Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • 2021 Book of the Year

    2021 Book of the Year

    It might seem odd that a company with a core value of “productivity” would choose a book of the year titled Do Nothing. But in a year of seeing people’s mental and physical health deteriorate due not just to issues a global pandemic continues to cause, but also because of the phenomenon of overworking and under living, we found the book captured the essence of putting productivity, and work, in perspective.   

    As the author, Celeste Headlee states, “The question is not about whether you are productive but what you are producing.” And we would go on to say that the question also expands to examine the method in which you structure your production and whether or not it leads to healthier, more joyful lives and more meaningful output. 

    Over the course of the year, we watched ourselves and our clients attempt to be on two to three virtual meetings at a time, catch up on work emails over the weekend because the work week demanded forty hours of meetings alone, and watched as story after story was brought up about people’s mental health crashing and therefore causing a complete meltdown of physical health.  Emergency surgeries were needed, trips to the ER for chest pains took place, and people cried at lunch with us because they were so exhausted and did not see a way out of their current state of life revolving around the need to meet “productivity” demands at work and at home. 

    But as our core value of productivity intertwines with the value to put people first and to foster passion with an end goal of innovating the workplace, we found that many of us don’t have the bandwidth or the energy to innovate anything as we constantly chase the next goal or metric, all while trying to multitask as we are chained to our phones and computers. 

    We’ve lost sight of the goal of work with purpose and replaced it with work towards some endless pursuit that creates exhaustion and insanity. This narrative may not be something you’ve personally experienced, but we’d venture to guess you know and love at least one person that has been impacted by this conundrum. 

    So, we all took or are taking sabbaticals in 2021 and 2022 to think deeply about what this means and to develop training and insights to shift the paradigm for ourselves and our clients on what it means to work, to be productive, and to think deeply about just how we got to this point where enough is never enough. 

    Do Nothing provides a history and research lesson about how, over the past 200 years since the industrial revolution, we’ve gotten here and gives us six “life-back strategies” on “how to break away from overworking, overdoing, and under living.”  

    And although we as a team may not agree with everything Headlee postulates in her narrative which may be more based on how she defines work (something for pay) versus how we do (something for pursuing purpose), we agree with its method of the scientific practitioner approach by taking sound research and applying the learnings of that research in our own lives and workplaces to experiment and learn.  Then, we can follow the information and data our learning provides to make better decisions. 

    And as Headlee suggests, in our metric obsessed world, sometimes the information provided doesn’t come in the form of numbers but in the way we feel.  We need to be paying more attention to how we feel and what that means for us to be productive in a way that leads to creativity and innovation. This book provides us with the opportunity to think about how to do that.   

    In fact, one method of feeling should be tied to our ability to have time to think, not just do.  Our ability to think, apply, and learn is what separates us as human beings.  It’s what makes us human and it’s what produces great work.  It’s what produces innovation. 

    Given the thinking and learning we’ve done over the course of 2021 and into 2022 on the topic of workplace wellness and wellbeing and in an effort to innovate the workplace through people practices, we are excited to be offering workshops- one on a cruise ship, yes on a cruise ship!- to help you come to understand the research, design experiments at your workplace, and help follow the data and the feelings to help not only yourself but also to help your workplace build a culture where people thrive.  To not just create change at the individual level, but to create it through organizational systems and structures.  These workshops will also provide an opportunity for relationship building and fun.

    The premise of our book of the year and our workshops is not to literally “do nothing” but to realize we’ve gone so far to the opposite extreme that we need to find a way to focus on doing nothing so that we can center ourselves so that we can find balance and pleasure not only in leisure but also in work, and to realize that sometimes they are both so integrated that you cannot have one without the other. 

    We are so appreciative of the opportunity to pursue purpose with you this year.  Thank you for your business and your friendship.  Blessings to you and your organization as we all strive to build workplaces where people thrive and enjoy doing work worth producing and have the health and mindset and permission to enjoy leisure.  Both are noble goals, and both require one another to happen.

    If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/

  • What Cultivates Gratitude? Or Better Yet, What Does Gratitude Cultivate?

    What Cultivates Gratitude? Or Better Yet, What Does Gratitude Cultivate?

    I was tasked with writing a blog post on gratitude for this week- Thanksgiving week. I love it when my team gets together without me while I’m on sabbatical and sends me an email telling me what to write 🙂  It’s a given- a post with a theme of thankfulness- even though as a culture we’ve seemed to skip right to Christmas once Halloween ends. 

