What Are You Going to Drop … and What Does Dropping It Cost You?
What Are You Going to Drop … and What Does Dropping It Cost You?
By W. Owen Thornton
Whenever you pick up some new activity whether its doing something for yourself, your employer or a volunteer organization, the first question you have to ask the principal people involved is, “What am I going to drop?” Unless, for some specific reason you have lived under a rock for the last 20 years and you literally have nothing to do then I’m guessing you already have more on your plate than you can handle: it’s the way we live in this society. One of the great costs to our society today is stress from over-commitment and I include in that scenario, things we desire to do that help practice human kindness. Picking up something new comes at a cost of something precious: your time! If we’re going to practice human kindness in the 21st Century, we need to be real and we need to examine what we’re going to drop … and what dropping that old ‘thing/duty/responsibility’ means.
I once heard a man say that his life wasn’t going to change simply because he and his wife were having a baby. I don’t know about any of you, but when you step back from that statement my reaction to it ranges from the low response of short-sighted to the incredulous: are you sure you should be having children? I would assume people have children because they WANT their lives to change … that they want to spend time with their own, new family!
We can have good or bad transitions when taking on something new whether it is a child or a new, large client. Bad transitions occur because of lack of planning and thought – a true understanding of what accepting a new duty or responsibility really means. Is this new duty or responsibility truly a feather in our cap or will it become a pain in the neck? Each thing we may be forced to give up because of a new responsibility may lead us to resent the new task. “I liked my life before I took on this assignment!” Suddenly we’re not doing the either the old tasks or the new one well. We become stressed out and unhappy. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s real.
For example: Give a busy service representative (marketing/sales team member) a large new, premier client, but don’t take anything away. These large clients can be a gravy train and a major drain. Someone has to service them 24-7. Sometimes they make large demands on small items. Even if they are reasonable clients, the other clients in that marketing/sales team member’s list suffer the consequences. Smaller, preexisting clients begin to feel like they’re getting short shrift. Some start to leave. The employee starts to feel like they are failing their old client list. A quick examination of what’s going on and the employee sees the problem immediately. All the added work from the big new client, something that was supposed to be a boon to the employee, is adding more stress, lowering service quality and creating tension in the office. I don’t even have to look up a stat on the cost of stress on companies and how many billions are lost each year in North America due to employees taking unscheduled mental health days.
Likewise if you want to start working out, meditating, or volunteering for a charitable organization … these great things can bring on the same stresses if we first fail to examine our lives to see what we can drop before we pick up something new. The human kindness project wants you to become real. It also wants you to realize that there may be more to just examining your life and dropping something to make time for a new activity. It may be even more complicated than you think.
The more I read, the more I seem to be learning that nearly everything we do creates some kind of chemical release in the brain that addicts us to a particular activity. Feel bad, take a bite of food, feel the release of the happy chemicals in your brain. Feel stress, pull out a cigarette, light it up and even though the chemicals inside the cigarette ramp up your body, I’m betting there is a positive endorphin release that temporarily makes you think you’re relaxing at the moment you breath out that first big lungful of smoke!
So if you want to invite the neighbour kid to go swimming with your son, you have to make the call, sit and observe them having fun (forget about doing anything for yourself what with all the, “Look-it me, Mom! Watch this Dad!” fun-yelling going on!). What have you dropped to allow you to enjoy this moment without secretly wishing your kids didn’t have to have friends which waste your freaking time?
How then can any of us practice ‘Active Human Kindness’ where we go out of our way to do nice things for ourselves and others without resenting all that time loss? The answer is simple, but I’m betting you don’t want to hear it.
We have to stop wanting so much stuff. Remember the term the Process of Adaption? It goes something like this! People were surveyed and they were asked how many things they needed before life was perfect. The answer was three. Ten years later, they were asked how many of those things they had acquired … the boat, the large-screen TV, the cottage on Lake Perfect … and the answer was something just over 1.5 of those three items. Then they were asked how many things they needed to make things perfect now and the answer was still … three.
We live on a treadmill of working to acquire stuff that doesn’t make us happy. After about a year, that thing we always wanted doesn’t mean anything to us any more. It becomes a part of the way of our lives and suddenly we need something new to make life perfect … or perhaps the word is, ‘we need something even cooler and newer to make life perfecter!’ (And the tension in our lives continues to mount throughout this process too. If we still possess the last purchase we need an income that supports it plus the three more things we still desire. The more stuff we have and hold onto, the more stress we have in our lives to keep them!)
There’s a problem with stuff. It does seem that we end up selling our souls to work for the stuff that stacks up in our closets and goes virtually unused. Simplifying our lives and wanting less may be the name of the game. How many times do we have to go around the ‘work-hard-buy-toys-we-don’t-have-time-for cycle,’ before we wake up and realize life has GOT TO BE BETTER THAN THAT! Stuff also prevents human kindness. Stuff is all about getting stuff for us. The focus is wrong. Stuff places the focus on us, when everything we’ve learned and read here on this website is that life is about being together, not being alone with our great us-ness! I have found that I am not that interesting to me. I am interested in other people though!
I know full well that if I’m asking you to read these articles, and then to do something kind for others, I am asking you to give up something else … something that probably doesn’t work for you, but that does give you a positive chemical ‘hit’ in your brain (which makes giving that other thing up far more difficult than we might think). We have to consider carefully what thing we think works for us that really isn’t working. Then we have to forgo the nice brain chemical ‘hit’ we get when we give it up. Even Dr. Phil has it right when he says that we don’t change so much as we give up one thing for another so we keep getting the same result but from a better, hopefully healthier and more meaningful activity.
Thus, before we pick up that new habit we had better be sure we really want to give up something that’s currently in our lives right now. Otherwise we won’t stick with the new habit. We’ll resent it. It will stand in the way of us and our old friends – whatever they may be. The old brain chemistry will drag us back to our old ways too easily. These old habits, these old friends as I have called them, seem to come from the dark side of the Force!
The last thing we need to have when we want to change our lives so that we can let in something new … something like active human kindness towards others … is that we need to find vision. Our lives in Western Society to this point, mine included, seem to be built from the framework that the tale is wagging the dog. We’ve let these dull, boring routines and the desire for stuff creep into our psyche, we’ve let our brain chemistry addict us to them and then we can’t change even when we desire to.
By vision I mean we need to see a big picture of how our lives and those around us will be so much better when I set aside five medium clients and give those to Bob and Jan, so that I can concentrate and do a great job for the one, big, new client. Rather than continue to think I’m superman and can do it all, I need to simplify first. In fact, I once heard the analogy of work and its’ vast ‘to-do’ list be considered as an aircraft carrier. Show your boss the planes you have lined up on the deck of your carrier. If he’s asking you to launch a new series of planes then explain, “Here’s what I’m working on and here’s what’s coming down the runway. Now where do you desire me to put your planes, in what order and which of these ones currently on deck can I delay from launching.” Reality can be an illuminating thing.
So in the end, what do we need to do when we consider taking on a new project? Simple. Let go of the need for stuff. Overcome the real, physical brain chemistry addiction to old behviours (difficult). Grieve the loss of the old things (this seems foolish but it is a necessary step). Grieve the loss of the old things repeatedly because the regret will come back to haunt you from time to time. And most importantly have vision for what life will be like should you make the change. Practice actively seeing the world as a better place with you doing fewer things. Find time to do the things that bring about human kindness. Have the vision, live the dream and one day, because you started acting actively kind towards friends and strangers, someone’s going to so something so incredible for you, you will not believe it! And then it will become all worthwhile.
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