Numerous employees, among them HR professionals, are returning to work this January with new year's resolutions, aiming to redress work/life balance, get less stressed and enjoy life more.
Given that by the end of last year, 39% of more than 1,500 employees, whom my co-researcher John Higgins and I surveyed, said that they had no time to pause during the day to reflect and prioritise, these resolutions are urgent and vital.
But, call me a pessimist, many won’t last beyond the first couple of weeks.
A key reason we fail is because we are obsessed with what John Higgins and I call in our latest research, the ‘doing mode’. HR, along with all other departments, is weighed down with multiple short-term tangible targets. Now, even HR, who are supposed to be the experts in people and culture, have come to narrowly associate success with the achievement of these goals. In many organisations, HR has become as instrumental as every other department.
Read more: Do you need a work/life balance in your 20s?
Fair enough. Of course, ‘doing stuff’ and ensuring accountability for targets is necessary for survival. However, if we rely on and recognise only the doing mode, we risk being busy fools, unable to pause to reflect, learn, relate with others deeply, make wise decisions and ultimately, live a fulfilling life.
Alongside ‘doing’ we need to access what I call the ‘spacious mode’. Perhaps surprisingly, I am not saying we need to find more time.
The spacious mode is where we pay attention to different things; where we stop our frantic ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ and allow ourselves to ponder, understand interdependencies, gain insight, innovate and develop lasting, trusting relationships – which means engaging with others as fellow humans, not things.
We have to stop allocating pausing to our vacation days (which often end up being just as pressurised. Does: ‘Right, now I’m on holiday I must relax and I must get my life in order…’ sound familiar?). Our performance and our colleagues’ performance relies on our capacity to be spacious throughout our workdays.
Read more: Work stress: balancing the bad with the good
So how do we do this in a world fixated with busyness? Here are three suggestions (with the irony of offering ‘top tips’ for you to do in order to be spacious fully recognised):
1. Pay attention to what you are paying attention to: If we can’t see that we are stuck in the doing mode, then we are likely to keep doing what we’ve always done! Notice whether narrow, instrumental and short-term targets always top your agenda. That might indicate a need to pause and experiment by putting another item that needs more spacious attention first. In previous research, I noted how regular mindfulness practice can develop our capacity to pay attention to our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations, enabling us to choose a response rather than revert to automatic doing. Although our attention is dangerously seized by social media, we have more choice about how we pay attention in the world than we often realise.
2. Get someone to help you: I describe many of the organisational systems that I have researched as ‘pathologically busy’. In these sorts of systems, it is extremely difficult on our own to resist the vortex of the doing mode. So, we should schedule in time with others who help open the space for reflection, learning and a different perspective. Coaches, mentors, therapists, facilitators and a few well-chosen friends or colleagues can fit the bill. Seek out someone who you can see modelling being spacious at work, and who is doing it without being seen as being lazy, unsuccessful or provocatively eccentric.
3. Purposefully encounter difference that forces you to pause: Sometimes we need to jolt ourselves out of the doing mode to gain a different perspective. Changing your environment, getting outside into nature, attending a conference or reading a book on a different topic can all help us to reset priorities and expand our attention. This is something we can do for ourselves but also help others to do, particularly if we are in a position of power.
We must pause. Not just during our vacation and definitely not when our body or mind breaks down, or when our relationships finally shatter. The doing mode is essential to life – but the spacious mode gives us the oxygen to flourish.
Megan Reitz is associate fellow of Saïd Business School, Oxford University
