#29 Escaping Busyness

#29 Escaping busyness
It's a good one. Welcome to episode number 29 of Diff'rent Points and I'm joined with my co-host Catherine Llewellyn and I'm Roy Collin and today's question is escaping busyness, are you too busy to notice? What comes to mind Catherine when you hear that one? I'm much too busy to answer that question. Are you too busy to notice? It's such a good question because certainly for me in my life when I've been over busy you can go into that mode of just not realising you're busy and just thinking this is just life.

I think you get a similar thing with dehydration. If you go beyond a certain point of dehydration you start to not want water anymore and I don't understand it as a survival mechanism, it doesn't make any sense to me, but I think that happens with being busy. It's almost like you're addicted to the, I don't know what it is, it's the fact that all your senses and faculties are all filled up to the edges so you've got no space to really feel anything or be affected by anything, you're just in this mode.

It's almost like being in a suit of armour that protects you from feeling life or feeling vulnerable in this sort of busy, busy, busy, busy, busyness around us. I've certainly got into that and I've known a lot of clients get into that as well. I think for me it's partly what people call the Protestant ethic, this idea that when you die you're going to be judged, have you done enough, have you worked hard enough, and this idea that the value you bring is equal to how hard you've worked, how busy you've been, which actually is complete nonsense because you can be really, really busy and work really hard and actually be going completely in the wrong direction and making things worse.

So, but escaping busyness, I think, often for me the way my mind works, if I notice I'm trapped in busyness my mind will think, oh I can think my way out of this by working really hard thinking my way out of being overly busy, right, but that never works because that just gives me another job to do. For me the way to escape busyness is to just stop and surrender and let myself feel all the overwhelm and the panic and the urgency and the fear, all of the other things that are driving the busyness, and just stop and let it clear and then come back and then suddenly things look different. So, so it's sort of almost counterintuitive to what the mind thinks we need to do.

We actually, certainly for me, I found I need to just, I've got this little joke with a friend of mine where if I'm getting all, if we're working on a project together, if I'm getting over revving, this person has a special instruction to turn around to me and say, Catherine, go upstairs, lie down, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and stay there for five minutes. And when they say that to me, my system understands, right, this is the code, I go and do it, I come back down and suddenly the busyness is gone and then it's clear what we actually need doing and what actually doesn't need doing. So it's a big one, this one, a lifelong practice, don't you think Roy? No, definitely, and when you said about the five minutes, I was thinking of the boardroom members who were objecting to your five minutes of silence.

I suppose for me, like even recently, because I've done a lot and I just launched a private business and networked the authority alliance and got a load of podcasts, got a lot of things going. So I'd have systems in place to do things and then I just, I kind of say like the wheel is turning, the hamster's dead. I know that I'm not really firing on all cylinders and then, you know, being with my son then I said, I need to step back, have a day or two for myself, you know, just recharge the batteries and then, you know, come Monday, you know, or whatever day, you're able to, you know, get back on track, get more productive and get things done.

And sometimes I reassess what I'm doing, I look at everything I'm doing and I go, is this serving me? And there's times just adjusting, you know, like say tracking all the social media things. Before I'd be doing it daily and watching everything and then I was like, all right, it's valid stuff to do, but now I don't need to do it daily. I'll just do it at the weekend once.

And there's a load of different things. So I just constantly look and then I'd have systems where I know a list and then sometimes I'll have a blank sheet and, you know, what I've done list, because sometimes we get overwhelmed by looking at all the things that we have to do. So I have things I've done and I've just changed it.

I think it's not that I haven't found a system that works. I think sometimes it just, it gets kind of boring for us or we just get complacent in what we're doing and just to shake it up a bit. And then, so I think paying attention to it, but when we feel the batteries are running down, that's not the time to put your head down and get more.

That's the time to turn off the laptop, go for a walk and, and just kind of get at one with nature or maybe take a weekend away. And that will help a lot. Beautiful.

Yeah. I love that the wheel's turning and the hamster's dead. Excellent.

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Until the next episode, take care.