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It’s hard to be human.

It’s difficult to fully expose who we are, and to be comfortable putting that person out there, regardless of any judgment that may result from it.

We all know that other people may judge us, but how often do you devote thought to the fact that you are probably also judging yourself every time you expose vulnerability?

Getting comfortable with who we are includes accepting and indeed, loving, all of our emotions and feelings, including the negative ones.

The fact that you feel negative at the moment does not make you a negative person.  The fact that right now, you feel angry and resentful, does not make you an angry, resentful person.

It has been years since I’ve cried openly.  It’s not because I don’t feel overwhelmed with emotion at times (in fact, I do, often).  Rather, it’s that as soon as I begin to feel that way, I clamp down and assert control over how I am feeling.

Why?

To protect myself.  To prevent myself from experiencing emotions that I judge weak, or negative, or unhelpful.  To ensure that I am a positive person, and not a negative one.

I currently feel overwhelmed, some despair, and at times, like I’m throwing life away.  That doesn’t mean that I’m in over my head, suffering depression, or a failure.  It just means that I too experience emotions like overwhelm and fear.

I am working to embrace these emotions as part of who I am, and to share them more openly.  I invite you to do the same.

It’s hard to be human – but it’s worth it.

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I’m on a ferry right now heading off to the first of what will be twelve intensive weekends spent in Seattle, attending more training related to coaching.  Victoria has just experienced a terrible week of weather, and while the rain seems to have settled a little bit, it’s dark and gloomy outside.  The lights are a little dimmer on the ferry, and the air is peaceful and quiet.  Most of the people beside me are working on their laptops.  One person is watching the latest Louis CK special and is not laughing out loud – clearly he’s crazy.

With this set playing from Nick Lewis, I’m feeling productive, so let’s get started.

Values?

I guess that’s got to be the first question.  What does it even mean when someone starts talking about values?  The term is being thrown around a fair bit these days, and I suspect that is often especially true when the economy is in a recession.  This strikes me as reasonable, since money represents one of the easiest ways to get distracted from what is really important to you.

Values are what genuinely matter to us.  They’re the things that, when we remove all distractions and look deep within ourselves, motivate our decisions.  Values are the reasons eating vegan is important to some people, but a waste of money to other people.

When you find yourself arguing with someone and both of you walk away convinced that you’re right and the other person is an idiot, it’s likely a case of the two of you holding different values.  It’s not that they’re ignorant because they don’t recognize the suffering that animals suffer, nor that you’re an idiot because you spend more money than you need to on things that aren’t that important.  One person simply holds money in high value (economics is a strong motivator for them) while the other person holds equality of animals and people in high value (justice is probably a strong motivator for them).

We generally feel our values at a very visceral level, and often act without being aware of them or how they are affecting our choices.  It might just be second-nature to you that you recycle certain things, but the extent to which you recycle is likely a function of your values.

Likewise, almost everyone does some kind of financial budgeting in their lives, but the degree to which they do so, as well as the emphasis they place on various things in their budget, is often a reflection of their values.  People that put a high amount of money away for investing probably hold economics and security in high regard.

But… boundaries?

Great question, me!  But first, what do I mean by boundaries?

Boundaries are our ability to set and maintain strong … boundaries.  Boundaries come into play constantly in our lives.  Here are just a few examples:

• Your boss comes in to your office and says “Hey, I’m going to need you to stay later tonight than you would normally have”, but provides no reason.  Whether you accept or reject this request is a function of how strong a boundary you put around your own time.
• A friend shows up on your doorstep and says “Hey, I’m bored and thought I’d stop by for dinner”.  Whether or not you feel compelled to oblige them (notwithstanding whether or not you actually want to) is a function of your boundaries.
• One of your divorced parents says “I’m going to need you to let your other parent know that they’re not welcome here any more”.  How you decide to act (notwithstanding whether or not that parent is justified in their statement) is a function of the boundaries you have set with your parents.

Boundaries are terribly important.  For one, they make it easier to turn down unwanted requests when they come our way.  Being mentally aware of what you are and are not willing to do goes a long way toward actually acting on it.  For another, the more times you act on a given boundary, the stronger you become in maintaining it.  Routine builds foundation.

Boundaries even help us with little things we would never imagine, like the socialization that happens around Christmas time.  If you have strong boundaries around what you will pay for a Christmas gift, you are better able to resist the social norming and marketing that imposes on us a duty to spend ever increasing amounts of money on gifts.  (“But they got me something really expensive last year, I should spend more this year!”)

The interplay

So how do these two concepts interact?  Very closely, actually.

First and foremost, it’s all fine and good to make a statement like “From now on, I will not let myself be taken advantage of in this way”.  But if you don’t understand why that is important to you, it becomes easier and easier to bargain and compromise with yourself the next time you’re put in that situation.

It may sound odd for me to suggest that we would bargain and compromise with ourselves in order to alter our boundaries at the very moment when we should be most committed to them.  However, it’s actually quite simple.  Boundaries come into play when you are facing pressure to act a certain way.  That pressure can come in many forms, but is most commonly social pressure.  Pressure from the person standing on your doorstep making a request of you, pressure from your relatives at Christmas-time and pressure from your boss asking you to stay later.

When we feel this pressure, the weaker and less affirmed our boundaries are, the easier it is for us to give in to the perceived social pressure and make compromises and bargains.  When your boss asks you to stay later and your boundary was only “I will not stay later more this month”, your train of reasoning will likely look something like:

“Well, he does have a point, there is a lot of work that needs to get done, and I can always go for a romantic dinner with my husband another night”.

Because the boundary itself does not have any inherent meaning to us, we are put in a position where we are more willing to acquiesce to the pressure and than find a way to rationalize it against the context of the boundary.  When we are faced with this kind of pressure, and our boundaries are simply words that we have stated only internally, we have nothing to focus on but the request being made.

Now, contrast that with a boundary that is backed and understood in the context of our values.  Understanding why a boundary is important to us makes it that much more real, and it instills the boundary at a more visceral level.  When we are faced with the same question, instead of being left in the position where we bargain with ourselves to reason why it’s okay to stay, we are now in a position where the question becomes:

“Am I willing to compromise my values of family and romance in order to stay later tonight?”

Do you see how much more powerful that question is?

Get to know yourself

Understanding who you are and what is most important to you is an integral factor in establishing firm boundaries and maintaining what is most important to you.  There is no end to the pressures exerted on us in our daily lives, and they come from every angle, most often unintentionally and covertly.  Due to how out of tune many of us are with our own values, we often don’t even realize that they have been trod upon.  All that we note is our unhappiness after the interaction.

Take note of the times when you find yourself making statements that are couched in the language of boundaries, and try to ask yourself why it is important to you.   Rather than focusing on what you do not want to have happen in the future, shift your focus to what you would like to have happen, and how that is important to you.  Move the conversation away from boundaries and into the context of your values.

