Introduction
Overworked and Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Mindfulness Alternative
The Backstory
It was 7:30 on a Sunday night on the campus of one of the world's best-known companies, and I was the guest speaker for a group of about 80 of the company's top high potentials. They had just finished the first week of a two-week leadership development program that wrapped up with a weekend project two hours earlier. Week two was set to start the next morning at 8:00 AM. So, it was the time slot that every guest speaker covets, right? (In retrospect, I was lucky to be there at all. Just two years earlier when I made the first presentation I ever gave to leaders in this company, I doubted if I was even going to be able to physically stand long enough to deliver the talk. We'll get to that later.)
My goal that night was to offer up a few ideas and tools that these leaders could use immediately to get stuff done and still have a life. I dived right in by asking the group if they were interested in seeing the results of some leadership behaviors research that I had conducted with a couple of hundred executives in their company. High-achieving people almost always enjoy comparing themselves to a norm, so this group of high-potential leaders was immediately hooked. As I shared the slide for the most highly self-assessed behaviors for their company execs, we looked at a graph that was all about accountability, open communication, and making timely decisions. The headline I shared with the group was, “Leaders here are great at getting stuff done.” All the heads in the room nodded up and down. Then we took a look at the lowest self-assessed behaviors. My flipside headline was, “And you're so busy getting stuff done, that you probably don't see what needs to be done.” I got more than nodding heads at that point. I got an eruption of emotion.
A catharsis began as the screen showed low rated leadership behaviors such as:
- Pacing myself by building in regular breaks from work
- Regularly taking time to step back to define or redefine what needs to be done
- Giving others my full presence and attention in meetings and conversations
Everyone in that room had a track record of success. And almost everyone in the room talked about their fears that they weren't going to be able to keep it up. They talked about staying late at the office day after day. They talked about the expectation to be “corporate warriors,” to always be available, to get by on four hours of sleep a night, to answer e-mails immediately, including in the middle of the night. They all agreed that they were burning out fast.
The exception was a woman in the center of the room who was listening attentively but not contributing to the conversation. She was projecting a sense of calm that stood in stark contrast to the frustration and angst that most of her colleagues were expressing. I asked her what she was thinking. She said, “I'm thinking I don't do any of that stuff.” After her colleagues picked their jaws up from the tables, the questions began—How do you do that? How do you pull it off?
Her answer was simple. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to have a life and not just a work life. Unless it's a true emergency, I leave the office every night at 6:00 PM. And, once I get home, I don't answer e-mails. The people who need to reach me know my number. They'll call me if they need me, but I don't answer e-mails all night.” From the corner of the room, one of the guys who had been driving the conversation said, “Yeah, because the first time you answer an e-mail at 2:30 in the morning, they know they've got you.” Everyone else nodded their heads knowingly.
By definition, this woman was among the top performing leaders in her company. She would not have been in the room if she wasn't. What set her apart from her colleagues was a measure of mindfulness in how she approached her work and her life.
The Purpose of This Book
This book, Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative, is for the rest of the people who were in the room that evening. Chances are, if you're reading this, you could have been there that night. As I was writing this book and talking with leaders and other high-capacity professionals about the project, the most common question I got after sharing that the title was Overworked and Overwhelmed was, “When can I read it?”
That was encouraging but not surprising. In close to 15 years of work with the top executives and high-potential leaders in scores of the world's best known companies and organizations, I've seen a clear trend develop year over year. Leaders and other professionals are working harder and harder. The input is coming in far faster than any reasonable expectation of output. Too many leaders and professionals today feel overwhelmed by the seemingly nonstop demands on their time and attention. The convergence of 24/7 smartphone connectivity and the permanent restructuring that followed the financial crisis of 2008 have created an environment in which many professionals feel like they're on a gerbil wheel with no way off.
They operate in environments in which the expectations for results are always rising and always changing. Different results require different actions, and all too often, the response of high-achieving people is to do more of what they've been doing. They (you) can't work any harder. They (you) are already maxed out. There are only 168 hours in a week and they're working most of them. There's not a lot of extra margin for them to work more or harder. They need an alternative. That's what this book offers—the mindfulness alternative. This book is a guide to learning to work differently—mindfully—so you are more clear about the results that most merit your time and attention and how you need to show up to offer your highest and best contribution as a professional and as a person.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction therapy, has asked, “Sure, mindfulness is difficult, but what's the alternative?”1 When you think about it, the alternative to mindful living is mindless living. Because of ever changing expectations, the amount of incoming input and the conflicting demands on their time and attention, too many professionals are practicing mindless living. Okay, so mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness, but what is it? We'll answer that question in depth in Chapter 2, but for now my short and simple definition is that mindfulness is the intersection of two qualities: awareness and intention. By awareness, I mean awareness of what's going on both around you and inside of you in any given moment. Being aware enables you to act in the moment with the intention of creating a particular outcome or result.
