I opened a leadership programme this week with 3 questions
o How are you feeling, right now?
o What do you want from this event?
o What are you going to contribute to this event?
It was the first question which prompted this blog post. All 10 delegates said how busy they were. That it’s busier this year than ever before and next year is set to be busier.
They all said it was great to be away from the office, that it was great to have some breathing space. They said it was good to have time to think and to refocus. We had a great programme and it was the 2-day follow up to an initial 5-day course we did in the summer. But they all craved space. Time to think. Time to look at their values and explore possibilities, to reassess priorities on a micro and macro scale.
It was time well spent, however, my opening question is more about the opposite end of the spectrum of busyness – is it possible not to be busy enough? What happens when there is too much time to think. When there is lots of head space and time to explore priorities.
I suggest it can be as difficult. It can lead to over analysis, too much self reflection and exploration of what is wrong or what is going on or what needs to happen. Not enough action.
I am speaking about myself when I say this – you may well be different. I have had the luxuary of time recently, with my time getting to grips with my eye problem (see last entry) and more recently with work being quiet. It has led to me over thinking things. Too many questions crop up in my head, I have many, many conversations with other consultants about the way of the economy at the moment, about why work is scarce, about what we can do to generate work and income and I love these exploratory conversations.
They are thought provoking and interesting, they take me down lines of investigation I wouldn’t have gone down but ..... but they can lead to frustration, to finding myself repeating my thoughts and thinking in circles and principally over thinking or worrying a problem.
This afternoon a great piece of work came in and I set up a series of meetings in the Big Smoke. Suddenly all the conversations and thoughts slipped away and I was left with something to do, some action to follow up on. I have a list of purposeful activity which will result in work, satisfaction, money and intrinsic reward – the reward of manual labour. Well, not quite, more the reward of doing an honest days work but you get the drift.
My point is, the balance between being so busy we can’t think and not busy enough so we think too much is a fine one. It is one we need to pay attention to and to work at balancing. I know I like to be busy and I like to have head space. I need to ensure I get both. It’s all about noise and being sure we get the right kind and amount of noise. The balance to noise is silence but too much silence is scary. Noise can be fun, silence can be restful, and noise can be stressful. Noise can be a distraction for good and bad. Silence can be overwhelming or just what we need to recover.
So, how busy are you and are you busy enough? Do you need to step into the noise or out of it?
Piers Carter
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