Summary

Finally, the summary:

• Values are an incredibly important aspect of who we are.  They guide and direct many of our actions, most of the time subconsciously;
• Boundaries allow us to resist social and other forms of pressure.  Having strong boundaries goes a long way toward protecting yourself and your time, and allows you to act in ways that are more authentic to who you are; and
• Boundaries that are not connected to our values are easier to compromise and bargain away.  The strength of and commitment that you have toward your boundaries is a direct function of how tied they are to your values.

A quick update on me

Just a quick update on myself too – I started writing this article on my way to the start of what will be a year of education in ontological coaching (coaching based on the concept of who someone is in their purest form).  I cannot emphasize how transformative I feel this year will be.

While everyone brings a different set of self-defences to the table, I was shocked to be given the awareness that mine is an inability to show people my own vulnerability.

While this is incredibly meaningful to me, the impact of reading these words for you will likely be minimal.  I guess that’s how it has to remain for now (maybe it’s okay that I can’t always articulate an idea…?).  More to come as the coming year presses on.  Stay tuned and thanks for reading.

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The fall term is starting to draw to a close.  That means that my work at the Law Centre downtown is starting to wind to a close and I’m closing out or transferring the remaining files that I have.  It also means that my time is starting to free up a little bit and I will be able to focus more on building my coaching business.

This term has involved a tremendous amount of time and effort building the foundation for what I will do once I graduate.  Identifying the business name, determining the target market, what is my niche, who are the people that I can best connect with, how should I market to and connect with those people, etc., etc.  Building the foundation can be frustrating, because you don’t see the fast results that typically signal progress to us.  It goes slowly, and it doesn’t provide the changes on the surface that we typically associate with success or transformation.  But that’s because it’s foundation.  It’s the groundwork upon which all of that good and more exciting stuff is built.  Without the foundation, your efforts will crumble without the support they require.

I’ve also been conducting more experiments on myself, and that’s what I’m writing about today.

Retreating from your vices.

What does this mean?  At first brush, it sounds pretty negative doesn’t it?  Rather than dealing with the problems you have, just run away from them!  That’s not what I mean though – I mean take a retreat from them.  Maybe even a vacation, if you prefer that terminology.

The genesis for this post began when I decided that I wanted to drink less coffee.  I’ve always loved coffee.  I like the flavour and the smell, but most of all, I love the buzz.  I don’t know what it is, but that sense of getting energized is something that I’ve always been drawn to.  Maybe it’s the fact that I’m naturally a person with a lot of energy and I love to accomplish a lot of things.  Perhaps the ability to “overclock” my personal CPU and get even more cycles out of myself (or at least, provide the illusion that I’m doing that) is especially enticing as a result of my nature.

However, for a long time, I’ve felt like my relationship with coffee had become unhealthy.  It’s not that I required coffee to get up and start my day.  I’ve never really allowed myself to make it a habit to that extent.  The problem, for me, was more one of self-control (a theme you will see revisited a couple times in this post).  When I would decide it was time for coffee, I wouldn’t just drink one cup – I’d have three or four.  It wasn’t enough to simply get a mild buzz, I wanted to be vibrating!

When we ended our orientation and began working proper at the law clinic, I made the decision to drop coffee for a month, and see what the result would be.

Why?  There’s a few reasons why.

First, I wanted to see if I could do it.  I was pretty sure that I could (it’s just coffee right?), but nevertheless, I knew that I would feel a sense of accomplishment simply from having the discipline to do this.

Second, I wanted to give myself some time to reflect on what kind of relationship I wanted to have with coffee.  I recognize that describing my coffee habit as a relationship might seem a little dramatic, but the shoe fits, so why not.  Did I really want to drink coffee every day?  What about every second day?  Did weekends count?  These were all questions that I was trying to resolve, but found it difficult to do when I was actively drinking coffee.  I would think half-heartedly about the fact that I wanted to consume less, but the next day at work when I wanted to really get some work done, suddenly there was a cup of coffee in my hand.

Vices are funny things that way.  Alcohol is a great example.  The morning after a heavy night of drinking, it’s easy to look in the mirror and swear that you don’t plan to do that ever again, but next weekend, when all your friends are drinking at the party… well, you know how it goes.

The Next Step

Halfway through “The Great Caffeine Withdrawal” (as I dubbed it), I enjoyed the process enough that I decided to add two more experiments into the mix: alcohol, and refined sugar products.

There’s a never ending amount of research suggesting that alcohol is consistently linked with cancer, and I really don’t want to set myself up with habits for the rest of my life that are going to detract from my longevity and quality of life.  Alcohol had become a crutch for me in a lot of ways too.  Most often it was a way to loosen up in social situations, and, oddly enough, I used it as a cure for boredom.  Nothing to do?  No problem, have a few beers and play video games.

As for refined sugar, my decision was to drop things like cookies, donuts, pastries, pie, cakes, pop and juice.  For the most part I’m pretty good when it comes to eating sweet treats, but, as always the case with me, the biggest issue is self-control.  Bay would buy a bunch of cookies for our cookie jar at home, and while I would initially begin eating one cookie a day, before long I would be shoving three in my face as soon as I got home.

The Common Thread

The common thread that runs through each of these things I chose to retreat from is one of self-control.  Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.  I have fantastic discipline, but absolutely terrible self-control.  I can set up systems of rules, and when I do, I’m excellent at adhering to those rules.  But, if you just put a bag of cookies, a 12-pack of beer and a pot of coffee in front of me and said “consume until you feel you’ve had enough”, you’d come back to a few crumbs, 12 empty bottles and me bouncing off the walls.

By setting up a specific duration of time during which I wasn’t going to consume any coffee, sugar or alcohol, I created a simple rule that I could follow — I exercise my discipline, rather than my self-control.

The Results

The results were really interesting.  Let’s start with coffee first.

I allowed myself to continue drinking tea, because tea has never really been an issue.  Sure, I will easily drink an entire pot of tea in one sitting, but that doesn’t cause me any problems and it wasn’t making me unhappy.  The relationship with tea was not a problem.  Also, since I never drank coffee consistently in the morning, it was never an issue to get out of bed or get the day started.  I would come in to work, make a cup of tea, and begin the day.

One thing that I did notice was the signalling that coffee produced.  In the past, coffee had always been something I would go and buy (or make) when it was time for me to really get down to work.  If I had a complicated problem that I wanted to work on, or needed to push through a lot of work in a short amount of time, the cup of coffee was a little signal that it was time to get into that mode.

Sure, I could make another cup of tea, but it just wasn’t the same. In the end, this came down to a matter of reprogramming myself.  If coffee had been the way that I had signalled to myself that it was time to get things rolling, I would have to substitute in a new signal.

I chose to use some specific songs, and switched from green tea to black tea when it was time to knuckle down.  This wasn’t really that problematic, but it was an interesting part of my relationship with coffee that I had not been aware of prior to this point.

