Much of my work is about making it easier for groups to achieve their goals. Often, that entails finding ways to eliminate friction. But sometimes, the best way to help groups achieve their goals is to add friction.
Consider exercise. Most of us don’t live in a world where we need to lift large weights above our heads or run long distances to get from one place to another. Technology has eliminated that friction in our lives. But many of us voluntarily reintroduce that friction, because we realize that it makes us healthier.
When I’m co-designing meetings with others, I use a template that helps me capture lots of information — intentions, tradeoffs, different scenarios, etc. This is great for having clear design conversations with others, but it’s distracting on the day of the meeting itself. When I’m facilitating, I need to be able to find specific information easily — timing, for example — and want extra whitespace where I can take notes.
About a dozen years ago, I decided to tackle this problem. I thought it would be useful to have a tool that automatically converted a meeting design document into a format that was optimized for facilitation. I started by trying to figure out what that format might be. I created a new template and manually transferred and reformatted information from the old one, which took me a few hours. My team and I tested it and found it useful. It validated the idea of an automatic conversion tool, because we certainly were never going to spend a few extra hours manually converting the information ourselves.
Except that I discovered something weird: Those few extra hours I spent copying the document over manually made me a better facilitator. Even though I had already spent days poring over a meeting design with my colleagues, the act of transferring the design from one template to another surfaced inconsistencies that we had missed. It also helped me absorb almost every detail of the design until I felt like it was part of my body. This enabled me to be even more present on the day of the meeting, which made it easier for me to adjust and improvise. The act of creating this new version of the design almost made the document itself unnecessary.
In the decade since, I’ve spent hundreds of hours manually transferring my designs from one template to the other for all of my meetings. I’ve tried to encourage my colleagues to do the same, but they have all demurred. I get it, and I’ve never pushed anyone too hard. Most of them are doing fine without it, and the performance boost they might get from spending those additional few hours may not seem worth it. But it’s been worth it for me, and I have no plans of stopping.
What are areas in your work or in your life where adding friction might actually help you?
I think this is an especially important question to ask in this world of artificial intelligence. Technology has always been a catalyst for eliminating friction, and AI is continuing this trend in potentially transformative ways. However, we can still decide that eliminating friction is not always helpful and choose a different path.
I shake my head when I work with teams and see blocks of back-to-back meetings on their calendars with no breaks in-between. When you are meeting with people face-to-face, you have to schedule time in-between so that you can physically get from one place to another. That extra time gives you the chance to breathe, grab a snack, go to the bathroom, have a followup conversation, or prepare yourself for your next meeting.
It turns out that the friction of moving from one meeting to another gives us an opportunity to rest, and that humans need rest (and food and bathroom breaks) to be at our best. With remote meetings, we don’t have to schedule a break, and so most of us don’t. Then we’re left wondering why we’re exhausted at the end of our work days.
Logistically, the fix is easy. The main thing preventing us from scheduling breaks in-between our remote meetings is culture, and culture is powerful. But at the end of the day, we still have a choice.
We, in all of our imperfect human goodness, have a choice. We can look to eliminate friction just because we can (have you been in a remote meeting where the AI note-takers outnumbered actual people?), or we can be thoughtful about what will most augment us flesh-and-blood human beings.
A few years ago, I took an introductory class on Bonsai, the art of growing miniaturized trees in pots. The first thing they taught us was that, with the exception of tropical species, trees needed to be kept outside. Why? Because trees sleep during the winter, and if they are constantly kept awake with artificial light and heat, they will eventually die.
It made sense once I understood the reasoning, but I would not have intuited this on my own. I’m clearly not alone, judging from the countless number of posts on various Bonsai forums from folks who are mystified as to why their trees, which they tended to lovingly indoors, end up dying. I’m sure some of this is because of general nature blindness, but I think another factor is society’s dysfunctional relationship to rest.
I was reminded of this when a friend was telling me about how the leaders at her work — a large tech company with thousands of employees — are constantly throwing around the word “velocity.” All of the internal messaging is about going faster, never easing up. Not surprisingly, there is a high-level of both burnout and apathy there. When urgency feels artificial, people tune it out.
I’ve seen similar cultures at countless nonprofits, but for different reasons. The stakes feel higher, because people’s lives often depend on the work. Resources tend to be scarce, but leaders look to do more with less rather than invest in greater capacity. The resulting burnout is predictable, and yet the cycle has proven difficult to break.
Most recently, I’ve been hearing about a new, but similarly pernicious pattern induced by artificial intelligence. Despite AI’s promise to do our hard work for us, people who are using it regularly often find themselves even more exhausted. My friend, Greg Gentschev, recently observed:
The funny thing about using AI for projects is that I feel decision fatigue. Everything gets done so fast that it’s hard to keep up. I think this is going to be a common complaint going forward.
Using AI can feel like managing a bunch of mostly competent, very fast interns who work nonstop, 24-hours each day. There are more to things to review, more things to respond to, more decisions to make, and no natural barriers (like your team needing to sleep) to stem the tide.
We’re like those poor Bonsai trees being kept awake by artificial light and heat. We, too, need to rest, or else we, too, will die. It’s crazy that anyone would feel compelled to explain this core human need, but the pace of de-humanization in our society is bringing new meaning to “velocity.”
So what can we do about this?
First and foremost, we can re-assess the stories we tell ourselves. As everyone who is actually a high-performer at their craft knows, sustainability and “velocity” are not at odds with each other. Ask any marathon runner. Rest and recovery, along with mental and emotional well-being, are critical for us to be at our best. Telling ourselves otherwise is not only counter-productive, it establishes the foundation of a toxic culture.
Second, we can name our intentions clearly. In my work with groups, I often see leaders confuse poor habits with lack of agency. We tend to replicate what we’ve experienced. If no one before us models a healthy, balanced culture, we’re unlikely to do otherwise, regardless of what we actually want. We assume that everything is the way they are, because that’s the only way they can be, when in reality, we tend to have more choices than we realize.
Which leads to the third and most important thing we can do: Establish new habits. My training, Power and Love for Managers, along with my work with dysfunctional teams, focuses on establishing Working Agreements and thinking through structures and processes that support them. If your intention is to create an environment that feels welcoming and supportive, then how you onboard new team members or how you run your meetings matter. Being super clear about roles and having clear cycles of stress and recovery will do way more for achieving human “velocity” than excessively preaching about it.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go fast. Indeed, sometimes our work requires it. But “velocity” doesn’t require shedding our humanity. Leaning into what actual human beings need to go fast will do wonders for your group’s culture and results.