    I’ve written about counting your blessings and even counting your first-world problems and being thankful when tasked with the same thing before. 

    But what keeps jumping back into my mind this year as I think about how to articulate some inspiration for gratitude is to cite Bryan Stephenson. I had the opportunity to hear Stephenson at a conference I attended this fall.  Bryan Stephenson is the author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.  

    He is obviously an in-demand speaker.  He apparently charged the group nothing for an almost hour-long talk.  He started the session by thanking the people in the audience for the work they do.  Mostly public servants in the audience who spend their days helping people on the margins, he made reference to how some of the services the group was involved in impacted him as a child. 

    He thanked and he thanked and he thanked before he moved into any form of argument or points. 

    But his points were powerful, and also speak to a heart of gratitude I believe that then leads to a heart of grace and mercy, and then one of action. 

    In speaking about the marginalized, or “least of these” Stephenson made four points: 

    1. Commit to getting proximate.  We can’t help if we aren’t close because then we don’t know what we don’t know.  We need to affirm people’s humanity to help them get to higher ground and realize that all our journeys are tied to one another.  
    2. We have to change our narratives.  This means we have to talk about things we haven’t talked about before.  He says we have to, “acknowledge, confess, and repent.”  My favorite quote of the night was, “Beautiful things happen when we tell the truth.  We close ourselves off to beauty when we don’t tell the truth.” 
    3. We have to believe in hope.  This means believing in things we haven’t yet seen and being confident that in getting proximate and changing narratives, they will become seen. 
    4. We have to do things that are uncomfortable and inconvenient.  Really, the first three things echo this point.  Getting proximate is uncomfortable and inconvenient.  Changing our narratives and telling the truth is uncomfortable. Staying hopeful is not only uncomfortable, it is also inconvenient to train our brains to be so.  But in the end, and in the journey itself, that is where the beauty lies. 

    I hope you’ll take this week to be thankful and it will lead you to grace and mercy, which will then inspire you to action.  

    During this holiday season, where do you need to get proximate, change a narrative, have hope, and/or be uncomfortable or inconvenienced? 

  • 7 Ways to Complete the Stress Cycle

    7 Ways to Complete the Stress Cycle

    We’ve been looking at all things workplace wellness throughout the fall, seeking to provide insight to ourselves and our clients about how to create workplaces where people can thrive.  A lot of the impetus is put on individuals to manage their wellness and stress.  This has its place but is also up to organizational leaders to help create systems and structures that give people the ability to survive and thrive at work.  This will impact how they also thrive in all aspects of life given that people do not live and operate in silos. 

    A thought-provoking book that is geared towards the individual management of stress is a book called Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle.  Although it focuses on how individuals can “complete the cycle” the book provides insights to organizational leaders on the difference between stress and stressors and how to complete the stress cycle in ways that can be incorporated into workplaces. 

    First, what the book describes as stressors: 

    Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body. They can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine could do you harm. There are external stressors: work, money, family, time, cultural norms and expectations, experiences of discrimination, and so on. And there are less tangible, internal stressors: self-criticism, body image, identity, memories, and The Future.  In different ways and to different degrees, all of these things may be interpreted by your body as potential threats. 

    It’s worth noting that as another book, What Happened to You? points out that we may be cognizant of these stressors happening to us, but more often than not, we aren’t.  As this book describes, our lower order brain- the brain stem then the diencephalon then the limbic system- takes in input from the inside world of our body and the outside world through our senses and processes stressors and reacts to stressors often before our high order brain, the cortex, ever receives it and is able to THINK about it.  That’s why you sweat when you’re nervous when you don’t even realize it, or you flee or “attack” someone when they smell in a way that is associated with a bad memory. 

    Likewise, we often don’t even realize what we are doing or why we are doing it in reaction to a stressor. We often do not connect the dots to the linkages between our stressors and our stress. 

    As Burnout describes, stress is: 

    …the neurological and physiological SHIFT that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats.  It’s an evolutionary adaptive response that helps us cope with things like, say, being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo…. It initiates a response to help you survive…. Your entire body and mind change in response to the perceived threat.

    As the book goes on to state, what we’ve been conditioned to do when we experience the lion is run! The book quotes Robert Sapolsky as saying “ …the core of the stress-response is built around the fact that your muscles are going to work like crazy.” 