Sugar had similar results.  It’s not that I was dependent on sugary treats – I exercised good discipline when at the store simply by not buying them.  Without having them at home, I wasn’t compelled to shovel the cookie jar into my face, and there was no problem.

The thing about refined sugar products was that they had come to symbolize a reward.  I first noticed this returning to work after having the charges against one of my clients stayed (which means that the Crown, for one reason or another, drops their case against the client – they effectively walk away from the charge).  I got back in to work and paced around a bit.  I felt like going and getting a donut, or something else sweet to symbolize the moment of triumph.  But, without having that option, I just sat back down.  I could make more tea, but there’s nothing special about that – I make tea all the time.

Again, the solution here was to come up with new ways to signal that success.  Separate the signal from the product itself, and then reattach something new to that signal.

The results for alcohol were a little more drastic.  Much like refined sugar and coffee, alcohol had come to symbolize certain things for me.  It symbolized relaxation and also symbolized the end of the week.  In addition to that, it was also a big part of socializing.  If I was going to meet up with people, drinks would usually be involved.

One really funny thing that I noticed was that I would find myself thinking things like “Hmm, well, there’s a party going on that I could go to, but I’m not drinking, so do I really want to be there?”  After reflecting on this a bit, it struck me that this statement really said more about the party than anything else.  If I wasn’t interested in going unless I was going to be drinking, why would I even want to be at the party in the first place?

I noticed another funny thing while not drinking.  Most of us that drink recognize that awkward moment between the first time you get together with a group and the end of the first drink, where everyone is friendly, but the vibe hasn’t quite settled in.  People are still figuring out where they’re comfortable and what to talk about and are generally focused a little too much in their heads, rather than simply being present.

This moment always passes, typically after everyone has finished their first drink.  The funny thing I noticed was that the moment passed regardless of whether or not I was drinking.  It was simply a matter of time and sitting in the slight awkwardness of the moment.  I’m sure that many of you won’t find this surprising at all, but to me, it was a bit of a revelation.  The fact that this moment passed once people had gotten a little bit liquor’d up was one of those things that I’d always simply assumed and never had any data to suggest otherwise.

Again, I’ve found myself in situations where I miss liquor.  Going out for dinner with Bay and cheers-ing our relationship with a glass of water to her nice glass of champagne just didn’t feel right.  Sitting around home and drinking tea with my parents was okay, but I enjoy drinking beer with friends and family.

So is it all gone for good?

Definitely not!  Removing certain vices from my daily life for the course of thirty days does not mean that I never intend to have them in my life again.  What it does mean is that I’ve cleared myself out from them and can now be completely present to the kind of relationship I want to have with them going forward.

As an example, I mentioned above that refined sugary treats had come to symbolize a reward – a treat when things have gone well.  This is the kind of relationship that I would like to have with this vice.  Not something I simply eat because I’m bored of studying and want something to break up the tedium.  Not something that I eat as a matter of course every single time I come home from work.

Alcohol, as I mentioned, is also a great way (for me) to celebrate, and is something I really enjoy sharing with good friends and family.  But again, I don’t want to have a relationship with liquor where celebrating means I drink my way through 12 beers in a night.

What about coffee?  Is it making it’s way back into my life?  Well, that’s the actual casualty of this experiment.  I don’t really miss it.  I substituted black tea for the moments when I wanted to supercharge myself, and I also drink decaffeinated beans when I really want that delicious taste that I enjoy.  If I’m not missing any other aspect of it, is there really a reason to make it a part of my life?  I can’t think of one.

And that’s the beauty of this approach – you don’t need to do anything in particular when you’re done.  Maybe you will finish your 30-day retreat and come to the conclusion that you’re content with the relationship you have.  Maybe you’ll change your mind and want to strike out some new balance.  Either way, you will hopefully arrive at your conclusion more present to what it means, and with more purpose and awareness behind the decision.

What does this mean for you?

Think of  something in your life for which you’re not particularly happy about the relationship you have with it.  It might be drinking, it might be overtime work, it might be exercise (maybe you hate jogging 4 days a week but you do it because you feel you have to).  Identify what it is, and isolate it.  Then, remove that thing’s presence from your life for the next 30 days – take a retreat from it.

More important than anything else here is that you commit to those 30 days.  Commit yourself to remove that thing from your life for those 30 days, and refuse to allow yourself to break this commitment.  When you find yourself missing that thing, or getting frustrated because you can’t have it, reflect on why that is.  Why are you missing it right now?  What does it mean?  Is this a reward system at play?  Is it a thing you use to relax?  (And is that the relationship you want to have with this thing?  Maybe you don’t want to need this thing in order to relax…)

Isn’t this just a cleanse?

It depends what you mean when you use the word “cleanse”.  For most of the people I see posting on Facebook, a cleanse is a ridiculous diet that does not have any scientific merit and is meant to “supercharge your health”, or at least clear out all of your toxins.  (Something that our biology has had millions of years worth of evolution to do far better than lemon juice, honey and cayenne pepper ever will).

Further, I don’t see how you could possibly intelligently reflect on the relationship you have with something when making such a drastic change to your overall diet.  Removing coffee from your system is one thing.  Removing all solid foods is quite another.  Your system will be in such a state of shock that it will be a challenge to focus on anything other than how much you want to feel some texture between your molars.

Summary

Here’s the summary for those of you that want all of the sex and none of the foreplay:

• Temporarily retreating from your vices can be a great way to gain better control of them
• Removing the influence of a vice in your life will put you in a better position to understand how it affects you, and what kind of relationship you have with it (and remember, vices aren’t just something you consume – they can include things like work!)
• Use moments of desire as an opportunity for reflection, rather than regret or frustration
• Taking a retreat from something in your life does not mean it has to be permanent
• The goal in an exercise like this is to end up more present and conscious of the decisions that you are making.  If you can achieve that, you’ve scored a victory for yourself and your self-awareness.

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I’ve just gotten back from spending some time today at a mingler with the folks putting on @TEDxVictoria.  This event promises to be an inspiring one, with a number of very interesting speakers attending.  I’m volunteering on the day of the event, and am looking forward to touching base and meeting a ton of new people.  I’ll be working the registration desk, so please stop by and say hi if you’re attending the event.

The theme for the event is “Cultivating Evolution”.  I had hoped to get my act together and submit a talk for the event, but had a number of other commitments that were more pressing and, to be fair, more important as well.

However, this theme is very near and dear to my heart.  Growth is an integral component of who I am, and it’s the reason my clients seek out my coaching services.  I help people find where and how they want to grow, and I enable and accelerate that growth.  Evolution, to my mind, means growth with purpose.

Does growth require a purpose?

No.  But, I believe that growth without any purpose is often cancerous.  It doesn’t lead in any particular direction and often results in imbalance, burn-out and resources being strained or devoted to the wrong things.