In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)
Earlier this year, my partner and I were spending an evening with friends, enjoying a beautiful dinner. We mostly avoided talking about current events, but eventually, one of them asked us how we were grappling with our nation’s turn toward authoritarianism and our federal government's attack on much of what we care about and believe in.
In truth, I was dealing with it by avoiding these conversations when I could. However, I felt that these friends knew me well enough, both personally and professionally, for me to answer without having to explain myself too much. So I told them that I was dealing with it by going to the nearby hills every Sunday and weeding.
The Birds and the Bugs
My Mom has always been an avid gardener, and she was disappointed that neither my two sisters nor I seemed to take to the practice. I killed many houseplants before giving up on them entirely. They were just too much trouble. As much as I loved being outdoors, I couldn’t tell one tree from the next.
That changed for me during the pandemic lockdown. I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone other than my partner and my younger sister. We ended up spending a lot of time outdoors. And for the first time, I really started paying attention. Truly, actually paying attention.
It started with the birds. I’ve always liked birds, but they were all mostly flying brown blobs to me. One day, my partner decided to fill a birdbath I didn’t even know she had because it had always been hidden by a mass of weeds. The next day, we heard something splashing around in there. That was enough for me to clear the weeds and move the birdbath somewhere visible. The payoff came quickly, and we were rewarded with the sight of a little brown blob taking a bath.
I was bewitched. I sat there and watched. I listened to the water splashing as the sun faded. I noticed that this brown blob was bigger than most brown blobs I had seen. I decided to look up its name. “California Towhee.” The next day, I saw my friend perusing the yard with its mate. “Hello, Towhee,” I greeted it. It ignored me, hopping around, scratching and pecking. Once again, I sat and watched.
Over time, I learned the names of other brown blobs, and I greeted them too. I watched, and I watched. I didn’t have to go out of my way to look for them, because they often were just there. Something started changing in me every time I came across these happy little critters, and I started wondering how I could attract more of them.
It turns out that birds eat bugs. Lots of them. They vastly prefer them to other types of food. The best way to bring more birds to your garden is to attract more bugs. The best way to do that is to grow native plants.
My previous track record with plants had me hesitant about diving in, but I was newly motivated, and I was lucky enough to have the time and the space. I scoured local nurseries and the Internet, trying to soak in everything I could find. I bought one plant at a time, put them in the ground, and did my best to keep them alive.
Miraculously, most of them survived. Native plants are resilient, and they’re already adapted to our local conditions. They don’t need the rigamarole of unnatural watering regimens or soil modifications that traditional gardening requires. I mostly had to stick them in the ground, and most of them did okay.
A few years into the practice, I had started to suspect that my enthusiasm for gardening and native plants was more of a dalliance than a passion. I appreciated everything that gardening had done for me, but I wasn’t sure how much more time I wanted to invest into it. Weeding, in particular, felt like just another maintenance task that I was mostly failing at.
A Beautiful Discovery
When my partner and I first met, she introduced me to Skyline Gardens in the hills just outside of Berkeley, California. We didn’t know the name of the place at the time. The trail didn’t have a clear marker, and we didn’t know where it ended. We would park on the side of a road and hop a fence to reach it. It quickly became our trail, and we would walk it often.
During the pandemic and my subsequent gardening deep dive, I realized to my delight that there were many beautiful native plants along the trail. I assumed that they had been there all along and that I was noticing them for the first time, but that wasn’t quite true.
Most of the beautiful, “wild” spaces we enjoy are being actively stewarded, whether we realize it or not. Trails need to be cleared, weeds need to be pulled, shrubs and trees need to be pruned. It’s not just about creating lush, accessible, green spaces. It’s also about maintaining safety and balance in the ecosystem, from removing dried foliage from fire-prone areas to creating habitat for endangered pollinators. There’s so much invisible work, it’s easy to take it all for granted.
But Skyline Gardens had other gifts beyond active stewardship. A combination of elevation and terrain and location, location, location has made it the most botanically biodiverse region this side of the San Francisco Bay. As someone who was nature-blind prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if an area were biodiverse or not. It all just looked like a bunch of greenery to me.
Two years ago, while slowly emerging from my nature-blindness, my partner and I were walking through Skyline Gardens on a beautiful Spring day, and we decided to wander off the beaten path. We walked up a series of switchbacks through tangles of waist-high weeds and a grove of eucalyptus trees. We emerged onto a rocky ridge with panoramic views of the Bay, Oakland, San Francisco, even the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked along the ridge, skirting around thickets of coyote brush and silver bush lupine, until we suddenly came upon this high meadow. I then realized that biodiversity can look like a lot more than a bunch of greenery:
Even the most nature-blind person in the world could understand, without explanation, that these fields of colorful splendor were beautiful and exceptional. What I didn’t know was that, a century and a half ago, this was actually the norm for much of California.
California is known as the “Golden State,” which is mostly an allusion to the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. But it might as well be a description of the warm, ochre hues dancing across the hills throughout the state for most of the year. This is the California I grew up with, and in truth, I think it looks beautiful. But those evocative yellows also represent barrenness and destruction. It is the result of invasive grasses, mustards, and thistles that suck up moisture and nutrients, outcompeting everything else in their relentless quest to go to seed and reproduce as quickly and as bountifully as possible. Not only do their shallow roots barely sink any carbon, their short lives make the hills especially fire-prone.
Before colonization and industrial agriculture, much of California looked like what Skyline Gardens looks like now. In the 1880s, the conservationist John Muir described the Central Valley as “one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your feet would press more than a hundred flowers at every step.”
I had read Muir’s description years ago, but I had had trouble envisioning what it looked like. Thanks to Skyline Gardens, I no longer had to try to imagine. I could see it for myself a quick 20-minute drive from where I lived.
The Downside of Vision
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a visualizer. I would spend hours as a kid imagining what it might be like when I was older, how I would want to behave, what I would do in different situations. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not exactly at least. I grew up in a middle class household in beautiful Southern California, where the sun was always shining. Both of my parents were active in our lives, I was close with my two sisters, and I made friends easily.
Still, there was turmoil in my household, secondary trauma from my parents’ experiences growing up in Korea under Japanese oppression, losing close family members during the Korean War, then immigrating to this country without any kind of support system and trying to make do.