The purpose of Overworked and Overwhelmed is to make the practice of mindfulness easy, accessible, and relevant for people who feel like they're trapped on the gerbil wheel. The goal is not to turn you into a Buddhist monk or nun but to offer the knowledge that, along with simple, practical, and applicable routines, will help you align your work and the rest of your life with the results that matter most. The emphasis here is on small steps that, when taken consistently over time, lead to big results. If this book helps you raise your effectiveness and improve the quality of your life by 5 percent in the next month, I will consider that a win. Five percent may not sound like much, but if you have a 5 percent improvement each month, in six months you're going to be 30 percent better. That's nothing to sneeze at. Based on my own experience and that of many of my clients, I know you can do it.
Why Me?
If I were you, I might be interested in being less overworked and overwhelmed but would also be asking the question, “Why should I pay attention to what this guy is offering?” Let me attempt to answer that question with two quick stories. One has been public for years, and the other, until the publication of this book, has been very private.
The Public Story
Over the past seven years, I've shared many of the concepts and techniques that will be highlighted in Overworked and Overwhelmed with senior and emerging leaders in some of the world's most prominent companies and organizations.
Based on the leadership behaviors research I've conducted with thousands of leaders in these organizations and dozens of others, I've concluded that a more mindful approach to leadership and professional life is desperately needed. Over the past several years, I've been much more explicit in my senior executive coaching engagements and education sessions with high-potential leaders that professionals today are so busy doing things that they often don't see what needs to be done. I'm getting universal agreement with this premise and great success in sharing basic mindfulness routines and habits with executives and other professionals who are hungry for approaches to their work that are effective and more sustainable than the 24/7 expectations that many of them have set for themselves.
My own professional journey includes 15 years of managerial and executive experience in the public sector, work in financial services, and time spent as a vice president in a Fortune 250 energy company. I've spent the past 14 years as a leadership coach, speaker, educator, and author working with C-suite and other senior executives and high-potential leaders in some of the world's best known companies and organizations.
The fact that I'm not a Buddhist monk or the secular equivalent actually makes me well positioned to write this book. Like you, I'm someone who is leading a very fast paced life. I run a successful business. I have a family. I have friends and interests outside of work. I live in a bustling city, not a retreat center in Big Sur. I've had my share of ups and downs. Sometimes I'm proud of the way I show up, and other times I'd love to have a do-over. In short, I'm just a guy who's doing the best he can and trying to figure things out.
For more than 20 years, though, I've worked diligently to incorporate mindfulness into my life. I didn't even think of it as mindfulness when I started out. As I've learned more over time, though, that's what I've been trying to do.
My mindfulness journey includes 20 years of annual reflection and planning retreats with my wife, Diane, 15 years of regular (more or less) meditation and prayer, more than 1,200 yoga classes in the past four years, and the recent completion of a 200-hour training program that led to me becoming a Registered Yoga Teacher.
The Private Story
That previous line about completing a yoga teacher training program is the setup for the private version of the story about why you may want to consider me as your guide on this journey to a more mindful way of living and working.
In the summer of 2009, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). That was one of the great shocks of my life, as I was 48 years old, had run two marathons, and thought I was in excellent health and pretty much bulletproof.
My self-identity in 2009 often started with “I'm a runner.” I started running when I was 13 years old. Although I was never that fast, I had a lot of endurance and would regularly run for an hour or more at a time. Beginning in late 2008, that got increasingly harder to do. With each passing week, my legs felt more and more like they had lead weights in them. Then I started getting lower back pain. Like any good twenty-first-century professional, I got on WebMD and tried to self-diagnose. My conclusion was a condition called lumbar stenosis in which a bone spur on your spine presses against a nerve. I thought this would be easy to fix so I went to a physiatrist to get my diagnosis confirmed and start treatment. She suggested I get some MRI scans taken of my spine and come back in two weeks.
Two weeks later, I went back to see her. As I was walking across the parking lot from my car to her office that day I could feel my feet getting numb. Early in our time together, the doctor told me that the MRIs showed lesions on my spinal cord, that she thought I had multiple sclerosis, and that I should see a neurologist. To make a long story short, the neurologist ran all the requisite tests, and sure enough, I had MS.
