Currently, more and more people are feeling isolated, overwhelmed, and vulnerable, especially given the COVID-19 situation this spring. We have lost a sense of connection in a world of connectivity, a sense of community, and a sense of safety. For some, life has become nothing more than a meaningless process of getting stuff done and spending more and more time numbing ourselves from the uncertainty of life, the suffering, and the pain .
Some of us as leaders are suffering from task fatigue. Murr Brewster in her article called “Me, my garbage cans, and the spinning of the globe” in the January 27, 2020 issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly wrote: “Two generations ago (in my family, at least), people had ways of coping with cold. They might have preferred not to bring the cows into the barn through a North Dakota snowdrift, but they could do it; they could bundle up, and they could prevail. For thousands of years, people have managed to feed themselves and regulate their temperatures.
Today we are bundled up in layers of tasks - places we think we need to be and things we think we need to do - and extreme weather has turned into more of a calamity. We’re almost undone if we can’t drive to the store.”
In some families, our children and their lives are just becoming “one more thing to get done”, too. And if we are not suffering from task fatigue, we are overwhelmed with decision fatigue or future fatigue. We never really get a break from making decisions or worrying about the future. With no boundaries between work and home, work decisions and home decisions are all mixed up and impacting each other.
In certain situations, some leaders are still suffering from confidentiality fatigue, i.e. we carry the burden of knowing too much that we can not share. Others are adding to this list compassion fatigue, i.e. there are too many people to care for at one time.
The outcome of all this fatigue is that we feel depleted which leaves us with two courses of action. First, we make careless choices. Or second, we surrender to the status quo and do nothing. We forget that it’s one thing to engage in depleting activities, but there’s another dimension, namely how we behave under the influence of depletion. Doing things that deplete us is not the same as doing things when we’re depleted. As Marshall Goldsmith in his book, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be, (Crown Business, 2015), notes “The former is cause, the latter effect.” The outcome for us personally and professionally is that many of us are experiencing moments of brokenness. We feel like we have slipped into the ditch of life rather than moving forward on the road of life.
This sure happened to me one winter day many years ago before I was a consultant and executive coach. I was driving my car to work and I was not a happy man. This job could have been a case study for the book, The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job. I was miserable. The job was miserable and to a degree life was miserable and overwhelming.
On that day, there were icy road conditions. As I crested the hill coming out of town on the western edge, my car spun 180 degrees and pointed back to town. I was shook up and the back tires were just off the gravel on the edge of the road. Just then, a truck load of teenagers pulled up and pushed me back on to the road. I drove home that morning and thought about just going back to bed. There are days when you just want to start over. William H. McRaven in his book Sea Stories: My Life In Special Operations (Grand Central Publishing, 2020) shared a popular saying amongst Navy Seals, namely “… the only easy day was yesterday.” I have experienced times in my life journey when even yesterday wasn’t very easy.
This week, I want you to focus on not making your life less stressful given how few things we can control right now and instead focus on making your life more meaningful. Understand that some days we are overwhelmed by fatigue on many levels. It happens, but it does not have to define who we are and in what we believe in. Slowly we can rebuild our lives from the inside out. It will take time and energy but it is possible.
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