My parents had a dream for me and my sisters, and they scratched and clawed and fought to try to make it a reality. They fought with people and institutions that did not necessarily like how they looked or sounded or smelled, folks who did not necessarily want them here, much less to succeed. They also fought with each other and with my sisters and me. Every day, they were tired and stressed and scared. When they didn’t know what else they could do, they yelled and screamed. Sometimes, they went beyond that.
In those times, I tried to find a place where I could be alone and visualize. I often envisioned difficult situations, and I would think through how I would deal with them. In these scenarios, I always figured things out, although not necessarily easily. It was empowering and hopeful, and it not only helped me problem-solve, it made me more resilient.
I first met my mentor, Doug Engelbart, in 1997, when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 70s. Doug made my little exercises in visioning seem like child’s play. Among the many things I learned from him was that we rarely permit ourselves to truly think big. What was so unique about him was that he wasn’t a dreamer. He was a doer, and his enormous vision was his roadmap.
Doug passed away in 2013, and he was depressed the entire time I knew him. Mental health is a complicated affair, and I don’t want to pretend I fully understood everything that was going on with him. What I did understand was that he had made the fate of humanity his mission in life and work, and he constantly felt like a failure as a result.
His insight, first formulated in the 1950s, was simple. Problems were scaling faster than our ability to solve them. If we were to have any hope of survival, we needed to get smarter together, and fast. He made it his mission, at the ripe old age of 25, to do something about it. He approached the problem practically and systematically, taking his cues from his boyhood experiences growing up in the Oregon countryside during the Great Depression. He had a way of articulating complex ideas simply, using everyday objects to make his points: a brick, a pencil, a mirror, a bicycle.
The focus of everything he envisioned was to make people’s lives better. And yet, his peers almost overwhelmingly rejected his concerns and his vision.
Doug likened our situation to all of us being on a giant, Goldberg-ian contraption that was hurtling toward a steep cliff. He felt like a lone wolf, insistently pointing toward our impending doom, begging others to join him in trying to steer us back to safety. Nobody seemed to see him, much less listen to him. Even worse, many folks perceived the messenger as the bigger threat, and they did their best to marginalize him.
I commissioned the amazing Brian Narelle to create this comic for Doug Engelbart’s 80th Birthday.
Doug was incredibly stubborn, and he pushed forward despite the opposition. He became most famous for some of the things he invented — graphical user interfaces, hypertext, the mouse — all of which he revealed to the world in 1968 at an event that’s come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. But those of us who were lucky enough to enter his orbit knew him for and were inspired by his all-consuming mission.
I hated that he felt so much despair, given all that he had accomplished and the many, many people he had inspired. In making his mission my own over twenty years ago, I swore that I would not fall into the same trap. I would remember that this could not be my mission alone, that I could not judge my success on the overall state of the world, and that I needed to right-size my expectations. And yet, even before the current shitshow that is masquerading as the United States government, I was failing at this.
Belief and Despair
In 2012, about ten years into my journey of helping groups collaborate more effectively, I pulled together an all-star team of practitioners to help a group of highly contentious stakeholders come to a shared understanding about one of the most intractable, some would say religious issues in the state of California: How to divvy up our limited supply of water.
We succeeded, but something bothered me about our success. I wasn’t sure how much of it was due to our most sophisticated (and expensive) techniques. Much to my surprise, I also realized that our most basic interventions — ones that we often took for granted — had played a major role. These stakeholders had been more than capable of doing these basic interventions without us, which would have saved them time, heartache, and money. They just needed to realize this and believe it.
I spent months pondering this, reflecting on past work and on other groups I had observed or been a part of. This led to what, in retrospect, seems like a stunningly obvious revelation: High-performing groups do all of the “basic” things well. They regularly check in with each other to get clear about what they are trying to do, how they are trying to do it, and how they are actually doing, so that they could adjust accordingly. They also treated each other like human beings as opposed to automatons or brains-on-sticks.
One of the trademarks of my work up to that point was how inclusive I was. Making stakeholders co-conspirators in both the design and implementation is largely what enabled us to achieve our goals, but it had the added benefit of showing people how to do the work well. It gave them the opportunity to learn by doing, which meant they could succeed in the work well after we left. Or so I thought.
It’s not that people didn’t learn something from our work together. It’s that simply going through the experience once was usually not enough for them to sustain the work on their own. I and my team had muscles that many of our clients did not, and when we went away, things usually reverted to how they were before.
My revelation, obvious or not, felt like a major breakthrough, because it meant that groups didn’t have to acquire world class skills in facilitation or design or strategy or communications to be successful without us. They just had to do the basics well. Helping groups do the basics felt achievable. If I focused on this, I could be much more successful in helping groups in a way that might last.
More importantly, this approach felt scaleable. Democracy requires muscles, not just structures, to succeed. The muscles required to be and work together well at small scales — with our families, our friends, our work teams — are the same muscles required to be and work together well at larger scales — in our organizations, our communities, our country as a whole. Those muscles have severely and collectively atrophied for many reasons and over many years, and it’s resulted in fascism in America today. Re-building these muscles at a small scale not only felt achievable, it felt critical in newly urgent ways.
So I pivoted how I did my work. I’ve been lucky to have found groups willing to let me test and evolve this approach with them, and it’s reinforced my belief in its efficacy. But this feeling of being a failure began to accelerate over the past few years.
I can think of two reasons why. First, if you’re in the business of making the world a better place, and society is going in the wrong direction, it’s hard not to feel bad about it. The problem is placing outsized responsibility on yourself. It is factually incorrect and a little narcissistic to think that any individual — even those with great structural power (which I do not have) — can have such a huge impact on our collective success or failure. I’ll call this the Doug Fallacy and hope that my mentor forgives me. It manifests in all sorts of silly ways among progressives, such as feeling guilty about driving to the convenience store instead of taking public transit or taking your kids to the park and being silly and joyous with them instead of going to a protest.
Second, it’s hard to believe in the power of relentlessly and collectively doing the basics over and over again, especially when the world (or even just your job) feels like a tire fire around you. When you’re on a team, and things have been falling apart for a while now, and you’re struggling to do your job while immersed in toxicity and dysfunction, it’s hard to believe that having regular team checkins over the next year or so will help correct the problems.
Or, if you’re a social justice organization, and your communities are under constant attack, and all of your government grants have been cut because you had the word, “diversity,” on your website, and now you’ve had to let go of a quarter of your staff who were already overworked and burnt out, it’s hard to believe that aligning around priorities and checking in on them regularly over the next year or so will help correct the problems.