    But we aren’t doing very much running these days in modern workplaces. We aren’t involving our muscles to help alleviate and eliminate the stress we feel.  We are, however, experiencing a lot of modern-day “lions.”

    So what do we do? 

    1. So first and foremost, one thing workplaces need to incorporate into practice to help their employees complete the stress response is to initiate movement into the workday.  Especially when a situation is anticipated to be stressful or a stressor has occurred. 

    For example, one day I knew I was going to have to have a conversation that was going to induce a stress response with someone I worked with.  Instead of sitting down across the desk from her, I said, “Let’s take a walk.”  We walked and talked instead of sitting and staring.  I know it helped to reduce my stress about the situation and I think it did hers too. 

    We need to be encouraging people to move and allowing time for movement during the workday. The book suggests that most people need twenty to sixty minutes a day to walk, run, swim, dance, or anything that involves physical activity. 

    2. In addition, in the modern-day workplace we live in, we may think that dealing with the stressor deals with the stress.  We need to realize dealing with the stressor doesn’t necessarily allow us to complete the stress cycle.  Take for example a “jerk” you’re dealing with at work.  Maybe he or she is not a lion, but they’ve been elevating your stress level at work, so much so that your natural response is either to literally fight the lion, I mean jerk, or to flee from him/her.  But, you can’t come across the table at the person literally like your body might be telling you to do, so you play nice. (As the book states, social appropriateness- or being taught to be “nice” at all costs- really impedes the natural stress cycle- it makes us get stuck). Or maybe you even act and go talk to your supervisor and/or theirs about it, or you go home and vent to your spouse about it.  But, dealing with the stressor, aka the jerk/lion, doesn’t mean you’ve completed your body’s natural response to the person and situation(s) he or she creates. 

    So we need to help people, again, move to help complete the stress cycle. But we can also create workplaces where other things happen regularly- all that involve engagement with our bodies and minds-  to help deal with the stress, not just the stressor.  These are: 

    3. Breathing.  “Deep, slow breaths help regulate the stress response.”  Encouraging people to breathe is a very simple thing that can help change the tone of a conversation, meeting, or a person’s outlook on a situation.  Asking people to inhale deeply for a count of three to five and exhale at the same or longer cadence is simple, and sometimes seems silly, but it may be the small thing needed to get people to a point where they can access their higher-order brain to be able to think clearly and respond appropriately. 

    4. Positive social interaction.  Things to include in positive social interaction are opportunities for laughter, affection (hugging and kissing- encourage this at home, not at the office-!), and also can include interaction with animals, like petting a dog or a cat. 

    5. Allow time for creative expression. Incorporating sports, arts, music, theater, and storytelling in all forms can help with this. Some of the work your organization does may naturally incorporate creative outlets.  We incorporate coloring sheets, fidgets, and role play at times into training to help initiate this.  Asking people to start a meeting by sharing something- in other words, something that is going to allow for storytelling can be a good way to start things off on the right foot.  Like, “Tell us about a time when you…” where the question and response is tied to the meeting’s purpose. 

    6. Allow crying.  Crying is one critical way for the body to release stress, yet we label people who cry, especially at work. At the very least, keep a stigma around crying that is neutral and do not punish people at work when crying happens. 

    7. Help people pay attention to their body’s response to things.  This is necessary to know when stress is taking place and also to know when the stress cycle has been completed due to one or more of the interventions above.  It’s like knowing you’re full after you’ve eaten. Some people are more in tune with it than others and we need to equip people with the mindfulness to pay attention when we are “hungry” or “full” when it comes to stress as well.  Some questions or actions you may help people engage with this is to encourage people to check their heart rate, monitor their body for tension, sweating and other responses that show us we have not completed the stress cycle and need to “eat” to initiate an action to help our bodies do so.  

    How do you deal with stress at work and how does your organization incorporate systems and actions to help people complete the stress cycle? 

    If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/

  • 6 Steps for Planning and Implementing Effective Extended Leave

    6 Steps for Planning and Implementing Effective Extended Leave

    Earlier in the week, our post was a reflection on why I will be taking a walkabout, or an extended amount of time away from work this fall.  Each person on our team will be taking four to six weeks off at some point within the next six months.  

