Work-Life Innovation |

You hear a lot these days about work/life balance. About how it’s becoming more important for people to integrate their lives better with their work. It’s a big buzzword in corporate life, and many large companies stress their commitment to helping their employees pursue it.

Jazz Up Your Life

If you’ve been thinking about work/life balance lately, forget it! It’s wrong headed thinking. The balance analogy implies a win/lose relationship between the two - a pair of scales where as one goes up the other goes down. I prefer the approach of Dr. Stewart Friedman presented at T4HWW. He argues that a much better analogy is to think of our lives like a jazz band, where the aim is to be a tight, integrated musical masterclass - think Miles Davis and John Coltrane:

Like all music, the important aspect is that each instrument supports and enhances each other. Jarring interference isn’t what’s required (except in some forms of modern Jazz!). When it really comes together you experience ‘flow‘; the experience of things harmoniously in sync. Where you’re effortlessly focused on, and interconnected with, your environment, tasks are fully absorbing and where hours fly by in minutes - usually accompanied by feelings of joy or deep satisfaction.

Brainjacking

Similarly in work and life, Friedman explains what is important in developing a harmonious work and personal life isn’t so much managing the competing time demands of each, but the avoidance of interference of one part of your life in others. Interference occurs whenever your mind isn’t where your body is - when you’re filling out a spreadsheet while thinking about your weekend, or when you’re laying on a beach thinking about a work project or, god forbid, when you’re making love and thinking about the football!. Basically anything that’s non-local to your body and disconnected to the present task at hand. This kind of psychological interference, or brainjacking, kills your focus and without focus there is no flow and without flow there is no joy!

I’m reminded by a piece of advice from Alan Watts the 60’s anti-guru who said we should think of ourselves as though we were a great monarch - someone who is always serene and has great presence simply because they know they are the most important person in any room they enter. They are the only game in town. They don’t have to be anywhere else, because where they are is, by definition, the most important place to be! In other words, they know how to be ‘the cat where it’s at’!

The Four Point Anti-Brainjacking Plan

What then can you do to avoid having your brain hijacked by the non-local so you can get where it’s at?

• Employ the WSD Methodology: Yes, most easily and most practically you can Write Shit Down! Get all that extraneous ’stuff’ out of your head onto paper, todo lists whatever. Let your environment carry the weight that’s on your shoulders. Don’t let it clutter the valuable real estate of your mind.

• Be Embodied. Your body is your most vital link to the present and the most valuable tool you will ever own. Learn to listen to it and get to know it. The best way to do this is to use it! Take it out for a run, stretch it and move it around.

• Go on a Mind Watch Safari. In other words, meditate. Meditation is real, and is basically a way to acquaint yourself with the overridingly dominant part of your existence - your mind. Don’t live your life without getting to know its quirks and freckles - you can’t afford not to do this one.

• Teflon Think. What you will learn from meditation is that you can develop the non-stick mind technique, or Teflon Think. This is basically the realisation that the only way to deal with an errant mind is to drop it! Like you would drop a red hot poker. No reasoning with it, no arguing with it, no rationalising it, you just drop it. End of. What happens when you drop thought in this way? You end up back where you always were! Here with your body in the present, where all that’s left to do is the task in front of you. It’s instant, easy and the only mind training you will ever need.

I’ll leave the last word to ‘The Cat Where it’s At’

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