SLOWING – how to S-L-O-W D–O–W-N

Good to have you back Viphilus*

This post is the last on the topic of slowing down (April's theme and topics are shown in the margin at right). Today the focus is on actions … so let’s quickly get to some practices to help you slow down. Well, not too quickly.

What should you expect when trying to slow down? Know this … even the simplest (or goofiest) of the suggestions below can be important scaffolding to help you build a slower cadence into your life. The ebb and flow of life naturally presents you with enough real urgent situations without having to manufacture your own, intentionally or accidentally.

The learning objective is to take (make) every possible opportunity to break the rhythm of URGENCY in your life and choose to do things simply because they are IMPORTANT … and do them before they become urgent. This helps establish in you a proactive nature while diminishing your natural reactive tendencies. As well, it helps bring about significant holistic recovery from the stresses associated with urgency.

Remember the time-matrix from the March 16 post? If you haven’t read it, stop now and read that and the other posts from March … they are the set-up for today’s. Choose to live in Quadrant 2 as much as you can. Choose to live in Quadrant 3 as little as humanly (and divinely) possible; it’s transformative!  Choose to never live in Quadrant 4.

Read the March 16 post for a reminder of what this is about

Below is a baker’s dozen of suggested rituals (some with a few parts to them). Read them right through to the end. Then read the list again, stopping to pause on ones that intrigued you. Spend a long time pondering the ones that annoy or scare you.

1.    Make a commitment to yourself – RIGHT now – to not try to slow down too quickly or expect instant results from your efforts of slowing.

2.    Become more intentional about doing things because they are important to do and not just because they have a deadline. For things that come with a deadline, accomplish them long before the deadline makes it urgent. This will help to break your dependency on being driven by urgency rather than importance. Make a commitment to yourself right NOW. (if you are a person of faith, ask God for help in this).

3.    Begin immediately some of John Ortberg’s suggested slowing-down disciplines:

·         Deliberately drive in the slow lane (and rather than cursing those who pass you, think nobler thoughts about them and relish in the joy of being a considerate driver)

·         Declare a fast from honking… put your horn under a vow of silence

·         Eat your food slowly… force yourself to chew at least 15 times before each swallow.

4.    Go a day without wearing a watch

5.    Each morning as you begin your normal routine, include the following affirmation (or something similar) out loud to yourself: “My parents were right … haste makes waste. There are too many important people and too many important goals in my day to jeopardize any one of them by hurrying … so I will slow down and allow myself to accomplish the most.”

6.    If you are a person of faith …. over the next month introduce BillHybels’ slowing down practices into your life to improve the effectiveness of your prayer-time with God:

·         Let your knees hit the floor first when you roll out of bed; this forces you to slow down and shift from your agenda to God’s and keeps you from beginning your day in a hurry

·         Journaling (gets your RPMs down from 10,000 to 5,000)

·         Write out your prayers (gets your RPMs then down to about 500)

·         Listen to God (only possible by getting the RPMs way way down)

7.    Pick a day for you (and your family if possible) to declare a “technology fast.” No Internet, TV, text messaging, or email (or even pick just one of those). Progress to trying this each week.

8.    Seize every opportunity to practice solitude. Try for at least one hour a week where you simply assess your degree of impatience and impulsiveness. Know that these stem from hurry-sickness. Make a commitment to yourself to TRAIN these out of you.

Quiet time alone is one of the best ways to slow down

9.    Schedule unstructured-time in your calendar (time when you are not doing or producing – just being).

10. Take an hour to sit on a bench in the middle of a shopping mall and watch the frenzied nature of people going by, noting the look of urgency in their eyes. Following that realize that others have likely noticed you through the same eyes. Think about this and then purpose to slow down.

11. Here’s another one from Ortberg … at the grocery store, look carefully to see which check-out line is the longest and get in it … then let one person go ahead of you.

12. For the rest of your life, never again push the “CLOSE DOOR” button on an elevator (after all, it’s nothing more than an urgency-enabling device to keep you locked in that destructive paradigm). Cherish the gift of these extra few seconds and use them to your advantage:

·         Take a couple of deep cleansing breaths

·         Close your eyes, take one deep breath and just clear your mind

·         If you are not alone, enjoy the private amusement while you watch others reach past you to push the button, evidence of their own hurry-sickness … then pray for them

·         Reflect in your mind over the top 3 roles that you are playing that day … or the top 3 goals that you have for that day.

