Dear (busy) Leader – today’s message comes from Love:
Stop. Slow down. You won’t want to do this, I know.
But the very full, frantic, busy-ness you are living is destroying your life, health and actual business success.
Feel you haven’t got the time even to read my words?
Perfect! You need to read this then indeed!
Stop and give me 7 minutes to look at this topic.
It might save your life, increase your health and accentuate your leadership!
You KNOW you need to slow down.
Take some rest, some more life and breath and joy for yourself daily.
Your kind of enslavement to the screen, to Zoom and Teams meetings, to pressure – well it is just another version of being a serf, enslaved to work – not the warrior king/queen of your life and career.
For many years now, there has been a movement called Slow Cities. This expanded into Slow Food and now there are even Slow Cafes.
This global movement is all about quality, sustainability, lifestyle and mindful living.
Quality.
Not being hasty and rushed.
So now I am naming the next movement we need – for sanity, well-being and success.
Slow Leadership.
This is my challenge to the mindsets of business leaders.
My challenge to you!
You are the king (or queen) of speed, haste and urgency. No doubt this feels how you got to your success.
Deadline, quick results, mega-responsivesness – this is a lifestyle that rules you.
But you are a leader.
And I would like you to slow down.
Right now, and right down!
Please take a breath – you are now 1 minute into a 7-minute read. Slow down, breathe and take it in!
We all know a great dish needs time to cook. So it is with your leadership. I am not talking about your rate of decision making – more on that later. I am talking simply about the speed of your life, and slowly accruing space to develop reflective, wisdom practices and space to be still and quiet.
To think and feel, ponder and wonder.
Like a train engine uncoupled from its many cars for a much needed service,
let me park you on the sidetracks for a rest – to consider how your journey of leadership is going.
I want to talk of increasing BEING a leader, rather than succumbing to DOING more as a leader.
Modern corporate leaders lead an anxious lifestyle – this is what I have observed in my executive coaching clientele over 20 years, and it’s growing massively now.
We live in the age of anxiety now.
Speed, quality, accuracy, haste.
Adrenalin and caffeine immediacy.
Quick decisions.
Instant gratification
And high-performance results.
I am sure you love to achieve, to tick things off that list.
But now I want to talk to you about having a better view of the value of leadership, and of your time, and of your actions. This can be hard for driven people.
But it is the next level up in Conscious Leadership.
I have worked with many Olympic athletes, CEOs, top teams, actors and artists in my career.
If I think of the Olympic athletes –
No matter the final speed of execution achieved on the day – it was the slow, calm, committed, training – up and down that pool –
round and round that track, this built the deep, resilient success.
Over and over in the discipline of plodding.
Thoughtful,
Practised, watchful.
Daily devoted learning and training is how all masters of any craft succeed.
Slowly excelling, developing prowess,
A steady stream of skill build-up and potency is built.
So while I acknowledge
You are a wonder of speed,
Excelling through push and rush,
Coping in corporate culture on caffeine-fuelled anxiety,
Packing it in, online meeting schedules now full,
With fast living and late nights,
Big socialising and exhausted mornings –
I want to “pause button” you!
Leading well is not about astounding speed.
Not when you have an army to move over the next big river.
Or a huge orchestra to attune and align around the Rachmaninoff score for tonight’s concert.
“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act,
it is a habit.”
Aristotle
Leading with quality even excellence needs time
– to reflect, grow, ground, practise, and deeply relate.
And this is the art where you can manifest results with ease. Excellence and discipline are two more concepts to ponder in the days ahead.
I know your BP and heart at times register complaint –
of not enough rest, too much intense, crazy or rich living. You sleep badly often.
You push it
And push it.
Do you really listen to your body?
Takes a pandemic to ground the planes
And those full-on packed schedules.
To bring leadership practices into question.
I know this life well … I have lived it too,
Up the glamorous skyscraper,
Barely time in the packed day to visit the restroom,
Grab a coffee between meetings,
Return 4 phone calls in a 10-minute break,
Grab lunch with a colleague.
Is it a stage of life?
Or an addiction?
Is it the pressure of work and meeting client needs …
Or is it poor resourcing and unrealistic deadlines?
Or wrongly skewed thinking about success?
Fueled by pressure and anxiety of achievement?
We all need to have a look at this.
By the senior leadership stage, this breathless,
“barely time to contemplate life” lifestyle
does not serve your leadership. And now we have the same intensity just transferred online – to endless meetings, often not well connected together, few breaks from the screen, and endlessly carrying one’s work into all hours, nooks and crannies of one’s life.
The ART of leadership is linked to time and how we use it, and life-force and how we spend it. It has a huge relationship with stillness and slowing down.
Please take time to be slower …
Ponder.
Meditate.
Step away and gain perspective.
Let answers appear.
Have long conversations
Listen to the quiet inner voice of intuition.
The flow of magical thinking requires space and breath,
not force and pressure.
This is the opening to Yin, balancing with the directness of Yang. Becoming centred in the middle path.
Here are some advantages of slow living, deciding, and leading which I believe will assist and increase your leadership success:
1. PRESENCE AND ATTENTION
Your presence is the greatest gift of any leader.
You need calm to give it totally and calmly to your team, your issues, your self.
Make space and practise giving your full attention to what is right in front of you. That means no distractions and not doing 3 things at once, with 3 screens open while you talk to a staff or family member! This means developing a relationship with your breath, your body and what you give attention to.