The rest of 2009 was downhill from there. Within a few weeks I could barely walk around the block and had to sort of pull myself by the banister to walk upstairs to my bedroom. A couple of months after the diagnosis, I was in downtown Washington, D.C., for a meeting. As I was leaving, a huge summer storm broke out of nowhere. I tried to run for my car, which was four blocks away, and couldn't feel my feet. Pretty tough for someone whose self-identity was “I'm a runner.” The story that began to replace “I'm a runner” was “the great crippler of young adults.” (I recently learned that this line came from an old Barbra Streisand public service announcement for MS that I must have seen a lot as a kid.)
A month later, I was scheduled to give my first ever presentation to that major global company that I referred to at the beginning of this introduction. A week before the event, I said to Diane, “I think I'm going to be doing that speech with a cane.” It turns out that I didn't need a cane that day, but I didn't allow myself to get more than a couple of feet away from the podium in case I needed to grab it on the way down.
Later that year, my brain started feeling like a wet sponge inside my skull. I was afraid to go see clients because I wasn't even making sense to myself. I was losing thoughts and words. I could barely walk, let alone run. Early in 2010, I enrolled in a trial at Johns Hopkins Medical Center for a new MS drug. I was told the side effects of the biweekly injections would be flulike symptoms for a few hours. That was true at first. Then the symptoms extended for a day, then a weekend, and then three or four days at a time. After each injection, I was flat on my back for a longer period of time. It got to the point where Diane would have to help me lift my head off the couch to take a drink of water.
She was desperate to help me and in October 2010 encouraged me to start going to yoga on the off weeks from the injections. I was amazed that I could do it at all. It made me feel so much better that I quickly became a regular. On a Monday in December of that year, I got a call from my doctor at Hopkins. He told me that based on my blood work from the prior week, I needed to get to Baltimore right away so he could admit me to the hospital. I told him that I had spent the previous afternoon in a three hour yoga workshop and asked how I could possibly need to be admitted. In return he asked, “Do you want to hear your page numbers?” My markers of normal liver functions were 10 times higher than they should have been. With each injection of the MS drug, my liver moved closer to failure.
While the drugs work for many people, they didn't work for me. It was at that point that I stopped taking them and started doing yoga four or five times a week. I learned a lot more about what I should and shouldn't eat to keep my autoimmune system healthy. I got more serious about meditation. Six months after I almost had liver failure, I did the first headstand I had ever done in my life—and that was just a few weeks before my fiftieth birthday. Today, I practice yoga six or seven times a week, have completed that 200-hour yoga teacher training, and do some combination of headstands, handstands, and arm balances pretty much every day. While the physical strength and flexibility I've gained has been vitally important to managing my health, the perspective and calm that I've built through the practice is equally important. I'm stronger than I've ever been and savoring each moment of life in a way that I never have before.
Pursuing the mindfulness alternative literally saved my life. If you've read this far, I believe it can save yours. That's why I've written this book. I am so glad you're here.
How We'll Roll
Overworked and Overwhelmed is organized into four parts.
Part One has three goals: to define the nature and sources of the overworked and overwhelmed state you find yourself in, to lay out the choice between mindful and mindless living, and to open up the hood on your brain and body to share some information about your operating system and how to manage it.
The goal of Part Two is to start painting the picture of what your version of non-overworked and non-overwhelmed success would look like. I'll introduce you to the Life GPS® personal planning model that will be the organizing framework for the rest of this book. We'll get a running start on answering the first of three big questions framed by the Life GPS: “How do you show up when you're performing at your best?” And we'll wrap up Part Two by taking a reality-check look at the one commitment you have to make for any aspect of the mindfulness alternative to work. (You can do it. I know you can.)
In Part Three, we'll answer the second big Life GPS question: “What are the simple, practical, and immediately applicable routines that will enable you to show up at your best?” Those routines fall into four domains: physical, mental, relational, and spiritual. There are lots of great routines you can adopt in any or all of those areas that will help you strengthen the mindfulness muscles that will enable you to feel less overworked and overwhelmed. The fact is, though, that you probably don't have time for a lot of new routines in your life. That's why each of the routine chapters will focus on a Killer App—that one thing you should do if you're not going to do anything else in that domain. If you're interested in doing a little more, you'll find short Habit Hacks throughout Part Three that are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference. Recognizing that none of us are perfect, Part Three will finish up with some ideas on how to keep the wheels on your bus and how to get back on the road quickly when the wheels come off.
Part Four will help you pull it all together by sparking your thoughts and intentions around the last of the three big Life GPS questions: “If you're regularly showing up at your mindful best, what are the results and outcomes you hope to see in the three big arenas of life—your life at home, your life at work, and your life in your broader community?”
Every chapter will end with a Coach's Corner, where I'll ask a few questions that will help you identify your takeaways from each chapter and how they apply to you.
So, are you sick of being overworked and overwhelmed? Are you ready for the mindfulness alternative? Awesome. Let's keep going.