When house plants grow, they do so with the purpose of maximizing their exposure to sunlight.  Their purpose is to harness and utilize the available resources as efficiently as possible.  You’ll note that your plants often grow towards the source of sunlight in your home.  Growing in every direction without any purpose would be inefficient.  The plant would need to devote more energy to supporting the parts of itself that aren’t collecting sunlight.

Humans are the same way.  We need to ensure that our growth happens in a purposeful manner.  Optimally, we want to design our growth so that we move and grow in directions that are consistent with what matters most to us.  Growth that is in alignment with our values and our purpose will be growth that is maximally beneficial to ourselves.

Take a moment and think of someone in your network that has achieved great things, but is miserable.  Most of us know at least a few people that meet this description – many of us meet the description ourselves.  With the intense pressure put on young adults graduating from high school to enter university, get a degree and start working “in the real world”, there are ever greater numbers of people that have grown in ways that are simply irrelevant to their values and drive.  Aside from the intrinsic value gained from education itself, what good is an engineering degree if all you have ever wanted to be was a professional actor?

Where does comfort fit into this?

Let’s get back on track  – what does comfort have to do with evolution?

The answer is: Nothing.  Comfort is what will kill your evolution.

The thing is, growth doesn’t occur when we’re comfortable; it occurs when we are pushing outside of our comfort zone.  Comfort represents a number of things.  To name just a few:

• Security
• Safety
• Inertia
• The known
• Being at peace with our surroundings

Most of these things are good.  Security and safety are important in our lives, and provide us with a sense of predictability and rationality in a world that doesn’t always behave that way.  Being at peace with our surroundings allows us to let our guard down, giving us the opportunity to rest.

When I was 19, I worked at McDonalds.  I made very little money, but it was enough to pay my rent, buy groceries and liquor, and go out to the bar with friends multiple times a week.  It was comfortable.  In fact, I could have stayed in that place for the next ten years without making any changes (and there were certainly some people that did just that).

But I demand growth from myself, and I think that you should too.  Evolution along our own values is something that we, as humans, intrinsically seek.  You may not even be aware of this drive, but you can feel it every time you experience a sense of discontent, or hear yourself saying “I feel like I’m better than this”.

There’s no growth in comfort

This is my key point.  Really juicy growth occurs when we are pushed out of our comfort zone and forced to adapt to circumstances that we have not previously encountered.

Our minds are rational.  It’s the way we’ve evolved to think.  We seek out patterns, we make predictable results based on those patterns, and then we assume that the same result will flow from that pattern the next time we encounter it.  When we’re exposed to new patterns or situations, the likes of which we have not before seen, we experience discomfort.  How do we know what result will come from this new situation?  We’ve lost our predictability; we’ve lost our rationality.

For the first ten years of my life as a dancer, I practiced my technique in front of a mirror, and it became very refined as a result.  But for those long years, I never felt like I was really progressing at the rate that I wanted to.  What had happened to the leaps and bounds that I’d been experiencing when I first started?  Simple — I was now only operating within my comfort zone.  When you allow yourself to remain in this realm, the best you can hope to do is refine what you already know.

Don’t get me wrong, refining our existing knowledge is its own form of growth and has its own value.  It’s just that it isn’t the same kind of growth, and it won’t generate those big rewards that you remember getting when you first started learning something new.

When I went to Vancouver and was put in a position where I had to dance in the middle of a circle of my friends, I was thrust right back in to that awkward, uncomfortable place.  And you know what?  My growth was incredible!  It felt discomforting and a little bit terrifying.  But those things are healthy.  They let us know that we’re doing something new.  We’re being exposed to something that is currently outside of our existing knowledge base.

If you want to grow, you need to be willing to expose yourself to something new

And so here’s the call of action to you, my readers.  Determine some areas in your life where you would like to see some growth.  Perhaps it’s meeting some new people.  Perhaps it’s quitting a habit that you’ve been carrying with you for quite some time.  Perhaps it’s pursuing a dream that you’ve let sit on the back burner for far too long.

Figure out where your first point of discomfort is with respect to this change you would like to make.  If you’re aim is to meet new people and become better at talking to strangers, perhaps that first point of discomfort comes merely from the thought of taking that action.

“What will I say after I say hello to them?”

“What if they just look at me strangely?”

“What if they don’t like me?”

These are all questions that represent that first point of discomfort.  See that point of discomfort for what it truly is: a milestone indicating an opportunity to grow.  Recognize that it doesn’t represent a failing on your part that you feel uncomfortable about it, and treat as a challenge, rather than a barrier.

Then, attack that point of discomfort.  Commit yourself to feeling uncomfortable for a period of four weeks, and then…

Dive head first.

Just do it.  It’s that simple.  The real meat of true growth is rarely about long planning sessions, strategy and identifying points of possible failure.  It ultimately comes down to your willingness to experience the discomfort associated with being in an unfamiliar situation.

Remind yourself, it gets easier every time, and that’s because you’re growing.  The first time you say “Hi” to a stranger will feel awkward and silly.  It’s outside of your comfort zone.  It’s not who you currently are.  But you’re doing it because you want to get better at it, right?  The second time you do it, it won’t feel quite as uncomfortable.  You’ve already done it once before, and you have an inkling of what to expect.  And so the cycle continues.

So what’s standing in your way?

We’ve all got complaints that go like this: “If only for X, I would be able to do Y”.

And make no mistake, X is entirely real to each of us, regardless of what it happens to be.  Maybe it’s money.  Maybe it’s the fact that you aren’t supported by your spouse.  Maybe it’s that you didn’t do something when you were younger, and so you don’t think you can achieve Y now.

But it doesn’t matter how real X is to you, because I have the real answer.

What’s predominantly standing in the way of your own growth isn’t X (or A, B or C either).  It’s fear.

Fear is what stops most of us from growing.  What do those fears look like?  Here are some:

• Fear that we won’t be supported by our partner

This is something worth delving into a little more deeply, but if Y is something you truly want to achieve, why would your partner want to stand in the way of that?

(Probably because of their own fears).

• Fear that you won’t be able to afford to do Y

There are always creative ways to achieve what you want.  Maybe you can’t do Y full-time until you’ve established yourself, but that’s not to say that you can’t start do a little bit of Y until you’ve made more of a name for yourself.

• Fear that you don’t have the time to do Y

Is Y important to you?  Where are you spending your time?  Is everything that currently occupies your time more important than Y, or are there some things that could be dropped off to make more time for Y?

Again, most of these really amount to assuming that our current context, that is to say, what we are currently comfortable with, is the only possibility that there ever could be.  But there’s no validity to this assumption.  Although you’re probably quite comfortable with the way you’re spending time, if it’s stopping you from growing toward something that is truly important to you, maybe it’s time to experience some discomfort.

