Are you a smart worker?
Most professional people I meet believe in working hard and pushing through to get results. And there are times when that's needed. But, in the act of pushing through, we cease to pay attention to our self. We put our self on hold while we get work done. While this may be OK for a short period of time, turning pushing through into a habit means we gradually lose the capacity to listen to our thoughts and feelings. Once that happens, stress impacts our health. This was my own case for many years.
We all know the mantra 'work smart not hard'. I often use it, or a version of it, in my consultancy work. For organisations, it usually means rethinking processes and systems to eliminate waste. This is the opposite of pushing through - rather than persist with old methods and work harder at them, it requires a fundamental rethink. Intelligence and discipline are prerequisites, as well as openness to new ideas. First you need to know what you want to do. Then you need to understand what actions are essential to achieving that, so that you can remove everything else - anything non-essential. As an example, a blue-chip client of mine is going through a digital transformation. They started by spending considerable time and effort cataloguing and understanding in detail the complex landscape of digital infrastructure and applications they were using, and how it interacts with the business. Only then did they look for new tools, systems, and processes which reduce duplication of work and bring higher performance where the business needs it. Then they designed and executed program to implement the changes. This kind of transformation process will be familiar to almost everyone working at a large company.
And yet, when it comes to our self, we find it diffcult to apply the same principles. We persist in old habits, even when these are causing stress and inefficiency. We may not be aware of the effects - unnecessary tensions in our body and mind. Sometimes those tensions manifest as pain (for example in back, shoulders, neck or jaw). But often they go completely unnoticed. We don't even realise we could be functioning better than we are.
How can we manage a change process at individual level? Just like in a corporate transformation, it requires intelligence, with openness to new possibilities, and disciplined attention. Let's go through the steps:
First, know what limitation you want to remove or overcome in your self. Perhaps you would like to be able to work at a desk all day without getting shoulder pain. Perhaps you want to be able to write reports faster because you feel your workload is too heavy. Perhaps you have to do a multitude of tasks and want a clear overview of shifting priorities. Whatever it is, be clear about the change you are looking for.
Then, get to know that limitation. Spend time with it. Understand how it feels to approach it from different angles, and experiment around it. If you're wanting to overcome that shoulder pain, spend time paying attention to how you hold and move your shoulder, and how that relates to the whole of your self. If you're wanting to write reports faster, experiment with doing it at different speeds, to understand what makes a difference. If you're struggling to keep clear priorities, record what you spend time on and why. This is all about increasing how well you know your self. Doing this is internal work. It needs a non-pressured environment, and careful attention to your self.
With deeper self-knowledge, new insights can emerge that lead to more efficient ways of working. Perhaps the shoulder is helped by a different breathing pattern. Perhaps report-writing can be speeded up by not bothering with certain sections, or accepting a lower quality of editing, or using an AI assitant to draft it. Perhaps clarifying priorities comes easily once you identify for yourself certain principles you want to apply, such as 'external customers always get priority over internal requests'.
None of this is rocket science. But doing it is hard: to change our self we have to confront our self, and be prepared to be vulnerable. That's why in the Feldenkrais Method we put so much effort into creating a learning environment where people feel safe and playful. That enables us to pay attention to our self without distraction. While the method centers on movement, the process and discipline of changing our self is the same in other aspects of life.
How do you encourage change in your self? Please leave a comment.