13. For one week, when you drive in the car alone, do not turn on the radio, CD player, IPOD, (or cassette or 8-track) or have any sound. If you get through a week, try another one. If still successful keep it going as long as you can.

shhhhhhhhhhhhh

Some of these may sound pointless or silly but don’t underestimate their power to help initiate in you a paradigm shift away from a hurried perspective. Remember the prime directive from the Mar.9 post: Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life!

OK, so if you did what I suggested and have read through them a couple times, reflecting on some, pondering deeply on others …. Then you are ready.

PICK 2 and implement them immediately.

Getting Real
If you are still looking for something more than just a list before you decide which ones you'll pick … read on for some real-life stories about some of these in either my life or the life of someone I have had the privilege of training. The numbers correspond to the list numbers above.

1.    Slowing down too quickly – almost everyone jumps in too quickly and tries to microwave the benefits that come from slowing. My first attempt was in the early 90s and it took the form of a personal retreat for a week. I hadn’t heard about John Ortberg or any of his ideas about simple ways of introducing spiritual disciplines into the life of an ordinary person. My expectations about the results of my retreat were other-worldly so, of course, I could only end up disappointed. By the conclusion of my week of “slowing down” I was in much worse shape and was convinced that such pursuits were sheer nonsense. It would be almost a decade before I would try again … but not by conscious decision … it was an emotional breakdown that would eventually make the choice for me.

2.    Be intentional about doing things just because they are important – I remember the day I made the commitment to stop living reactively and start living proactively. It was after re-reading Covey’s 7-Habits book, and in particular, his ideas surrounding proactivity and the Eisenhower time-matrix. This was a game-changer for me and dramatically changed my use of time; I realized that I would never find time for anything, but that I had to make time for what was important. Before I knew it the things that were important started to naturally crowd out the things that were simply urgent. I also discovered that many of my quadrant 1 activities (things that were both urgent and important) could be shifted to quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) by simply dealing with them before they became urgent. I remember the most immediate benefit was the dramatic decrease in my perceived stress load.

3.    Ortberg’s slowing down disciplines – The first year I began teaching these things in a group setting was fun as I got to see, for the first time, the reactions of other people to some of these exercises. There was one woman who confessed to succumbing to road-rage too easily. When I suggested that she might consider practicing the discipline of deliberately driving in the slow lane, her reaction was more than visceral … it bordered on hysterical revulsion. The group enjoyed (a little too much) pointing out to her that since her reaction was so strong that it had, in fact, identified to her (and all the rest of us) where she should begin her scaffolding. She returned the following session and reported that she gave it the ol’ college try … and that it nearly killed her to slow down that much. [Don’t underestimate the power of these simple exercises to evoke strong emotional reactions. And understand, the stronger the reaction, the more it needs to grab your attention about something wrong on the inside.]

6.    Bill Hybel’s slowing down disciplines – I embraced a couple of these more than a decade ago. The one worth reporting here is how I wake up – instantly!  When my eyes open up I literally pop out of bed and am instantly functional … as in, my mind is already racing with what I want/need to do and I could be at my computer 60 seconds later, cranking out something. I realized, however, that just because I could, doesn't mean that I should … and Hybels' slowing down exercise of letting my knees hit the floor first as I roll out of bed is a powerful one for me. It’s an instituted ritual that became a habit that became lifestyle. This action forces me to slow the RPMs of my brain down as I begin my day with prayer. (for those who aren't comfortable with that, then let it be time for contemplation). Either way … I have found it is pretty hard to do anything quickly when I get on my knees. The position alone engenders humility which is hard to do in a hurry. This is a great SLOW way to start my day.

10. Sit on a bench in the mall and watch hurried people – I've done this for much of my life. Initially I did this exercise in a pure judgmental mode, feeling superior to the “poor clods who just don’t get it.” It wasn't very noble but I did find it insightful. Later I noticed that I was watching more from a pity-mode, genuinely feeling sorry for “those poor people who just don’t know any better.” Now, when I do this I observe the hurry in the faces, demeanor and words of others and immediately find myself examining my own remaining hurry-sickness to see if I might still have more of it in me than I want to admit. Obviously, the less judgmental the better … but it’s all still data-gathering.

11. Ortberg’s grocery store checkout exercise – this one deserves its own section because of the following funny story. The first year I taught this material to a group there were 18 people in the group, including a husband and wife. It was a Saturday morning and when it was over I sent everyone on their way with a strong encouragement to practice some of the slowing down rituals we had discussed and then report back to the group next time how they did. I began the following meeting with the promised follow-up, “So, how did all of you do with your slowing exercises?”

The husband of the couple was the first to speak. “After the group finished last time we went straight to the grocery store … something we had planned on doing before we came to group that day. We did our shopping and came to the checkouts with about a half cart of groceries. I said to my wife, ‘Well, I guess we should probably do Peter’s grocery store exercise, shouldn't we?’  ‘Right now?’ she pushed back. He said, ‘well with that attitude, I think you need this right now!’” (brave husband)

In his story he told how she rolled her eyes and harrumphed as they looked for the longest line. To their shagrin, one line was twice as long as the others (I'm convinced that this only happens in Nova Scotia). After another harrumph they joined the long line and proceeded to experience a 15 minute slow-shuffle to the cash.

Oh yeah … he is about 6’3” and well over 300 pounds. This is important to know for what happens next.

When they finally get to the checkout, he says to his wife, “well, we might as well go all the way with this,” at which point he turned to the woman behind them and said, “why don’t you go ahead of us?” The woman politely refused saying something like, “Oh no, thank you … you've been waiting just as long as I have … besides, I have a lot more groceries than you do.” To which my proud student said, “no, you have to go first … it’s part of my therapy!”

His wife confirmed that the woman backed up a little (and probably considered switching lanes). [these exercises don’t have to be boring – they can be downright hilarious, if you let them]

12. The Close Door Button – of all the things I have taught, this is the one that has garnered the greatest attention and has been practiced by the most trainees. I have had people run into me 5 years after I've delivered training, telling me that they still don’t push the button. Personally, I have made wonderful use of elevator time, especially during my working years, to steal an extra 5-10 seconds of recovery through one or two cleansing breaths. One thing is for sure … there is an unwritten code in society that declares, “he who is closest to the panel must push this button.” I've actually received some very dirty looks from people who gave up waiting for me to push it and almost pushed me out of the way to do what I was “supposed to do.” I actually had one woman (in her late 50s or early 60s) actually stare at me in disgust while she repeatedly (noisily) pushed the button. I confess that I didn't take the high road … I blurted out laughing as I said, "In a hurry, are we?" OK, I'm not proud of myself for that one, yet I'm smiling as I recall it now. 

13. Drive in quiet – joking aside, this one literally was transformative for me. Until 2001 the thought of driving alone with no radio or music playing was unconscionable. Then I had my crash ‘n burn. Obviously something snapped in me because I lost all interest in music or news and for a period of almost a year there was total silence in the car while I drove alone. I didn't choose this … it was apathy that really made the choice. BUT … I came to discover that with no sound, I was able to think. Think about what? The things that had led to my breakdown. I started enjoying this quiet time for thinking and deep contemplation. It carried over into my out-of-car life and I found myself enjoying silence and noiselessness at every waking opportunity. It was probably almost ten years before I started listening to anything again in the car … and even then, only on occasion. But to this day, the first 2-4 hours of my day are usually in total silence. What started as a dysfunctional response in the car has turned into one of my most important recovery practices. I find that sound, even music that I love, amps me up inside. Silence slows me down. I need SLOW because there is already enough FAST in everything else.

OK…. Pick 2.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

SLOWING – getting to know your elephant

Welcome back Viphilus*

You haven’t been through a full month of posts with me yet … the full-cycle of the monthly process I want us to take on this learning journey. Whereas the first two posts are more didactic and informative, the third one (today’s) is an exercise to increase your self-awareness. Posts 1 and 2 will always be about perspectives, principles and prime directives. Post 3 will always be personal; I will suggest questions or contemplations that come out of the take-aways of the first two weeks that you can use as tools to dig into yourself to get to know yourself better. Hopefully, a LOT better.

Self-awareness, as I’ve read, is one of those things that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom; we are able to think about our thinking and we are able to contemplate the nature of the kind of person that we are. Getting to know yourself is a spiritual pursuit (not talking religion here) because it is getting to know who lives inside the tissues, bones, sinews, nerves and cells. That great existential question: “who am I?” has been asked by people since the beginning of people, along with its supporting prime directive, the ancient aphorism “know thyself” (which was already ancient when Socrates used it).

