The many ways we communicate and process information are gathering in speed and complexity, but can our bodies and minds keep up? Claire Genkai Breeze is finding that many of her executive clients are overwhelmed by hyper-regulation
It’s Friday night and I’m heading home after a fairly full-on week of coaching appointments. I’m sitting on the train heading back to the retreat centre in Dorset that I call home. My mind is turning over fragments of conversations and my body is reliving certain sensations and states as I think about the clients I’ve seen this week. I look up and across the narrow table opposite me is a man in a suit, looking very drawn, drinking from a can of beer and reading a book on wellbeing.
He could easily be one of my clients. We start up a conversation and he tells me about his work and family, his feeling of time passing, how he begins to wonder if he is doing the right thing and how he is noticing that he doesn’t have the energy he used to have.
He’s forgetting things more easily, collapsing in front of the TV in the evening and struggling to keep a sense of balance; in particular, he’s using Sunday night to get a head start on his week.
Showing up
Of course, this is as familiar to me as a coach as it will be to many of you, but the loose anonymity of this conversation allows something fresh and revealing to surface for me.
As he gets off the train I fall into a reverie about myself, and my own working life. I see the tastes and flavours of some of his experiences showing up in the margins of my own. I, too, forget things, wonder about the value of my career and notice my energy can only be maintained with more support and, frankly, more imagination, than it once needed.
More than 25 years ago I was at the heart of a big project to teach people stress management skills in the workplace. I was very busy – the irony of being so busy teaching stress management was not lost on me at the time.
However there were some very profound differences compared to the situations our clients and, thus we as coaches, face today.
At that time it was still a very valid strategy to suggest that people structured their day with a proper break to down-regulate and get away from their desks.
Delegation and time management were also central skills in a stress management regime; and with the addition of assertiveness, one’s working life could be offered some freedom from the tyranny of the overload.
Tipping point
In today’s global and technological age, our working day is almost unrecognisable to that of an executive from the late 1980s. Pace of communication and the variety of ways in which we process information have increased at a far greater rate than our physiology has. In other words, as mammals, our bodies are designed to cope with about 20 minutes of stress response before we move into a natural phase of release and regulation. I don’t believe I coach anyone who has a working day that flows in this way right now. Instead I am working with people who are moving at pace from one issue to the next, in diffuse accountability structures, while using at least two if not more electronic devices as ways to keep in touch and respond to requests.
We’re coaching people who are therefore in a more perpetual state of what I think of as hyper-regulation. It’s a state associated with hyper-arousal, stress, anxiety, high alert or a narrower field of vision.
It may sound dramatic, phrased like this. But I’m spending a substantial part of my working week coaching executives who have become overwhelmed by a body-mind continuum that has downed tools.
I’m working with clients who are finally getting the message that their body doesn’t know what they earn, what their job title is or how important they are. The body is not subject to the same rules as the ego. This point of divergence is emerging as a real issue for executives and for organisations that care about them.
A year ago, and prompted by some very memorable client situations, I enrolled a group of 30 or so interested executives from FTSE 100 companies, to explore with me as an action research method, the lived experience of bringing intentional attention to their states of resilience and wellbeing.
I would write a sort of provocation and a few mini case study ideas and suggest some enquiry questions for them to experiment with. In return, they gave me a sense of where their enquiries were taking them and what their lived experience of attempting to integrate resilience and an executive career was like.
In addition, new enquiries surfaced from them as well as actual stories from the workplace that have made the process of writing our book, research, new tools and the new book, Your Body Doesn’t Know What You Earn, both richer and more immediate. We are still in the heat of this process and will continue to explore practices and approaches, causes and conditions (see box, right). Each time I sit with a client who has this area as part of their goal or enquiry, I have more depth and breadth upon which to draw.
A complex tale
What’s emerging is a complex story with components as wide apart as the general state of the economy affecting people’s sense of security, to some individuals displaying addictive behaviours around emails and messaging – checking even when the device has not shown a message.
We’re finding out that for some their identity is so caught up with who they are at work that other roles in life do not hold the same sense of purpose.
For others, we’re discovering that the core culture of the organisation they work in actually undermines wellbeing initiatives because of a conspiracy of silence or a senior leadership approach that implies it is weak to feel under-resourced or overwhelmed.
The systemic approach
This implies that coaches need to take a more systemic approach to resilience issues. It’s not enough to focus on the individual’s resourcefulness, as this is nested inside a wider context of relationships, expectations, corporate cultures and economic anxieties. In the coaching programmes we are designing now, such as the 90-day Turnaround programme for leaders we’re rolling out this year, there is a much deeper emphasis on seeing the individual and their goals through a number of lenses, including physical, mental/emotional, the habitual behaviours and mindsets that foster less resilience and areas that create deeper connection to meaningful purpose. Issues of low resilience are no longer the domain of the unfit or anxious.
I was in conversation with an ex-client I worked with five years ago in this space and we were reflecting on what he had learned and how much of that was connected to the quality of our coaching relationship. He offered me this angle to think about and so I offer it to you as fellow coaches to reflect on too:
“When you are writing this book you ought to put a chapter in it on how you as a coach work on your own resilience and what it is like to work with so many people who are feeling under-resourced.”
Be kind
I sat with a group of executive coaches recently, supporting one organisation, and I thought a colleague of mine pointed to something very important when he said that he loved doing the coaching work in the organisation and supporting its objectives, but he wouldn’t want to work for the organisation himself. There was a lot of resonance in the room with that comment.
I am reminded of philosopher Philo’s words: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
Resilience and wellbeing are one of the great battles of our time. Choosing to work outside large organisations may resource us as coaches, but it does not make us immune. When coaches approach me saying they want to work more skilfully in this space, my response is simply: “What are you doing for yourself?”
Claire Genkai Breeze is co-founder of Relume: claire@relume.co.uk
Faulty strategies: Don’t apologise
One client highlighted how much time she was spending apologising – a strategy many of our clients, and ourselves, resort to. Our book, Your Body Doesn’t Know What You Earn, includes an invitation to explore questions, including how frequently we apologise actively or inactively through avoidance, to whom we apologise most, why we select this commitment or person particularly, and what do we think we can get away with. It suggests keeping a log for two weeks to see what patterns emerge, and considering asking people we apologise to what the impact is.
When I ask people who they apologise to most I discover something interesting. Apologies seem to fall into two distinct categories, and both are very revealing about our private, unedited thinking when we are using this as a strategy to manage our energy and time.
The first category is apologising to those with less power or status than us in organisations. You know how it is: you are less likely to tell the chairman that you are overloaded and will be running late, than a more junior member of your team.
In the second category, of course, are our family and friends. It would appear that people who use this strategy are prepared to disappoint the ones we are closest to rather than the people we work with.
Is this also a power and status issue? Do we believe we can make up for it over time when things improve? Are we happier to preserve a face in the workplace of coping by trading time with our families and friends? Do we believe they will be more forgiving of us than the businesses we work for?
Coaching at work, volume 8, issue 4