    Whether it is taking time for intentional rest, reflection, and/or deep work or going out on maternity or extended sick leave, stepping away from anything at work requires preparation beforehand in order for the time away and the people providing support during the time away to be a success. Here is a roadmap for doing so: 

    1. Plan/proactively discuss with your team the timing of your absence and the roles and responsibilities they will have while you are away.  You can read more about my team’s discussion on the timing of my absence in the last post, but the next step in this for me has been thinking through and communicating with them about who will do what while I’m out. We will do the same as each person takes leave. Some things are natural, given that many of the projects I work on and the people I work with have at least two of our team members providing support.  There are some things where you may be the only person with a knowledge base for execution, so planning proactively gives you the time to provide cross-training, introductions, information, and or tools needed for success. 

    2. Communicate proactively with the external contacts you interact with regularly that you will be out with.  For the past two weeks, I’ve emailed or called every client and/or potential client that I interact with to let them know that I’m going to be out, for how long, what this means in terms of what they should or shouldn’t expect from me (for example, I will not be checking email during this time), and who their new point of contact will be on our team.  I will say that in doing this, EVERYONE I’ve talked to has been supportive and encouraging in taking the time away.  They are appreciative of the heads-up and connection(s) with our team for the project to continue in my absence. 

    3. Start saying “no” based on your scheduled time away.  In the past two weeks, I’ve said “no” to more things than I have in a long time.  Both personal and professional.  It really helps you realize how much stuff you say “yes” to without even thinking about it.  “Yes, my calendar is clear on the date you asked to meet with me, so yes, I’ll meet with you” happens a lot without a thought about whether or not the meeting is necessary or if you even want to meet with that person.  We commit to things without thinking about them and then wonder why we can’t find the time to do the most important things. It’s pretty liberating and reflective to take back your time. 

    4. Set guardrails and systems around being able to maintain your no and the margins the time away should provide.  I know my email will be a problem for me. It is the mechanism in which I say yes to most things because most things come in the form of calendar invites via email or requests for this or that via email.  So, for me, I will not be checking and responding to emails while I’m out.  To ensure I do this, someone on my staff will be changing my email password for me on the day I go out.  She will also check the box once a week to make sure there are no emergencies she and the team need to tend to (this will help me maintain my sanity of not checking it) and I will set up an out of office reply explaining that I’m out, points of contact for specific needs, and when I will return.  You may not need to go to the extreme of getting someone to change your password (if you do, you have a lot more self-control than I do, because checking email is such a habit for me), but know yourself well enough to deploy the guardrails needed for maintaining the integrity of your leave. This may mean deleting social apps on your phone, disconnecting your wifi (or getting someone to change your wifi password), or setting standard times around the do not disturb feature on your phone.  Figure out what you need and solicit any help needed to do so. 

    5. Reflect on what these planning exercises are telling you. As mentioned earlier, delegating responsibilities to others may help you realize they need to be cross-trained on a certain task or function to be successful.  Saying no because you’re going to be out may help you realize you need to say no indefinitely to certain things.  It may be telling you that you have a problem with your social media or email usage and need to get a healthy grip on it.  All these planning items can help you succeed in an absence and the reflection on them can help ensure long-term success upon your return. 

    6. Reflect on the purpose of your time away and what you hope to accomplish in taking it.   Before you go out, write down two or three things you want to focus your time on while out and post them for yourself in the form of yes or no questions you will see every day. Mine are: 1) Did you rest and restore today? 2) Did you read/research and write/create content today based on your purpose? 3) Did you play with your kids today?  Don’t overload yourself with more than three to four questions.

    Framing the questions in the second person as “you” has been shown to be helpful in training the brain to eliminate “chatter”. It gives your brain a word that naturally offers more grace than using the first person “I”.  Like the book, Chatter states, “Doing so (using ‘you’ to refer to yourself) is linked with less activation in the brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.” Some questions you may have if you’re recovering from surgery or bringing a newborn home may be: Did you rest today?  Did you do something to help your body recover today? Did you refrain from checking work email today?  You know what you need, so customize the questions for you. As you begin to heal and or accomplish what you want while you’re out, your questions may change. 

    Finally, you may not be at liberty to decide if and when you get to take an extended time away from work.  But if you are a person in a role where you can impact policy at your workplace, consider how you might drive the conversation around the need for people to take more than a standard week or less of vacation annually and what business results it might achieve.  At the very least facilitating dialogue around how you can provide autonomy by structuring work differently (four day work weeks, hybrid work arrangements, mental health days, etc.) in order to impact workplace wellbeing and productivity could lead to substantial gains in recruitment and retention.  If you’d like more information on the research related to this, see our previous post on readings for reflection.

