Chapter 9

Jumping off the guilt trip

Stress and guilt often are the symptoms that drive us to improve our productivity, but a life driven by stress and guilt is not a brilliant or productive one. This chapter lifts the lid on how these factors actually affect our productivity and how to change the way we respond in order to put ourselves back in the driving seat.

Is guilt stealing your time?

In the quest for productivity, we talk a lot about time, organisation, tools, schedules, techniques, emails, distraction, interruptions, motivation, mindset, vision, action, procrastination, deadlines and focus.

But there’s something I often hear, that none of us explicitly talks about. I hear it hiding in the frustration of not being able to say no and the exhaustion of sacrificing sleep for the sake of catching up. I hear it lurking in the resignation of ‘I’d love to, but…’ and ‘if only I had more time’. I hear it prowling in the pressure of trying to keep on top of everything, the worry of letting someone down, the struggle of trying – and failing – to please everyone and get everything done.

That thing is guilt.

‘I feel guilty when I’m working and not there for my kids… and when I’m with my kids and not working.’

‘I feel guilty that I’m neglecting my health, but also when I take time off for me.’

‘I feel guilty when I have to work late… and when I leave the office.’

‘I feel guilty when I’m on holiday… and I know I’m guilty of not taking enough time off.’

‘I wake up guilty knowing that there are emails waiting for me on my Blackberry.’

Guilt shows up everywhere.

It shows up when we’re working and when we’re not working; when we show up, when we switch off; when we bring work home and when we leave work undone; when we miss out on school plays, sports days and bedtimes, as well as when we take time off for our children, for sick days and school strikes; when we forget birthdays and miss deadlines, but also when we can’t forget about work.

And its constant message is this: ‘You don’t have enough time. You’re not doing enough.’ Some of us even use guilt to spur us on, to tell ourselves and others: ‘You have to do more.’

But what does guilt actually do?

Guilt distracts us

Ever notice how the thing you feel guilty about is never the thing you are focused on? When you’re working, guilt tells you that you’re neglecting your family, your health, your house or your relationships. When you are not working, guilt taps you on the shoulder and reminds you of the email you forgot to send or the meeting you are not preparing for.

Guilt thrives on counting losses: all the things you’ve missed, not done or are not doing right now. Forget the lovely Sunday afternoon you have just had with your kids and count the seconds you’re not spending with them. Forget the magical moment you just had when he took off on his bike without you holding on, and keep beating yourself up about the first step you missed when you were at work. Forget the brilliant victory you have just pulled out of the bag at work, and keep counting the jobs that are still on your to-do list.

By default, guilt distracts and diminishes our capacity. Just like when we try to drive in one direction while looking in another, or a child starts running one way while looking somewhere else; it’s exhausting, ineffective and, frankly, a disaster waiting to happen. You cannot pay full attention to something if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, and guilt always draws our attention to what we are not doing.

Guilt devalues our time

Research from Stanford University Graduate School of Business suggests that people who are time-affluent, who feel like they have more time, are people who regularly experience a sense of awe, being captivated by the present moment.¹

Guilt, on the other hand, steals our ability to be in the present. Instead of enjoying the time that we do have, we end up worrying about what we don’t have time for, what’s not been done and what’s not gone well. Instead of giving ourselves permission to be completely absorbed in the moment, to fully experience what’s right in front of us, guilt whisks us away – our bodies might be present, but our minds start time travelling – replaying past regrets and fretting about the future.

Worrying itself takes time, energy and attention. As cricketer Glenn Turner put it:

The more we worry about not having enough time, the less time we seem to have.

Guilt disables us

What have you told yourself you’d love to do someday, when you have time? What do you find yourself saying you’d love to do ‘if only you had the time’? What do you keep putting off, waiting for that elusive moment when everything else is done and you finally ‘have time’?

Guilt holds us back from pursuing the things that really matter to us – the bold business idea or brave career move, the trip you’ve always wanted to make or the book you keep meaning to write, the stuff that matters to you, that perhaps nobody else is ever going to chase you up on.

Take the rocking chair test: imagine yourself aged 96, looking back on your life – what would you be most proud of? What would you consider to have been time well spent? Chances are those are precisely the things that guilt tells us we don’t have time for.

Not enough time

Guilt has a way of sneaking in and making itself at home. Somewhere along the line, we’ve accepted guilt as a permanent resident in our lives – sitting on our shoulder, at the dinner table, in the bath with our kids… and its constant message is ‘not enough’. There’s not enough time. You’re not doing enough. You’re not enough. The guilt-driven life is one of fear, where nothing is ever enough.

Guilt has us believing that we don’t have enough time, but what if guilt is the very thing that’s stealing our time? What if we stopped feeling guilty about our time? What if we said no to guilt?

What if we said enough?

Enough with the guilt trip. Enough with the exhausting cycle of never having, doing or being enough. Because, quite frankly, that’s not working. Let’s redefine our relationship with time. Let’s start a new conversation about time. Let’s ditch the guilt and start telling the truth about time.

Guilt tells us there is never enough. So, let’s start with enough. Instead of what we don’t have time for, let’s start talking about what we do have time for. Let’s start with what we do have and what we are doing. Let’s celebrate that and start from there.

