Time to Breathe by Bill Mitchell

Author:Bill Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472973009
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Seeing the zone of flexibility could allow you to recognise that this is the learning zone.

If you are in a new job, a trainee, newly promoted, doing a course, or a parent, you are going to make mistakes. It’s through mistakes that you learn. If you are not making mistakes, you are being too cautious. The easiest way not to make a fool of yourself when you’re learning to ski is by sticking to the green runs, but there is no fun in that.

It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, life is changing fast. You will inevitably encounter circumstances that you haven’t had to deal with before. At first you muddle through, but really it is an opportunity to learn and enjoy the discovery. This is the zone of self-deprecating humour, funny stories about skiing off-piste, cooking disasters, hours spent putting together a chest of drawers that falls apart after a week. Shared stories around the dinner table, told with warmth and humour, all coming out of being a long way from perfect.

The joy of pragmatism

This is the zone of pragmatism, of focused use of time. Let’s consider Alex – she is doing two full-time jobs after her head of HR went off sick. She is a model of pragmatism. A perfectionist would have collapsed in her place, unable to let go of what doesn’t matter, fearful of the consequences of letting people down; she would have ended up working impossible hours, neglecting sleep and in all probability getting ill.

This is the zone of experimentation and flexibility. Enjoy adapting how you run your life – always look for how you could make it work better. Many of the practical ideas we have looked at will be difficult for the perfectionist at first – more conscious of how they could fail than conscious of the opportunity they might be creating.

Exercising at lunchtime, doing emails in blocks, discussing priorities and deadlines with your manager, not looking at emails after you get home, turning down meetings in favour of other priorities, cutting an email to three points that the person needs to read rather than three pages of detail – these are all risky to the perfectionist. The pragmatist would embrace all of them with an open attitude of experimentation, and ‘let’s see what happens’.

Pragmatists are more focused on what really matters, they know what doesn’t need their time, they get more done, they make faster decisions, they are more agile in the face of an unexpected demand, and they are better adapted to the fast-moving culture of life today. ‘Be open – life is changing, I need to experiment’ is the alternative to perfectionism.

It boils down to being kinder to ourselves. Realising that no matter how much we would like to do everything perfectly – at work, as parents – we just can’t. Some things will go wrong, but life goes on. We might learn something from it, and while sometimes we don’t, we are no less a person for this having happened.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.