Too busy to improve

There’s one cartoon I’ve returned to probably more than any other over the years. You’ve likely seen it – two cavemen are dragging a cart with square wheels. A third caveman offers them round wheels, but they wave him off as they rush past “No thanks - We are too busy!”

The nature of our adrenaline-fuelled #GETSHITDONE culture means that the compulsion to tick things off the To-Do list often outweighs the wiser urge to pause, reflect and learn.

I should know – a decade as a workshop Experience Designer and Facilitator - all learnt on the job. Which is fine I guess, until it isn’t and you realise, as I did, that I was at the edge of my capability. So this year I made myself stop ‘doing’ long enough to ask What exactly am I doing? And more pertinently, Why?

I signed up for the ‘Flourishing Facilitator’, a four month course run by Kirsty Lewis. I could write an essay about the many many things I learnt from the experience - and how wonderful Kirsty is - but in the interests of brevity I’ll restrain myself. All I’ll say for now is that exquisite flowers should be thrown at her feet and folk songs composed in her honour.

My biggest takeaway? A question so simple and fundamental that it might be quietly driving your decisions too:

❓ Are you driven more by Fear or Opportunity? 

I realised the insecurity of being self-taught meant that many of my workshop designs were based on avoiding ‘failure’ rather than maximising potential. “What if it goes wrong?” my System 1 brain would whisper. “What if I get found out?”

That’s when my rational, System 2 brain tried to compensate, spinning up an array of contingency plans to create a sense of control. But that, as Dr Claire Lewicki reminds us and Cole Trickle, is a fantasy.

🚀 What Kirsty’s course gave me — beyond practical skills and fresh theory — was the confidence to shift from  ‘I don’t know how to do that’ to ‘I don’t know how to do that… YET’ – a tiny difference but, take it from me, one that can make a world of difference (for more on this check out the YT video ‘Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck’).

The writer David Foster Wallace said, “Real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own”. He could have easily replaced the word ‘Leader’ with ‘Facilitator’ – because of course the best are both. If you are a fellow facilitator looking to polish up your skills and expand the perceptions of your own potential do check out Kirsty’s course.

Dr Carol Lewicki (Nicole Kidman) tells Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise) how it is: Paramount Pictures’ ‘Days of Thunder’ (1990)