Posts Tagged ‘wholeheartedness’
Do you plan your time carefully?
When I was a young psychologist, I advised people to schedule their time. My boss, an organized goal-oriented man, disagreed. He said that as long as you are doing something important, then it doesn’t matter what you do.
Before we went to meetings with clients, he would go through the our goal and sub-goals, which he would put in a meeting planner. Clients were well aware that he had a check list because they could see him looking at it and ticking things off.
He also ran the office with tight deadlines. He would phone in that he was coming to pick up his overnight work and he expected someone to be at street level to hand it to him through the car window.
His work was returned in the morning and with a ‘rinse and repeat’ the next night, all our work was turned around in three days.
But he didn’t do schedules.
What is the alternative to schedules?
I read a long post today from someone who scheduled his time for a whole year – very precisely.
I think working out how much time we have available is helpful so that we can work backwards to sensible work practices.
- We can find a daily, weekly, and monthly rhythm that is enjoyable and effective.
- We can discover what is important
Yes, we have a year, a month, a week, a day or an hour to spend. What will we do with it? We have a year, a month, a week, a day or an hour to spend. What would be the most enjoyable and satisfying thing to have accomplished in the next hour?
We need a system to make to find our priorities
Long “todo” lists and massive schedules are oppressive. I find people who have “calendars” simply fill them up and then claim they are very busy.
I don’t want to be busy. It only makes me impatient with others.
My 2010 priorities
I simply ask whether what I am going to do in the next hour enjoyable, satisfying and meaningful?
I simply ask how my day will be enjoyable, satisfying and meaningful.
Right now, I am asking why this week (or weekend) will be enjoyable, satisfying and meaningful
How will the remainder of this month be cherished and celebrated?
As I take my blank calendar for 2010, where are the moments in 2010 that will be enjoyable, satisfying and deeply meaningful!
And I will leave time, plenty of time, for events to surprise me and make the year better than I could ever dream.
In the words of poet, David Whyte:
“What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep?”
This strange expression has been made popular by poet, David Whyte, who heard it first from a monk, counselling him during a bad bout of professional burnout.
It seems cruel, doesn’t it, to be told to put some elbow-grease into it, at a time we are so tired, we literally can’t think straight?
How does wholeheartedness cure exhaustion?
We feel exhausted, we become exhausted, when we pursue conflicted goals. We become like the mouse in a maze with cheese to the left and cheese to the right. Deary me – which way to go? It is the dithering that is exhausting. Or being greedy and trying to get both lots of cheese at the same time.
We feel relaxed and at ease when we make up our minds about what we want to do
We have a heap of expressions for the sensation of getting moving.
- We cross the Rubicon (from which there was no turning back as Ceasar and his troops marched on Rome).
- The universe conspires to help us (Who said that? It means that suddenly it is easy to do what seemed hard only moments ago. And that people seem to go out of their way to help you.)
- Our path opens up as we take the first step (Paulo Coelho tweeting on Saturday). The path only becomes possible when we are totally committed to moving forward. Totally committed – with no reservations.
Clarity of goals generates energy – moving toward a goal multiplies energy
Action becomes so easy and so natural. ‘Getting things done’ is not the issue – it is never the issue.
Setting goals is the issue. Making up our minds is the hard part.
Do you know what you want?
Until we can distill our goals to a set that our smallish inefficient memories can remember (3 and at the most 5), we dither, and we wear ourselves out.
But is what you want, right?
You do know, I hope, that we become impossible when we pursue goals. The dithering mouse turns into a juggernaut trampling over everyone and everything.
We must make sure that our goals are the right goals.
More this evening . . .
Postscript: Tuesday 15 September 2009
@paulocoelho: Cloning Confucius: a bird sings because he has a song, not because he has an answer
Do have a look at the rhyme added by Whappen in the comments.
I am very very tired after a hard weekend cranking out lecture notes. Rather than go into the details of why that is so tiring, I would like to take another tack. How do we recover from exhaustion?
David Whyte, corporate poet, has popularized the saying: the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. So should I tackle another set of notes? No, not quite. I should spend the few hours of the evening moving towards the “channel in which my life flows” (Thoreau).
One way positive psychologists use to take us closer to our ‘natural element’ is to express gratitude. So I thought I would mention one person who I think represents what is good and true, better and possible in contemporary UK.
Chris Hambly, musician, helicopter technician, social media guru, tertiary educator is one of the extraordinary connectors of the emerging internet-based creative industries in the UK. He is the prime mover behind the Social Media Mafia, he sponsors media camps in High Wycombe & London, he runs conventional conferences on Social Media in Business, he advises on the use of social media in business and he manages online education for organizations such as SAE (sound and audio engineering).
Chris represents the best of up-and-coming Brits. He represents what is emerging, what is hopeful, what is helpful, and what represents real value. Check him out as an antidote to the credit crunch and bailout blues.
And it works. I feel better. Wholeheartedness is the antidote to exhausation.
flowing motion 
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