Exercises in self-awareness have multiple goals; one that I will pursue in these posts is to help you make your unconscious mind conscious to you, in order to study it, understand it, and make changes to it. Before we get there let’s just take 1 minute for a primer on self-awareness from Daniel Goleman who has written some very practical books on emotional/social intelligence.

Goleman postulates that before we can ever become an effective leader (my wish for you), we need to learn to maximize four critical skills: two about ourselves and two about how we relate to others.

The 2 personal competencies are self-awareness and self-management.
The 2 social competencies are social-awareness and relationship management.

As for the personal competencies …self-awareness is the ability to read one's emotions and recognize their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions, whereas, self-management involves controlling one's emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances. The main postulate here, driven by logic, is that self-awareness drives self-management … you can’t change (intentionally improve) yourself until you first know yourself … and self-knowledge begins with self-awareness.

Translating this into the language I’ll be using …

Self-awareness/knowledge is about getting to know and understand your rider and your elephant. Self-management is teaching your rider how to train your elephant.

Therefore, the highest personal competency of emotional intelligence is the art of elephant training.

OK, the primer is over.

Now, you are a half dozen paragraphs into this post and you might be saying to yourself, “I thought this was going to be about personal stuff. He’s still just teaching and yammering on about theories and ideologies. Harumph!”

Is that you? If so, and if you experienced the genesis of an emotional storm brewing inside of you because you never learned to properly manage your expectations, a bench-mark of maturity and high emotional intelligence, then let this mark your first self-awareness exercise:

1.    Did it bug you that after I said that this wouldn't be as much a teaching post as it would be me giving you some ways of becoming more self-aware ... but then I seemed to just keep yammering on with teaching points? Ask yourself …. “did it bug me a bit?” 

Next question: did I just offend you by asking you to query yourself by implying that you might lack a bit of maturity? If so then here is your second self-awareness exercise, in the form of another question:

2.    “Am I easily offended, by either life circumstances or by other people?”  (a corollary question might be, “Am I easily irked by people, especially if they don’t move at my speed with things?”)

Teaching point: self-awareness and self-knowledge never end, if you keep working at it. For example, it wasn’t until 10 years after I learned to understand and then manage my expectations that I learned just how closely they were tied to my urgency paradigm. Same thing with how easily I used to be offended … completely linked with my urgency paradigm. Who knew? (well, I do …. now).

OK, now that we are on a roll, let’s just keep going. Everything below is for you to use as tools to help you get to know yourself a bit better … specifically when it comes to understanding the strength of the urgency paradigm in you (your need for pleasure-NOW and no-pain-NOW).

3.    Without being too analytical about it, estimate approximately what percentage of time you spend on activities in each of the 4 quadrants (draw a blank version of the matrix that you read about last week and write these into it).

     I – doing things which are both important and urgent
     II – doing things which are important but not urgent
     III – doing things which are urgent but not important
     IV – doing things which are neither important nor urgent

Ponder your results. For now don’t judge them … don’t ask whether or not you are content with what you see … just ponder them.

How to use these tools

Read through the reflection exercises below. In my training I refer to such reflections as disciples of thought … all aimed at helping you understand your rider and elephant.

Read all of them and note which ones make you pause, wince, cringe or heave. Did you find one that stirs the greatest reaction / resistance in you? If so, congratulations … you just found the starting point for a self-awareness sprint … you will grow quickest by digging into this one right away.

John Ortberg was the literary mentor who helped me most with this more than a dozen years ago, so I’m going to let him guide you as he did me. Here are things that I pulled out of his teachings … things that helped me just by their contemplative power alone.

4.    When you are behind the wheel of your car, do you curse those who pass you or do you have noble thoughts that every other driver on the road has an equally valid claim on that piece of road just ahead of you?

5.    At the grocery store checkout, do you rush to get in the shortest line, and then continually monitor and evaluate your choice, sometimes even switching lanes … but then keeping an eye on that woman with the green coat because I would have been in her spot had I stayed in that lane?

6.    On an elevator, which do you push first, the button of your destination floor or the “close door” button?

7.    Back to the grocery store because it is a wonderful place for developing self-awareness. When you are in the checkout line, are you spending time in contemplation about your day and chatting with the people around you … OR … are you 100% in vigilance-mode about how quickly your line is moving, and do you become easily exasperated when the cashier or person ahead of you or the checkout technology doesn’t operate at the speed required for your current need?

8.    John says that, “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day (because it kills love); it can keep us from living well … it can destroy our souls.”

