SLOWING – a power principle to understand

Welcome back Viphilus*

“If passion drives then let reason hold the reins.”  Ben Franklin

Just over a week ago, Debbie and I conducted a workshop for more than 60 women who were celebrating International Women’s Day. The subject was on effective living (specifically, we wanted to bust some myths about a balanced-life) and our workshop focus was on the link between human stress and how we spend our time. From the reactions to our material and subsequent conversations, there were a lot of surprises for this group … things that they had never heard before. But nobody was more shocked than I was when I asked how many had heard about the Eisenhower* time matrix, and only 3 people raised their hand. (* - the urgent vs. important matrix)

Considering that it has been mainstream teaching in all time-management books and courses for decades, and that for me, it is one of the cleverest self-awareness tools out there, I was incredulous that it was still new to anyone. That cinched it for me … it needed to be discussed in this blog, and right away. Before we get to that though, I’ve learned over the years that I need to come at this tool carefully in order for its full depth and power to be appreciated. Therefore, I’m going to back up to a statement that I made near the end of my last post:

"All human beings are born as hedonists ... pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures." 

As I said last time, this was a teaching point in a course that I took on how the brain works. Despite it being an unappetizing “truth” for me, I can’t argue with the statement. In fact, I believe it to be a key truth in understanding yourself, especially your self-sabotaging nature.

We are born with strong animal instincts for survival and a genetic predisposition towards seeking pleasurable things and avoiding painful things. As we grow older and develop a conscience and a will and something along the lines of self-determination (one of the things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom), we know that we need to subordinate those basic instincts to our control … to our will. The thing is, these instincts are powerful beyond imagination and will completely dominate us unless we learn how to tame the beast within us so that we act like a human being and not like an animal.

The analogy of taming this beast is brought out very well in Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,” where he cites the Buddha similie where every person is like a rider on an elephant; the rider is the rational conscious part of the brain and the elephant is the more emotional subconscious part. 

The rider knows where he wants to go … he wants to be good and do good and he wants to head in directions that are noble, principled, spiritual and altruistic. The elephant, on the other hand, is stubbornly selfish, lazy, hates pain and is only interested in what is safe and pleasurable. AND .... the rider is easily exhaustible while the elephant seems endlessly energized. One yeah, one more thing; the elephant spooks easily at change.

It was probably with this analogy in mind that prompted the Ben Franklin quote at the top of this post. [side note: the Heath brothers … Chip and Dan … turned the elephant/rider analogy into a brilliant strategy for how to effectively bring about change when change is hard … check out their book SWITCH].

OK … here’s the deal. This inner conflict between the rider and the elephant is really a civil war going on inside of us. This isn’t a new discovery; it’s been known about for millennia. If you want the Christian take on this you can look to Jesus who said, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” or the Apostle Paul, who actually describes the civil war in himself in great detail in Romans 7. Perhaps you are more sanguine to something a little more recent such as the Canadian First Nations story (which, by the way, made a great heritage-moment commercial) where a chief tells a young boy that inside each of us lives two wolves, one who makes us do good and one who makes us do bad; when the young boy asks the chief which wolf wins, the chief offers, “the one you feed.” 

Of course, even this is just a reworking of Plato’s charioteer with two horses (a good one and a bad one). 

Maybe you want a (somewhat) fresher version from the likes of Freud with his teaching on the id, ego and superego. 

Then again, maybe you’re completely satisfied with the simplest version of all … the Hollywood depiction of the little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.

Personally, I really like the elephant and rider analogy because it fits well with the social science and human performance data … something we will visit in the posts to come. Here are the two driving truths about the elephant:

1. The elephant doesn’t just want pleasure … it wants pleasure NOW. In fact, it wants the pleasure NOW so badly that it is willing to borrow tomorrow’s pleasure and bring it into today, or like in Æsop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs (a fable about the unprofitability of greed), it brings the pleasure of all-the-tomorrrows into today. But here’s the rub … the elephant will do this even if it knows that by bringing the pleasure into today, not only will tomorrow’s pleasure be zero, today’s pleasure will actually be a diminished version of what tomorrow’s pleasure would have been. Of course, this is that whole conversation about delayed gratification that brings to mind marshmallows and cookies. 
2. The elephant is also highly motivated to experience no pain NOW. In fact, it so desperately wants to avoid any pain NOW that it is quite content to delay the pain until tomorrow … even knowing that when tomorrow arrives, the pain might actually be much worse. All it knows is that it just can’t handle that pain NOW.

This pleasure-NOW, no-pain-NOW nature within all of us is what creates the urgency paradigm that we all find so powerful and compelling. The elephant has the power - this is the principle we need to understand; all that remains is to teach the rider how to train his elephant. 

Now we can discuss the matrix.

U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower once said something along the lines, “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” It’s reported that from this, he created the simple 2X2 matrix that you see here and used it to decide how he would spend his time.

The science/math guy in me loves this matrix because it creates a valid 2-dimensional function space with truly orthogonal (independent) variables. Application, in plain English?  It helps us keep two things separate which we find almost impossible to separate, especially in the battle conditions we call real life.

Whether Eisenhower was correct in his statement is less important than this fact; important and urgent are two independent things. Something can be both, either or neither of these, but they mean two very different things.

IMPORTANT – these are things which are:
1. Important to you, although not necessarily to anyone else.
2. Important to you (in an absolute sense), even if you didn’t know it.

URGENT – these are things which cannot be done at your discretion … there is a timeliness about them that is not under your control; this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be done immediately, but they also cannot be postponed just because you don’t have the time to do them.

