An invitation to join us in an exploration of busyness – from Katherine Handy-Woods and Rowan Gray
It was a few years ago, in a catch up call, that we started to get curious about the busyness we see in the world. We were noticing the endemic of busyness across almost all our clients, across sectors, businesses and teams and started to wonder…
- How come we are so busy? What might be behind our increasing levels of busyness?
- What is our relationship with busyness? How do we find status in being extremely busy? When does it cause burnout and overwhelm? When does it cause a state of flow and achievement? What causes us to feel shame at not being busy enough?
Through the course of our conversations together, we started to form some of our own views on busyness …
Why we are busy
Our increasing levels of busyness lie in some fundamental ways of working
- Our preference for transactional and tactical ways of working.
- Technology that means we are always on.
- Our paradigm that change happens through new initiatives, so we just keep adding more and more work, without ending stuff.
- Our tyranny of meetings spent updating each other without progressing real work together.
The cost of our busyness
We noticed that in a world of busyness there is no space for
- Relational work – particularly real conversations that might involve difficult feelings
- Reflection – Pausing to reflect to notice, to make sense of of even challenge what’s happening
- Complexity – In a world that wants quick solutions, simplicity is King.
- Creativity – We need space and stimulus to innovate, and when the pressure is always on, we rarely have the time to get creative or to explore new things for the sake of creativity.
Busyness as a source of pride and shame
To complicate our relationship with busyness further, we put status and prestige on being busy. It can be a badge of honour that we wear with pride. So, when busyness tips over into overwhelm and burnout, there can be shame in the ‘not coping’ or inability to delegate.
Equally when we find ourselves in periods of quiet – as self-employed consultants between projects or when made redundant, between jobs – this typically creates a feeling of shame at not being busy enough.
Shame is a powerful and, typically, hidden emotion which limits our ability to see things clearly, think creatively, reach out and connect.
The connection between busyness and change
These shared reflections got us fascinated in the relationship between busyness and change in organisations and systems. We observed how much organisations talk about change and yet how little was fundamentally changing.
It got us wondering, what is the connection between busyness and change?
Is busyness an anti-change agent? Is busyness preserving the status quo?
An experiential workshop
As a result we started to run a series of experiential workshops over the last year with groups of people willing to explore their relationships with busyness.
As Gestalt consultants, we were interested in unlocking the wisdom that lies in our bodies about busyness. We know that paying attention to our body can tell us something very different to what our mind is telling us.
The results of these early workshops were fascinating. People reported having profound insights into their relationship with busyness and most people left the workshops with different questions from the ones they started with, such as …
- How can I demonstrate that I need to do less to achieve more?
- Knowing that I am going to die one day, what do I choose to be busy with?
- How can I experience more power and agency through by busyness? How do I use this to challenge my organisation’s belief that busy is good?
- When do I need to push? When do I need to yield?
Come and join us
Due to the popularity of these sessions we are running another session on Thursday 25 September.
The session will be hosted on Zoom, from 1215 to 1415 UK time.
It costs £25 to join and would love you to come and participate. If this cost is prohibitive for you, please reach out to us as we want to make these sessions as accessible as possible for people.
Sign up here to join us https://buytickets.at/madetomove/1769999