  • Taking a Walkabout

    Taking a Walkabout

    It’s funny what will put you over the edge to make you bite the bullet on a decision you know you’ve been needing to make for quite some time. 

    Mine was a Hollywood movie star’s memoir.   Prone to reading a lot of business books and fiction, memoirs have become more and more of an interest for me in the last year or so, but not the pop culture icon type.  

    However, I’d heard a snippet of an interview with Matthew McConaughey on Sunday Today with Willie Giest on his bestselling memoir Greenlights and was intrigued. While in the airport in Dallas looking for the next thing to read, I saw it and picked it up.  While in Texas, why not read about a hot Texas boy’s life, I thought.  

    My husband and I were in Texas for the wedding of a dear family friend that was supposed to happen a year prior but was delayed due to COVID. I was about to finish my latest summer fiction and knew I needed something else to peruse sitting poolside at the swanky hotel we had booked on points.  I thought McConaughey’s reflection on his life so far would be another easy read just like the chick flick summer fiction I had finished reading and just like the movies I know him most for. 

    I was wrong.  It was a deeply reflective read.  A “Greenlight” McConaughey would say.  One I needed.

    ***

    The day before picking up the book, I was sitting on our back porch for a quarterly planning meeting with my team.  The vibe of the porch sets itself for a type of casualness that makes things feel not quite like work, but the setting was doing no such thing for all of us.  With computers in front of us and phones at our sides, we were all distracted.  One team member was concerned about this email, another concerned about this text message. I tried to talk about a topic while simultaneously trying to figure out why the heck lunch hadn’t been delivered yet through the Panera Bread app on my phone.  

    Trying to lay the groundwork for our plans for the next quarter, we were all lost in the distractions of right now. 

    The constant “distractions”  or stresses each of us had been faced with over the last year or so- all of a different variety- was seeming to take a toll in a similar fashion. My toll seemed to explode through the year of COVID. A year of constantly navigating the stress of the unknown which included never knowing if my kids were going to be home for “school” and therefore rendering it necessary for me to change all my work plans.   A year of trying to salvage one business before it even really began.  Feeling like I was never going to be able to make a plan and stick with it ever again was always at the forefront.  Not being able to plan is not how I’m wired.  

    Add to this a house fire that left us dislocated for a while and unexpected stress on some of the people I love the most and of which I could do nothing about, I felt like I was another person entirely.  The organized, type A, on top of things wife, mom, and business owner felt like I had all but vanished.  

    Maybe this had been coming on for more than just the time period of a global pandemic.  In looking back over pictures posted for our Horizon Point ten-year anniversary,  I realized I was pregnant in more than half of them.  During my decade of growing a business, I had been pregnant or nursing most of the time.

    So you might imagine that my toll was resulting in extreme fatigue.  Like, can’t shake it no matter how much you sleep fatigue. This all led me to be frustrated with everyone and everything, especially myself.  My husband had borne the brunt of this, although I would imagine some of the challenges of this toll brought to the forefront some important truths about the imbalance of expectations between men and women and the extra load I still seemed to carry at home and with the kids even though we both have demanding careers.  He is more involved and supportive than most men, but when I joked about having a COVID hangover, he looked at me like I was crazy.  The inconsistencies of juggling work and kids during a pandemic hadn’t been his burden to bear.  Nor had been growing human beings and nursing them. This is something I’m glad my husband and I are actively discussing and trying to address now. 

    Other tolls for the team resulted in two team members spending time in the emergency room in the spring with chest pains and other related issues.  Anxiety will tell the body something is wrong, and if it has to, it will get your attention by making you feel like you are having a heart attack.

    I had been worried about everyone’s health including mine and feeling some guilt about how I had maybe contributed to it all. 

    So in the midst of our distraction state, I stopped and broached a subject with my team that I had put on the agenda but we weren’t to yet.  Now was the time to call this to everyone’s attention. “I want us to consider all taking sabbaticals over the next few months,” I said. 

    I think that got their attention.  All looked up from their phones and computers. 

    I asked some questions, they asked some, there was some reluctance, some sparks of, wait, I think she is really serious. Is she?  She’s going to pay us not to work? 

    There was a discussion about what a sabbatical really is.  One team member suggested what would be most helpful she thought would be the opportunity to take a long weekend once a month.  I told her to block off her calendar for this if that is what she felt like would help.  She did.  I also told her to figure out when she wanted and needed the time for more of an extended break.  