Embrace discomfort

Here’s your take-away point for today.  Take note of when you are experiencing discomfort, and rather than simply reacting to it, ask yourself why you are feeling that way.  What’s causing that sensation?  What is it that you are uncomfortable with?

Then, embrace it.  Recognize it as an opportunity for growth and let yourself sit with that uncomfortable feeling.

Let’s close it out

Here’s your summary for today:

• Evolution is ultimately, in the personal sense, purposeful growth
• While it is good to feel comfortable at times, true growth does not lie in feeling comfortable
• In order to grow, you need to experience discomfort.  In fact, discomfort and growth are often mutually inclusive
• Identify some areas in your life where you want to see some real growth, then find the first point of discomfort.  Once you’ve done that, attack that point head-on.  Dive in to the discomfort and let yourself sit with it.
• Don’t simply react to discomfort.  Understand that it represents a challenge and an opportunity to grow, and treat it as such.

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This blog has now been silent for a little over a month.  I’ve sat down and written a few drafts, but nothing has come out the way I want it to, and that is for a simple reason: I’ve been avoiding being completely authentic.

Authentic to myself.  Authentic to my readers.  Authentic.  Period.

Authenticity is a powerful word.  In fact, it is one of the most important qualities we can be true to in our lives.  I will elaborate on what this word means to me as we go forward from here, but I want to share with you my own story, and how it is time to really drink my own medicine and live up to the ideals I’m purporting to help others live by.

The Background

I’m working through my final year of law school now.  When I went back to school, I wasn’t certain I wanted to be a lawyer, but found law fascinating and loved working with intricate and technical systems.  I also knew that, for me, education is an end unto itself, and I would therefore benefit simply from going back to school and learning more.

The first year of law school was very challenging.  Many of us forget what it feels like to start from ground zero again and have to learn something from the roots up.  This year, along the continuum of learning something new, my classmates and I moved from unconscious incompetence (we didn’t even know what we didn’t know) to conscious incompetence (we knew what we were doing wrong, and it stressed us out).  For lawyers, this is a continuing process that lasts far beyond the paltry three years of law school.

Since that initial phase wore off and I moved back a little bit more into my comfort zone, I’ve been able to focus on other things.

Okay.  I just spent fifteen minutes writing my around what it is that I actually want to say, so let’s just tear the bandaid off.

When I graduate, I’m not going to article.

There, it’s out.  For the last six months, I’ve known what I want to pursue when I graduate, and I’ve been taking significant steps to enable that future.  However, this is the first time I’m publicly affirming my decision here.

Put simply, once I graduate, I will be making my living exclusively as a coach and consultant.

Wow, that feels good.

See, for the last six months, I’ve been holding my cards right against my chest.

Why?

Because of fear.

Let me state that again, because it’s important.  I have not been authentically representing myself for the last six months because of fear.

Let me elaborate on some of those fears, so that you can see what I mean.

The idea is risky

Who in their right mind spends a whole bunch of money going to law school, so that they can not become a lawyer?  Well, I do.  And I do it for a number of reasons.  I can and do create tremendous value in my capacity as a consultant and a coach.  I’m passionate about this path.  I love turning other people on (in the general sense – this isn’t about sex).  This is something I’ve been doing my entire life, and I am an expert in the subjects in which I support people.

There’s not a really big safety net for what I intend to pursue.  Bay is working, and we have equity in our home, but we also have a great deal of debt.  If I flounder and fail, where does that leave us?  The answer: not looking too great.

Is this a reason to turn back from my vision?  Simply because it’s risky?  No.

Everything worth pursuing has a degree of risk involved.  No reward without risk.  You can’t grow if you don’t push outside of your comfort zone.

And besides, there are always creative solutions available.  If I don’t succeed in the direction I’m setting out in (I will), I have lots of experience and two highly valuable degrees on which I can fall back.

Other people aren’t doing this

There is great comfort and safety in staying with the pack.  Animals know this, and humans do too, even if only on an instinctual level.  If everyone else is doing something, it’s probably a good approach to take.  There is some blunt validity to this approach, and it works very well in general situations.

A wolf is trying to eat one of your own?  Run together in a pack so that it’s difficult for him to pick out one individual and eat him.  This behaviour has roots deep-down in our reptilian brain (the reactive part of our brain), and is fantastic when we’re operating in survival mode.  But most of us aren’t.  We live in a privileged society, and we are pursuing more than mere subsistence.  The people that I work with aren’t looking for simple survival – they are looking to optimize their happiness, their time, their output.  They are looking to optimize their lives.

We’re not all the same.  At the end of the day, we are each unique individuals (Sorry Fight Club, I’m right).  If we truly want to make ourselves happy, we need to follow our own path, hard as it may be.  Thanks to the society in which we now live and the advances that have come along with it, we are seeking more than mere survival, and mechanisms that address only this concern will fall short.

Having said that, while I know that pursuing my own path is the right approach, that does not simply delete the fear generated from going against the grain.  This concern raises its head often – pretty much every time someone tells me something like “well, that’s a neat idea Adam, but I really think you should reconsider articling”.

There is no guarantee

I can’t speak for other vocations, but a Law degree creates a considerable conundrum.  Upon graduating, students are essentially presented with the a situation where, if they are willing to work harder enough, they will be guaranteed never having to worry about money again.

What did you think when you read that?  If you’re like most people, you probably thought one of the following:

1. “Pfft, must be nice”
2. “First world problems…”
3. “Take the money and run”
4. “I’d like to never have to worry about money”
5. “I knew it, lawyers make way too much money”
6. “Pffft….  pfffft.”

Those are the common responses.  For a lot of people, it’s hard to look past the third and fourth responses.  Money has a powerful effect on us, and when we see dollar signs, it’s difficult to break the spell.  Here’s a question – how hard would you be willing to work for money to never be a problem?  Would you work 16 hours a day, six days a week?  What about 14 hours?  Where’s your limit?

If never having to worry about money meant that you sacrificed things like a relationship, exercise and your health, would you still take the deal?

I’m not suggesting that lawyers necessarily have to do any of this, but my own research has certainly suggested that the articling experience is unpleasant and highly demanding on the student’s time.  My time is too valuable for the remuneration rates and number of hours that are expected for articling students.  It wouldn’t be authentic (nor wise) for me to accept a position that placed a value that low on my time.

Focus on values and passion, not on fear

It is a testament to the power of fear that I have held back from writing about that which I am currently singularly most passionate about.  Doing so has meant that my writing has fallen off.  Every time I would sit down to write, I would have to hamper my creative process by trying to avoid writing about the thing that was most frequently on my mind.

This is the power of authenticity.  When we allow ourselves to maximally live and act in alignment with our values and who we truly are, we stop hampering ourselves.  Most importantly, we stop having to push ourselves to achieve.  When you set yourself along a path that aligns with what you feel is important, you will be pulled along – no more pushing.

