I’ve done a lot of talks over the years on the importance of reflective time. How critical it is to create space, step back from the pace.
I talked about ‘creating a new relationship with busy’, ‘leadership reflection as the number one high performance skill’, boundaries of course, endless talks on creating boundaries.
I stepped away from that circuit about ten years ago. Mostly because I’d started to feel part of the problem, rather than the solution. There was a look on the faces of the people I was talking to, a kind of exhausted pointlessness, is the best way I can describe it. I felt like a walking talking cliché at best, and for the people listening there was a very understandable “yes, and have you actually met my life?” look. Fair enough, really.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand more about busy. I became deeply interested in burnout, not just as an end result but as a way of being. And, as I’m also a psychotherapist, a lot of my own CPD was spent investigating these topics at depth.
None of us resist the idea of reflective space. It’s a great idea and pretty much everyone I know and have worked with would like more of it. In my coaching sessions, everyone gets why we need it and why it helps, but my whole approach to it had to change.
I used to think of busyness as a problem to be solved, a poor habit to be interrupted, something you could step away from with the right tools. If only, right? Busyness is far stickier and more complicated than that.
For most of the leaders I know, it isn’t the problem, it’s the answer. Being over-busy, the same as ‘over’ anything is a response to something; and until you get genuinely curious about what it’s a response to, you won’t shift it, not in any sustainable way at least. Instead, you’ll just end up feeling guilty about not shifting it, which is its own kind of exhausting.
What busy actually feels like
Here’s something I recognise in myself, as much as in anyone I’ve ever worked with:
There’s a particular quality to full-throttle ‘doing’ mode that can feel really lovely. It brings a sense of momentum, a pace that keeps you just slightly ahead of whatever might catch you, if you stopped.
It feels like progress and who doesn’t love that?
Underneath it all, there’s a sense of being needed that feels like mattering. Again, who doesn’t like that?
I’ve sat with enough senior leaders in enough honest moments to know this is pretty much universal. The relentless, diary-full, always-on version of doing isn’t just cultural pressure, though it’s that as well. It’s a relationship to doing that we don’t want to, and feel as though we can’t, step away from.
Like all habits, it thrives on familiarity, which comes with it’s own kind of pseudo-sense of safety. It can become a clever false refuge for a fragile sense of self. It strongly believes it is the right way to be because, it’s true, it got us to where we are today by delivering, and by being the one who could hold more and carry the weight.
I don’t want to pathologise it or reduce it to a coping mechanism and leave it there, but I do think it’s worth sitting with what it costs. Not the costs you probably already know about.
When the busy stops
This is the part that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and I think it might be the most important bit.
What I hear from clients, and what I know from my own experience, is that:
the hardest moment isn’t being too busy,
it’s what happens when we aren’t busy.
It is the times when the busyness briefly lifts, due to a cancelled meeting or a rare quiet morning, a gap in the diary with nothing actually pressing. And, instead of the relief you’d expect, there’s this strange, slightly vertiginous feeling of: “Now what?”
In those moments of not being busy, we don’t know who to be. If you’re anything like normal, you’ll almost immediately reach for things to do: checking your phone, or manufacturing a small urgency to fill the gap, before the gap fills with something else. It can feel almost impossible to just be in the space, so we create the need to fill it. It’s so annoying and so common.
I’ve watched incredibly self-aware leaders do this and feel genuinely bewildered by themselves. They know they need more space to think, they really want it, and the moment it appears something in them can’t quite tolerate it and goes looking for more doing.
This isn’t weakness or lack of discipline. In IFS terms, the part of you that has kept the busyness going doesn’t simply stand down when the diary clears. It has been running the show for a long time. It doesn’t quite trust what happens if it stops. So it reaches, because reaching is what it knows and because, underneath the reaching, there is often something it has been working, very hard, not to have to feel.
Busy masks feelings. Particularly the uncomfortable ones.
That part has probably kept you functioning through things that would have felled a lot of people. Never forget that burnout favours the strong. But it was never meant to be the only voice in the room.
The question worth sitting with, and I mean really sitting with, not solving, is what that part of you might be protecting you from:
What gets closer when the noise goes quiet?
Not so you can fix it immediately, but just so you can begin to know it a bit better. Because, in my experience, once you can be with it rather than outrun it, it loses some of it’s grip. Not all at once, but enough to create enough space to get curious and clear.
I love the neuroscience on this, its unbelievably helpful. When you’re in full doing mode your brain is locked into task-focused attention. What it cannot do in that state is access, what neuroscientists call, the Default Mode Network or DMN. This is the part of your brain that makes meaning, processes emotion and generates insight. It only switches on when you’re not focused on an external task, not in back-to-back meetings or scrolling, but when you’re genuinely, quietly, not doing.