    A week later she told me she needed that extended break sooner rather than later, and blocked off her calendar. 

    One team member said she was good right now. Her workload easing somewhat from the first quarter where she was almost drowning.  “I don’t need it right now, but someone else may,” she said. 

    I asked her to consider when she might need it, prompting some things that I knew might be coming up for her.  She emailed me the dates in early 2022 when she plans to take a little over a month off. 

    Another looked at me and I said, “I want you to pick a time period of four to six weeks to take off. And I want you to do it at a time where you can actually have some downtime, where you aren’t mired into pouring into all your kids’ activities too.”  

    She said she’d take the month of November. 

    “Block your calendar,” I said. 

    I am so blessed to have a fabulous team at my side.  We are all givers to the core, and I think that is what brings us a lot of competitive advantage in our business.  But, as the book Burnout describes, we all have “Human Giver Syndrome”.

    It states, “Human givers are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly, to the other class of people ‘the human beings’.  The implication in these terms is that the human beings have a moral obligation to be or express their humanity, while human givers have a moral obligation to give their humanity to the human beings.”  The paragraph goes on to state, “Guess which one the women are.” 

    It’s time for all of us to get our humanity back. 

    I looked at the calendar before the meeting and felt as though taking mid-August through the first week in October would be the best time for me to take off.  One because there wasn’t much I’d committed to yet other than a speaking engagement in Florida, and two because I could flank my time with a fifteen-year anniversary trip with my husband and end it with a fall break trip with my family. 

    So it comes time for me to express my need for a sabbatical, and I’m hesitant to say when I want to take off.  My hesitance comes from two places.  First, because as one of our team members says every year, “Just wait until September” with the knowledge that September is always our busiest month. Can I take off during what we have seen to be over the past ten years the busiest month on the calendar for our business? And two, if I take this time period off, I’m going first. And “leaders eat last.”  

    Nonetheless, I share the time period I want with my team and lunch arrives.  The team member that has worked with me the longest accompanies me to the door to get the food. 

    “I don’t think I can take that time period off,” I say.  “It would mean me going first…” 

    She seems to know exactly what I mean by this. 

    “I think this would mean you are setting the example.  You don’t know how much an answer to a prayer you offering this to us is for me. And you need it too.”

    ***

    The first time I heard about sabbatical was my freshman year in college.  Assigned to write about really anything I wanted in a freshman honors seminar, I somehow chose the topic of the intersection of religion and politics in Alabama.  This is a topic that was interesting and complex almost twenty years ago and has gotten even more so in recent years. 

    In pouring through the literature and research on the topic, I came across a thesis called “The Least of These” by a law professor at The University of Alabama.  Whether she wrote this information or took the time to talk about the publication across the state and country while on sabbatical, I can’t recall, but what I remember is that she was able to produce such a work and promote it because she took time away from her regular work duties.

    Her piece was thought-provoking and thorough and one with which I aligned a lot of my thinking with. It’s taken me almost twenty years to realize that sabbatical, commonly taken in university settings as a “period of paid leave for study or travel” is also “of or appropriate to the sabbath.”   

    A period of rest.  A period of restoration.  Of which comes, in this professor’s case and what I hope to in mine, a period of time for deep thinking and work of which comes clarity and meaningful output.  Purpose-driven work that only undistracted time can produce.

    McConaughey calls this a “walkabout” in his memoir.  Describing a period in his life following the notoriety his role in A Time To Kill brought about, he evokes his own walkabout in his life.  Page 147 of his book  is a poem titled “why we all need a walkabout”:

    We need to put ourselves in places of decreased sensory input so we can hear the background signals of our psychological processes….

    In this solitude, we then begin to think in pictures, and actualize what we see….

    Whatever the verdict, we grow…

    We tend to ourselves and get in good graces once again.

    Then we return to civilization, able to better tend to our tendencies.

    Why? Because we took a walkabout. 

    I get it. I like it. 

    ***

    While in Dallas, I’ve gotten to have a mini walkabout.  I’ve spent time alone with my husband eating and drinking and socializing our way through Dallas on a wedding weekend. I’ve sat by a pool where someone delivered me freshwater before my glass was ever empty and a cocktail when I was ready. I read without interruption.  All things I’ve needed.  Or maybe all this extravagance is a want. First-world problems are what I’ve almost always had the fortune to have.

