Notes from an Open Life

Busy-ness

Taking a moment out of my busy day to write about busy-ness.

We've all been there - I'm so busy today! I've got so much going on! I feel overwhelmed today! Too much stuff on my plate.

Maybe every day isn't like this, but I'm pretty sure that most of us have some experience with being too busy.

What I'm here to argue is that we create our own busy-ness. Period. There is no one else creating our overloaded schedule for us. It is us creating it.

It is me creating it for myself.

I have caught myself arguing with myself, in the midst of my own busy schedule, "Well, I have all this stuff to do. I have to get the kids ready for school, and then I have to get to work, and then I have to get this stuff done for this thing I committed to, and I'm going to school and taking a class and I have to get my assignment done for that, and I need to have some fun in there too! So there are all these things I have to get done."

But when I look at this and break it down, every one of these things are things I choose to do. These are things I chose to take on at some point. And then I get to feeling overwhelmed and horribly put-upon, and that just tweaks my day and my perspective.

The point being, the cause of my own busy-ness is me. I hear about something cool, and I want to be involved and I commit to doing something. I hear about something else cool, and I want to be involved in that, too. Pretty soon, I'm way over-committed - to stuff I really want to do, but over-committed nonetheless.

When I feel over-committed, it makes me cranky. I also don't like being perceived as a busy person. Don't get me wrong, I like being busy - but it really pains me when someone says to me "I know you're really busy, but..."

I don't want to be the "busy" guy. I like doing stuff, but I don't like this state of "busy-ness".

So what to do? (Look, even the solution is about doing something.)

For me, the key to decreasing busy-ness lies not in getting stuff off of my plate. It's ultimately not about stopping doing things, though that might help. That's treating the symptom, not the root.

The secret for me is to stop taking on new things. Or at least to be more thoughtful around what I do take on.

There is a great newsletter called Pause by Patricia Katz that often resonates with me on this topic. Recently, a post called "What's on your plate?" really struck me. She compares your available time with a plate at a buffet. Most of us will fill our plate completely, no matter the size. So the key is: start with a smaller plate.

The post is good because it gives me a framework from which to think about my available time. My available time is not 24 hours in a day.

The problem for me is, I find that I don't even think about the size of my plate when I hear about cool new projects. I just put it on the plate, and assume I'll figure it out later.

Which then makes me cranky. And ultimately more scattered and less productive, and I don't enjoy my life.

So my self-assignment is to consciously - consciously, and this is the hard part - stop taking on stuff, or at least to stop myself a moment and evaluate whether I can really take it on. No matter how little or cool it sounds. Is this something I want to add to my plate?

And in this way, hopefully break my own pattern of busy-ness.

And now I have to get back to it, because there's a lot to do today, and I just committed to something else in the course of this writing.

Success is...

Just got a little flash on what success looks like. I think success comes to us in many forms. In some sense, an easy path toward our goals is a sign of success. Simply appreciating where we are is an appreciation of our success.

Today I received a gift basket from Springer for speaking at a couple of their eBook Summit sessions this year. They didn't have to do that - but they did, and I really appreciate it on many levels. True, it's a coffee gift basket, so they know me and my love of coffee well. But to me, it is a symbol of the success of my information consulting business, Social Information Group. It's a symbol of all the wonderful people I work with in this venture, and in the many different ventures going on right now. On a larger scale, to me it's affirming of where I'm going and what I'm doing, of this new path in life.

Maybe I'm making too much of a simple gift basket. But this really touched me. Thank you, Springer, and thanks to everyone in my life. I continue to be astounded by how each and every person I connect with is important. I'm grateful for every one of you, and for what you bring to my life. I hope that I bring something to your life, too.

The balloon boy incident - a different perspective

I know by this time, many of us are tired of what's being called the "balloon boy" story. But before it goes away and leaves our consciousness (which it should), I want to talk about a couple of things that this brought up for me, and perhaps for other people too.

I happened to catch wind of the balloon boy story (sorry for the pun) on Twitter. It initially seemed like a joke, or almost whimsical - boy flies away in balloon. Then I found the link to the story on a local news website, which then linked to the live video of the balloon from an Air Tracker.

And this is where the story really gripped me. The live video from the Tracker was truly frightening.The balloon was at times flying so fast and so high, it was almost beyond comprehension to imagine what a boy trapped in that balloon might be experiencing. The fact of watching it live made it that much more intense. That kid is either dead, I thought, or on the extreme end of terror. It was truly almost unimaginable.

For a couple of hours this went on. As the balloon began to come down, it seemed like this whole event would very likely have an awful end. The boy avoided higher altitudes only to be smashed to earth or entangled in a stand of trees or smashed on a structure. But, amazingly, the balloon came to a relatively gentle landing in the midst of an afternoon of high winds.

And then - he wasn't there. There was no one in the balloon.

This really affected me for a few hours after the balloon came down. And I started to wonder why.

Two things came to mind.

The first thing was the gripping thought and image of a boy flying around in that balloon. And I realized that the image is an image of the ultimate loss of control.

As it was flying along, I thought (as I'm sure we all thought), "what can possibly be done to get that boy down safely?" Shoot it down? Of course not. Puncture a hole in it? Too big of a chance of the mylar ripping and the balloon coming down like a rock. Try and capture it? How? The winds were too high, and the movement of the balloon too unpredictable.

There was nothing to be done. It just had to play out.

And that was the hook. The balloon was COMPLETELY out of control. There was literally nothing to be done except to watch. And hope and pray for the best.

