You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Hello, it's Claire at The Coaching In, just here to open the door and welcome Becky Hall with the Art of Enough Book Group, chapter five. Enjoy. Hi there, it's Becky again and today I'm talking about chapter five from the art of enough and chapter five, art five, as you know, is all about enough resource, harnessing your power.
And in preparation for this conversation, I was just rereading what it is that we explore and As a reminder, I'm just going to read you the overview of the chapter and then I'll read the question I was asked and respond to it. So in Art 5, we explore the resources we need to do enough. This can mean internal resource, energy, capability, drive or external resource, time, support, others to delegate to. Often when we're overwhelmed, we can feel disconnected from our resources.
We look at enough resource as a replenishable cycle. and we'll explore habits that you can develop in order to sustain yourself in the face of life's demands on you. I thought that would be useful reminder, it was useful for me anyway to ground myself before having this conversation with you. And I was asked a question this week and thank you so much, by the way, to all of you who are continuing to read, who are continuing to think about the art of enough and engage with it.
I'm conscious that it's been a long time now since we started this process, 10 weeks, because we're doing it every other week. So really, really appreciate your continued dialogue and reflection on the work and on the book. So I'll read the question as usual and then respond to it. So the question says this, I was struck by the description you gave of how to recover after a period of intense pressure, the recovery. reset and redesign.
I wonder if you could say a bit more about what that might look like to walk through that. Given the context of the pandemic, I wonder how we could all recognise the need for these three steps. Do you think they happen one after the other or in tandem? So absolutely brilliant question. Because the question itself was referring to something really specific, I'm actually going to read what I put in the book, partly because I think this stuff is absolutely critical.
And yes, it's especially critical and important for us all. As we emerge from the pandemic and many of the people that I coach, I've been having conversations very similar to this one in the last few months, couple of months. So I'll read just a couple of passages. meaning and intentional future, we need to stop, reflect, choose, reset.
Often the first thing we need after a long period of intense pressure is immediate recovery, preferably some physical time off, but certainly a conscious psychological break. Next, a reset in which we intentionally set a different pace of working. Third, a practical redesign of how we are going to manage the challenges of work for the long term in a way that is sustainable. This is not about nice to have or stating good intentions.
This is about creating a robust, practical, actionable plan in which individuals and teams think about how to preserve and recharge energy in order to have the ability to continue to serve their purpose for the long term. I make no apology for reading that actually, because I know you've read the book, that's point of this. But I think this is so important. And... Let me break it down a little bit in terms of the work that I've done both with individuals and with teams.
Because I think what often happens is that teams, when they are in crisis mode, and indeed individuals, when we are responding to a crisis, go into sort of heightened functionality. There's loads of research that suggests actually that often that have been dysfunctional or don't particularly work really well in a crisis situation do work really well. So they suddenly become very highly functioning.
And then for the duration of the crisis, because there's one single point of focus, it's so action focused that the difficult team dynamics sort of fade away. They become less important. It's adrenaline-fuelled. you get results, it's quick to get response. In organisational life, and this absolutely happened in lockdown, decisions become centralised and quick.
So all that sort of organisational sludge and the slowness that democracy and engagement and all the good stuff that we want, but that takes a long time, just doesn't get in the way. We're action-focused, we make things happen, decisions, response, et cetera, and it can feel really good. The cost of that is that often it leads to burnout over time.
It requires a lot, and you will know as well as I, those of you who have either been working during the pandemic or working with people who are working in places, in leadership roles in any sector during the pandemic will know how how many long hours people put in, how exhausting it was. So the cost is high and it can be really addictive and compelling because of all those things I've just said. It's quite nice to lead in that way sometimes. Things get done.
And it was actually about seven years ago that I first heard the phrase, said to me by a leader of a very big organisation with some yeah, we run a crisis as usual culture here. you know, jokes were made about everyone jumping onto their white steeds for a point of crisis. And you know, it was kind of part of the known dysfunction of that own, of the culture, that it was a crisis culture, which meant that of course people worked crazy hours and lots of people burnt out.
So, So this is really important because it can feel satisfying, it's adrenaline-fuelled, it's okay to work in a crisis way when there is genuinely a crisis, of course. But if that becomes business as usual, then it leads to burnout, and that's what we're looking at in this chapter. And I think that often in organisational life, it's really hard to take a pause to reset.
But right now, in our organisational lives as we're all re-emerging from the various stages of lockdown and hybrid working and COVID recovery that we've been in. It's really important to think about, or to take the opportunity, I would say, to think about how are we going to work differently for the long term in the future? And lots of organisations are doing that because of hybrid working, it's sort of forcing people to work out. Okay, how are we going to do that?
But I would suggest that this is the moment exactly to do the three steps, the recovery, reset and redesign. And one of the things that I think can be really useful is to start actually with the recovery, to start with something that I've spoken about quite a lot in the book, which is acknowledging what is. And in lots of organisations I work with and with lots of individuals I work with, people are still exhausted.