When you start from enough, you stop getting distracted by trying to find more and you make the most of what you do have. How much time do you have: 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 months? Instead of wishing you had more, focus on what you do have and what you’re going to do with it.

When you start from enough, you appreciate what you have; you value it, love it, treasure it, enjoy it, instead of worrying about where the next thing is going to come from. Not sure how everything’s going to play out next week? That’s ok, you’ll work it out. But if now is not the moment to figure it out, then let it go. Focus on the person, the moment or the forkful of food that’s right in front of you right now and enjoy it.

When you start from enough you stop holding yourself back and you actually start. And you know that’s where the magic happens. It’s from a place of enough that we grow and create more. So, I’ll start with this:

You have enough. You do enough. You are enough.

Now, what are you going to do with that?

How to feel like you have more time

In 2012, psychological scientists Melanie Rudd, Jennifer Aaker and Kathleen Vohs embarked on a study to understand what makes people feel like they have more time and what makes some people time-rich, when others feel time-poor.²

They studied awe – the experience of being captivated by the present moment –

They found that awe changes our subjective experience of time. It makes time slow down – not the actual ticking of the seconds, but in how we experience it. It expands our perception of time.

This certainly chimes with Gay Hendrick’s theory of Einstein Time (time is relative) versus Newtonian Time (time is finite) in his book The Big Leap. An hour with your beloved feels like a minute; a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour. Depending on what we do, space seems to narrow or to expand, time seems to slow down or accelerate.

As one Head of Talent put it:

Awe also makes us feel like we have more time available. We become more patient and less materialistic and more willing to volunteer our time to help other people. People who feel like they have more time are more generous with their time and experience greater life satisfaction, too:

Magic moments

How easy is it to generate awe? Do you have to travel to the Grand Canyon or Paris? Or might these moments be found a bit closer to home, too?

Perhaps it is the feeling of being beautifully overwhelmed by a sunset or a stranger’s generosity. Or being completely lost in a book, a work of art or a hot bubble bath. Or those goosebump moments when life surprises and delights you.

Here’s an experiment – start noticing your magic moments and let yourself be captivated by them. Then capture them – write them down or tell someone else. I have one client who has cultivated a habit of capturing his AMGLs: achievements, magic moments, gratitudes and learning moments. Writing them in a notebook roughly once a month, he now has five years’ worth of these to look back on.

What might your moments of awe be? Whatever they are, when we allow ourselves to be captivated by the present moment, we’ll feel like we have all the time in the world.

Daily treasures

There’s a lovely old man who comes into my writing cave – the local café where I’m fast becoming part of the furniture as I write this book. He’s a regular, too – he usually visits as part of his daily routine to get out of the house, pick up a couple of things from M&S, then stop by the café to read his paper over a cup of coffee and usually a few extra treats from the staff.

He used to volunteer at another café (I seem to live my life in cafés!) where I used to take my children, and has known them since they were babies. Normally we say hello, he asks about my family and he settles down to his coffee and paper while I carry on typing.

On Good Friday, however, the café was busy. I had negotiated a few precious hours to type away in my little corner when I spotted him come in and turn around, and his face fell as he noticed there were no free tables. Despite the staff calling out to him to wait, he said he’d come back tomorrow. I called out to him and he looked in my direction without seeing me, his eyes dejected and his shoulders slumped.

I ran after him. I had to, to invite him to share my table (he would say I attacked him).

‘Are you sure I won’t be bothering you? Haven’t you got work to do?’ he asked.

I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

We talked for ages – about his life, his family, his memories. Memories he hadn’t visited for a long time, stories that came pouring out because there was somebody to hear them. I learned more about this man in a couple of hours than in some six years of knowing him.

‘You’ve really made my Easter weekend’, he told me, ‘with all these memories fresh in my mind.’

‘Aren’t I boring you?’ he kept asking.

‘Not at all.’ I replied.

He kept apologising for taking up my time and kept wondering, suspiciously, if I was a good listener or a good actress.

‘Haven’t you got work to do?’

Yes, about 30,000 words’ worth. But that didn’t matter right then. Right then I got to watch this man come alive, as he relived perfectly ordinary memories that meant the world to him. I got to watch the sparkle come back to his eyes, his shoulders bounce as he laughed, his face light up as the joy of those moments poured into the present.

He refused to leave without buying me lunch. So I made him a deal – if he was to buy me lunch, then he wasn’t allowed to feel guilty for ‘taking my time’. Because it was a pleasure and a privilege, it really was. To see him come alive, to know that, in that moment, whatever I had planned, whatever I had on my list, right there and then I was in absolutely the right place, doing absolutely the right thing. And all I had to do was sit and listen.

And that was his gift to me. To be fully in the moment, witnessing this man recall moments past with a joy that was so tangible and present – because he was fully present in the moment when he first experienced them. That’s the gift of being in the moment. When you live fully in the moment, you get to relive it, time and time again.

