Making Your Time Yours
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As I’ve mentioned, the coaching clients I worked with during my coaching certification this past year all had three things in common: pervasive stress, the feeling there is not enough time, and challenges managing social media.
Last week we covered how five activities can help us stop running on stress and move into the recovery and recharge zone. This week – how do we possibly make time to do that, given our packed schedules? As you will see, the key is in that phrase “make time.”
First, consider how many of our activities are habitual, things that we don’t think about but do regularly, from the first cup of coffee to compulsively checking social media. When we run on stress, we are predominantly operating out of the part of our neural network designed to handle crisis, to focus, and to solve problems. That leaves us vulnerable to inputs that give a false hit of security (dopamine), and/or which actually feed our sense of crisis. These habits run us, when we could be reclaiming our time as ours.
Also, our sharp focus on tasks and execution mean we don’t spend enough time on the wider picture: our future, our vision for where we want to be in 5-10 years. And the frantic chaos of the moment may deafen us to parts of our lives that are calling softly for attention (the guitar that sits un-played in the corner; the unfinished novel or screenplay, etc.).
Second, when we want to replace a habit, we need to be sure we do so with one that is healthier than the one that we are discarding. Otherwise, what we are doing is called exchanging addiction (Boyatzis, et. al).
What to do instead: any of the personal renewal practices that we listed last week, including centering/meditation, time with loved ones, time focused on a hopeful future, time serving others in community, and time in nature. As you do so, if anything else in your life needs attention, you will have the space and attention to hear it calling to you, and the additional time to spend attending to that call.
Again, you may say “this is all well and good -- but I really don’t have time.”
Get out a sheet of paper and as you go through your day, write down all activities no matter how minor. When you record that level of detail you are shining a light into every corner of your life to see what may be hidden. If that day-long audit doesn’t bring clarity to areas that need attention, do the time audit for several days, or a full week. There are also time-tracking apps you can use if you prefer that approach.
Based on my clients’ results from this exercise, I guarantee you’ll find at least an hour or two, likely more, that you can then devote to renewal practices or other parts of your life that are calling you to growth and exploration.
When my clients did their time audits, they each saw their major time-sink by far was social media. Morning, throughout the day, every evening and on weekends. Your audit results may differ, but social media does appear to be one of the main time-management challenges in our current landscape.
The main question to ask yourself after doing the audit: Do I see draining habits that I want to shift towards habits that renew and recharge me? Are these activities fully aligned with the things I most care about, the type of person I want to be, and will they get me to the future that I want to embody? If not, we have some work to do.
The good news:
We are the only ones who control our time. Yes, we have commitments to work and family, but there are areas in all our lives where we have allowed unconscious habits to fill in all other available moments – especially when it comes to social media.
In his book, The Big Leap – author and successful coach Gay Hendricks asserts that we are the only source of time in our lives. In other words, we make time, we are the ones who decide where to allocate a given 24 hours. By taking back conscious control of our schedule, as opposed to staying unconsciously responsive to conditioned habits, we open space within our schedules to breathe, recharge, and take on activities that truly restore and feed us.
When my clients each experimented with taking a break from social media, including the range from selectively silencing certain feeds or groups -- to going cold-turkey for week or more, they all reported a sense of more time, more ability to relax, and a decrease of the sense of stress in their lives. One of my clients also crushed her monthly earning goals by 40% as an entrepreneur by cutting her social media time over 2/3rds. As she described the issue, she both won back the time spent on social media and the mental cycles spent ruminating about what she read on social media. She took back her agency, and gained clarity of mind, extra space, income, productivity, and greater focus on what really matters in her life.
Another client spent his won-back time on visioning, planning his ideal future, and ultimately mapped out a route to becoming a full-time entrepreneur, and quit his day job. Boyatzis et. al. write that spending time working on our life vision “…helps us to see a bigger picture, engage in intelligent thought, be more empathetic, move to action, enact a larger range of behaviors, and build resilience to get through the tough times.”
How you spend your won-back time is entirely up to you based on your needs. The additional good news is having made more time in your schedule you will give you space to figure out how to use it. But be sure some of that time is spent in renewal.
A word on dosage – which can help fit renewal activities into an otherwise busy schedule: when establishing renewal activities, it is much better to space out relaxation over the day and week (15 minutes at a time) rather than all at once on the weekend. Studies show that:
“If you were to spend sixty minutes working out as a renewal activity in a day, your battle to reverse the effects of stress would be better suited by breaking that into four separate fifteen-minute activities. For example, fifteen minutes of talking with friends about their lives; fifteen minutes of a breathing or meditation or yoga exercise; fifteen minutes of playing with your children or dog (or cat); and fifteen minutes of joking and laughing with friends or family…. Smaller doses, in terms of time and more frequent episodes of renewal activities, are better than longer, less frequent ones. And using a variety of activities in renewal is better than using the same one or two repeatedly.” (Boyatzis et. al.).”
Should you wish a clear and proven centering and renewal practice to establish, embodied leadership coach Amanda Blake, author of Your Body is your Brain, has an e-book called the Stress to Serenity Guide, outlining a centering practice that you can learn along with her audio guidance in short 8-minute exercises over seven days. This practice is based on the work of Richard Strozzi, of the Strozzi Institute, who along with Amanda and other trained somatic coaches have helped leaders and companies gain leadership competencies, social and emotional intelligence, and enhanced business outcomes for more than three decades.
Once this centering practice becomes established as a new habit, it is something you can do in as little as a few seconds throughout the day, to check in with where you are, how you are embodied, and what neural network you are operating from so that you can consciously choose which might be more effective and healthy to manifest.
What unconscious habits run your time, and where in your life can you reclaim, and make your time yours?
This article is part of a series of posts on life and coaching, with particular focus on the intersection of coaching with our sense of meaning and fulfillment, aligned with what the world needs, and how we can embody leadership (as defined by Master Somatic Coach Amanda Blake: leadership “… as a process of connecting to what matters, envisioning what could be, and taking action to bring that vision to life. When you care about something enough to ask others to care about it with you and you effectively collaborate with others to co-create a new future, then you are leading.”)