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You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour. Hi and welcome to Making Sense of Work. Over the last weekend I finished reading Beth Kempton's beautiful new book, kokoro. I really recommend it. For those of you new to Beth, she describes herself as a Japanologist and she is also a beautiful self-help author. She also teaches the art of writing and I've enjoyed a few of her courses.

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Her latest book is an exploration of the Japanese word or character, kokoro. She explores its meaning in depth heart or heart, mind or intelligent heart. She explores how, for each person, it holds a different and personal meaning. And through the book, beth works with different ways of understanding kokoro to help make sense of her own experience of midlife pressures of family, her own grief and her approach to her writing, work and business, and in turn she shares how we too can learn from our own Kokoro to help us live a life well lived. It is a beautiful, soul-affirming book.

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For me, it was in her thinking about work that I became most curious, because of course this is the area of my life that I'm most interested in and of course it's what I share on this podcast, making Sense of Work, and if you're a regular listener, you will know that over the past few months, I've been exploring topics related to being overwhelmed at work, both physically and emotionally. In my reading of Kokoro over the weekend, one thing kept coming up in relation to overwhelm and unhappiness at work, and this is the idea of ease. I don't know about you, but I don't have much ease in my working life. I can't remember when I last approached life in an easeful way. I'm rushing to work, then to cook, then to exercise. I read quickly, I listen to podcasts at speed. I even feel my early morning meditation has a ring of more quickly around it, and I can see the people I coach under enormous pressure in their organizations pressure to get things done at speed, and especially leaders. I notice that they feel guilty if they take any time away to think or recover or just to step back. So I know I have this hurry up message going on inside me, and I know many others do too. And here we are in what feels like a global crisis and in the midst of this we are all rushing. So we're lacking ease in our working lives and I don't believe the solution to my problems, to our problems, is in this rushing. I believe that they can be found in stillness, in calm and in ease.

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In her book Time to Think, nancy Klein outlined the 10 conditions or components that she believes we need to have in order to be effective thinking partners to help each other to think, and she includes ease as one of the 10 components. She suggests that ease creates where urgency destroys. She also suggests that ease is a presence defined by an absence. I love this. When ease is present, pressure and urgency are absent, we are opening up to something new and possible.

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As I started to think about this, I noticed how coaching and coaching conversations in themselves bring ease. They allow time and space to sit and explore something without pressure. But many of us are really lucky if we have one coaching session a month. And how can we find ease in other bits of our life if we're only getting that space? So I have been wondering over the last week what would happen if we did find more ease in our lives, and I found myself beginning to play with it. So even just in writing this podcast once I got thinking about ease, it kind of wouldn't let me go. I was planning something else for the podcast this week, but I kept finding myself looking out the window thinking about ease and playing with the idea of it. So here I am talking about it.

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To start, I was curious about how the dictionary defines ease and I was actually slightly surprised. It was different to how I was feeling it. So here are a few definitions. It could be to make something easier or smoother, or something being not difficult or needing little effort. Other definitions included at ease, so relaxed, absence of difficulty, to be free from something that burdens, to make something less painful, to alleviate, or the state of being comfortable or relaxed. I realized as I was reading those definitions that I'd put lack of ease and speed together and I wasn't really sitting with ease in its true definition, except that when I'm working at speed, when I'm rushing, when I'm feeling the pressure, I want something to alleviate my pain. I want to be free of the burden. I want to experience more at ease working time, time when I don't feel burdened and time that I can enjoy the job at hand, time when I can experience relaxed work. As I was thinking about relaxed work, I found myself laughing. I was like, is there such a thing? And yet I think there is. I actually find writing the podcast, preparing for this podcast relaxed work. I love thinking about it and it only becomes a problem for me when I don't make enough time to prepare or I try and squeeze it in somewhere. If I do make enough time and I have the discipline to sit in my chair to prepare, I do relax, I get into the flow, I enjoy it, time slips away and I'm happy.

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Imagine if we allowed ourselves or our leaders encouraged us to approach pieces of work with this ease, to take our time. Imagine if we went for a walk to think over a complex client situation that we're facing, or if we extended a deadline because we could see that it was being too much pressure for people. We know a little bit of pressure can be helpful, but we are a long way beyond helpful pressure, unfortunately. I think waiting for others to help us with this is not good. I think they're unlikely to be able to help us because they are also under a lot of pressure. So if we want to find moments to create space to experience ease, we're going to have to find ways to build it into our working lives ourselves, and I believe this is possible. I could see how I could build a bit more ease into my day, and I started doing this, and my days, even just this week, have become more enjoyable, more fulfilling, and what I'm noticing is no less productive. And so I became intrigued and I started to explore. What was it about my own thinking about ease that was stopping me from experiencing it more? I became aware that I've got a thought that we can't have ease in our working lives, that our working lives are too full and ease won't be present, and I really resonate with this personally. And as I was thinking about it, I thought about Byron Katie's the Work and thought it might help me here.

