The Prepared Mind: The Importance of Going Fallow

[Article originally published on Medium] 

Photo by Zbysiu Rodak

THE SABBATICAL: WHAT IS IT & WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of shmita. Relating to agriculture, every seven years, a sabbath (or rest) year was ordered to give the land a break from agricultural production. In a similar way, our minds, like the soil, need rest to be able to continue to grow and provide.

A “sabbatical” has come to mean an extended absence in the career of an individual. But there is a hook — most people come back from these experiences still forcing production in exhausted soil. They feel under pressure to fulfill some goal, e.g., writing a book, or somehow operationalizing their experience for others, or even productizing it in some way. We have a very hard time just doing something for the sake of doing it. With proverbs like “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop” or references to “killing time” allowing ourselves to go fallow does not come easily.

In his 2009 TED talk, The Power of Time Off, designer Stefan Sagmeister explains how he decided to start closing the doors of his New York studio for a full year every seven years:

“Like many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to them and over time, get bored by them. And in our case, our work started to look the same.”

Sagmeister first thought about taking a work sabbatical when reflecting on the typical flow of our lives. He estimated most people spend 25 years learning, 40 years working their career, and then 15-plus years in retirement. But, Sagmeister proposed, what if we cut off five years of retirement and interspersed them in between the working years?

When he experimented with this new schedule, the result was both creatively and professionally beneficial. As he explains in his TED talk, in that first sabbatical year, Sagmeister created a film, explored new design styles and materials, and experienced new cultures and ideas.

“The work that came out of that year flowed back into the company, and into society at large.”

SIGNS YOU NEED A SABBATICAL

A sabbatical is an opportunity to unplug and press pause. It doesn’t have to be a full year or 6 weeks. Giving yourself an opportunity to pause is about disrupting the inertia to which we most often succumb. Most of us can’t opt out and go completely fallow, but we can create space for an intentional shift in thinking. Changing our thinking changes our decision making, which eventually leads to behavior change. We can embrace an opportunity to gain perspective that enables a mental shift in attitude, thoughts, or emotions that otherwise would not have occurred. We all need to create that kind of shift for ourselves, on a daily basis.

Here are five signs that you’re due:

1. If you used to love your work and now you can’t stand it.

2. If your boss or partner tells you things aren’t working out.

3. If you’re constantly distracted by your phone or social media.

4. If you’re facing a challenge or adversity.

5. If an opportunity comes knocking on your door that you want to follow.

Creating space could be signing up for a class, up-leveling your business, getting better something, or saying a truth that may not have been said before. The whole idea is to connect to yourself. If you had an extra five minutes or an hour, what could you do differently? What would you say? Who would you be with? Those are great cues about what would work for you.

Start by creating space in your day. We constantly shift and go into autopilot. We succumb to the back to back meetings, the constant stream of email and information coming our way. To take a few minutes to journal your thoughts and feelings at different times of the day can be really informative. Your mood improves when you consciously bring thoughts into the moment.

Consider checking in with yourself first before checking your social media feed and ask, “How do I feel? What am I thinking right now? Is this where I want to be?”

When you check in, tune out others and focus on yourself. We’ve been counseled since we were children to be first, be right, to win — none of that has anything to do with slowing down. In racing against the clock and against others, we didn’t learn how to care for ourselves very well. There is a reason why we are told on airplanes to take care of ourselves first. We have to learn to take care of ourselves to be the best self we can be.

HOW TO CREATE A SABBATICAL

Sabbaticals are all about rejuvenating and acquiring nutrients. They are a time to explore topics you’re deeply passionate about or try something new outside of your comfort zone. But if you read through this article and still feel like it’s impossible for you, there are ways to get the benefits of disconnected, unstructured time off without risking your job. Not everyone can take a big break in their life or career. Start with a day, or an hour.

TAKE OFF ONE DAY A WEEK

Dr. Matthew Sleeth, author of 24/6: A Prescription for a Healthier, Happier Life, has indisputable proof that life doesn’t have to be quite so frantic all of the time: himself. His experience changed his life, leading him to write his book — a guide to refocusing your life around the principle of taking a much-needed rest day.