I get this, and I’ve tried my best to be empathetic and to meet groups where they are. But I also know that most groups (just like people) are inclined to skip steps and that skipping steps will not lead to success. I think I’m better than most at holding my ground with groups, but I still relent more often than I would like, and the results are predictable. I feel guilty and responsible, and then the Doug Fallacy creeps in again, and the bad feelings start to spiral. These feelings aren’t just bad for my mental health. They’re bad for the work.
Good Energy
Skyline Gardens was founded by Glen Schneider, a retired landscaper. In 2016, while walking the trail, Glen noticed that the local municipal district, which owns the land, was removing a grove of Eucalyptus trees. He knew that when the trees were removed, the land underneath would be newly exposed to sunlight and that invasive plants would quickly take over. So he started to weed. Over time, the municipal district discovered what he was doing, and rather than raise a fuss, they encouraged him.
Skyline Gardens became a sanctioned project. Almost a decade later, dozens of volunteers come there weekly to help restore the land.
Last Spring, I and others were invited to walk the space with Glen. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he had founded the project, but I was anxious to learn as much as I could from him about this place that I loved.
I had low expectations. I had been to other native plant gatherings, and while people were generally pleasant enough, I didn’t feel any affinity toward most of them. People rarely introduced themselves, much less asked about me or my interests, even when there were only a few others around. I felt tolerated, not welcomed, and I got the sneaky feeling that most of these enthusiasts preferred plants to people. Everyone seemed so much older (thought I, a member of the half-century club) and whiter.
This walk felt different from the start. The group was more diverse than I had seen at other gatherings. To my surprise, Glen even kicked things off with introductions!
We started up a fire road to the top of a ridge, giving us gorgeous views of the hillsides below us. Then we made our way down to the trail below — my and my partner’s trail! — before taking a detour up another ridge and ending up at the meadow of purple and yellow and red and orange that my partner and I had stumbled upon one year earlier.
Glen stopped often, sharing stories of the plants and this place. He explained the differences between native bunchgrasses and the invasive annuals that are so pervasive here. He showed us the telltale signs of deer grazing on the tender, green stalks. And he told us his story, how he fell in love with this place and how he set about to save it.
Glen was passionate and practical, and despite his “I’m-just-a-retired-landscaper” demeanor, he knew as much about people and human systems as he did about plants and the land. He spoke casually about his approach to restoration and to wrangling volunteers, but it was clear how much thought was behind them. For example, they only sought volunteers who were willing to make a weekly commitment. The first six weeks were “training” sessions, and if you made it that far, you would get a cool hat. Volunteer sessions began with a discussion about that day’s tasks as well as what people were seeing and learning. The days ended with snacks, a ritual that Glen clearly treasured. He wasn’t recruiting hands. He was building a community.
Similarly, Glen didn’t make a big fuss about his evolving relationship with the municipal district and other agencies, but it was clear that his approach was a huge reason for the project’s success. He not only had positive relationships with the different entities involved, he seemed to be changing them from the outside-in.
“Every system wants good energy,” Glen explained. “When you bring good energy, it flows throughout the system, encouraging others to bring their good energy, and it flushes the bad stuff away.”
Something shifted inside of me when he spoke those words. We stood at the edge of the bright, colorful meadow, listening to Glen share his small, simple formula as we experienced first-hand what it looked like to heal vast swaths of land, despite the odds.
I thought about all of the groups I had been working with, all of the resistance I had been experiencing, all of my failures. I thought about how tired and demoralized I felt by my work and by the previous four pandemic years. I thought about how helpless I felt about what was happening in this country. And yet, when I stood there, when I heard Glen’s stories of how this place became what it was, when I felt his and other people’s good energy, I felt validation and hope.
Skyline Gardens came about because he cared about something so much, he decided to do something about it, however small. And small it was. Keeping even a small patch of land clear of weeds is an arduous task, one that most people (myself included) disliked. There was no way Glen could succeed in his task, even if he could recruit an army of volunteers. It was too big, too hard.
And yet, Glen has succeeded. He has succeeded by being thoughtful and strategic in how he does the work. He has succeeded by bringing others along with him, investing in community, taking time to get to know and develop the knowledge and leadership of those around him. He has succeeded by balancing rest with relentlessness. He has succeeded by not skipping steps. He has succeeded by bringing good energy.
When I got home that evening, my partner asked how the walk went. I told her about the things I experienced, the people I met, the stories Glen told. I told her about what he had said about good energy. Then I started sobbing uncontrollably.
Church
Many years ago, I was getting to know a new colleague over dinner, and he asked me if I had a spiritual practice. “I play basketball every Sunday morning,” I responded.
Last year, after two decades of living in beautiful San Francisco, I moved across the Bay to Oakland. I happened to be nearing my 50th birthday, and I knew that someday soon, my body would force me to find a new “church.” Moving away from my regular game seemed to be a good excuse for me to try something new on my own terms.
I had been dreading this moment for years. No other physical activity brought me the same joy as running around the court, trying to make that silly orange ball go through that round metal hoop. Nothing else allowed me to breathe, to let go of whatever was occupying me, to stay in the moment the way basketball did.
But for the first time, I felt that maybe there was something that could take its place, something that could serve as a weekly physical, mental, and spiritual reset.
One week after my move, I showed up to Skyline Gardens, ready to work. I wasn’t sure at the time if I was in it for the long-haul, but I committed to making it through the six-week training period and getting that coveted hat.
Two weeks in, I was sure.
Time in nature and gardening have well-documented physical and mental health benefits. I’ve known this for a long time, and I’ve always felt the benefits, but I’ve never been able to make either a habit before Skyline Gardens. The quality of the people who volunteer there is a big reason why. There is also something special about the weekly rhythm. When you literally stick your hands in the dirt week after week, you start to notice the little things. You see plants go through different cycles. You hear the Spotted Towhees clicking and the California Quail warbling. The vast array of insects stop being “bugs” and start becoming green sweat bees and stink beetles and checkerspot caterpillars. You start to understand the eating habits and preferences of bunnies and gophers and deer.
Time. Slows. Down. And you slow down with it.
Over time, you start to see the impact of your work. You see seeds that you’ve sown start to grow. You see natives that you didn’t plant start to emerge from areas that you’ve weeded. You start to understand why you should ignore the mustard seedlings while relentlessly pulling the six-week fescue, even though the mustard is right there and would only take you a few seconds to remove it.