Identify your Values

This is the most important piece of advice I’m offering today.  Take some time and try to identify what matters to you.  What is most important and most real to yourself?

This is often the first step that I take with my clients when they come to me indicating that they don’t know what they want to do, or why they hate their job so much.  Getting clear on your values can be a lengthy process and take time and effort, but it’s worth it.  Without knowing what is most important to you, it is difficult to be authentic.

Let’s wrap it up

The wrap up for today:

• Let your values, not fear, direct your decisions
• Be authentic to yourself and your values – it is the most important thing you can do
• Just because the rest of the pack is doing something does not necessarily mean you should do the same
• Spend the time and effort to identify what matters most to you.  Get a coach if you need to.  It’s worth it.

And that leads us back to…

Me.  The aim moving forward is to maximize the remaining time between now and graduation.  The way I will be doing that is working on my practice, building a client base, crafting a website and marketing strategy, identifying exactly who I am and what I do (in terms of my business), and of course, sharing that all with you through this blog.

Keep it tuned and stay locked for more updates as I continue to progress along the path to maximum authenticity.

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List B

List B!  First of all, thank you to everyone that took the 10 seconds required to vote in my psychology experiment.

I have to admit, I was surprised that I didn’t see more votes.  I guess it’s harder to get people to participate actively than I thought it would be.  That or my analytics are vastly over-reporting the number of people visiting this blog.

So, what was this all about anyhow?  Read on to find out.

Creating momentum

A lot of effective coaching is helping a client generate and maintain effective momentum.  Many of us can start thinking about something we are passionate about, but very quickly have limiting thoughts take over our mental space.

“Well, I can’t possibly do that because it would mean I’ve have to quit my job” or “There’s no way I could do that, my parents would never let me”.  Even if those thoughts are true, they’re irrelevant when we’re trying to figure out what it is that we are passionate about.  If you’re passionate about something, it’s worth exploring that freely.  Maybe you can’t do it immediately.  Maybe you would have to quit your job if you were to chase after it right away, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in simply understanding that you are passionate about it.

I call this dissipating our momentum.  It’s a challenge to part the fog that sits in our head and getting the brain moving in a direction you want takes time.  When we let limiting thoughts get in the way of pursuing how we really feel, we stall the process.

Don’t get me wrong – limiting thoughts have their time and place.  Once you’ve identified what you want to do, the next step is determining how you can actually achieve it.  This is the point where it’s okay to see your limiting thoughts (provided that you don’t accept them as immovable barriers that will forever stand in your way).  When trying to determine how to move in the direction you’ve identified is correct for you, it is important to see what will stand in your way, and then to think creatively about how you can move forward.

So, what does all of this have to do with lists?

Just start moving

The key to all of this is that the hardest part is often just getting your brain going.  I’ve worked with many clients that knew where they wanted to go, but simply could not get the ball rolling.  We identify a goal that they want to pursue, but when it comes time to try to figure out some steps to actually start moving in that direction, they draw a blank.

One of the things that I’m good at is determining next steps.  It’s one of the reasons GTD methodology has been such a good fit for me, and one of the reasons I was a natural at project management.  My brain naturally breaks projects down into small, bite-sized increments.  However, coaching should never be about the coach — it’s about the client.  I’m fine offering a few suggestions, but the best suggestions ultimately need to come from the client.  After all, you possess everything that you need in order to resolve your problems.  That’s the true beauty of coaching.

During my training, we used a technique referred to as the “chinese menu” (why that is the actual name I do not know).  The idea behind this approach is that it is okay to offer a few suggestions, but it is important to provide a number of other entries or blank lines for the client to write in their own suggestions.  Imagine two scenarios:

•  In the first scenario, I have one suggestion for you.  I write it on an otherwise blank piece of paper, and then ask you to come up with some other suggestions that might work.  When your mind stares at that single items on an otherwise blank piece of paper, all you can envision is that one item.
• In the second scenario, I also have one suggestion for you.  However, I write 4 numerals down, and draw a horizontal line across the paper from each of those numbers.  On the first line, I put my own suggestion.  When you look at this piece of paper, your mind is naturally going to try to think of at least three other suggestions that will get you toward your goal.

In reality, the number of lines I draw is actually irrelevant.  The real goal here is to generate momentum.  Once your mind has accepted that it needs to come up with some answers, the gears will start to turn and the ideas will start to flow out.  It’s amazing how many solutions come out of your head once you actually get the ball rolling (my client’s routinely surprise themselves by the number of solutions that they generate on their own).

So… again, what does this have to do with lists?  Well, my experiment was to try and determine:

What kind of layout will best generate momentum?

That was the ultimate aim of my experiment.  If I was to create empty slots alongside my own suggestion, ready to be filled out, which configuration would best start the momentum that we want to get a client on their way?

The results were a little surprising.  I figured that List C would be the best to fill out.  Why?

Well, I figured that List C was simply begging to have a single item put into the first slot.  There’s already an item in the second slot, and that makes my own mind absolutely desperate to fill in that first slot.  Once the first slot is filled in, there is only one other item to fill out in the third slot and you’ve got three solutions.  The momentum is rolling!

In reality, only 2 people (out of 20 total) voted for List C.  I didn’t vote, but that would have been my vote as well.  List A received 5 total votes, and List B received 13 votes – 65% of the total votes!

List B clearly trounced the other options.  Another thing worth noting is that after filling out the first slot of either List B or List C, the resulting list is exactly the same.  So what matters most is which list generates the most initial momentum to get you working.

Thanks to your responses, I now have some valuable information!  From now on, I know that when I have a suggestion to offer my clients, the best way to create a “chinese menu” is to put my suggestion first.  The other benefit (that I can think of) to this approach is that the rest of the list remains open-ended.  If I draw enough lines, the client isn’t working to “complete” a list – they simply have one suggestions that gets them started and can then go as long as they are able to.

Thank you!

A big thank you to everyone that participated in this experiment.  There’s another favour that I would like to ask you – please help me out by passing along this site to anyone that you think may be interested.  It’s challenging to write on a consistent basis, especially while attempting to develop both a law career and a professional coaching career simultaneously.  With your help, I can generate more readers, and nothing provides more momentum than knowing that what I’m writing about matters to people.

Thanks for your continued support!

The near future…

Finally, a brief update on my own journey.  As mentioned, I’m actively trying to develop both a career as a legal professional and as a professional coach.  It’s very challenging trying to balance both of these pursuits, but challenge has always been what drives me, and time management is an area in which I excel.

This fall, I will be working a clinical term at UVic’s legal aid clinic, the Law Centre.  There I will be assuming conduct of client files and representing clients in court.  I anticipate being much busier this term than I was during my summer school term, but I am nevertheless excited for the coming four months.  Stay tuned!

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You can help me out with 10 seconds of your time.  I’ve been thinking about motivation and how we can best spur ourselves onward to action.  I’ve slowly absorbed the fact that I have a bit of an emotional aversion to the process of actually getting things done (hence the many systems that I set up and maintain to spur me forward).

