14 August 2006
“Free yourself from the Plough and model yourself on the Owl” or reduce “doing” and start “feeling”
I remember reading Animal Farm quite some time ago and feeling very sorry for the extremely hard working Horse doing everything for all the other animals. I never realised that there are lots of business owners, directors and senior managers who are just as hard working and get into a habit of “doing” all the time and don’t see what is really happening to themselves, their business, health and family life in the meantime. Quite a lot of my clients use coaching to get them out of the “doing”.
The fact is that the more you “do” the more likely it is that you will continue to “do”. The “doing” becomes a habit, which possibly started way back in childhood when you needed to prove ourselves to others – parents, teachers and/or peers. The result? That you ended up “doing”.
The reality is that the more you and your colleagues become “doers”, the more you will all take on; the less you delegate and, over time, the more you may all become divorced from your feelings. “Doing” becomes the mantra and leads to a lack of communicating, resulting in loneliness at the top, even though they may have someone at home to talk to, it all ends up going round and round in their head.
The unfortunate thing is that the pressure of running a business or climbing the promotional ladder has a tendency to build gradually. Over time the vicious circle of taking on more and more “doing” leads to people becoming isolated and the stress increases to the point when they’re isolated in their personal stress bubble.
But how do you recognise if you’re in a “doing” bubble or about to be enveloped by too much “doing”? You’re likely to be familiar with some of the following situations:
1. Working later and later during the weekdays
2. Working first of all Saturdays and then Sundays
3. Cutting short holidays or going into work on holidays
4. Feeling indispensable at work and therefore definitely cannot go on holiday
5. Unable to delegate because you have no one to delegate to
6. Friends become thin on the ground
7. Use the phrases more and more – “you don’t understand how much I have to work” or “you don’t value how much I work”
8. You hear the words – “we never go out”, “you are never around”
9. Work begins to be a drudge and is no longer interesting
10. You lose the spark
11. Getting up in the morning becomes more and more difficult
As soon as you recognise your situation you can start to work out what to do and how to reduce the stress involved with all that “doing”. It’s only when you realise that you’re lost that you can start to work out where you are and plan the way home.
There are plenty of short-term ways to reduce the “doing” and the stress that goes with it – exercising, even just walking is excellent (get a rescue dog from the local RSPCA if you need an external reason), stay in the office less by being forced into thinking about someone else’s business by becoming a mentor with the Princes Trust or “google/yahoo” mentoring to find a local organisation that needs mentors. You will find that the external perspective, especially from mentoring others will automatically reduce the “doing”, because just by being out of the office clears the brain. With a clearer head, new ideas and solutions seem to appear out of nowhere.
Gradually people find that their perspective changes and with new contacts people discover others with a common business situations. Talking through them becomes the norm and what was so difficult becomes natural and so obvious, that you will wonder how you had got into the rut in the first place and stayed there. The old adage that “a problem shared is a problem halved” springs to mind and is so very relevant.
In the workshops I run I suggest that as alternatives to working with a business coach then they could talk with their peers who are in a related industry; approach retired directors and senior managers to see how they dealt with similar challenges; appoint a non-executive director, which could provide that all-important independence needed to overcome a given challenge and can be milked for his or her life’s knowledge.
The fact remains that while it seems easy to just keep “doing”, there will be diminishing returns from working longer and longer. You can act like the Horse and plough yourself into the ground or change and be like the Owl: listening and wise; reflective and knowledgeable.
As BT likes to keep telling us: work smarter not harder.
©William Barron
Creating Insight
August 14th 2006
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