“I think 99 times and find nothing.
I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth
comes to me.” Albert Einstein
2. REFLECTION TIME
Senior leaders need to turn from keen precise strategic planning. and operate more in the field of “soft focus”.
Here is where inspiration can arise.
Consideration needs space and time.
See how space and slowing need time! And this allows deeper wisdom and insight to arise.
Meditation can help you learn to soften and calm your brain waves
And in this theta state we can widen the gaze to the bigger picture.
“When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself” ~ Lao Tzu
3. EMERGENCE
When you don’t push but allow space, the process unfolds. This is the threshold of learning to blend and flow.
In martial arts we call this “effortless effort” and the principle of “Wu Wei”.
In this space, mindfulness, calm stillness and humility allows less control, and more aligning with the natural forces of change and momentum. With less speed, often more can be achieved – we all know this one!
And space allows you to see what is emerging in YOU, as well as the process.
Allowing time to go over issues and decisions, calmly watchful, also makes a new embodied relationship with decision making.
True wisdom, the real superiority does not win by fighting but by letting it happen for themselves. Plants that resist wind break, while the flexible plants survive the hurricane.”
Epicurus
4. BALANCE
Creating more space in your schedule is about giving balance into your life! This is of benefit for you, human.
A life less hurried lets you have more restorative time, for renewal and rejuvenation.
I have worked a long time with business leaders, all hell bent on success. And know this one to be true – aiming for living life in balance is a worthy and vital practice.
Inside this practice can be a quality of space and time that adds to your potency as a leader. We fear slowing down, but it ironically it opens up your energy, and thus your thinking, reflecting and insight.
5.SAVOURING YOUR LIFE
Have this time in your life and leadership, deeply.
Notice your authority and value it.
Enjoy the gravitas and potency of your influence.
Why rush it by?
There comes a time when you will wonder how life rushed you by. Days disappear in speediness, rather than are gently appreciated.
Sometimes it takes having to say goodbye to loved ones, to realise mortality as you drop usual life and go sit at the side of a dying one, to ponder deeply how you have allotted time in your life so far.
Life goes fast.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
I send you these thoughts to help you, even challenge you. In loving support of your greatness and potential,
I am suggesting the relationship of speed and time to leadership is worthy of consideration!
Increasingly I am working with coachees to practice opening up space in their day, for consideration and reflection time.
It takes bravery to do this. To disconnect, turn the phone off, to say no to some meetings – it is all a discipline to come to a new way of being.
8. DOUBT
When we DO slow down – often self-doubt or questioning arises …
“How am I leading?
What is needed in the team?
What could we do differently?
What is going well?
What are people thinking of me??
What am I feeling?
Am I happy?”
It takes courage to sit with these questions and reap the benefits of reflection. To shape your life into one that serves you, as well as the workload.
This is just a reminder of what you know.
Plus – it can be enjoyable making space and slowing the mind and tempo of your life. Whether walking on the beach, the golf course, when kicking back in the yard, or mountain hiking. Making time to slow your fast world can have so many benefits!
9. ANXIETY
Dissolving anxiety needs breath.
Slow breathing.
Loosening the diaphragm, deepening the relaxing …
In our world of modern existential angst, anxiety is fed by breathless rushing, sleepless nights, tight bodies.
Leaders mostly suffer over-full lives, grasping the illusion of doing more and more, the “fast company”, fast growth, let’s capitalise real fast.
The relentless hurry to build and sell, denies you the pleasure of crafting your leadership and the pleasure of meaningful engagement. And of building something worthwhile in a business based on values, vision and soul mission.
Does a shoddy hurried building get more at auction?
Does your pride glow at a careful and considered build of a house? Or a team?
We all know a slow cooked meal gathers more flavour if it’s artfully attended.
So – is the flavour of your life a hurried stir-fry?
Yes, I am the proponent of SLOW LEADERSHIP.
If you didn’t get it, skimmed the surface of this letter to you, didn’t have time to read this piece, had three screens open at once….
STOP
Please slow down, get a cuppa and read this piece again.
Slowly. Let it drop in to your being.
Consider if you can let your life become andante. A great symphony is not only one movement, not all allegro, but varied in tone. The full performance needs contrast.
Can your leadership play and experiment with this relationship to “slow”?
Can the presence, reflection and deep dive of leading with less harried speed become your philosophy of living?
Can you carve out some space, sculpturally – to create an artwork of how you do this leading of your life and your team?
When it is all over, what do you want to look back on?
Yes it’s hard to imagine.
But be grown up
And face it.
You may – no, will – one day run out of time!
So slow down, and enjoy these days of life, leading, creating and achieving.
Be brave about this, slow leader.
It is worth it.
I know you can do it.
Love and affection for your unfolding leadership journey.
I am here if you want to talk about all this!
Virginia Sada York
YOUR WORLD WITHIN
PS
A few easy things to try –
Turn off the phone more!
(It’s better for your brain and energy system.)
Be present with your family and near ones. That means full attention.
Rest your brain with sleep, quiet, how about some “no screen time” days even?
Go inside and breath.
Go outside and ground and breathe.
Watch the inner silence with courage.
See if more wisdom and insight comes.
Leadership is simultaneously an art,
A philosophy,
A practice
And a learning journey.
Virginia Sada York, 2021