These little wins accumulate over time, and they strengthen your faith and your resilience. And if your faith ever waivers, you just have to remember that gorgeous meadow in the Spring, and you feel the good energy surge within you once again.
Faith, it turns out, is also a muscle. I remember why I’m doing my work. I remember what I’m trying to help others do, and how. I remember the importance of vision, but also the dangers of it. I want people to understand that taking time to make small things — however trivial they might seem — builds our muscles, our faith, our resilience. All of these things are what make big visions possible.
Thanks to Eun-Joung Lee, H. Jessica Kim, Travis Kriplean, Kate Wing, Doug Obegi, Jenny Lau, Rebecca Petzel, and Renee Fazzari for helping me crystallize these thoughts over many conversations. And many, many thanks to all of the wonderful volunteers at Skyline Gardens, especially Glen Schneider, Cynthia Adkisson, Margaret Flaherty, and Mary Palafox.
When I was in my early 20s, I used to play pickup basketball with a guy who was 20 years older than me, but didn’t look it. He was in superb shape, and he never seemed to get injured. At one of our games, I sprained my ankle, and when I was healthy enough to return, I asked him if he had any rehab tips. "Yoga," he replied. He hadn't sprained his ankle in over ten years, which he attributed to his yoga practice.
I was intrigued, but never seemed to get around to trying it. It took me another ten years before I took my first yoga class. It was hard, it felt great, and I could see the value of making it a regular practice. But I never did, and I was totally okay with that.
Now I’m in my mid-40s. My partner is an avid yoga practitioner, so I’ve been doing it more often too — at least once a month. As someone who likes to push myself, I used to chuckle when my instructors would encourage us to do the opposite, to appreciate where we were and to celebrate that we were doing something rather than strain to do more and possibly hurt ourselves along the way. It was the opposite of how I was used to doing things, but I ended up embracing this kinder, gentler mentality. Frankly, if this weren’t the culture, I would probably never do yoga at all. Which is the point!
Here’s the thing. The last few years, I’ve done yoga more than I ever have, but I’m not noticeably stronger or more flexible. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m less flexible. The yoga has almost certainly slowed my deterioration, and it’s undoubtedly had other positive effects as well. However, if I want to counter or even surpass the impact of age and lifestyle, once a month clearly won’t cut it.
High-performance is a choice. It’s okay not to make that choice (as I have with yoga and my overall flexibility), but it’s helpful to be honest with yourself about it. If you’re the leader of a group, it’s not just helpful, it’s critical, because saying one thing and behaving differently can end up harming others, even if your original intentions were sincere. I have seen this play out with groups my entire career, and I’m seeing it play out again in this current moment as groups struggle with their desire to address their internal challenges around racial and gender equity.
The root of the problem is lack of clarity and alignment around what success looks like. A good indicator of this is when leaders say their groups should be doing “more,” without ever specifying how much. What do you actually mean by “more”? If you have a yoga view of the world, then “more” might imply that whatever you end up doing is fine, but not necessary. You’re not holding your group or yourself accountable to the results. If this is indeed what you mean, then it’s better to make this clear. (With the Goals + Success Spectrum, you can do this by putting it in the Epic column.)
If this isn’t what you mean, then you run the risk of doing harm. People project what “more” means to them, which leads to contradictory expectations, working at cross-purposes, and toxicity. Worse, people’s definitions can shift over time. When this happens, the person with the most power gets to decide whether or not the group is succeeding or failing, and ends up doling out the consequences accordingly.
A team can’t perform if the target is obscure and constantly moving. Furthermore, if someone is already being marginalized in a group, a system like this is only going to further marginalize them. It’s also natural to question a group or leader’s sincerity when they aren’t holding themselves accountable to clear goals.
Instead of saying “more,” groups and leaders should practice asking, “how much?” How much more revenue are you trying to make? How much more equitable are you trying to be? How much more collaborative are you trying to be? What exactly does success look like to you? Most importantly, why? Why is it important to make this much more revenue, or to get this much more equitable or collaborative?
Your answers to these questions will help you understand whether or not your strategies and even your goal make sense. If your goal is to stay in shape, then running a few miles a week might be enough. If your goal is to run a marathon, then running a few miles a week isn’t going to get you there. If you don’t want to run more, maybe it’s better to prioritize staying in shape over running a marathon.
One of my favorite tools to use with groups is the Behavior Over Time graph. Once a group has articulated what “how much” success looks like, I ask them to draw a graph, where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is the success indicator you’re tracking. I then ask them to put the current date in the middle of the X-axis and to graph their historical progress. Finally, I ask them to graph their best case scenario for what the future might look like if they continue doing what they’re doing.
For example, if my goal is to run a marathon by November, but I’m only running a few miles a week, my Behavior Over Time graph might look like this:
The gap between the best case scenario and where I want to be is a signal that I either need to do something differently or change my goal. However, someone else might have a different hypothesis for what the best case scenario is:
The goal of all this is not to rigidly quantify everything, nor is it to analyze your way to a “definitive” answer. The goal is to make your mental models and theories of change explicit, so that you and others can talk about them, align around them, test them, and either hold yourself accountable or openly and collectively adjust your goals as you learn.
Getting concrete about “how much” is a lot harder than simply saying, “more.” You might think you can do everyone a favor by keeping things ambiguous, but what you’d actually be doing is exacerbating toxic power dynamics, where everyone is left guessing what the goal actually is and starts operating accordingly.
The way around this is to do the hard work while applying the yoga principle of self-compassion. When you don’t achieve a goal, I think most of our defaults is to be hard on ourselves. The challenge and the opportunity is to re-frame success so that it’s not just about the goal, but about both the goal andthe process. If you’re doing anything hard or uncertain, failure is inevitable. What matters is that you fail enough so that you have the opportunity to find success. Holding ourselves accountable to goals is important, but celebrating our hard work and stumbles along the way is equally so.
COVID-19 has forced many of us to reckon with a working world where we can’t be face-to-face. I’ve been heartened to see how collaboration practitioners have been responding overall. I love seeing folks tapping the wisdom of their own groups before looking outward and sharing their knowledge freely and broadly.