So those of us who were watching it were watching a playing out of a complete loss of control.

In this context, the incident is a striking image.

Then, the balloon came down. And I realized that either the boy was dead, or there was no one in it after all. And lo and behold, there was no one in it.

And that brought up the second thing that hit me about this. Here I was, gripped in this story and this image for a couple of hours, and it wasn't at all what I thought it was. There was no boy in danger. There was no unimaginable experience going on there. It was just a mylar balloon in the wind.

And here's what struck me. It made me angry that I had essentially been fooled into thinking that a poor little boy was in that balloon (as it has made many angry, and led to all the attacks and publicity around this). I thought reality was a certain way, and when the balloon came down, I felt manipulated. That boy was supposedly in a box in an attic all the time.

To me, this is important that I recognize this reaction in myself. I felt betrayed and angry.

But what I need to realize is that this is not typical of the world. I could have taken that strong feeling of betrayal and held that against the world: "The world lied to me, the world is not what it appears to be." But I know this is an anomaly.I'm not going to generalize that to the world.

I'm not interested in persecuting this family and this boy because of how it made me feel. I'm truly glad that the boy is all right.

What's phenomenal is to see how events like these affect people, including myself.

Update: October 22, 2009

Nice addition to the post - thanks Guy for posting this :)

One year walking, China to Germany

Just saw this (thanks to Guy Mason) and had to share. I'd love to see this slowed down a bit. I'm sure there's something I could say about time passing, identity, change, location, continuity, etc. but I think it's better just with the visual. 

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Unconditional positive regard

So Carl Rogers introduced an approach to therapy in the 1940s and 50s that, at the time, was a major break from the psychoanalytic viewpoint that Freud and his immediate followers held. Freud's perspective was that the analyst was the expert, telling the "patient" what his or her issues were. The patient has psychoses and neuroses that the expert is treating. The patient comes to the analyst in a broken state. (Nowadays, a psychoanalytic approach is not typically like this, but this is very much how it was in its earlier stages. Heck, you can find several Woody Allen films that depict the psychotherapist in this traditional mode.)

Rogers' approach was radical in a few ways. One example is that it assumes that the person seeking help already has all the tools and resources to solve his or her own issues. One of the things that the analyst or therapist does is to help that person discover and use those tools and resources. This approach is very different than viewing the person as broken, as needing to be "cured".

What I want to address is a piece of this Rogerian approach, commonly referred to as "unconditional positive regard". Basically, this is a basis of the therapist/client relationship. The therapist has unconditional positive regard for the client. In other words, the therapist goes into the relationship (and maintains the relationship) assuming the client has worth and value, no matter what the circumstances. The client may have no self-esteem, but the therapist believes in the value of the client. The client may have done terrible things; the therapist still focuses on the strengths and positive qualities of the client. The therapist still sees positive value in the client, no matter what.

(A quick delineation here: having this approach does not mean that the therapist condones the "bad behavior". It means that the therapist believes, again, that the client can move towards improvement and healing with the strengths and resources that he or she already has.)

First, imagine the power of this approach for a client who has never felt like he or she has been listened to - for someone who has never felt he or she has been seen or valued.

People get hurt and angry because they don't feel they're being valued. We've all felt like this. Some people go through their entire lives never feeling heard or valued.

The power of this simple valuing of another person can be huge.

But what I really want to write about is taking this approach outside of a therapeutic setting, and applying it to people in general, and to the world.

Let me say the phrase again, to kind of separate it out:

Unconditional positive regard.

What a great phrase.

What if you practiced taking this approach - an approach of assuming some kind of value, an approach of positivity no matter what the conditions - to everyone you see and meet? To everything there is in the world? 

To put it another way - what if, rather than approaching people (or certain people) with suspicion or fear or hatred, what if you approached them assuming only positive things? What if you approached them with love and care, with enthusiasm?

As Mary Ellen Bates sometimes says, I know this is a bit "woo woo", but I invite you to try this for even part of a day.

What I find, when I consciously try this approach, is that two things happen. One, the quality of my interactions with people shifts dramatically. Not only am I able to be more open, but I listen more carefully. I am more able to actually be with the person, and I walk away with a greater appreciation of who that person is.

This works amazingly well especially with "difficult" people, people I would typically shy away from, or would rather not talk to for whatever reason. It allows me to step outside of the barriers that I'm putting in the way of the interaction. I have had the most surprising and beneficial conversations with people I'm dreading talking to by using this approach.

The second thing that happens is my whole perspective on the world and attitude changes. Often times I can shift my feeling of the world from one of apprehension to one of appreciation and warmth.

This approach can help shift how I am in the world. A variety of factors from my childhood left me with an underlying and unspoken view of the world as an unpredictable, unstable place, where the world could fall apart at any second. Practice approaching the world from one of unconditional positive regard is the opposite of this, and it allows me to relate to and see the world differently from the view I've carried unconsciously.

This kind of thing takes practice - a LOT of practice. A lifetime of practice. It's not easy to do, because I think many of us (and I'm placing myself squarely in this category) are used to approaching the world with fear, worry, doubt and suspicion. We grow up with this approach. We're often pretty well steeped in it.

In rereading this, I feel like I'm using a lot of words (and lots of "high concept") to try to illustrate a relatively simple point that I've made more eloquently before - maybe with The Santa view. But I just love the concept.

Unconditional: No matter what.

Positive: There is a positive outcome or aspect to everything.

Regard: An approach, a perspective. 

Unconditional positive regard.Try it out.