Breaking Up with Busy. Yvonne Tally

what you do, even though you’re (in theory, anyway) in the driver’s seat.

       Slowing your pace can unclutter your thinking, boost your energy, revive your spirit, and awaken your passions.

      • Busy and Relationships •

      As mentioned above, our behavior ripples out. As parents, we are teaching our children how to be busy. We feel that by overscheduling them, setting high standards, and providing them with the newest technology we are helping them get ahead of the pack and ready for a nitty-gritty, competitive world. And although we may be well-intentioned, our continuous quest to get more done in less time, and our efforts to teach our children to do the same, ends up incubating us from one another.

      When busy pushes its way into our significant relationships, little room is left for intimacy. Emotional intimacy occurs when we allow ourselves to be present, vulnerable, and aware of our needs and the needs of our partners. When we are distracted by our pursuits, shifting our priorities so that our significant relationships fall in line behind those pursuits, we become disconnected from our partners. It’s unlikely that we will be raised up and invigorated by our relationships if we feel tired, stressed, or unsupported, and it’s doubtful that our partners will feel inspired to support us if they don’t feel they are a priority.

      In our professional lives, it might seem counter-intuitive that doing less and connecting more could be an effective formula for success. Yet when organizations value the importance of professional interpersonal relationships, they experience long-term benefits, such as better employee health, fewer absences, and decreased worry and anxiety. Cultivating relationships takes time and effort, and unfortunately, when doing so is not considered an important part of an organization’s tenet, opportunities are missed and personal health and well-being are sacrificed. Imagine if we all slowed down enough to get to know the other people we are spending 50 percent of our waking hours with? Building professional relationships doesn’t need to involve inviting our coworkers to dinner. We just need to slow down, be present, and get to know another person. Doing so builds camaraderie and communication and mutually focuses efforts.

      • What’s the Price of Your Pace? •

      What’s the price of your pace? Your health? Your relationships? Your career?

      Now that you’ve determined the signs that it’s time for you to break up with busy, you can begin to advance that awareness and discover what motivates your busyness and the importance it represents in your life. The three questions below will help you begin your exploration of both.

       1. What motivates you to continue your busy pace?

       2. What value does your busy pace provide you?

       3. What do you want, and what do you need, to make it happen?

      Take a few minutes for each question and consider each with thoughtful consideration; it’s a significant step that will help you gain clarity around your motivations so that you can begin your break from busy. These questions may not be easy to answer. Perhaps you’ve never thought about what motivates you or considered the concept that busy is a choice, a culture, a behavior, one that entices you to feel important and valued. Just by exploring these questions, you’ve expanded your awareness, and awareness allows you to recognize your blind spots and build on your strengths. So, congratulations! You’re on your way to breaking up with busy and starting to live your life instead of just running the race. Understanding exactly what strategies you have in place that are keeping you busy and overscheduled is your next step.

       CHAPTER THREE

       Giving Busy the Boot

       Kicking Your Busy Habits

      The busy habit is just like any other habit — breaking it takes practice. You may be accustomed to rushing from place to place, saying yes when you really need and want to say no, or being the go-to person all the time, and it’s exhausting! I’m sure you know far too well what that feels like and are ready to change for good. Merely scratching the surface of a habit provides only temporary feel-good solutions.

      As we learned in the last chapter, you’ve got to dig down to get at the root of what motivates you and the value you derive from the habit. Motivation is the bridge between desire and action, and to make change stick, especially when changing deeply ingrained habits, it is your motivation that helps you remain focused on your goals, even when setbacks occur. Your motivation determines how likely you will be to accomplish your intended outcome. Knowing what value you’ve attached to that outcome is key in formulating your decisions associated with achieving your goals. Motivation aligns your efforts with your goals, and the value you place on that goal greatly influences your success in meeting it.

      The next step is to understand how your motivations and the value of a habit play significant roles in your thought processes when setting up your strategies. As you shift your thinking, alter your timeworn habits, and discover your need/want connection, you can begin building new strategies that will help you kick your busy habits and make your life a lot more joyful.

      • How and Why We Do What We Do •

      We formulate strategies throughout our lives. These strategies are a set of tools we use to navigate our experiences, and they are significantly influenced by our parents or primary caregivers. As we grow and change, our tools evolve, enabling us to hone the ones that work well. We also may use ones that are not as useful or helpful, but we use them simply because they are familiar to us. Our experiences, the development of our strategies, and the evolution of these tools function as a script we continually refer to as we move forward. Values, morals, and societal norms influence our experiences and become part of the development and structure of our strategies. And as we have these experiences and employ these strategies, what emerges are habits. It’s how we do what we do.

      Charlene’s story below illustrates how some people are really good at adapting their strategies and modifying their behaviors. Their ability to self-evaluate, shift perspective, and change an approach gives them a greater capacity to reinvent themselves.

      CHARLENE’S OSW STORY

       I moved around a lot as a kid. I went to six different middle schools and three high schools. Each time I had to find a way to make friends and fit in, and because I moved so much, getting along with people and making friends without getting too attached became a natural way of fitting in wherever I went. It also helped me advance in my career because I was able to build relationships without getting overly involved, and that worked for what I wanted to achieve. I learned to separate the relationship from what I needed to do. Where I struggled was in my personal relationships. It took me until I was in my late thirties to figure out what piece of that strategy wasn’t working for me. My ability to distance myself was blocking me from true emotional intimacy. Realizing this was like having a light go on in my head — how could I have missed that piece? Well, I never had to use that before to get what I wanted, so I had to figure out how to adjust my strategy to get what I needed.

      The good news is that we all have the capacity to adapt and the power to reinvent ourselves. As you make small edits to your busy habits, you’ll begin building the bridge from where you are now to where you want to be.

      Habits are strategies on autopilot. They are often our fallback reactions when we are stressed and busy. A habit consists of three primary elements: the cue, the behavior, and the reward. For example, it’s 5:00 PM (cue), you pour a glass of wine (behavior), and you sit down and unwind (reward). Or your phone rings and you see it’s your best friend (cue), so you answer (behavior). You know she always makes you laugh and you always enjoy talking with her (reward). The cue, behavior, and reward are the fundamental mechanisms that prompt automatic thinking, feelings, and actions. In simple terms, habits are the result of training. By repeating a certain behavior, we train our body and mind to perform it with less conscious thought. The