Q: Is this true in my life?

9.    Does just the thought of going one day without a watch create anxiety in you?

10. Dr. Ortberg says that many of us suffer from “hurry sickness.” Examine his list of some symptoms of hurry sickness to see how badly you suffer from it. If you are a person of faith, ask God to help you diagnosis yourself honestly (since we all have a tendency to shine ourselves on):

          I.    Speeding up daily activities – the hurry-sick person reads faster, talks faster, and when listening, nods faster to encourage the talker to accelerate; they will speed up the activities of their children for no reason other than to get them over with ("OK kids, let's see who can get ready for bed the quickest?"); and, of course, the whole grocery store thing discussed above. 

          Q: Do I speed up daily activities unnecessarily?

        II.    Multi-tasking – in their desperate need to hurry, hurry-sick people find themselves doing or thinking more than one thing at a time; psychologists call this polyphasic activity (if psychologists have a name for it, that’s usually an indication that it’s not a good thing); if you have ever tried speaking with a multi-tasker you’ve already learned that you never get their full attention.
Q: Do I multi-task (perhaps even proudly)?

       III.    Clutter – the lives of the hurry-sick lack simplicity and order; they buy stacks of books and magazines but don’t find time to read them; they acquire countless time-saving gadgets but don’t have the time or patience to read the instructions and figure out how to use them.
Q: Does clutter describe my home or office? 

      IV.    Superficiality – this is the result of hurry because depth always comes slowly; character depth is the casualty of hurry-sickness; we have traded wisdom for information and depth for breadth.
Q: Am I superficial … content to put in half-hearted efforts in all that I do?

       V.    Inability to love – the most serious sign of hurry-sickness is a diminished capacity to love; love and hurry are incompatible because love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have; hurry-sickness often manifests itself in “sunset fatigue” … the condition which renders a person too tired, too drained, or too preoccupied, to love the people to whom they have made the deepest promises; a by-product of this is a loss of wonder and gratitude [and ultimately, if you are a person of faith, this includes a loss of the ability to love God]
Q: Is it difficult for me to love/care?

Happy reflections.

See you next week when we start taking action.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

SLOWING – a power principle to understand

Welcome back Viphilus*

“If passion drives then let reason hold the reins.”  Ben Franklin

Just over a week ago, Debbie and I conducted a workshop for more than 60 women who were celebrating International Women’s Day. The subject was on effective living (specifically, we wanted to bust some myths about a balanced-life) and our workshop focus was on the link between human stress and how we spend our time. From the reactions to our material and subsequent conversations, there were a lot of surprises for this group … things that they had never heard before. But nobody was more shocked than I was when I asked how many had heard about the Eisenhower* time matrix, and only 3 people raised their hand. (* - the urgent vs. important matrix)

Considering that it has been mainstream teaching in all time-management books and courses for decades, and that for me, it is one of the cleverest self-awareness tools out there, I was incredulous that it was still new to anyone. That cinched it for me … it needed to be discussed in this blog, and right away. Before we get to that though, I’ve learned over the years that I need to come at this tool carefully in order for its full depth and power to be appreciated. Therefore, I’m going to back up to a statement that I made near the end of my last post:

"All human beings are born as hedonists ... pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures." 

As I said last time, this was a teaching point in a course that I took on how the brain works. Despite it being an unappetizing “truth” for me, I can’t argue with the statement. In fact, I believe it to be a key truth in understanding yourself, especially your self-sabotaging nature.

We are born with strong animal instincts for survival and a genetic predisposition towards seeking pleasurable things and avoiding painful things. As we grow older and develop a conscience and a will and something along the lines of self-determination (one of the things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom), we know that we need to subordinate those basic instincts to our control … to our will. The thing is, these instincts are powerful beyond imagination and will completely dominate us unless we learn how to tame the beast within us so that we act like a human being and not like an animal.

The analogy of taming this beast is brought out very well in Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,” where he cites the Buddha similie where every person is like a rider on an elephant; the rider is the rational conscious part of the brain and the elephant is the more emotional subconscious part. 

The rider knows where he wants to go … he wants to be good and do good and he wants to head in directions that are noble, principled, spiritual and altruistic. The elephant, on the other hand, is stubbornly selfish, lazy, hates pain and is only interested in what is safe and pleasurable. AND .... the rider is easily exhaustible while the elephant seems endlessly energized. One yeah, one more thing; the elephant spooks easily at change.