Stress

Stress has become commonplace in our working lives (and, arguably, every other part of our lives, too!). We experience stress when there’s too much work, when there’s not enough work, when everything happens at once and when nothing seems to be happening. We get stressed about the demands other people have of us – and the expectations we place on ourselves. We can experience stress over a wide range of situations, from the state of the economy or the environment, to finding socks, parking spaces and grey hairs. ‘I’m stressed’ has become part of everyday vocabulary, even among school children.

What actually happens when we get stressed? And is it always a bad thing?

Psychologist Rob Archer suggests that ‘human beings are well evolved to deal with acute stress, but less well evolved to deal with chronic stress’.

Acute stress happens when something puts immediate pressure on us to act, like being chased by a lion. The human stress response primes our bodies to move quickly to stay alive: our attention span narrows, giving us extreme focus on one thing, energy is diverted away from less immediately essential systems, such as our immune or digestive systems, to our big muscles (so that we can run and stay alive!).

Of course, for most of us our stresses are likely to be psychological rather than facing actual lions. As human beings we have the capacity to create stress any time we like: when we have a difficult conversation, a big decision to make, changes to navigate or deadlines to meet. The acute stress response can actually be quite useful: when we are firefighting an emergency or working to a tight deadline, energy to move and increased focus is not a bad thing to have at all.

The problem comes when acute stress becomes chronic stress. When there are five different emergencies all crying out for our attention, we become overwhelmed and lose our focus. When our energy becomes depleted because we are constantly in emergency mode, we become exhausted. When our digestive and immune systems have been shut down for too long, our health suffers. As human beings we’re probably never going to be caught by a lion, but we can be caught by fatigue.

The answer isn’t to avoid stress. As Rob Archer explains:

Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal also suggests that how we think about our stress also changes its impact on our health. One study found that people who experienced a lot of stress – and believed that stress is harmful for your health – had a 43-per-cent increased risk of dying. People who experienced a lot of stress but didn’t view stress as harmful actually had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

In her TED Talk, ‘How to Make Stress Your Friend’⁶, Kelly McGonigal explains that:

Instead of seeing stress as harmful, she suggested seeing the stress response as a sign that your body is energised and preparing you to meet a challenge. The image that comes to my mind is one of an athlete about to start a race.

One of the acute responses to stress is that our heart rate goes up and our breathing increases to deliver more oxygen to our brain. In a typical stress response, when our heart rate goes up, our blood vessels constrict, which is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. However, McGonigal found that when participants viewed their stress response as helpful for their performance, they were less anxious and more confident, their heart was still pounding but their blood vessels stayed relaxed: ‘It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.’

How could you use the energy created by stress, if you choose to see it differently?

What are your feelings trying to tell you?

It’s always good to check and challenge our feelings. As a friend once said to me, ‘Sometimes I need to remind myself that, just because I’m in a bad mood, doesn’t mean I have a bad life.’ Sometimes it can also be useful not to dismiss our feelings or to try and get rid of a bad mood too quickly, but to dig a little deeper into our feelings of guilt and stress and pay attention to what they might be trying to tell us.

Stress, guilt and frustration can be a sign that something is out of kilter with our values, beliefs or expectations. Sometimes those expectations are wildly unrealistic (I must be all things to all people and get everything right) and lead to the constant guilt that just makes us feel terrible, but sometimes our feelings can serve us if we use them to help us to put a finger on something specific we want to change or do differently.

1. Check your feelings. What’s behind this feeling? What thoughts, worries, or fears are creating this feeling of guilt, stress, frustration or being overwhelmed? What do you believe to be true about this situation?
   
2. Challenge your thinking. Ask yourself, ‘How true is that, really?’. How true is that underlying belief that emails need to be answered immediately, that your boss is out to get you, or that every moment you are not with your children you are neglecting them? Sometimes our feelings can come from underlying beliefs that are based on past truths, part truths or pure imagination.
   
3. Clarify what’s important. Rather than focusing on the fear or worry itself, what is it that you value that feels threatened here? Get to the core of what’s important, so you can focus on making changes that honour what you do want, rather than react to what you don’t want.
   
4. Change your perspective. What’s another way to look at this? What are the positives? What else is going on or going well? Do you see a heavy schedule or a week full of opportunities? Pressure to perform or the opportunity to do your best work? Curveballs or plot twists? Failure or the opportunity to do something new? Doors closing or new beginnings? Chaos or beauty in formation? Perspective matters. What you see shapes your world and how you live in it.
   
5. Choose your response. What can you do differently? What positive changes can you make? What actions can you take that will help you to honour what’s important?
   

Reclaiming good

Sometimes, the pursuit of achievement and greatness can leave us feeling inadequate, exhausted and underwhelmed. Sometimes we can be so consumed with achieving more, we can forget to enjoy what we have and what is good.

In his book The Artisan Soul, Erwin McManus says this:

Often we associate productivity with greatness – the act of doing more, achieving goals and reaching upwards and outwards, but I think true productivity is also about goodness. It’s about doing good work, beautiful work, satisfying work. It’s about living a good life – one where we embrace and enjoy being as much as becoming. Where exploring, wondering (and wandering) and asking questions are just as valid as achieving, reaching and having answers.

Over to you