“For most of my life, I worked in emergency medicine. Ten years ago, I was given a 24-hour Sunday shift. I felt wiped out, and I was dreading Sunday each week, so I decided to take Saturday off to have a very simple day to read and explore my purpose in life,” recalls Dr. Sleeth.

BE UNREACHABLE FOR A SET PERIOD OF TIME

Learn how to disappear, for a bit. Start with 90 minutes twice a week.

It’s a powerful trick that lessens stress, increases productivity, sparks creativity, improves work/life balance, and changes your perspective of work.

Medium member Josh Spector reveals his tricks and what you’ll get from pulling your own disappearing act.

LEARN TO TAKE “MINI-SABBATICALS”

According to Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson, one of the best ways to enhance your creative output is to separate work and consumption. As she explains, even taking an hour a day for a “mini-sabbatical” to be in an “absorb” state where you gather information and inspiration without doing any work can be an easy way to get new ideas.

If you’re feeling stressed, unmotivated, and burnt out, there’s no point in trying to just push through.

Instead, our best ideas often come when we’re not working. And a sabbatical–no matter how long–is a fantastic way to rest and rethink how you’re approaching hard problems.

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If you find yourself blaming your (mental) tools, do something about it. Learn about mental models, learn from how Craftsmen talk about how they learn and get better at what they do and more importantly, take ownership. Moving forward requires change but change by itself does not mean that you are moving forward. As Socrates said, “The un-examined life is not worth living.”

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Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a leadership consultant and adjunct faculty at Washington State University. She helps busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. She writes on the topic of “Craftsmanship and The Future of Work.” sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.

Why Quality of Thinking Is So Important

Some facts are chilling. Consider this one: the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. It is chilling because its implications are enormous. The critical takeaway is that there is nothing – nothing—more important in developing organizational effectiveness than ensuring that people think for themselves with rigor, imagination, and courage. Every day, in every meeting, and in every interaction.

It begs the question: In hierarchical structures often driven by the alternation between reward and reprisal, what does it take for people to think clearly and for themselves? And how do we find the time?

The answer is not in our innate intelligence, education, experience, or power. It is not even the amount of time we allot to thinking. The main factor in whether or not people can think clearly for themselves is the way they are being treated by the people with them while they are thinking. The impact of our behavior on people’s ability to think is, whether we realize it or not, that big.

The ability to hold our attention is a meditative and psychological tool that helps us perceive the subtle patterns continuously occurring between others and ourselves. These patterns determine our behavior and the automatic ways in which we react. When we do not hold our attention we cannot be fully aware of our impact, nor can we perceive the unconscious subtle pulls continually placed upon us by others.

When we hear or watch any story, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our ability to see reality clearly. This is one reason why humans have such trouble recognizing lies. First, we believe what we are told. Then, we have to make a conscious effort to assemble facts and disbelieve. Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value.

In other words, we have to fight the tendency to form opinions immediately, work to deconstruct what we’ve learned, and reconstruct it through a more objective stance.

Would you or your team benefit from a consultation? Let’s talk!

Explaining Is Harder Than Achieving

More difficult than achieving expertise in something is describing it, especially to a novice or someone outside their medium. When asked directly about their expertise, virtually none of the craftsmen referred to themselves as an expert. While all had a master designation, they all felt they were still learning, still developing an edge to their skills. They also described the challenges of their medium by using other disciplines: “Clay drying is different than paint drying.” An interesting analogy, but to a novice in both disciplines, the implications of dry clay versus dry paint are lost. They talk about having a feel for their material, understanding the pace of the work, and showing up deliberately in their practice. Across the board, the actual work was described as “meditative.”

What does a novice do in the face of this level of ambiguity? The death of the industrial age has exposed a level of uncertainty we are not used to. We reach for playbooks, follow recipes, seek templates that we know will work—we do what is familiar, tried, and proven. We become conservative in our experiments. We start to think conventionally. This is the very reaction I am working toward changing with this book.

The work we do matters. How we go about it matters.

The degree to which we can dance with uncertainty is in direct proportion to the ingenuity of our problem-solving capability. The more we risk what we know, the more we learn. The better our skills get, the more we can engage uncertainty (in ourselves, in others, and in our environment), the greater our capacity for solving problems. Increasing our capacity for uncertainty increases our tolerance for dealing with the unknown. The more problems we directly interact with, the greater the change we are capable of making in the world.

Skills are about meeting a standard. Mastery is the ability to create your own standard. In order to achieve mastery, we need to be improvisational with our skills, like a craftsman. It’s our choice, then, to find what level of uncertainty we can effectively manage when we learn something new. My wish is that these vignettes provide a way forward for people interested in developing their life craft, in whatever work they do.

So how do I know about craftsmanship? Through detailed interviews, observation, and hands-on learning. I wanted to understand what made their approach to work unique in a way that didn’t repeat what I was trying to avoid: a top ten list, a template, or a playbook. Too often we are looking to emulate that a handful of leaders or companies that enjoyed a unique set of circumstances, at a particular time in their development. In business, we sometimes believe that if organizations do those same five things, or produce the same kinds of products, we too can get where they are. The organizations we admire, it turns out, do enjoy a prime state but seldom stays there for long.[i] Virtually every company featured in Good To Great peaked at the time of that book’s initial publication.[ii] Greatness in business is generally measured in stock market return or market share. We might imagine that we’d like to be in their shoes, but most leaders in those positions have such a high-risk profile, their focus is on playing not to lose.

For this effort, I sought people performing at their peak with a different definition of success. They regard the struggle to learn as part of the privilege of their craft, of working hard to make a difference and do work that is worthwhile to them. From these individuals, I gathered detailed descriptions of their work, I observed them, with some I even practiced alongside, and I recorded my understanding of their efforts in action. The findings in this book are the result of that effort.

This process formed my ideas about the essential qualities of craftsmanship. I learned how craftsmen regard and engage problems, the relationship between process and outcomes, and the emergence of craft from a foundation of inner knowledge that generally goes unspoken and unseen. This project also informed me about the potential of our innate ingenuity.

In analyzing how craftsmen approach their work and how that work reflects them as individuals, I wanted to know how the eager and awkward efforts of an apprentice can transform into the flowing precision of a master. I wanted to understand an approach to living and working that’s possible across all fields, and a way of learning that helps people wrestle with the ungainliness of the beginner. I wanted to understand a way of engaging a business that helps people grapple with the uncertainty, change, external expectations, uniqueness, and complexity of organizational growth—while solving societal problems. I wanted to understand how people across a variety of sectors—from engineers, members of a band, to leaders of organizations—can effectively apply their uniqueness to a problem at hand, using business as their medium for creative self-expression.

This approach to business—call it craftsmanship.

Interviewing master craftsmen and business leaders about how they learn; I wanted to understand what motivates them; what inspires them; how they orient themselves toward their work; where their attention wonders when they are at work; how they go about their work; how they confront challenges; and, how they push against the constraints of their mediums. We discussed how they manage the tension of remaining open to the surprises (that enable creativity), while demonstrating control (expertise) in their craft. This research resulted in a navigation system for business and leadership discussed later in this book that anyone can apply toward their own development if they look beyond scale as a primary goal and think of their work as a medium for creativity and not a template to fit into.

Once we sat down, I asked them questions. A lot of questions. What do you value most? What made you get this going to the degree that you have? What was the biggest decision you ever made? What was your biggest mistake? How do you ignore the competition and maintain focus on your personal vision? How did you find your purpose? What has influenced you most in your life? What is success? How do you know you’ve achieved success? When do you feel pressure to conform? What do you do about that? —to name a few.

[i] prime Mintzberg, H. (1984). Power and organization life cycles. Academy of Management review, 9(2), pp.207–224. and Adizes, I. (1979). Organizational passages—diagnosing and treating lifecycle problems of organizations. Organizational dynamics, 8(1), pp.3–25.

[ii] good to great failed http://www.economist.com/node/13980976AND  http://y0ungmoney.blogspot.com/2015/04/good-to-great-is-flawed-book.html

This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.