It was probably with this analogy in mind that prompted the Ben Franklin quote at the top of this post. [side note: the Heath brothers … Chip and Dan … turned the elephant/rider analogy into a brilliant strategy for how to effectively bring about change when change is hard … check out their book SWITCH].

OK … here’s the deal. This inner conflict between the rider and the elephant is really a civil war going on inside of us. This isn’t a new discovery; it’s been known about for millennia. If you want the Christian take on this you can look to Jesus who said, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” or the Apostle Paul, who actually describes the civil war in himself in great detail in Romans 7. Perhaps you are more sanguine to something a little more recent such as the Canadian First Nations story (which, by the way, made a great heritage-moment commercial) where a chief tells a young boy that inside each of us lives two wolves, one who makes us do good and one who makes us do bad; when the young boy asks the chief which wolf wins, the chief offers, “the one you feed.” 

Of course, even this is just a reworking of Plato’s charioteer with two horses (a good one and a bad one). 

Maybe you want a (somewhat) fresher version from the likes of Freud with his teaching on the id, ego and superego. 

Then again, maybe you’re completely satisfied with the simplest version of all … the Hollywood depiction of the little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.

Personally, I really like the elephant and rider analogy because it fits well with the social science and human performance data … something we will visit in the posts to come. Here are the two driving truths about the elephant:

1. The elephant doesn’t just want pleasure … it wants pleasure NOW. In fact, it wants the pleasure NOW so badly that it is willing to borrow tomorrow’s pleasure and bring it into today, or like in Æsop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs (a fable about the unprofitability of greed), it brings the pleasure of all-the-tomorrrows into today. But here’s the rub … the elephant will do this even if it knows that by bringing the pleasure into today, not only will tomorrow’s pleasure be zero, today’s pleasure will actually be a diminished version of what tomorrow’s pleasure would have been. Of course, this is that whole conversation about delayed gratification that brings to mind marshmallows and cookies. 
2. The elephant is also highly motivated to experience no pain NOW. In fact, it so desperately wants to avoid any pain NOW that it is quite content to delay the pain until tomorrow … even knowing that when tomorrow arrives, the pain might actually be much worse. All it knows is that it just can’t handle that pain NOW.

This pleasure-NOW, no-pain-NOW nature within all of us is what creates the urgency paradigm that we all find so powerful and compelling. The elephant has the power - this is the principle we need to understand; all that remains is to teach the rider how to train his elephant. 

Now we can discuss the matrix.

U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower once said something along the lines, “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” It’s reported that from this, he created the simple 2X2 matrix that you see here and used it to decide how he would spend his time.

The science/math guy in me loves this matrix because it creates a valid 2-dimensional function space with truly orthogonal (independent) variables. Application, in plain English?  It helps us keep two things separate which we find almost impossible to separate, especially in the battle conditions we call real life.

Whether Eisenhower was correct in his statement is less important than this fact; important and urgent are two independent things. Something can be both, either or neither of these, but they mean two very different things.

IMPORTANT – these are things which are:
1. Important to you, although not necessarily to anyone else.
2. Important to you (in an absolute sense), even if you didn’t know it.

URGENT – these are things which cannot be done at your discretion … there is a timeliness about them that is not under your control; this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be done immediately, but they also cannot be postponed just because you don’t have the time to do them.

Think about it. Which are you more likely to respond to (or react to) … something that is urgent, or something that is important? (this is not rhetorical … answer this to yourself). If you are at all like the other 7 billion people on this planet, then you have an elephant underneath your rider, which means that until the rider learns how to take control, you are governed, more or less, by the tyranny of the urgent.  

You want a real-life example of how you might respond to urgent even when it is not important (or worse, how you might respond to an urgency even though you know that your response is contrary to what you have declared to be important, leading you to behave incongruently with your beliefs or principles)? Let me give you three:

1. Your child asks for something and screams in rage when he doesn’t get it. You give in to whatever he wants, even though you know you are creating a dangerous habit and are training him that all he needs to do to get his own way is to scream. But you do it so that he will stop screaming NOW, even if it is just for 5 minutes. Correcting him takes time and effort (energy) and the rage will not stop immediately … so acquiescence is just easier (though not better).
2. You have a significant report to write and your manager needs it in one week. You know it will take a full day to do it but it involves a lot of mind-numbing data-mining that is anathema to you, so you defer it to the weekend. You have the time now but the thought of getting started NOW is simply overwhelming. The weekend seems like a better option even though it means you’ll need your spouse to keep the kids busy while you get it done, and your promise of spending the weekend with the family just got broken … but they’ll get over it … they always do.
3. You are really hungry (famished actually) and get home just in time to smell the most incredible dinner on the stove. You wonder what deliciousness your mom has prepared, but instead discover your twin brother stirring a pot of lentil stew. You can’t imagine why it smells so amazing, but all you know is that you haven’t eaten for a day or two, so you demand a bowl. Your brother says, “sure, just sign over your share of the inheritance from Mom and Dad’s estate.” Whaaaaa? Is he insane? For a bowl of stew? Funny thing is you find yourself saying yes before you can stop yourself. All you know is that you are hungry NOW … who cares about anything later … it’s all about NOW!

Is this worth giving up your inheritance?

Who would do these things?  Well I watch #1 happening all around me … #2 was a story about me from my younger years … and #3 is actually a guy named Esau (and the brother who took advantage of him?  Israel … as in the guy after whom the nation was named).

Everyone responds to urgent more than important every day … many times a day. It is a primary root cause for much of our self-sabotage. Authors Loehr and Schwartz call this unconscious behaviour modification, “expedient adaptations.” We will spend an entire post on just this in the coming weeks.

When I teach this topic in workshops or coaching I actually refer to the matrix as the Eisenhower-Covey time matrix, simply because Stephen Covey is the one who really popularized it in his 1989 best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (which for me is probably amongst the top 10 most important books I have read in my life).  

Here is how Covey characterized the people who spend the majority of their time in each quadrant:

If you can’t wait until I cover this more comprehensively in a future post, take 5 minutes now to troll the web and see the thousands of variations of this matrix and how it is used to teach about time-management (just type into Google, “Eisenhower time matrix” and then select “images” rather than “web”). Enjoy! But please come back to this post.

Promise: I will come back to this in much greater detail (including an interesting look at how stress and energy factor into this matrix). For today’s purpose, I just wanted to get you into the mode of thinking about how you respond to urgency in your life, rather than responding to things just because they are important. It is our over-dependence on urgency that revs us up on the inside … hence, the need to lower those RPMs by intentionally choosing to slow down (strategically – tactically).

Over time we train ourselves that the urgency-paradigm is normal and we even convince ourselves that it’s a healthy way of living. Such distortion can lead to things like procrastination, something not intuitively linked to the urgency-paradigm. See if this describes you; you believe that the pressure of a later, more imminent deadline will focus your thinking and energy and you have convinced yourself that, “I will put this off until the last minute because I work better under pressure.” In reality, all you have done is to confuse the good stress of doing what is important to you, with the bad stress of working under an artificial time-constraint. In the end, you sabotage yourself by seeking out that which is self-limiting and potentially self-destructive. You don’t actually function better ... you simply respond as you’ve trained yourself.

Did I just get a bit too personal?  I’m not sorry (a statement which makes me a bad Canadian ... for which I must apologize).

Borrowed image from AKWAABLOG!

Urgency helps us create artificial emergencies which, in turn, help us to produce adrenalin on-demand. Most people have become adrenalin junkies and believe that this is the best way to live. Adrenalin is a wonderful hormone that gives us instant power to deal with a stressor via fight or flight. That’s it! But, re-arranging our life to create artificial survival conditions is akin to having an IV-bag strung over our shoulder with a permanent adrenalin drip. Sounds great you might say. Nope. Not good. Continual presence of adrenalin in the system causes the vital organs to break down. But long before that happens, the addiction has already delivered exactly what all addictions deliver: increasing craving with decreasing enjoyment/benefit. Oh, and I forgot to mention that a long-term presence of adrenalin in the system also creates chronic fatigue and sickness. What started as a sensational rush has now become a necessity for functioning … with diminished capacity as the legacy.

From the perspective of trying to slow down, the main point is to begin shifting away from things which motivate you simply because of their urgency and start shifting towards doing things simply because they are important to you. When we look at the stress side of this discussion it will become very clear why this is one the most dysfunctional habits that we can have … and why I believe SLOWING to be life’s most important habit.

Next week I’ll get personal and give you some ways to investigate your own urgency paradigm and evaluate the degree of your addiction. It’s not about whether or not you are addicted; the question is, “how much?”

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"