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If you know Byron Katie's work, you will know that she teaches that we can always question whether the thoughts that we are thinking are true. Her book Loving what Is encourages us to do just that to love what is and to stop arguing with reality. She suggests asking four simple questions. So you start by thinking of a thought that's causing you pain or holding you back, and then, in the presence of that thought, you ask these questions Is it true? Can I possibly know it's true? How do I react when I believe the thought, and who would I be without the thought? So we can use Byron Katie's work to really question the thoughts that we have around ease and to see what's possible, and I decided to play with this in relation to my own experience of ease, and here's my example.

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My thought is that because I run a small business, I can't possibly take time to approach work with ease. This is a really common thought. For me, it's a small business thing. People with small businesses don't work with ease, they work really hard. So the first question, then, that Katie asks is is it true? Well, no, there's a clue in the statement. I run my own business. This is a choice I'm making to go quickly. I'm caught up in my own culture story, my own ideas of go faster, hurry up. So it's not true that I can't bring more ease into my working life. I do personally feel a lot of societal pressure to get more done in less time, but it's also, I know, a lot of drive in me. I do read all the productivity books and I'm always thinking I should be doing more books and I'm always thinking I should be doing more. So, whilst it's not true that there's no room for ease, my mind is trying to convince me otherwise, but I decide to agree that it isn't true and that I can work with ease. And so I skip to question three.

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The third question is when you believe the thought is true, what happens? Well, when I believe it's true that I can't approach work with ease, I simply don't. I rush through the day. I often feel a bit annoyed or irritated because I'm not focusing on things. I get tired, I notice a lack of fulfillment in my work and it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't believe I have ease and so I don't have ease. I feel my day, I rush, and then it doesn't happen. And you know, I essentially love my work, but when I'm not in ease, that enjoyment disappears. And that brings us on then to the fourth question who would I be without this thought, or what would happen if I turned the thought around? My thoughts are I can't approach work with ease. Well, without this thought, I would approach my work with ease. I would see two hours in my day and not fill them with five jobs to be done. I would put one job and take time over it. I would time box my emails and only work on my emails once or twice a day and then get them done, and then I would focus on other work If I turn around the statement I can't approach work with ease.

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Ease is my approach to work. I first saw this a couple of days ago and it really hit me. What would my working life be like if I embraced? Ease is my approach to work? Even as I'm saying it now, it feels so different If I go back to our definition of ease that it means I would approach work without pain or burden. I would slow. I would say to myself and my team ease is my, is our approach to work. And even as I say this now, I feel a drop in my system. So I took this into a couple of days work.

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Once I first saw the statement and of course I had to remember it the old hurry up messages were there, but, as I remembered, ease is my approach to work things changed. I began to see that I would actually just focus on one thing and get it done because I was embracing ease. So how could you two do this? How could you embrace ease at work? To put this in context, we have got a lot of pressure from society and there's one example that I see around at the moment to do with AI artificial intelligence that I'm just hearing this message everywhere, quickly, quickly. We need to get on with it. We need to learn it fast. If we don't do something about AI now, we'll be left behind, we'll miss out. And we're adding this on to already full diaries, and so then we are launching into actions and we're not pausing to see whether the action we're launching into is the right one. We're not noticing our thoughts. We're not even making decisions consciously.

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So if you've become curious about whether you would like to bring more ease into your working life through this, I think that starting with your thoughts about your work is a good place, and then you can begin to think about. Could I turn some of those thoughts around so you can take some time to jot down a few thoughts you have about work, about the pace of work that you think you should be working at. You can notice messages, explicit or implicit, from your boss, from your organization, from your peers, and see what thoughts come up. Here's some examples Maybe you notice that you need to work really, really hard for a promotion and to get that promotion in a certain time, or there's a lot of pressure to win a client deal, or maybe there's competition with colleagues, or this idea that I keep hearing that you mustn't step away from your computer because you'll be seen to be not working hard enough, even though we know the evidence about this is that if we're stuck at our computers our productivity drops.

