How to Pull Yourself Back from the Brink of Your Caffeine-Driven, Smart Phone-Addicted Life

This is a post by Scott Eblin. Scott is is the co-founder and president of The Eblin Group. He is the author of The Next Level and Overworked and Overwhelmed.

On a summer Sunday night four years ago, I found myself standing in front of a roomful of about 80 corporate managers who probably didn’t want to be there. They had just finished the first week of a high-profile leadership development program in one of the world’s largest companies and week two was scheduled to start at 7:30 am the next morning. They were polite but understandably restless. I was there as a guest speaker brought in to share some of what I’d learned from working with several hundred other leaders in their company.

Since high-achieving people usually like to compare themselves to their peers, I asked if they’d like to see the summary results of hundreds of leadership behavior self-assessments completed by those other leaders. Of course they said yes. Starting with the highest assessed behaviors, everyone could quickly identify with commitment to behaviors like making timely decisions, being clear about priorities and accepting accountability for results. Then we took a look at the lowest assessed behaviors like pacing myself, taking regular time to step back and giving others my full presence and attention. There were nods and murmurs of recognition. I summed it up for the group with the headline, “Leaders in your company are so busy doing stuff that they probably don’t see what needs to be done.

Then the room erupted. Not in anger but in vociferous agreement. “Yeah, that’s exactly it!” one person exclaimed. “Yeah, another agreed, they expect us to be corporate warriors, answer e-mails at 2:00 in the morning and get by on four hours of sleep a night.” Several people at once said, “We can’t keep this up.”

The conversation I led that evening was the beginning of work and a thought process that led to my new book, Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. One of the things I’ve noticed in my work as an executive coach and speaker over the past four or five years is that most of the executives, managers and professionals I work with are trying to work harder every year. The demands of a “do more with less” culture and a 24/7, smart phone enabled operating environment have left too many people teetering on the brink of a caffeine-addicted, sleep-deprived, stressed-out existence. The impact of all of that on short-term productivity and happiness and long-term health and well being is devastating.

Because of all they’re trying to do and pay attention to many of the leaders and professionals I work with are in a chronic state of fight or flight. Their stress hormones and blood pressure are too high and their immune and digestive systems don’t operate at healthy levels. In the short run, all of that leads to anxiety, insomnia, poor decision making, lack of focus and generally poor health. In the long run, it leads to broken relationships, premature aging and early death.

The point I’m trying to make in Overworked and Overwhelmed is it doesn’t have to be that way. There are simple, relatively easy steps you can take to pull your life from the brink. That’s where the mindfulness alternative comes in. Over the past few years, mindfulness has gotten more and more attention in the mainstream media – it's even made the cover of Time magazine. The picture that a lot of people get in their minds when they hear the word mindfulness is of blissed out people sitting cross legged while they meditate and chant. That’s one way to do it, but it’s not something that most stressed out professionals are going to do.

What I’m presenting in my book is what I’ve learned about how the basics of mindfulness can be used and applied by just about anyone who needs to get out of chronic fight or flight. We all know what fight or flight is – it’s supposed to be the emergency response system controlled by your body’s sympathetic nervous system. It’s a big problem when the fight or flight response gets stuck in the on position and becomes chronic. That’s where another system that all of us have but few of us have heard of comes into play. It’s called your rest and digest response and is controlled by your body’s parasympathetic nervous system. You can think of it as fight or flight being the gas pedal and rest and digest as the brakes. We need to exercise both throughout the day to be healthy, happy and effective. Fortunately, there are simple, easy to do routines that we can learn from the practice of mindfulness that can help even the most overworked and overwhelmed people activate their rest and digest response. I summarize a lot of those routines in my book and offer a simple one-page framework called the Life GPS^® that helps make it easy to follow through on the routines that help you show up at your best.

The Life GPS^® asks for your answers to three questions:

• How am I when I’m at my best?
• What are the routines – physical, mental, relational and spiritual – that will help me show up at my best?
• What outcomes do I hope to see in the three big arenas of life – home, work and community – if I regularly show up at my best?

Based on my work with hundreds of leaders, I can tell you that getting clear about your Life GPS^® and following through on it can help you step back from the brink and make a huge difference in the quality of your life and for the people you care most about. It doesn’t require perfection in either discipline or execution. It just requires the willingness to take some small initial steps and repeating them until they’ve become healthy habits.

It’s never too late to pull yourself back from the brink and reclaim your life. Now is a great time to get started. My goal with Overworked and Overwhelmed is to help you do that.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:37 PM
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