Hitting The Reset Button
Recently, I’ve been feeling rushed and busy. It’s felt like I’m doing a lot but not accomplishing enough. Have you ever had this feeling?
Your calendar is jammed, and there are no empty spaces. Good! This means you’re not idle. But it also means you don’t have much time for yourself. For me, it meant I would get up, do my morning devotion, my basic routine and then immediately jump into work. I’d get through a few things, and then it would be time to wake the family up. After that, get everybody moving, and soon it’s time to do school drop-off. Once that is complete, I come back to the home office and jump into the next set of meetings, calls, emails or what my assistant has placed on the calendar. If I’m not in the office, then, I’m hopping over to a training on-site with a client or conducting virtual training. After completing this, I have school pick-up, then a basketball game or volleyball or cheer practice. We get home, and there are the home chores, waiting patiently for us. Ahhh, there’s also dinner. Can’t forget that. Oh, can’t forget some of my church responsibilities. The bottom line is my calendar is busy.
Fortunately, I’ve built in moments of reflection where I get to recognize the need for a reset. I had one of those moments recently and noticed what was happening. I had set up moments for myself to reflect and get focused. However, I was zooming through them. I was doing them more out of routine and less out of meaning. Before I finished the devotion, I was already mindlessly switching over to a new app. I was checking my email to see what 5 Things CNN had to share this morning. I’d forgotten about meditating and taking a moment to breathe because I was completing my list. I was checking the checkboxes.
My mind recognized this. My body felt it. My emotions told me I had reached this place of robotic function. And now, it was time to do something different.
Doing It Differently
Many people reach this place, and instead of taking a minute to figure out what to do, they plow through without paying attention to the signals they are receiving. I’ve done it. So, what did I do this time?
Here are the steps I took to reset:
1. I wrote without judgment. Some call this free writing or brain-dump. I got my book and wrote everything I was thinking at the time. No pressure. No grammar. No right or wrong. No timer. I simply wrote until I felt like stopping.
2. I wrote lists. I began writing lists of all of the things I thought I needed to do accomplish. There were no criteria. I allowed the lists to flow. If it came to my mind, I wrote it.
3. I gave myself space. Since my calendar was the culprit, I used it to my advantage. Instead of filling the blocks with meetings, I created some moments where the entry was SPACE or RESET. In fact, I created two full days of SPACE!
4. During this SPACE-time, I determined what priorities for me were. One glaring priority was margin. My calendar reflected back-to-back appointments even though I KNEW I needed to schedule breaks for myself. I began placing appointments on my calendar and making mental assumptions about breaks. But, I would continue working through those break assumptions, and when I would take a break, it would be at the expense of another item on my calendar. Pushing this item would create a backlog and ultimately a breakdown of some sort. So, permitting myself to let certain things go was essential.
Consciously or unconsciously, I’d gotten into the mindset of immediate return. This meant, on some level, I was expecting an immediate result for every action, and if I didn’t see it, I needed to keep working. But I’m learning, as you set your efforts, you complete the activity and let that be enough for the moment. The accumulation of actions produces the desired result and not always a specific action.
Even the best of us get busy with busyness and not business. Our bicycles get rolling downhill, and they pick up speed. Sometimes, we begin to go so fast, we miss out on the beautiful scenery as we go zoom down the decline. But, once we recognize this gap, it’s a good time to tap on the brakes and hit the reset button.
Yes, I mixed bicycle and computer analogies.
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About The Author
My name is Robert Kennedy III. I’m a professional speaker and author. I speak and write mainly about leadership and communication. Connect with me onTwitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or on my website, RobertKennedy3.com