    But on Sunday afternoon, lounging by the pool with my husband and finishing McConaughey’s memoir, I realize that I’ve just begun to have enough time in my mini walkabout to think, to think deeply.  And it’s over.  Tomorrow I’ll go back to all the “sensory input” and to-dos.  To a beautiful life of course, with so much to be thankful for, but one in which I’m growing increasingly unable to see because I’m exhausted.

    I sit with my feet in the pool by my husband in silence.  We’ve gotten to the point in our trip where we’ve talked a lot to each other, caught up on a lot of things and thoughts, laughed a lot, and are now content to sit together silently.  It’s peaceful.  It’s reflective.

    I look up at the clouds.  There are white fluffy clouds moving one direction and above them, gray, wispy clouds moving the other. 

    “Look,” I say to my husband, “there are two kinds of clouds, moving in different directions. I’ve never seen that before.” 

    And I silently think that the gray ones are higher in the sky.   And I think I’d rather be that maybe moving in a different direction than the way I’ve been conditioned to move, but higher nonetheless.

    With that, I do something I don’t do much of if at all as I’ve aged- as life has gotten infinitely more complex and stressful but also infinitely more joyful all at once- I jump into the pool.   

    ***

    As I write this, I’m keenly aware of all the people in this world who don’t know nor may ever have the freedom to take a walkabout.  For the single mom who can’t break or pause because if she does, mouths won’t be fed and roofs won’t stay overheads.  To the employee who would be fired if they ever even attempted to suggest they needed more than one week at a time for a vacation.  Who would never allow themselves to take more than a few days at a time (and usually still work while “off”) because this is what their heads, their employer, and the world tells them they have to do to be “valuable.” 

    But all the research is there about how much people need rest and reprieve in order to be productive, in order to thrive, and in order to be creative.  To produce their best work. To be human.  I’ve been shocked by the number of conversations I’ve had just this week about people’s physical health crumbling because of the mental health issues they are dealing with by being overworked to the point of exhaustion.  Some of this is self-imposed, some of this is cultural and systematic, some of it is unique to the pandemic world we are living in, and some of it is due to technology. But none of it is good.   (If you’d like to delve into the research on how we got to this state and what it is doing to us, two good books to read are Do Nothing and Burnout.) 

    But as the professor who took a sabbatical to produce deep work impacted the conversation about tax policy in Alabama from a Christian perspective, so too might my time to rest and restore and to think deeply lead to more purposeful output that can impact these challenges I’m describing now.  Maybe it is a catalyst for impacting individual situations (like the single mom) and workplace mindsets that keep us all desperately needing a break. 

    Later in Greenlights, McConaughey describes another period in his life where he intentionally called a red light in order to wait for the best greenlight.  Realizing that the rom-coms he had become famous for served a purpose and a place- and created a whole heck of a lot of wealth for him- he was able to realize he wanted something different for himself.  A role with more purpose and meaning.  So he waited it out. For almost two years. 

    That waiting led him to win an Oscar.  

    And maybe, more importantly, it allowed him an opportunity to watch his young kids grow and be a dad without distraction.

    *** 

    I think one of the fondest memories my kids have of me is running full force in just shorts and a sports bra into the ocean to them.  While on vacation after an extremely hot run,  the only thing that seemed natural for me to do was to run full force into the ocean with half my running clothes still on.  Not prone to impulsivity and to having just a sports bra on without a top, my kids were shocked I think.  But after the jolt of the shock, they giggled and giggled.  We played and played.  And I cooled off.  They still talk about this and it happened almost three years ago. 

    I want my kids to see me more uninhibited, more fun, more free, less distracted, less frazzled.  I need to reset and maybe you do too. 

    Although I don’t have the runway of wealth that McConaughey did to support extended walkabouts in the form of years, the theory of it and the need for it is not lost on me.  I can take a month or two with it fulfilling the same intent.  I do have a fabulous team at work that will support things in my absence and I will support them in theirs as they each take their turn.

    By taking a walkabout, I hope I’m giving others a green light to do the same, of which comes the clarity to pursue things of true meaning and value.  Here’s to the possibility of diving in, either literally or metaphorically or both, into the beauty of the one life we each have to live and modeling for our kids and others that they have permission to do the same. 

     

     

    If you would like to dive further into reflection on this topic, here are some readings (some of which are referenced in the post) that I’ve found to be valuable: 

    Greenlights 

    Do Nothing 

    Burnout

    Scarcity 

    The Common Rule

    The 4 Day Week

    Fair Play