Think about it. Which are you more likely to respond to (or react to) … something that is urgent, or something that is important? (this is not rhetorical … answer this to yourself). If you are at all like the other 7 billion people on this planet, then you have an elephant underneath your rider, which means that until the rider learns how to take control, you are governed, more or less, by the tyranny of the urgent.  

You want a real-life example of how you might respond to urgent even when it is not important (or worse, how you might respond to an urgency even though you know that your response is contrary to what you have declared to be important, leading you to behave incongruently with your beliefs or principles)? Let me give you three:

1. Your child asks for something and screams in rage when he doesn’t get it. You give in to whatever he wants, even though you know you are creating a dangerous habit and are training him that all he needs to do to get his own way is to scream. But you do it so that he will stop screaming NOW, even if it is just for 5 minutes. Correcting him takes time and effort (energy) and the rage will not stop immediately … so acquiescence is just easier (though not better).
2. You have a significant report to write and your manager needs it in one week. You know it will take a full day to do it but it involves a lot of mind-numbing data-mining that is anathema to you, so you defer it to the weekend. You have the time now but the thought of getting started NOW is simply overwhelming. The weekend seems like a better option even though it means you’ll need your spouse to keep the kids busy while you get it done, and your promise of spending the weekend with the family just got broken … but they’ll get over it … they always do.
3. You are really hungry (famished actually) and get home just in time to smell the most incredible dinner on the stove. You wonder what deliciousness your mom has prepared, but instead discover your twin brother stirring a pot of lentil stew. You can’t imagine why it smells so amazing, but all you know is that you haven’t eaten for a day or two, so you demand a bowl. Your brother says, “sure, just sign over your share of the inheritance from Mom and Dad’s estate.” Whaaaaa? Is he insane? For a bowl of stew? Funny thing is you find yourself saying yes before you can stop yourself. All you know is that you are hungry NOW … who cares about anything later … it’s all about NOW!

Is this worth giving up your inheritance?

Who would do these things?  Well I watch #1 happening all around me … #2 was a story about me from my younger years … and #3 is actually a guy named Esau (and the brother who took advantage of him?  Israel … as in the guy after whom the nation was named).

Everyone responds to urgent more than important every day … many times a day. It is a primary root cause for much of our self-sabotage. Authors Loehr and Schwartz call this unconscious behaviour modification, “expedient adaptations.” We will spend an entire post on just this in the coming weeks.

When I teach this topic in workshops or coaching I actually refer to the matrix as the Eisenhower-Covey time matrix, simply because Stephen Covey is the one who really popularized it in his 1989 best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (which for me is probably amongst the top 10 most important books I have read in my life).  

Here is how Covey characterized the people who spend the majority of their time in each quadrant:

If you can’t wait until I cover this more comprehensively in a future post, take 5 minutes now to troll the web and see the thousands of variations of this matrix and how it is used to teach about time-management (just type into Google, “Eisenhower time matrix” and then select “images” rather than “web”). Enjoy! But please come back to this post.

Promise: I will come back to this in much greater detail (including an interesting look at how stress and energy factor into this matrix). For today’s purpose, I just wanted to get you into the mode of thinking about how you respond to urgency in your life, rather than responding to things just because they are important. It is our over-dependence on urgency that revs us up on the inside … hence, the need to lower those RPMs by intentionally choosing to slow down (strategically – tactically).

Over time we train ourselves that the urgency-paradigm is normal and we even convince ourselves that it’s a healthy way of living. Such distortion can lead to things like procrastination, something not intuitively linked to the urgency-paradigm. See if this describes you; you believe that the pressure of a later, more imminent deadline will focus your thinking and energy and you have convinced yourself that, “I will put this off until the last minute because I work better under pressure.” In reality, all you have done is to confuse the good stress of doing what is important to you, with the bad stress of working under an artificial time-constraint. In the end, you sabotage yourself by seeking out that which is self-limiting and potentially self-destructive. You don’t actually function better ... you simply respond as you’ve trained yourself.

Did I just get a bit too personal?  I’m not sorry (a statement which makes me a bad Canadian ... for which I must apologize).

Borrowed image from AKWAABLOG!

Urgency helps us create artificial emergencies which, in turn, help us to produce adrenalin on-demand. Most people have become adrenalin junkies and believe that this is the best way to live. Adrenalin is a wonderful hormone that gives us instant power to deal with a stressor via fight or flight. That’s it! But, re-arranging our life to create artificial survival conditions is akin to having an IV-bag strung over our shoulder with a permanent adrenalin drip. Sounds great you might say. Nope. Not good. Continual presence of adrenalin in the system causes the vital organs to break down. But long before that happens, the addiction has already delivered exactly what all addictions deliver: increasing craving with decreasing enjoyment/benefit. Oh, and I forgot to mention that a long-term presence of adrenalin in the system also creates chronic fatigue and sickness. What started as a sensational rush has now become a necessity for functioning … with diminished capacity as the legacy.

From the perspective of trying to slow down, the main point is to begin shifting away from things which motivate you simply because of their urgency and start shifting towards doing things simply because they are important to you. When we look at the stress side of this discussion it will become very clear why this is one the most dysfunctional habits that we can have … and why I believe SLOWING to be life’s most important habit.

Next week I’ll get personal and give you some ways to investigate your own urgency paradigm and evaluate the degree of your addiction. It’s not about whether or not you are addicted; the question is, “how much?”

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"