One thing I absolutely adore about being on vacation:
Is getting a vacation from having to endure everyone around me telling everyone how busy they are every moment of the day.
And trust me I am not judging around this. It is a fact of life I know and something we all do. I personally do it all the time-even though it annoys the hell out of me and even though I try very deliberately not to do it.
Being busy is a safe haven. Telling others how busy you are –is almost a type of cult I have noticed. I tend to belong to this cult as often as the next gal.
That’s why I love being on vacation. I love taking a vacation from this part of society and this part of myself.
On vacation, down south as I am now beside the sparkling Caribbean seas-it is quite rare to see someone and say:
“How are you?”
“Very, very busy”.
Somehow it is just not as believable when the person is in a bikini, with a drink in their hand, sand in their hair and deciding if they should go suntan at the beach or pool.
I have a very unique relationship with busyness personally. I am extremely busy and stressed most days of the year-but I find it quite embarrassing to admit it. I find it makes me seem less successful. I don’t wear busyness as a badge of honor as many people around me do……I don’t think of it as attractive.
At the office if I look like a truck ran over me from staying up all night, or I barely have time to notice the new picture of someone’s child on their desk or ask them about their recent holidays….I am deeply not proud of these episodes.
When I seem bothered, or stressed, or constantly on the run…I am embarrassed about it. I feel less effective as in why could you not get your work done in a reasonable amount of time? Are you a slowpoke??
I am just tired of hearing “You have no idea of how busy I am!!
Trust me I do. I get it completely.
I have 3 demanding kids, two homes to take care of, I work for a high performing company and have my own business, and my husband has a career where he is not home before 10:30pm at least 2 nights a week and we both have a massive workload. We entertain a ton and host family and friends regularly.
That being said, we chose all this stuff and all these careers, and decided to have all these babies and entertain all these friends. We did these ourselves. And most of the time we absolutely love our lives.
When things get super busy we always have choices to make. We could give up out cottage, I could not coach extra clients, my husband could make less money, and we could cancel X-mas at our house.
I find it fascinating to watch around me though how so many people feel that they have no control over their own lives. As though it is there life (and not them) who choses never to take a vacation, never to hire a sitter and have a date night with their partner, never to put makeup on, never to watch a favorite TV show and never to have time to host a dinner party.
But…some of these same people have tremendous time to line up their soup cans in alphabetical order, have floors so clean you could eat off of them and have perfectly manicured nails that they have professionally done three times per week.
Are these choices any better or worse than the choices I have made in my life?? Absolutely not….they are individual preferences. The difference is when it comes to owning these choices and priorities. The realizations that by making a certain choice you may be sacrificing on another level. Those super clean floors might mean less date nights (or a whole bunch of at home date night on the kitchen floor perhaps??) Or that having a second home might mean less order in general in both of them. You have to be willing to accept the consequences of your decisions. Stand up and own them instead of using “I am so busy” as a constant excuse. Stop and examine what exactly you are so busy doing?
At work it especially irks me when people talk about how busy they are all the time. I mean aren’t be supposed to be busy there? What kind of job would we have if we got to sit around and get paid for surfing the net or manicuring our nails in the washrooms? Aren’t we paid the big buck to produce, deliver and tolerate higher levels of stress? For me it’s about work ethic….and realizing that we own our own career. If we sincerely feel we have too much to handle then it is up to us to figure it out and find solution. To manage our workloads and our projects.
No one in business if going to come and say to us “Gee Jane-you sure so look tired these days-can I help lessen your load” Business is business. There is a bottom line to consider. There are profits to be made. Even if it is a business that really cares (like the awesome one I work for) it is still up to me and not up to them to holler if I am in need. And it is my job not just to holler and complain but to come up with solutions to these problems and prove to them that these solutions are effective.
I am all about win- win solutions. They feel good. I feel good. Win and win. No one has to lose at all do they?
And don’t even get me started about the home front either…..especially people with babies who often say they cannot take a shower they are so busy. I mean seriously….what is wrong with putting your baby in a little chair beside your shower and letting them wail their lungs out for 10 minutes while you lather up?
Trust me I know I sound harsh on this one but the basis of the type of coaching I do is all about prioritization and understanding that we make choices in life and are accountable for these choices. True success comes from living life by our values and making deliberate choices that we can stand by and feel good about.
Often the teacher is also the student right? In my own case this applies to me. I might always have time to take a shower having endured three wailing babies over the years, but there are other areas of life where I am totally lame and aggravate myself from my own complaining. I hate the sound of my voice whining to others that I am too busy to exercise 3 times a week or to take the time to tuck my kids in properly every night.
As much as I try I seem to be too busy to exercise on a regular and consistent basis, I seem to be too busy to cook, I seem to be too busy to cut up celery with peanut butter for my snacks at work and revert to easy granola bars. I may be really good in some areas but I severely suck in others. I need to fix this. Quickly.
My poor mother, because she works in or home a few days a week gets to see the lovely “I am soooo busy side of me “ too often. Haggard, distraught, stressed, complaining, bitchy. Party because she loves me unconditionally and I feel I can act this way and partly because she happens to be at home during the “witching hour “when I take about 30 monstrous minutes to truly successfully transition from my work like to home life.
Unfortunately for her and me..she usually has to leave right before the 29 minutes right about when I come down the stairs, with a bit of lip-gloss on, a bigger smile, in my PJs ready to conquer the second part of evening shift. Those 30 minutes in between however are frightening on many days and probably why the smart people head straight for the drinks to minimize the impact of the nasty transition from work to home.
So as I sat here on the gorgeous beach today and chit chatted with a bunch of other vacationers throughout the day..I realized that I don’t miss hearing “I am crazybusy” in response to a simple“how are you?”
Makes me think that I need to start asking another question when I call people on the phone or walk by their offices. Something that focus less on busyness and more on happiness. Less on circumstances and more on choices.
Maybe we are due for a change in society? Maybe the worldwide “How are you” …..needs to be replaced by something else universally that provides, happier, more accountable, more uplifting and more joyous responses?
I will have to give that some serious thought. And here away from blackberries, deadlines, business, busyness and everything else-I have all the time in the world to ponder.
I am excited to see what I come up with. Could be a revolution.