To help me gain a better understanding of overcoming aversions like this one, use the poll below to answer this simple question:

Without knowing anything else, which of the three lists below makes you most inclined to start filling it out?

Each list has three slots.  List A already has the third slot filled, list B has the first slot filled and list C has the middle slot filled.

Poll

List A

List B

List C

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The results

I will share the results and what I think they mean after I’ve gotten enough answers.  Thanks for taking part in the experiment!

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The summer is drawing to a close, and I feel like I have a little bit of distance and time to reflect.  I took on a tremendous amount on this term.  I achieved many of my goals, but wound down the term feeling a little burnt out.  Since my goal for school was to actually get away with giving it less of my time and attention (while maintaining a GPA that I was happy with), I won’t focus any more on that.

[Update: I just got my grades and this goal was a success.  My GPA did not drop at all and I was able to devote much more time to other pursuits this summer.  Feels good to celebrate a success!]

While completing the term, I put a lot of effort into setting up my coaching practice, and I have been regularly coaching a number of clients throughout the summer.  We’ve had some great successes, and it’s been very inspiring to be a part of this process.  As part of my goal, I’ve been undergoing coaching myself, and this has been a surprising journey.

Exploring things like what motivates me, how I derive value, and what my strengths and weaknesses are has been confusing and enlightening.  Often both at the same time.  One astounding insight I had was the realization that I’m an intuitive person.  When I told my Mum, she said “Well, yah, wouldn’t you say that you’ve always been a very intuitive person?”.  It’s funny, the most significant discoveries we make about ourselves are often those that are already obvious to everyone else.  It’s taking me 32 years to come to this realization.  I’m fairly certain I would have come to it eventually as time bore on, but through coaching, this process was vastly more efficient and my growth was accelerated.

One of the assessments that I undertook as a result of this ongoing process was from a book titled “Strengths Finder 2.0″, by Tom Rath.  The book is pretty short, and is really just a compendium of the various strengths (as the author has chosen to categorize them).  The real meat of the process comes from filling out a test online and then see what strengths are fed back to you.  (Unlike the Myers-Briggs tests I did when I was in secondary school, this test had just shy of 200 questions, rather than 20).

Today, I’m sharing my own strengths, so that you can get a glimpse into what sort of things you can explore through coaching.  Imagine if you could move yourself in a direction where we you were working with all of your strengths, instead of weaknesses.  Wouldn’t everyone be better off in this situation?  By working with a coach, we can all move in the direction of where we are our greatest and most authentic selves.

Let’s look at my results:

Strategic

The strategic theme enables you to sort through the clutter and find the best route.  It is not a skill that can be taught.  It is a distinct way of thinking, a special perspective on the world at large.  This perspective allows you to see patterns where others simply see complexity.  Mindful of these patterns, you play out alternative scenarios, always asking, “What if this happened?  Okay, well what if this happened?”.  This recurring question helps you see around the next corner.  There you can evaluate accurately the potential obstacles.  Guided by where you see each path leading, you start to make selections.  You discard the paths that lead nowhere.  You discard the paths that lead straight into resistance.  You discard the paths that lead into a fog of confusion.  You cull and make selections until you arrive at the chosen path — your strategy.  Armed with your strategy, you strike forward.  This is your Strategic theme at work: “What if?” Select. Strike.

My biggest take-away:

• Trust your intuitive insights as often as possible.  Even though you might not be able to explain them rationally, your intuitions are created by a brain that instinctively anticipates and projects.  Have confidence in these perceptions.

Learner

You love to learn.  The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning.  The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you.  You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence.  The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered — this is the process that entices you.  Your excitement leads you to engage in adult learning experiences — yoga or piano lesson or graduate classes.  It enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments are are expected to learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time and then move on to the next one.  This Learner theme does not necessarily mean that you seek to become the subject matter expert, or that you are striving for the respect that accompanies a professional or academic credential.  The outcome of the learning is less significant than the “getting there”.

My biggest take-away(s):

• Refine how you learn.  For example, you might learn best by teaching; if so, seek out opportunities to present to others.  You might learn best through quiet reflection; if so, find this quiet time.
• Be a catalyst for change.  Others might be intimidated by new rules, new skills, or new circumstances.  Your willingness to soak up this newness can calm their fears and spur them to action.  Take this responsibility seriously.

Relator

Relator describes your attitude toward your relationships.  In simple terms, the Relator theme pulls you toward people you already know.  You do not necessarily shy away from meeting new people — in fact, you may have other themes that cause you to enjoy the thrill of turning strangers into friends — but you do derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from being around your close friends.  You are comfortable with intimacy.  Once the initial connection has been made, you deliberately encourage a deepening of the relationship.  You want to understand their feelings, their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and you want them to understand yours.  You know that this kind of closeness implies a certain amount of risk — you might be taken advantage of — but you are willing to accept that risk.  For you a relationship has value only if it is genuine.  And the only way to know that is to entrust yourself to the other person.  The more you share with each other, the more you risk together.  The more you risk together, the more each of you proves your caring is genuine.  These are your steps toward real friendship, and you take them willingly.

My biggest take-away:

• You might tend to withhold the most engaging aspects of your personality until you have sensed openness from another person.  Remember, building relationships is not a one-way street.  Proactively “put yourself out there.”  Others will quickly see you for the genuine individual you are, and you will create many more opportunities to cultivate strong, long-lasting connections
• (See: 1.  This blog.  2.  This experiment)

Communicator

You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write.  This is your Communicator theme at work.  Ideas are a dry beginning.  Events are static.  You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them, to make them exciting and vivid.  And so you turn events into stories and practice telling them.  You take the dry idea and enliven it with images and examples and metaphors.  You believe that most people have a very short attention span.  They are bombarded by information, but very little of it survives.  You want your information — whether an idea, an event, a product’s features and benefits, a discovery, or a lesson — to survive.  You want to divert their attention toward you and then capture it, lock it in.  This is what drives your hunt for the perfect phrase.  This is what draws you toward dramatic words and powerful word combinations.  This is why people like to listen to you.  Your word pictures pique their interest, sharpen their world, and inspire them to act.

My biggest take-away:

• If you enjoy writing, consider publishing your work.  If you enjoy public speaking, make a presentation at a professional meeting or convention.  In either case, your Communicator talents will serve to assist you in finding just the right way to frame your ideas and state your purpose.  You delight in sharing your thoughts with others, so find the medium that best fits your voice and message.
• Volunteer for opportunities to present.  You can become known as someone who helps people express their thoughts and ambitions in a captivating way.