I am especially happy to see people reminding others and themselves to pause and revisit their underlying goals rather than make hasty decisions. There is a lot of amazing digital technology out there, and it’s easy to dive head-first into these tools without considering other, technology-free interventions that might have an even greater impact in these difficult times. It’s been interesting, for example, to see so many people emphasize the importance of checkins and working agreements. When this is all over, I hope people realize that these techniques are relevant when we’re face-to-face as well.
After all, online collaboration is just collaboration. The same principles apply. It just takes practice to get them right in different contexts.
One adjustment I’d like to see more people make is to focus less on meetings. (This was a problem in our pre-COVID-19 world as well.) Meetings are indeed important, and understanding how to design and facilitate them effectively, whether face-to-face or online, is a craft that not enough people do well. However, meetings are just a tool, and a limited one at that. I’d like to offer two frameworks that help us think beyond meetings.
First, try not to think in terms of “online” or “virtual.” Instead, think in terms of work that happens at the same time (synchronous) or at different times (asynchronous), and collaboration that happens in the same or different places (remote).
Many collaboration practitioners tend to focus on synchronous collaboration — stuff that happens at the same time (which often ends up translating to meetings). I think some of the best opportunities for improving collaboration lie with asynchronous collaboration. Many of us assume that we can’t replicate the delightful experiences that are possible when people are in the same place at the same time. I think that’s narrow thinking.
Many years ago, I asked Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki (the collaborative technology that powers Wikipedia), how he would describe the essence of a wiki. He responded, “It’s when I work on something, put it out into the world, walk away, and come back later, only to find that someone else has taken it and made it better.” To me, that beautifully describes what’s possible when asynchronous collaboration is working well, and it resonates with my own experiences. It also offers a North Star for what we’re trying to achieve when we’re designing for asynchronous collaboration.
Second, it’s important to remember that collaboration consists of three different kinds of work: task, relationship, and sensemaking. Breaking collaboration into these three categories can offer greater guidance into how to design and facilitate asynchronous work more effectively.
For example, a common type of task work for knowledge workers is creating documents. Agreeing on a single place for finding and editing documents hugely simplifies people’s abilities to collaborate asynchronously. It also better facilitates the kind of experience that Ward described than, say, emailing documents back-and-forth.
A common sensemaking exercise is the stand-up meeting, where everyone on a team announces what they’re working on and where they need help. (People are asked to stand up during these meetings to encourage people to keep their updates brief.) You could easily do a stand-up meeting online, but aggregating and re-sharing status updates over email is potentially more efficient and effective.
One interesting side effect of so many people meeting over video while sheltering in place is that we literally get a window into each other’s homes and even our families and pets, an emergent form of relationship-building. Pamela Hinds , who has long studied distributed work, calls this “contextual knowledge” and has often cited it as a key factor for successful remote, asynchronous collaboration. (It’s why, when we were designing the Delta Dialogues, a high-conflict project focused on water issues in the Sacramento Delta, we chose to rotate the meetings at people’s offices rather than at a neutral location. We wanted people to experience each other’s workplaces to enhance their sense of connection with each other.)
Once we recognize this form of relationship-building as useful, we can start to think about how to do it asynchronously. In my Colearning community of practice, which consists of ten collaboration practitioners across the U.S. and Canada, each of us posts a weekly personal checkin over Slack, often sharing photos and videos of our loved ones. We post and browse at our own convenience, and the ritual and the artifacts forge bonds that run deeper than what would be possible with, say, a monthly video call, which would be incredibly hard to schedule and would almost certainly prevent some of us from participating.
Similarly, we don’t need video to see each other’s faces. A trick I stole from Marcia Conner many years ago — well before video was ubiquitous — was to get silly photos of everyone on the team, combine them in a document, and have everybody print and post it on their office wall. This not only enhanced our conversations when we were talking over the phone, it created a constant sense of connection and fun even when we weren’t in a room together.
While I hope these examples dispel the notion that synchronous collaboration is inherently more delightful and impactful than asynchronous, I also want to acknowledge that designing for asynchronous collaboration is more challenging. I think there are two reasons for this.
First, you have to compensate for lack of attention. When everyone is in a room together, it’s easier to get and keep people’s attention. When people are on their own, you have no control over their environment. You have to leverage other tools and techniques for success, and you’re unlikely to get 100 percent follow-through.
The two most common tools for compensating for lack of attention are the artifact and the ritual. An artifact is something tangible, something that you can examine on your own time, whether it’s a written document, a picture, or Proust’s Madeleine. A ritual is an action — often with some cultural significance — that’s repeated. It could be a rule (with enforcement) or a norm that people just do. It’s effective, because it becomes habitual, which means people are able to do it without thought.
The trick is finding the right balance of artifacts and rituals. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously requires people to write a six-page memo before meetings, but they designate shared time at the beginning of each meeting to read the memo together. On the one hand, writing the memo requires discipline and attention in-between meetings, or asynchronously. On the other hand, rather than save meeting time by having people read the memos beforehand, they devote synchronous time to reading the memos together. I can guess the reasons for this, but the truth is that I don’t know what they are. Different practices work in different contexts. Everybody has to figure out what works for themselves. Certain kinds of cultures — especially transparent, iterative, developmental ones — will be more conducive to these kinds of practices.
Finally, our relationship to technology matters, but maybe not in the way you think. On the one hand, if you are going to use a tool for collaboration, then it’s important to learn how to use it fluently and wield it skillfully. On the other hand, technology has this way of making you forget what you already know. It may be that the tools that will be most helpful for you have nothing to do with the latest and greatest digital technology.
This has always been easy for me to understand, because I have always had an uncomplicated relationship with technology. I love technology, but its role is to serve me, not the other way around. When I design structures and processes for collaboration, I always start with people, not tools, and I try to help others do the same.
What I’ve come to realize over the years is that this is often hard for others, because they’re worried about what they don’t know and they have a block when it comes to learning about technology. I get this. I have blocks about learning many things, and I know that advice that amounts to “get over it” is not helpful. Please recognize that these feelings are not only real, they’re okay. While I’d encourage everyone to find peers and resources that help them learn about digital tools in a way that feels safe, I also want to remind you that collaboration is ultimately about people. Keeping your humanity front and center will not only help you with your transitions to remote work, it will help you through this crisis.
I discovered weights freshman year in college, and as a weak and skinny kid, I found them to be a revelation. One of my friends had played football in high school, and he and I would work out together often. He worked out hard — at least five days a week — and I liked his routine, so I adopted something similar.