Then there is what chronic busyness does to cortisol. Sustained pressure keeps it elevated, and elevated cortisol gradually degrades the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain you need for nuanced judgement and for actually being able to think beyond the next decision in front of you. This same part of the brain has been shown to be denser and healthier in those of us who meditate. The harder however any of us push without any recovery, the less access we have to the thinking that leadership most depends on.
So that strange uncomfortable feeling when the diary suddenly clears and you don’t quite know what to do with yourself? That’s actually a nervous system that has been in activation for so long, it’s genuinely forgotten what settling feels like. And the reaching for the phone that follows, is simply it avoiding something unfamiliar.
Which means reflective space isn’t a nice to have, it’s essential maintenance for the one instrument you’re actually leading with.
The research on busyness is well established and so I won’t labour it here. Very simply put, leaders without space to reflect make worse decisions, and rushed meetings produce the appearance of progress, more often than the thing itself. All true, all important, but the cost I keep returning to in my work is subtler than any of that.
The cost is what happens to the quality of your presence when you’ve been in doing mode for too long. Because whatever busy is masking and protecting you from, it affects your presence. I notice it in myself in a coaching session, realising I’m already formulating a response before someone has finished speaking. I’ve seen it in leaders I deeply respect, in the moment when someone on their team says something genuinely vulnerable and the leader moves past it, because they’re operating at a frequency where that signal simply doesn’t register.
Most of the senior leaders I’ve worked with care deeply about their people. Yet there’s often a painful gap between how much they care and how little of it lands, simply because they’re not quite present enough for it to travel across the space between them. That’s the invisible cost. We see it in the slow erosion of the very qualities that made you worth following in the first place. And that is worth making time to care for and restore.
Reflective space isn’t slower thinking
When most people hear “create reflective time”, they imagine doing the same kind of thinking they always do, just at a lower speed: reviewing strategy, or working through a decision more carefully. That’s still doing mode. It’s the driven part at the wheel, just with a slightly longer time horizon.
The kind of leadership being I am talking about is genuinely different. It’s the capacity to not know for a moment, to sit with a question without immediately reaching for the answer. It is the ability to notice what’s actually present in yourself and in the people around you, without moving straight to fixing it. It’s uncomfortable, especially at first, and especially for people whose whole identity has been built around having the answer quickly.
What I find, in myself and in the leaders I work with, is that the first thing you meet when you create that space is whatever you’ve been moving too fast to feel: a worry that keeps looping, a relationship that’s quietly concerning you.
When you do stop, when you literally create the comma, something else starts to become available because the quality of your attention changes.
That’s it, it’s actually pretty simple. It doesn’t need hours or any fancy hacks, it just needs a willingness to build in the conditions where a quieter, less driven part of you, can occasionally be heard. And enough self-compassion not to immediately fill that space with more doing, the moment you feel uncomfortable.
I’m in my third decade of this work. I’ve sat with leaders at the height of their power and at the edges of their failures, and at many points in between. I’ve been the coach who was too busy to properly reflect on my own practice. I’ve outrun things I should have sat with, confused momentum with meaning, mistaken pace for progress, sometimes for quite long stretches. Even now, after a session, I’ll sometimes get hold of a blind spot or a moment I didn’t quite follow, and I have to sit with that rather than move straight on. It’s humbling work and I have to be very prepared to not know.
What I do know is that the leaders who remain genuinely effective over the long run, have found a way to stay in some kind of honest relationship with themselves. Not perfectly, or continuously, but enough to notice when the doing has become more about defence than purpose, and enough to stay curious about the people they lead and the job they do.
That relationship with yourself is what reflective space is actually for. But it has to be chosen, and then chosen again, usually against the grain of everything else pulling for your attention. Because every time you intend to pause and then override that intention with busy once again, you reinforce the doing loop. Sad, but true.
So, I’m not going to tell you to block out an hour, or a week, or put your phone in another room, though that’s not a bad idea.
Just one question, asked honestly and with some warmth toward yourself, not as yet another demand, but as a genuine act of curiosity:
What am I not quite hearing right now, in my team, in myself, because I’m moving too fast to catch it?
Start there. You don’t have to answer it straight away, or even fish for it, just be quiet and wonder. Let it sit. See what arises when you’re not actively looking for it.
That is when leadership operates at its full depth with wisdom, and not just at full speed.
Let me know how you get on.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash
