Grow With Soul: Episode 150 - 4 (Unexpected) Work Habits To Break
Today’s episode is four pep talks on four of the things that become bad habits in our work. They are all things that I have done, and all things that people I’ve worked with have done too. This isn’t meant in a shame-y way; these are just the grooves we slip into in our work, that even serve us for a time, but which eventually stop us having a happier, calmer work life. I’ll talk about over-committing yourself, sticking to the plan, following the rules and making things mean something. There are lots of fun stories as well as practical next steps in here, so, let’s get going.
What I talk about in this episode:
Respecting future you - and making decisions with them
Thinking of your plan as a safety net, not a straight jacket
Breaking the habit of following ‘the rules’ through curiosity
Exploring all the possible meanings for the way you’re feeling about your work
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Read the episode transcript:
Today’s episode is four pep talks on four of the things that become bad habits in our work. They are all things that I have done, and all things that people I’ve worked with have done too. This isn’t meant in a shame-y way; these are just the grooves we slip into in our work, that even serve us for a time, but which eventually stop us having a happier, calmer work life. I’ll talk about over-committing yourself, sticking to the plan, following the rules and making things mean something. There are lots of fun stories as well as practical next steps in here, so, let’s get going.
Over-committing
This is the problem that connects all the clients I’ve worked with who feel like they have no room for themselves in their work. Saying yes to everything, making impossible deadlines, making things available to buy and dealing with the fall out later, draining time, energy and money on things that they’re never going to see a return on.
Perhaps that’s agreeing to speak on something that is unpaid and takes you out of your normal work for three days when you know it’s not exposure to the right customer. Perhaps it’s promising a course to be ready in less time than it’s physically possible for you to make it. Perhaps it’s saying you can definitely supply 200 units even though you’ve never made 200 units before.
I think there are two main reasons we overcommit. One is that we get so excited about our work, we love being asked to do things, we have so many ideas and we want to do them all right now so we just say yes, yes, yes and then drown. The second is fear - that if we don’t do this one thing then the business will fall apart, that we can’t turn away money even though it’s going to be a customer service disaster, that we won’t get any other opportunities.
Underpinning both of these is the sense that this is just what business is. This is how you know you’re doing it, when you’re so scattered because you’ve lost control of your deadlines, when your calendar is full, when you sacrifice, when you don’t know how you’re going to cope. We know we’re working hard when it feels hard, and that’s how we know we’re doing it right.
Which, you know, sounds like a lovely life.
The thing with over-committing is that it has absolutely no respect for future you. You have no respect for future you. You are busy making all these decisions and taking on obligations that is going to give future you a nervous breakdown, cause them a burnout, even.
So this is how we start to break this habit; we start to make decisions with our future selves. We take a beat before saying yes (“I will have to check my calendar and get back to you” - go on you can say it), and then you do check your calendar and you think about the version of you 6 weeks from now and you think, with everything I know she’s going to have to deal with, plus all the things I don’t know but will certainly come up in that time, is this thing going to make her life worse?
Here is a small real example of considering your future self. When I first sat down to write this episode, I wasn’t feeling it. I spent two hours typing and deleting and opening other tabs (I was PMS-ing which is never my best time for diving into creative work). I was going to give up on the day and then I thought about the future self who was going to have extra things on her plate over the next, already very busy, few weeks. So, rather than leave altogether, I outlined all the podcasts and blog posts I had to make that month. Just a little favour to my future self, because although she would have more content to make, at least a lot of the initial thinking had been done for her.
Sticking to the plan
Wait, what? Aren’t plans good? Aren’t we supposed to stick to the plan? Well, yes. And also, no.
Plans are great for getting us going, and holding us steady. They give us a place to start from and some milestones to head for, and along the way they keep us confident and feeling held by the sensible plan that makes a lot of sense. But if we only stick to the plan then we are too rigid, too brittle and miss the whole point.
This is because plans are theoretical. You sat there in your little chair and you typed up or drew out a plan that, while based on real evidence, you essentially imagined. You thought it up to the best of your ability to the best of your knowledge. But once you actually start… your ability and your knowledge changes. You can’t really know what the right things to do will be until you’ve started doing them.
Once you’re in motion with the work, the gap between the plan and reality widens. Perhaps the early steps didn’t go the way you expected, perhaps someone asked a really pertinent question, perhaps what you’ve planned is too much work, or not enough. We get torn between following the plan and following what’s actually happening - and if you just follow the plan, it might take you further away from reality.
I’ve always said that a plan should be a safety net, not a straight jacket. It is there to bounce you back up when a risk doesn’t pay off, or hand you a pre-planned content idea when you’ve run out of things to say, or remind you of the options you’ve got when you can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s not there to bind you and hold you down and remove you from the experience of what’s really happening.
