~ Internet, a video camera, a still-shot one, etc. But somehow, as I thumbed my old device, I realized I only used the features that the old one had, too.

My digital drama turned out to be a gift. Back to the old black and white screen of my dinosaur Nokia, I am somehow happy to be back to simpler times. Who really needs a sexy screen or rose wallpaper design? You need to call me? The Nokia will connect you, too.

And you know what? I’d take that bike ride again in a heartbeat. The presentation got done after sundown just as well. And I’m no longer as attached to the gadget that’s most certainly rusting on the forest floor as we speak.

Farewell, ye trusty gadget of yesterday. Thank you for the liberation your departure brings!

Trumping Hard Times with Laughter

While talking with my sister on the phone yesterday, she made me laugh for a full 90 seconds. She was conveying something rather serious and power-of-slow-related about how annoyed she gets when people show up late to lunch dates.

“Your coming late by twenty minutes might mean I don’t eat.”

It struck a funny bone, and I couldn’t stop hooting about it. It was the way in which she said it. Dead-pan, and so true.

We often get caught in the swirl of our lives, regrettably late to appointments that might mean we get to eat. Or not. 

The work-life balance poll I conducted earlier this week shows people are on the fence with the entire notion. While many said their lifestyle has improved over 2008, many say there is no such thing as work-life balance.

Dr. Susan Fletcher, a psychologist in private practice, author, CEO of 2 companies (Smart Zone Solutions being one of them), wife and mother of 3 children, is a great person to ask about work-life issues. While I myself believe work and life are not separate and distinct, we are at our best when we live in harmony with all aspects of our lives.

 When asked how one can live powerfully in the face of today’s economic crisis, Dr. Fletcher writes:

• Use technology to connect to people – not to disconnect. According to scientist Alvin Weinberg, “Technology makes it easier and easier to disconnect from other people, and from ourselves.” Remember that human interaction can boost your mood. Make it a rule that if an email is more than 2 paragraphs that you will pick up the phone and call instead.

 

• Finish what you start. Research shows that when we are disciplined and deliberate with projects that it has an 18% positive effect on happiness. It’s not always easy to be conscientious and finish a large task – but we feel better about ourselves when we have the sense of accomplishment.

 

• Share a silly moment. “Laughter may be the shortest distance between 2 brains,” says Daniel Goleman in his book Social Intelligence. Think of the immediate sense of closeness you get with someone when you share a nice hearty laugh. For that moment it’s like you are in sync with each other’s thoughts. (Editor’s Note: As a parenting humorist, I find this one to be the most powerful!) 

 

• Know what makes others happy. Powerful people are attuned to the emotions of others. Try these ideas: Headed to meet with a client? When you grab yourself a cup of coffee on the way to the meeting buy one for your client also. Did you eat lunch out today? Order an extra dessert to bring back for a co-worker or neighbor. Spent a few days out of the office where your co-workers had to cover for you? Bring them back a small gift from your time away – it can just be a pen from the hotel or a whimsical trinket from the airport gift shop.

 

• Smile. You can actually trick your brain’s neurotransmitters into thinking you are happy with a smile. When you smile at people they typically smile back – it’s a natural reflex to mimic the facial expressions of others. If you are in a bad rut, clench a pencil in your teeth and you will force your face into a smile. This will subtly evoke a positive feeling. Try it!

 

• Don’t gripe and moan! No one wants to hang out with a whiner.  If you want to survive in today’s economy you must accept change with a smile and determine how you can contribute to making the change successful.  

 

• Don’t hold on to the carpet. You’ve heard the phrase, “eye on the prize” or “begin with the end in mind.”  If you’ve ever had the carpet pulled out from underneath you then you know change can be unexpected and unwelcome.  Early in Susan’s career, her job at a hospital was eliminated due to budget cuts.  Unwelcomed and unexpected, it turned out to be one of the most important learning experiences of her life. Discomfort is a fine teacher. 

No kidding.  I’d watch out for the chewing pencil technique, though. Make sure it’s a rubber one!

Labor Day poll – Work/Life Balance

Please take this one-question poll about work-life balance. Your input is greatly appreciated as it helps me know how better to serve my readership. Feel free to add a comment, too! Many thanks!

Wednesday Wisdom – Making Yourself Be the Appointment

Cynthia Colby’s advice is simple: make an appointment with yourself every day. Using her daytimer, she literally pencils herself in so that no matter how productive she is with other clients, she can also find time for herself, too.

As a communications specialist with Cynthia P. Colby (Creative Communications), she produces  radio and tv commercials so Cynthia’s audio is especially worth a listen! [Listening instructions: click on the link, then click on it again for your media player to open. Be sure to deactivate any pop-up blockers you may have.]