Discipline

Your world needs to be predictable.  It needs to be ordered and planned.  So you instinctively impose structure on your world.  You set up routines.  You focus on timelines and deadlines.  You break long-term projects into a series of specific short-term plans, and you work through each plan diligently.  You are not necessarily neat and clean, but you do need precision.  Faced with the inherent messiness of life, you want to feel in control.  The routines, the timelines, the structure, all of these help create this feeling of control.  Lacking this theme of Discipline, others may sometimes resent your need for order, but there need not be conflict.  You must understand that not everyone feels your urge for predictability; they have other ways of getting things done.  Likewise, you can help them understand and even appreciate your need for structure.  Your dislike of surprises, your impatience with errors, your routines, and your detail orientation don’t need to be misinterpreted as controlling behaviours that box people in.  Rather, these behaviours can be understood as your instinctive method for maintaining your progress and your productivity in the face of life’s many distractions.

My biggest take-away(s):

• Others may confuse your Discipline talents with rigidity.  Help them understand that your discipline helps you pack more effectiveness into a day — often because you prioritize your time.  When working with others who are not as disciplined, ask them to clarify deadlines so you can adjust your workload to accommodate their requests.
• Timelines motivate you.  When you have a task to complete, you like to know the deadline so you can plan your schedule accordingly.  Apply your Discipline talents by outlining the step-by-step plan you will use.  Others will appreciate your cues because they will help keep everyone “on task”.

Moving forward

I’m entering my third year of law school, and am currently trying to sort out exactly where I want to take the next phase of my life (along with Bay, of course).  Career choices are available to me, and the real conflict that is starting to emerge is one that I’m well familiar with: Doing what “should” be done, or what I want to do?  At the core of this conflict is the battle between doing what social pressure tells me to do and doing what I feel passionate about.

I know that my intuition is right, but now I have to figure out what that means, what the consequences of pursuing that path of action are, and how to explain what I feel to the other people that are affected by my decisions.  I’m unwilling to make changes in my life that would affect the people I love without them being onboard, so it’s really important to me that I’m able to understand what I want to do and why I want to do it.  Keep checking back and I promise I will provide updates.  This is a journey that we all undertake, so I hope that by sharing my own insights, we can all grow a little bit.

I have been seeking inspiration for a while – I want to keep writing, but none of the blog ideas I’ve stored are jumping out at me.  So help me out: post a comment or message me privately and suggest something for me to write about.  We both win – you get to hear a different perspective on something that’s on your mind, and I get to know that there are people out there that think about the same things I do.  And hey, we both get to learn!

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Just in the process of editing and publishing some posts proper.  In the meantime, here are three collages I’ve created from photos I’ve taken over the course of this Summer.

[Update: Links to full-size photos were not originally working.  Resolved now!]

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For a long time, my writing has been heavily focused on productivity.  I love being productive, and it provides me with a sense of purpose and of balance.  When I’ve accomplished things during the day, I feel like I’ve actually made the world a better place through my own industry.

In the first part of my life as an adult, I spent a lot of time learning how to maximize my productivity.  This, in effect, was a way for me to get as much as I could out of life.  The logic went that the more I can do, the more enriching my life is.

However, in recent years, that focus has started to shift.  It’s not that I no longer value productivity — it’s that I value something else above it: balance.

We can spend so much of our time focused on productivity that we lose sight of the present.  If we are no longer able to appreciate the moment at hand, what’s the point?  Without an ability to appreciate what’s going on around us, it doesn’t matter how much we accomplish.  Everyone else may gain from my productivity, but how fulfilling can I really say my own life has been if I’ve been unable to enjoy it?

We have become so focused on productivity.  We’re always looking for new ways to squeeze more efficiency out of our employees, ways to accomplish more during our commute, ways to do more things every day and tools to help us manage everything that we’ve chosen to taken on.  How often do we stop to ask if we’re doing what’s most important to us?

Productivity without balance is a vice, not a virtue.

If we don’t check ourselves and seek out balance by setting our own boundaries, how do we determine when enough is enough?

I know many people that are either unaware, unable or unwilling to set boundaries for themselves and allow the drive to be productive rule their day.  The result?  Their bodies set and create the boundaries for them when they won’t.  Stress, illness fatigue and burnout are all ways that our body provides an indication that we need to re-prioritize balance in our lives.

Tragically, our working culture has evolved to the point that you can often overhear people boasting about how late they’ve been staying at the office, as though it is a badge of honour.  It isn’t; it’s a sign of an unhealthy working culture.  Employers should be seeking to imbue in people an appreciation and respect for balance.  It means that they’ll get more out of their employees, hold better retention rates and have more satisfied workers.

Productivity without balance is a cancerous pursuit.  Without taking the time to check in with yourself and prioritize the other things in your life, your own industry will be coming from a less meaningful place.  Productivity that does not have a purpose behind it is like growth for the sake of growth.  This kind of unhealthy focus on productivity can develop its own vicious cycle.  The more out of balance you become, the easier it becomes to take on more stuff.  With a myopic focus on productivity, you lose an awareness of the other demands on your time.  Without a sense of balance, it becomes easier not to say no.

By making the effort to prioritize balance in your life, you will ensure that you remain productive in the greater sense.  Think about it – if you’re living your life out of balance, worn out and tired, who’s really gaining from your productivity?

By prioritizing balance, you maximize your productivity

By striking a balance in your life, you’ll actually ensure you are maximally productive by attending to all of your needs, rather than just a few.  These needs include things like:

• Sleep
• Nutrition
• Fitness
• Your relationship/Marriage
• Friends
• Family
• Fun

The more out of balance you become, the greater your body and mind will subconsciously pull you back toward your centre.  Your ability to sustain productivity, when done at the expense of balance, will suffer from diminishing returns.

Many of us respond to this reduction in productivity by attempting to push ourselves harder, staving off the inexorable return to balance as long as possible.  We don’t realize that the longer we remain in a productive state, the longer we need to recharge our batteries.  This isn’t a failing on our part (though we often treat is as such) — it’s simply a fact of life.

Imagine yourself as an elastic band.  Our natural, balanced state is the when the elastic band is left at rest.  When we push ourselves to be productive, we are tugging the elastic band from two ends.  The longer we push ourselves to be productive, the greater this elastic band is stretched.  We can attempt to squeeze more productivity out of our heads, but this requires stretching the elastic band even further.  The longer we hold ourselves from a state of balance, the more effort it requires to stretch that band further.  Hold yourself to a state of productivity for too long and the band snaps.  Your body will eventually take over and forcefully undertake the return to balance.  If you’ve pushed yourself too hard, that will often be via crashing into sleep, illness, or worse (Eg, your head could explode).

Summary

Here’s what we’ve covered:

• Productivity, when pursued to the detriment of balance, is not a virtue — it’s a vice
• A tunnel-vision-like focus on productivity is cancerous and self-perpetuating
• When you prioritize balance in your life, you actually maximize your ability to be productive
• If you think you can actually get more accomplished by cutting back on the other important parts of your life, you’re only fooling yourself

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