They're still feeling the effects of having given so much over the last two years. So recovery will be different for everybody, of course, and I'm not suggesting one size fits all, but there can be, for some individuals and teams, real benefits in doing some sort of collective storytelling and collective sense-making. No judgment listening to one another about what it's been like. No judgment listening to how people are feeling and how they have experienced the last two years.
Just giving a shared opportunity to really tune in and check in with one another about what it's been like can be massively useful. Obviously taking holiday, obviously recovering and absolutely thinking consciously about resetting the amount of work that needs to be done and the speed with which things need to get responded to. which leads into the reset.
So the reset is in part about saying, right, okay, I'm going to consciously change gear from being in crisis mode to being in a different mode, a sort of more sustainable mode, call it that. I was coaching someone who was people director of a huge institution and she was noticing during our conversation that she had got absolutely sort of locked into the habit of responding to things as if it was a crisis. And we realized together that this was because she was still in reactive mode.
things, her whole nervous system was responding to everything as though it was a crisis. So she was immediately going to fight, flight, freeze and all that amygdala crisis, the high levels of cortisol and adrenaline that we talked about in chapter three, enough presence.
So actually for her, it was about settling her nervous system every day and consciously settling her nervous system, doing all those lovely breathing exercises and being conscious of that so that she could address each day with a more measured, careful response. And I think that there's something very similar that can be done for teams.
So, leadership teams just as much as individuals can get into the habit of thinking that everything that comes across their plate in a day needs to be responded to immediately. And of course, that's not the case, especially with leadership teams when part of the issue is that the volume and complexity of what is being, what's being thrown at, what they have to deal with. When that's the case, of course you can't respond to everything as though it's got to be immediately thought through.
It needs to be looked at, assessed, thought about, prioritised. All the good stuff that we all know how to do, but in crisis, get out of the habit of. So the reset is in part really noticing how pace levels of urgency assumptions about how quickly you have to respond, assumptions about how quickly you have to decide and who decides. And just noticing and then giving yourself the chance individually and collectively to say, okay, is that really how we need to be?
Which of our current things are really very Urgent important, to use the old frame of Stephen Covey's, know, what's urgent, what's urgent and important, or what's important but not urgent. So all of those sorts of tools. So the reset comes really from off the back of the recovery leading into the noticing how you are responding. And the redesign is about again, being very conscious of how it is you want to work and what is most important right now.
So we go right back to sort of prioritization 101, know, using techniques that you might find in books like the Four Disciplines of Execution, great book, where they talk about having the one wildly important goal in the whirlwind, all of those things. the prioritizing techniques where you get really clear about actually what are we doing right now that is serving our purpose.
So it's, as I say in the book, as I said in the passage I just read, really reconnecting with your purpose, reconnecting with your priorities, your business priorities for the year, the business priorities longer term, and... getting very good about saying, okay, how are going to make that actionable in a way that isn't crisis?
Now in teams, this can be that some of the things that have happened during lockdown, which have been really useful, like having a very, someone always being able to back up or be available at senior level. One of the senior teams that I was working with, the leadership teams, took it in turns to do a rotor so that there was always someone on call, if you like, taking from the world of social work, if you like.
They weren't in a social work institution at all, but they just took a rotored approach to that so that not everyone has to always be on. There are loads of sort of creative ways that you can notice what habits you've fallen into, see what things you do need to continue, and sometimes you do, and then redesign that so that everyone always gets some time off. It's hard to be too generic about this because for each team and for each organization, it'll be different.
When in the question you ask, do they need to happen one after the other or in tandem? This is the sort of thing that you can do in a day with a team. This is the sort of thing that you can do intentionally over a few months, having set your intention, mapping it out and making it actionable. I think they're connected, they take time. So it's not a magic wand, especially the recovery bit. We all know how.
important but how complex and sometimes long how long it can take to recover from things that have been genuinely difficult, traumatic or tiring.
But what I would say is that the people I know who've been really clear and intentional about this, some that I've been working alongside as a coach but others that I see have really benefited from it and the teams, especially leadership teams that I have worked with who have been intentional about this have really benefited because I also work with lots of teams who are, if I'm honest, still stuck in crisis mode and I don't see much evidence of them changing that right now and
my fear for those teams is that they will, at least one person in those teams burn out or that the team will burn out and the culture that they're creating is a crisis as usual culture. So I think everybody pandemic in our own ways needs to think about how we recover, how we reset and how we redesign our lives. I'm doing it. I don't know anyone who isn't doing it in some way.
making choices that are available, looking at how we can reset and how else we could do our lives, our working lives, in a way that's sustainable and rewarding. So I hope that's been useful. This is really at the heart of our working lives at the moment, I think. So it's a great question. Thank you for asking it.
And I'm really looking forward to hearing about... your thoughts on enough growth, enough growth and enough connection if you like, and the bits of the book where we move from doing enough into having enough. So I'm excited to hear what you think about those. And thanks as always to the wonderful 3D Coaching and the Coaching In for running this book club and thank you for reading and engaging. Take care, speak soon. Bye bye.
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