I rapidly gained strength, but I also peaked quickly. Naturally, I tried working out more, but it didn’t seem to help. I maintained more or less the same routine throughout my sophomore year without any significant gains, which I found frustrating and demotivating. It led to long stretches where I would stop working out altogether.
Junior year, I restarted my workouts, and again saw little progress. My next door neighbor that year turned out to be a serious bodybuilder. One day, I asked him for advice. I started by telling him how much I worked out, and he cut me off. “You’re working out too much,” he said. “Your body needs rest to recover and build muscle. Try doing 45 minutes three days a week.”
“Are you sure?” I asked incredulously. Everything he said made sense except for his specific recommendation, which amounted to half as much as I had been doing for years.
“Try it,” he insisted.
I did. After just a few weeks, I saw marked improvement for the first time in over a year. I was floored. It turned out that, in order to get stronger, I just had to do less.
The Power of the Pause
I am often approached by groups with go-go-go cultures asking how to:
Align their structures and behaviors with their desired values and culture (often, these days, with a focus on equity)
When I hear more about their current situations, I often find myself channeling my bodybuilder friend. You can't do any of these things if you aren't regularly slowing down to pause, to:
Reflect together
Listen deeply to each other
Have hard conversations with each other
Make adjustments
Rest and recover
If you're not committed to developing your muscles around pausing, you not only will not succeed at any of the above, you may even hurt yourselves.
When my friend told me to try working out less, I was more than happy to try, even though I was skeptical. When I tell other collaboration practitioners they need to practice pausing, I get the same skepticism, but none of the joy. There are reasons why they are go-go-go, and trying to shift those habits and mindsets is not only very hard, it can be downright anxiety-inducing.
I know this all too well. For the first dozen years of my career as a collaboration practitioner, I was the worst perpetuator of this go-go-go mindset. It took me six years of consistent effort and constant failure along with a health scare to learn how to slow down. It's made me a better person and a better practitioner, and it's also made me tremendously empathetic to others who are suffering from similar afflictions.
I blogged a lot about my journey as I was going through it, both on my personal blog and on this one. I also shared a tool — my Self-Care Dashboard — that ended up being enormously useful. But I never bothered writing about how I eventually turned a corner, how I've been able to sustain this balance, and the impact it's had on my life and my work. I'd like to correct that here, both to complete the record and also hopefully to offer actionable encouragement to other practitioners dealing with this challenge.
Developing Bad Habits
The first thing to know about my go-go-go ways is that I wasn't always this way. I was capable of tremendous focus and endurance, especially when it came to things I was passionate about, but I also valued my chill-out time. My childhood was spacious and wonderful, full of time to think, explore, and zone out. My first few years after college were similar, which enabled me to realize my passion for collaboration as well as to develop some initial practices.
My lifestyle started to change for the worse when I cofounded my first collaboration consultancy in 2002. I was extremely fortunate to have a mentor who taught and encouraged me and a cofounder with whom I could play and learn. But I was also in my 20s with no formal experience and a job description that I had more or less made up. Moreover, we were trying to make do in a down economy.
Needless to say, business was not good. I went into debt and barely scratched a living for several years before things slowly started turning around. It was stressful and unhealthy, and even though I was barely making any money, I found myself working all the time. I was also young and single, and I suffered a bit from the Silicon Valley mindset that idolatrized struggle before success. I thought I was simply paying my dues, like any good entrepreneur or changemaker, and if business ever got better, I promised myself that I would return to my more balanced ways. Unfortunately, I was not precise with myself about what "business getting better" looked like, and my difficult habits and scarcity mindset continued to perpetuate themselves.
In 2009, three things converged, causing me to finally reconsider my ways. First, I experienced the painful end of a long relationship. Second, I was massively burned out. Third, my then four-year old nephew, whom I adored (and still adore), came to visit San Francisco for the first time ever, but I was so busy that week, I barely spent any time with him. I was extremely upset about this, and it caused me to reflect deeply on what I was doing and how I could change.
First Steps
One of the first and best things I did was to hire a coach. She helped me to articulate a clear vision of what a balanced life looked like for me. Put simply, all of the best, most balanced times of my life had three things in common: basketball, books, and lots of time with family and friends. Imagining a life replete with these three things made me feel light and happy, and they became my personal North Star.
The next step was to understand what, professionally, was preventing me from having these things. Two answers quickly came to mind: Bad habits perpetuated by a fear of not making enough money and a constant feeling of isolation. I was lucky to have community, but what I needed were colleagues. If I could make more money, and if I felt like I was part of a team, I thought I might take a break every once in a while, which would hopefully and eventually lead to me to my North Star.
I still had more questions than answers, but I made two concrete changes as a result of my coaching sessions. First, I raised my rates for the first time in seven years. More money, I reasoned, would give me more space. I considered myself to be one of the top people in the field, and I had known for years that my rate was not commensurate with others, but my deeply engrained fear of not getting enough work had prevented me from raising them earlier.
Second, I decided that I would never take on another complex systems change project without an equal partner. This decision both thrilled and terrified me. On the one hand, I craved partnership. On the other hand, it meant that I wasn’t just raising my rates, I was essentially raising and doubling them. Would I ever get any work again? I believed, in my head, that I would. I had seen others do it, so I knew it was possible, but I was still really scared.
Fortunately, I was able to test these changes almost immediately. The CIO of a Fortune 100 company approached me about some possible work. He fit the profile of a lot of past clients, in that he had tried working with a few traditional (and very expensive) management consulting firms, he had been dissatisfied with their results, and he was looking for something more outside-the-box. He was already talking to some prestigious design firms, when a colleague mentioned me as a possible candidate.
I felt excited about the possibility of working with him, I knew that budget was not going to be an issue for him the way it might be for a smaller organization, and I already had someone in mind with whom I wanted to partner. I thought my chances of getting the work was low, which emboldened me to really go for it — to put together a team of folks with whom I really wanted to work and to propose what I felt would be the ideal project without constraining myself. When I put together my budget, I could feel my palms sweating and my heart beating. I had managed projects with large budgets before, but I had never before written a proposal for that large a sum of money.
Somehow, we got the work! He and his team turned out to be dream clients, and a few members of the team I had pulled together became the core of the consulting firm I cofounded one year later.
After we secured a verbal agreement with our client, we had to work through some bureaucracy. I had been planning a vacation a few months in advance, but as the date approached, we had still not agreed on an actual contract, and I felt old anxieties cropping up. I strongly considered canceling my vacation, but my partner insisted that she had everything under control and that I should not only go, but fully disconnect while I was gone. I listened to her, and everything worked out. The structures I had created and the people with whom I had surrounded myself liberated me to take my vacation, my first in eight years.
