Last week was full to bursting point for me.
I had a big coaching schedule, faced multiple deadlines for a new venture, had proposals due, a 3 day business trip and my son was on school holidays. I didn’t even know that it would also involve a flat tyre and all my emails disappearing!
It’s not the week I had envisaged for sure, but it was the week I was facing on Sunday evening when I found myself looking at my schedule and thinking about everything I had to do.
I started to feel pressure building.
I used to feel this way a lot of the time and it didn’t matter whether my week was full to bursting point or not. To me the pressure was always justifiable by the circumstances I found myself in whether it be a big presentation, an important proposal or a challenging meeting.
Pressure quickly lead to me into a state of unproductive urgency. The hamster from Secret Life of Pets describes it so well as it runs in its wheel……..and gets nowhere!
https://vlipsy.com/vlip/zLytkXpr
Like so many, I wanted to get off the hamster wheel and in doing so innocently jumped onto another one. This new wheel involved fastitidiusly taking on board the advice of self-help experts. Keep more space in my schedule, upskill, delegate, get clearer on my why and on it went. All of these make sense at times but not as blanket rules.
Did I feel less pressure? To be honest I probably felt more pressure in my distracted mind as I was desparate to get things right.
Along the way I got so fed up of this repeating cycle of pressure and over-efforting I started to get curious.
I started to see that my circumstances and my experience of them were not one and the same. Some days the busy schedule sent me into a stupor and others I took it in my stride.
I started to see that my feelings were simply telling me about where my head was at and I could give them a lot less of my focus.
I started to see that the more distracted I became judging how I was doing, the less present I was to what was infront of me and the less new ideas were available to me. Inevitably in this state my productivity declined.
These new perspectives enabled me to be present to what I was doing in that moment and not what I had to do in 5 days time. This is what enabled me to access creative ideas and become more productive.
Not only did it feel like a pressure relief valve had been opened but I felt much more resilient to the challenges I faced and more creative ways to navigate them surfaced.
We all get ourselves on the hamster wheel at times but it’s in the remembering who we are, how our minds work and the fact that new ideas are always available that helps us to find ourselves back on solid ground with a greater ease and clarity.
Without remembering this I’m pretty sure my Sunday night hamster wheel experience would have been the experience of the week and I would be lying flat on the floor exhausted and disillusioned like our friend in the Secret Life of Pets 2!