The Role of Rest in our Busy Working Lives
Photo by Drew Coffman on Unsplash
In a recent podcast, Ezra Klein interviewed Judith Shulevitz, whose book “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” explores the Sabbath and the idea of rest.
Whilst their conversation considered rest in a number of contexts, it made me think about the role of rest in our working lives; living in a culture where rest is not valued.
So often with my clients, I will talk to them about what they do to reset or recharge after finishing a hard project or at the end of the day. We might chat about what they do to restore at the end of the working week. But do we talk about rest? Is it even in our workplace vocabulary at all? Not so much.
In this podcast, they considered “what if you spent a full seventh of your life operating at a different speed of time?” And what really stopped me in my tracks (because let’s face it I was listening to this podcast whilst doing something else!) was “how would this impact on the quality of interactions with others?”.
So many of my conversations in workplaces involve instances where things have gone wrong, maybe from a project point of view but more often from a cultural / people point of view because people have reacted and not responded to events in the workplace. We have all been there and we have seen this happen; a sharp comment or perhaps a stinging email. When I chat to people afterwards and ask “how did you think that would end up” inevitably they know that their actions were only going to lead to them landing in hot water but they describe feeling like they were not able to stop. This begs the question: would these workplace interactions be different if we practiced operating at a different speed?
Is it because we don’t rest? Because we don’t practice pausing or stopping? Is it a learned skill like everything else where we need to practice it to get better at it? So, when we have a routine, rhythm, ritual built into our life that acts as a reminder for us to rest regularly, we actually get better at stopping or perhaps pausing when we need to. For example, in our working lives when we need to be able to stop/pause before we act to prevent things from blowing up.
I want to emphasise the word rest here as opposed to relax. We all say to each other; “did you have a relaxing weekend or holiday?” but how often do we ask did you have a good rest over the weekend or was your holiday restful? Where does rest fit into our busy lives?
Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash
Where is our permission to stop and rest? More importantly, do we even know how to? In my M.A.G.I.C Framework, we talk about the Ground Rules that help us to keep upright in a world that often feels “topsy turvy.” Perhaps in your workplace, you can open up the conversation and get people to set some Ground Rules for themselves that incorporate rest into their lives. Allow people to sit with this as a viable option. We know we have to name things before we can make them happen. Perhaps instead of that Resilience workshop, you have planned you could have a workshop about how you can prioritise resting.
There are going to be lots of people at your workplace who are going to resist this because it is such a foreign concept to most people, but like most workshops I run, I think if you just change one life you are making a difference.
And for those cynics that are rolling their eyes and putting this type of exploration in the “warm and fuzzy” basket. Those people that are much too busy to be talking about rest let’s return to what Ezra and Julia explored when they discussed the Sabbath. They asked the question, “how would this impact on the quality of interactions with others?”. We know that 50% of a manager’s time is spent dealing with conflict. So rather than get the mediators in after things have gone south perhaps you can get on the front foot and get your people to set some Ground Rules that incorporate rest into their lives. We are all wanting work to work differently, to work again, this might be the change you need.