Falling Over and Over Again
I felt relaxed for the first time in my career, and it was showing in the work. I was excited about new opportunities, and I loved everyone with whom I was working. More importantly, my life was feeling more spacious. I thought I had turned a corner. Unfortunately, I had confused taking a few steps with walking. I still had a lot of inner and outer work to do, and — as it turned out — I was going to have to fall a lot more along the way.
Things started getting out of balance again when a few of us decided to formalize our partnership. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to build together and how. In addition to being great consultants and building a great company that modeled our values, I wanted to explore ways of working outside of consulting, as I was feeling like we were reaching the ceiling of the impact that consulting could have. But, in theory at least, I was happy for that to be a stage two project, focusing our initial energies on building a great consultancy.
Over the course of several months, we converged on three priorities for our first year, the third of which was, “Space for Renewal, Learning, and Play.” Everyone was fully committed and aligned around this goal, and we did some things well. We did a good job of protecting other people’s time. We instituted practices such as starting all of our meetings with checkins, a tiny, but much needed pause that enabled us to breathe and be human together on a regular basis. We started tracking our time, which we all hated, but which gave us real data to see how we were doing collectively and to make adjustments accordingly. I designated my Wednesdays as "play days," which at minimum meant no meetings and at maximum meant open time to read, experiment, or simply take a break.
Unfortunately, I was still falling back on a lot of terrible habits. Running a company is stressful. A lot of people are depending on you to bring in revenue and to create a healthy, thriving work environment. I also felt urgency to do more. On top of the day-to-day challenges of building a successful consultancy, I was anxious to at least start exploring models outside of consulting, even though we had agreed not to prioritize this that first year.
All of this pressure — some real, some self-imposed — kickstarted my superhero complex. It was important to me that everyone else on the team had balance in their lives, but I believed that I could make do without, at least temporarily. I was motivated, I was confident in my endurance, and I felt it would move all of us forward without harming anyone. Besides, it would only be for a little while. Once we got over the hump, I could focus on restoring balance for myself.
Of course, it didn't work out this way. As a leader, I was not modeling the behaviors I was professing to prioritize. Everyone noticed this, everyone felt stressed by this, and — fortunately for me — everyone called me out on this. Moreover, intense stress and not enough rest was making me a bad teammate. It also was impacting my health. I thought I felt okay, but I discovered at a regular checkup that my blood pressure was alarmingly high.
This was the ultimate wakeup call for me. I needed to prioritize balance immediately. My life literally depended on it.
Turning the Corner
Shortly after founding my company, I started tracking a set of self-care practices every week on a dashboard that all of my peers could see. It was stark to see how often I neglected all of my self-care practices, including the low-hanging fruit, such as going for a walk. The simple act of tracking helped me make sure I was always doing some form of self-care, which was an important start.
However, it also made me see that "some" self-care was not going to be enough. This forced me to explore more deeply why I wasn’t able to make time to take better care of myself. I realized that working made me feel powerful and in control. When I felt like things were going poorly in my personal life, I defaulted to working as a way of feeling better about myself. I needed to confront these patterns head-on. I also adopted some simple tactics that helped. In particular, I took up photography as a hobby, which served as a much-needed creative outlet, helped reconnect me to my community, and unexpectedly had a profound impactprofessionally.
All of this core work turned out to be critical for me to implement the simplest and hardest solution of them all. In order to work less, I needed to stop doing something. That meant taking something off my list, which I had never managed to do.
I decided to leave the company I had co-founded, which — to this day — remains the hardest professional decision I have ever made. Leaving helped a lot. I was able to maintain a modicum of balance for the next few years, but I noticed that I easily fell back into old habits. I re-focused on working less, even declaring my intentions here on this blog. Repetition helped, and I was finally getting the hang of being real with myself and taking things off my plate. But, as it turned out, I needed to do one more thing before I truly turned a corner. I needed to stop checking my email so often.
Turning off my work email before dinner and on weekends had long been on my list of self-care practices. They were the easiest to do, and yet, after three years of tracking, they were the things I practiced the least. All of my hard work finally made it possible for me to do these “simple” things, and my self-care scores soared as a result. More importantly, it felt good. It turns out my email behavior was a good leading indicator of how much balance I had and also a keystone habit that unlocked other important practices.
In September 2016, I went to my self-care dashboard — as I had been doing every week for over four years — and decided that I didn't need to track anymore. After six long years of failing over and over again, I felt like I had finally achieved the balance I was seeking.
The following year, my nephew and his little brother came to visit me in San Francisco for the first time since that crazy week in 2009. I cleared my schedule so that I could maximize my time with them. We played basketball every morning, we went on long walks, and we ate delicious food. As I drove them to the airport at the end of their trip, I started to cry, not just because they were leaving, but because I remembered what my life and work was like the first time my nephew had visited eight years earlier, and I felt grateful for how my life had changed since.
Takeaways
It's been five years since I stopped tracking my self-care practices, and I've maintained this balance since. Not only am I as happy, healthy, and fulfilled as I've ever been, I am a significantly better collaboration practitioner than I ever was. Just as my bodybuilder friend explained with weightlifting, to get better at my work, I “simply” had to learn how to do less.
I share these stories not because I've landed on some magic formula for achieving self-care and work-life balance. Everyone's story and circumstances are unique, and I don't want to pretend that what worked for me will work for everyone. I share these stories, because I want folks to know that self-care is really, really hard. If you don’t already have work-life balance, there are likely very real, very hard reasons for this — both internal and external.
Achieving balance requires hard work, experimentation, and tons of support, and — if your experiences are anything like mine — you will fail over and over again. Even if you manage to achieve balance, you will always have to work to maintain it. You will constantly face obstacles, and old habits and mindsets will continue to rear their ugly heads. At the same time, achieving balance will also strengthen your faith in the importance and power of going slow, which will serve as motivation for you to continue your practices.
This matters, especially for collaboration practitioners trying to improve the performance of their groups. Working with urgency is not the same as working urgently. In order to be agile and impactful, in order to learn as you go, in order to do values-aligned work, pausing regularly isn't nice, it's necessary. One of the most powerful acts of leadership — regardless of your job title — is to model this. It's hard, but it may end up being the most important and impactful work that you do.