So loosen your grip on the plan. The plan isn’t a map that’s going to show you exactly how to get somewhere, it’s more like a list of suggestions that might help you with life on the road. Allow yourself to be responsive, be creative, do the thing that feels exciting, check in with the plan like an excited dog running back to its owner at the beach. The plan is not the boss of you.
Following the rules
There isn’t one set of rules. We all have a different set of rules according to what podcasts we listened to and what courses we did and who we followed early on in our journeys. If this podcast was one of yours you may have a set of rules picked up from me! But generally we are either explicitly told rules, or we cobble them together from advice that isn’t exactly a rule but also sounds a lot like one.
And rules can be useful when we’re starting out because it gives us a baseline to start operating from when we’ve got literally no idea. They can make us feel comfortable and give us just enough know how to give us just enough confidence to go and do it. So the rules can work for a little while.
Until they stop working. Until they start to stymie your creativity, and your ability to work in alignment. My rules were mostly around Instagram because in the early days I invested heavily in research around Instagram growth because, well, it was easy to see Instagram growth as something that meant something about the business. During this I picked up explicit and non-explicit rules that did generate growth - I posted daily for about two years, I spent at least one hour engaging in hashtags after each post, I planned and re-planned the look of the grid, I stuck rigidly to my colour palette (never posting anything with a blue sky), I spent several hours a month turning my house upside down as I styled flat lays.
For a long while I enjoyed this, especially the styling and photographing part. And then I just started to… not enjoy it. I dreaded the hour I had to spend engaging after posting. So I started posting less. I felt hemmed in by my colours and “signature style”. So I started posting less. I couldn’t get the grid to sit nicely together with what I wanted to say and when. So I started posting less. I began to get bored of the styling sessions and repeating the old formulas. So I started posting less.
I think during 2021 I was maybe posting once a month. Because although I didn’t want to be following the rules anymore, I didn’t think I was allowed to stop following them so I did neither and didn’t post. But not posting meant that I wasn’t sharing, wasn’t being present, wasn’t promoting my business in any way. Either the rules had to go, or the work.
Breaking this habit took curiosity. The hold of the rules is strong, especially because they are what has always worked and you are fearful that if you go against them everything will collapse in on you and then it’s all over. So I started by being curious. What would it be like to post a screenshot of a blog post? What kind of Reel could I do? What if I posted and then closed the app? What if I posted two similar pictures close to each other in the grid?
The curiosity was also around, what if I changed what my expectations of this platform were? Instagram is always changing and it’s just not high growth for me anymore; I also don’t want it to be high growth because I don’t want to do the things high growth would take. I’d rather have growth on this podcast, growth on my email list. So when I decided that Instagram was a place to be present and share my daily mess and make it a noticeboard of cool quotes and things that were happening, I was able to let go of those rules.
I remember the first time I posted two similar pictures next to each other. I put them into the planning app and thought “oh that’s annoying, I can’t post that today I’ll have to find something different”. And then the warm, golden realisation through my body of “wait, I don’t care about that anymore. I can post what I like”. It was liberating.
Making it mean something
We always want to make things mean something. This is human nature of course, the way the stars have stories and we see faces in the clouds. Even if you are not religious or spiritual it is by now written in our cells that we look for a reason, to make sense of the flailing randomness of life.
The trouble is, we quite often make things mean something bad; make things mean that we are bad.
You can’t concentrate. You’ve already been sitting at the desk for half an hour and you’ve been looking out the window, picking up your phone, and opening and closing your inbox like it’s a jack-in-the-box on your screen. What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you so lazy? Why can’t you be productive like everyone else? This is why you’re never going to make it.
That’s the meaning we tend to jump to. But there are other possible meanings:
You haven’t eaten breakfast and your brain needs food to have the energy to concentrate
You are very tired and need a nap before you start this work
You are at low point in your hormonal cycle
You have something big and stressful going on in your life outside of work
You need a little time for your brain, body and energy to converge before you can properly start working
Any and all of those might be true. And may I say, are a million times more likely than “you are a lazy, unproductive failure who is a drain on society”.
Things don’t mean anything unless you make them mean something. Things are just neutral, just happening, just atoms bouncing around. Choose what you make them mean. You can choose anything, so choose something that helps you. Do a body scan and realise, yeah you know what I think I would feel better if I nourished my body and actually ate something given that I haven’t in twelve hours. Decide that this is probably your dad’s poor health or the stress of your house move and maybe it’s ok if today is a little slower or I switch to a more manageable task. Maybe you say, I’m not lazy I just haven’t arrived yet, this is part of the process for me to sit with until I get there.