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Maybe your thoughts are a bit more personal. You're thinking I can't take time to exercise or I don't have the ease of a day to have a slow meal with my kids or to play games with them. Maybe the thought is that work is painful it's the nature of work and that it's become so ingrained it's hard to imagine another reality. There isn't enough time, there isn't enough ease. Once you've written down those thoughts, you could take one of them and see what would happen if you work through those four questions and you can find the questions on theworkcom, which is where Bara and Katie's work is and work through them. See what happens when you begin to question the thoughts that you have about whether ease is possible in your day.

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Another way of starting to move towards ease is to build time into our days where we're consciously engaging our default mode network. I'm talking quite a bit about this at the moment, and there's more in the recent episodes of the neuroscience of the misery at work. But let me just recap it here One part of the functioning of our brains can be described as these two networks or systems. The task positive network is active when we're focused on a task, when we're doing something that requires attention. The default mode network is active when our mind is resting, and researchers found that when we weren't focused on something, actually our brain didn't rest, but I would suggest with ease it was making sense of all the information and experiences that we'd taken in. It's what happens when our minds are relaxed, like think about the good ideas that come to you when you're in the shower or you're out for a walk, just not listening to anything. And when our default mode network is active, it's making connections and it's coming up with ideas, and I think we need more of this. We need more default mode network time in our day.

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I saw a good example of this in a recent post from Ryan Holiday, where he was talking about how he wrote one of his books in the swimming pool, just swimming up and down, allowing his brain to explore different concepts, and I think for me that there's something about the thinking around the default mode network that might help us to find more ways or reasons to bring ease into our lives, and particularly our working lives, because we can see from the research on this that taking time away from the task focus is actually good for our brains to make sense, and allowing that part of work is really important. This also suggests, I think, that when we're not focused, we are still working. We're not stopping, things are still happening. We're just finding a different way of doing what needs to be done and we're allowing things to emerge out of the ease. So this is all very well, but how can we do this in reality?

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I'm guessing that you have a really full job and often many other responsibilities outside of your job, and ease feels really problematic. But I've got a few ideas here, so please allow me the indulgence of sharing some easier ideas and some more wild ideas and then see what other ideas you have to help you to come up with more ease in your life, to have more ease in your life. So the first one is actually quite simple and that's to make a decision to go slowly between meetings and if you're working in the office, you can walk more slowly. Slow your steps down intentionally between your meetings and while you're doing that, don't look at your phone. Just walk, enjoy the space, just notice what's going on around you. Try not to focus on the last meeting or the next meeting. Just walk, walk with ease, walk slowly.

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If you're working from home or you're online all the time, do a similar thing. Take a five minute breathing break between meetings. I have heard that some very successful and good leaders even go as far as meditating between meetings. I heard a story of somebody who was doing a lot of media interviews back to back who took time to meditate for five minutes between every interview so that they could regroup, calm and come into the interview with ease. Again, if you're going to do this, no phones or tech. Look out the window, breathe, take some time.

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Another thing that you could do is a bit different to this is that you could notice a piece of work that you're putting off. So, for example, we've usually got a difficult email in our inbox that we step over because we think it's going to be really hard, even though we know it'll probably only take 10 minutes. It feels really hard. So take that email and set aside an hour yes, a whole hour just to do this email, bring it up on your computer, read it through. Then go for a coffee with a notebook and write down everything about it, including what you're feeling about it, what your response should be, what your response might be. Take time, look out the window again, taste the coffee and then, when you've processed it, go back to your desk and write the answer. Write it slowly and thoughtfully and then notice how you feel.

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A couple of other things that you can do is take a two-hour lunch with your team with no agenda. Just go and have an easeful lunch with each other, enjoying each other's company and, if at all possible, no phones at the table. And then, if you're a coach or a leader who's coaching, you can invite your clients or your colleagues to come into conversations and be very explicit about approaching the conversation with ease. Suggest at the beginning of the conversation that you decide not to rush to any conclusions, that you take time to explore and to be there and to throw off the burdens and experience the ease. These are a few ideas to get you started, and you will no doubt have lots of ideas of your own, and I hope that maybe you can share those with us as well.

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But as we draw to a close, I'd like to finish with a quote I came across recently. It just is simple and it says no hurry, no pause, and the sense that I make of this is that when we hurry, time shrinks, and when we relax and allow, time expands. This comes from the idea that when we're in ease, we're not actually pausing, we're not stopping, we're just in flow. We're moving naturally. We're not pressuring ourselves, we're not allowing external pressure, we're not hurrying, we are allowing time to be, we're allowing our brains to do their work, and so there is no hurry, but there is also no pause. We are still active, things are still happening.

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In the coming weeks, I encourage you to consider how you could allow more ease into your working life. The more I'm doing it, the more I see moments of joy in mine and I am no less productive. Thanks for joining this episode of Making Sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.