Month: October 2019

The Stillness is the Rest

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I travel a lot for work. After more that 20 years of these trips, I’ve learned that I have no special abilities at conquering time zones. If anything, because I keep a pretty fixed schedule at home, and try to sleep at least 7 (or more) hours every night, going to new time zones takes a lot out of me.

Things that help me adjust include: exercise, meditation before going to sleep, not looking at my laptop or phone within an hour of sleeping, earplugs, and, if I’m flying East, Benadryl. I wrote a post about these, with a bonus recommendation about the world’s best suitcase.

That collection of approaches notwithstanding, I still often find myself lying awake, either at the start of the night trying to fall asleep, or some time very early in the morning try to stay asleep.

When I find myself sleepless in Seattle (or Nairobi, or Bangalore), I will lie still and do some version of savasana (yoga corpse pose), with the intention of focusing on my breath going in and out. I often count my breaths in a cycle of eight, one breath corresponding to each finger on my hand (thumb, second, third, fourth, fifth, fourth, third, second…and then start again). I mix this with a progressive body scan, paying attention to one part of my body and then the next, focusing my attention on relaxing that part of the body, or feeling it bathed in warm light (Headspace has lots of great guided body scan meditations). Through all of this, I aim to keep my mind clear and not let myself get hijacked by each passing thought.

In truth, all of this helps, but that doesn’t mean it puts me to sleep. I spend a lot of time resetting myself, clearing my thoughts, breathing and counting…and then quietly getting frustrated that I’m both exhausted and awake.

When this happens, one new thought that has helped me a lot is: this stillness, right now, is the rest. My mind is clear, my body is relaxed, and that is what rest entails. It is enough.

It’s a freeing thought that can release me from the goal orientation / failure cycle that trying to fall asleep inevitably entails.

I’m am here.

I am breathing.

I am resting.

And that is good.

The Difference Between Winning and Losing

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

In any close contest, the line between winning and losing is thin.

In sports, it’s a few points that go to one team or another, a couple of plays that were close, a few steps between being ‘safe’ or ‘out.’

These few moments create one winner and one loser. They last, at most, a couple of minutes over the course of a few hour.

And yet the story we tell ourselves afterwards is about the whole contest: “this time it was different” or “I really showed him,” or “I can’t believe I blew it, I’m no good.”

In our desire to make meaning, our story dwarfs the fleeting moments that were the difference between winning and losing.

It’s the same thing with any close call—job interviews when you’re one of a few finalists, promotions that are right on the fence, a client who says yes or no to a big sale you’ve been working on.

If it was a tough decision, then a few small (maybe arbitrary) things made the difference.

This helps us remember that “I’m so [adjective]” statements aren’t the right conclusion in these situations.

Instead, try out “it was close, and I [did/didn’t] get it this time.”

This mindset helps us focus more on those few clutch moments, the specific, small thing that kept us from winning—this time. It also frees us from unproductive self-criticism (or unfounded self-praise), shrinking the emotion of both the win and the loss.

Then, instead of telling ourselves a big, unfounded narrative, we can get on with our important work of giving it our best shot the next time around.

 

Stretch Assignments

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I may be looking at Ye Olden Days through rose colored glasses…

…but I can’t help but notice a difference in attitudes about work today compared to when I had my first jobs 25 years ago.

Back then, my colleagues and I would talk actively about whether our responsibilities would ever extend beyond making copies, sending faxes, and answering the phone. There was enough clerical work and hierarchy that “entry level” was truly menial. When a superior asked us to do anything that involved thinking, we jumped at it. Non-clerical work was a perk, and when it came our way, it was our job to find time to make it happen: do all our menial work, and do this too. These projects were a chance to demonstrate that we could do something other than stand by the fax machine, and each mini-assignment served as a testing-ground of whether we should be given another useful thing to do.

While there are countless flaws in that old system, the mindset around how to approach “stretch assignments” stands the test of time.

A great stretch assignment is a chance to do something new, challenging, and exciting. By definition it’s beyond our current levels of mastery, so it requires additional time on our part to learn and to get it right.

Often, though, I’m hearing just the opposite (including from job applicants): I can only take on that new thing if there’s a 1-for-1 trade of getting rid of this existing thing.

I don’t think it works that way, at least not in environments that are moving fast and trying to grow: the organization only grows its reach, its scale, and its revenues profits and impact, if the things that make up that organization—software, systems, processes and people—can stretch and grow.

Whether it’s a one-off project or an expansion of our role, the best way to take on stretch assignments is, literally, to stretch: our mental capacity, our willingness to be uncomfortable, the number of hours we put in to make the “stretch” possible on top of everything else that’s on our plate. That means finding time around the edges, whether early in the morning, late in the evening or on a weekend, to get that job done. Hopefully the opportunity and learning are more than worth the trade.

(Better yet, in the process of adjusting to this fuller plate, we often discover a bunch of non-essential things that we were spending time on that don’t require nearly as much polishing).

The reality is, the path to leverage in our job requires us to constantly shift, adjusting to new opportunities and new sets of responsibilities.

Learning the skill of sprinting, and getting adept at shifting and stretching time, is the way that we discover what our maximum output really is. It’s also how we discover where it is that we really shine.

How many times?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I can’t help wondering: will there ever come a day when we skip all the hemming and hawing and just get on with our important, daily work?

Will we ever, finally, manage to completely ignore all our excellent excuses:

The setting isn’t right.

I have less time than I thought.

I didn’t sleep well last night.

A very important other problem is raging through my head, unresolved.

Something aches–my head, my heel, my heart–and there’s no way I can do my best work today.

The pain of noticing how bad this paragraph seems, of how loud the “stop!” in my head seems, of how far away I feel from “the zone, is real.

That familiar mantra, “this isn’t working this time, why bother?!” is running on repeat at top volume. I could just put this off until tomorrow, couldn’t I?

On and on and on and on.

How many times until this all fades away?

I couldn’t tell you.

I’ve not gotten there yet.

But I suspect that the noise never disappears, nor is it my job to un-see it.

Instead, over time and with enough practice, while that noise remains, it becomes something that IS while I continue to DO.

The real secret is this: the IS and the DO exist on different planes. That’s why they don’t need to fight it out, because they can coexist if we just put our heads down and get on with it.

Nothing needs to be vanquished for us to do important work today.

The (false) dream of mastering the world

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

While I was in temple earlier this week, celebrating the Jewish New Year, I was struck by the words of this prayer:

We are stiff-necked and stubborn; teach us to bend before you.

Convinced we’re right, entrenched in our own perspective, we resist Your call to repent.

Convinced we’re self-sufficient, entrenched in the illusion of control, we resist Your call to humility.

Convinced we can have it all, entrenched in the dream of mastering the world, we resist Your call to wake up.

Today You summon us out of our arrogance, out of rigidity, fantasy, shallowness, self-deception.

Teach us to bend our knees, to bow our heads before the Mystery; to realize our frailty and our finitude.

When I think about the big problems our species has created in the world—most notably the climate emergency and mass extinction, but also the entrenched separations and divisions wrought by income inequality, racial injustice, gender discrimination, xenophobia and all of our manufactured fear of the “other”—I can’t help but feel that much of it is summed up by our collective stiff-neckedness and stubbornness.

The illusion of control.

Our dream of having all the answers.

Our desire to master the world.

Humility is a powerful, subtle thing. We often misunderstand it, thinking it cannot coexist with boldness, determination, and an unyielding belief that we can create something better tomorrow than that which exists today. It can.

Humility is the recognition that we know a lot, but we don’t know it all.

That we can control many things but not every thing.

And that, just maybe, mastering the world isn’t the point at all.