Dear, Chris,

Over the last few months, I’ve heard many comments from my clients like these:

“I just don’t feel productive unless I’m checking things off my list.”

“It didn’t feel good, but I kept pushing through -- I had to.”

“My days have been maxed out with wall-to-wall meetings. I kept saying 'I just need more hours in the day.' But on Thursday, I just decided to make more hours."

Perhaps you feel this way too.

The general pace of life feels too fast, requiring too much. You feel chronically behind, rushed. Maybe only vaguely aware of it, yet you’re exhausted from it.

We all know what it’s like to be in a rush. It’s that panicky feeling of trying to finish something quickly, or getting somewhere on time, or hurrying toward the end of the day only to collapse.

We rush towards many things — appointments, deadlines, life milestones — and when we do, we miss out on the present moment. 

We move at a pace that never really allows us to be here, and then we wonder where the days, weeks, and months have gone.

The faster we try to go, the more behind we can feel. 

We take shortcuts past the scenic routes, and arrive at our destination frazzled, tired, and cranky. 

We’ve become habituated to drinking from a fire hose of frenetic busyness and to the technology that perpetuates it.

Some of us are simply caught up in the habit of being busy and chronically on.

Or we find that staying busy can be a distraction from boredom or unpleasant emotions that are constantly surfacing.

Others of us feel the need to chronically demonstrate our worthiness, collapsing our sense of who we are—our identity—into what we do for a living.

What's the price for this breakneck pace? 

We cease feeling ourselves, becoming numb to our physical sensations and our emotions – the very experiences that remind us of what we care about in the first place!

Bestselling author Brené Brown shares that “We stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us.”

Caught up, lost in expectations, reactions, or in our devices, Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation and student of human-technology interaction, claims we “forget what we know about life.”

Today’s turbulent change brings with it a through line of fear that’s becoming more predominant. 

We see fear and its aftereffects run across our screens, read about it on social media, and observe it in our workplaces.

We see an increase in anxiety, fatigue, exhaustion—a grasping after something to do to keep busy and a longing for certainty where none is to be found. 

We see it in an increase of the fear of the unknown, fear of others, fear of being left out, and fear of missing out. This fear of uncertainty is palpable.

Fear drives the vicious cycle of busyness and lack of attention to what’s important. 

In reaction to the heavy influx of the constant push of distraction and the full-on realities of juggling all the details of our lives and commitments, we tend to do one of a few things or all of them: 

   Do it all, resulting in constant multitasking, making it worse

   Fight with reality to make things happen (AKA 'powering through')

   Avoid reality by shifting our attention to something else that captures us

   Numb with behaviors designed to comfort and self-soothe

The result? 

We miss out on the extraordinariness of the present moment, with all its beauty and possibility.

We rush past the tender or fun moments with loved ones and become blind to opportunities to make a bigger impact than we could possibly imagine. 

The price we pay is forgoing the intimacy of living fully.

What to Do

“To pause is to begin to intentionally train your attention on purpose, to direct it where you will.”

To pause is to interrupt an automatic and typically out-of-awareness behavior such as a thought, an action, or even an emotion—to open up the space to see what the present moment will hold.

It’s in the pause that we can discover what Pema Chodron calls maitri, loving-kindness toward ourselves and others, where we can ‘know’ what’s most important and take action.

Four qualities are cultivated when we pause to practice presence:

1. Steadfastness. To be with yourself.

2. Clear seeing. Less self-deception

3. Experience of your own emotional life. Drop our story lines that sustain the fear, the pace.

4. Attention to the present moment, here, now.  

It’s these strands of attention that form a pause and make up the acronym SCOPE: Space, Connectedness, Openness, Pace and Energy. This is covered in detail in my book, The Leadership Pause, and here's a PDF to self-assess.

What do you think about your pace these days? Do you need support in learning to pause? Reach me at DrChris@q4-consulting.com.



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