London. Sometime in 2020. 

14:20.

I was emerging from an intense morning at work. 

I hadn’t had a break since I’d sat down at 08:10. I had a headache and realised I hadn’t had a drink for hours. I also suddenly realised that I desperately needed the bathroom. I pushed myself up from my cross-legged position on the floor and started hobbling towards the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

All of this was pretty standard. I rarely took breaks. Even if I planned breaks into my calendar they always got overtaken by the latest emergency or a ‘quick question’ that someone needed help with. 

As a leader in a big business, my days were basically made out of meetings and conversations, topped with a sprinkle of emergencies. I led projects. Made decisions. Delegated work. Achieved goals. 

I did things. 

All the time. 

Even when I wasn’t at work, my mind was thinking about work in the background, solving problems and thinking about what I should do next.

It wasn’t just background noise either. My most creative work-related thoughts came to me when I was in the shower, walking outside or even sleeping. I’d often wake up in the middle of the night to my mind racing with solutions to problems or brilliant new strategies that I’d have to write down so that I wouldn’t forget them by the morning.

And I’m incredibly proud of the things I’ve done and achieved! I created a new ‘people and culture’ team from scratch for a 1,000-people business and led that team into becoming a strong ally that the rest of the business relied on. I coached a business through designing a highly ambitious ten-year strategy—its first ever—that all its employees resonated with, not just the Executive Team.

But the problem was that I never really stopped doing things. I had no idea how to be. Simply be. Without doing anything. 

As far as I was concerned, Descartes had it wrong. I did, therefore I was. 

The problem with being busy like that at work is that there wasn’t any space for me to do anything other than what my work constraints were guiding me to do.

Of course I had my habits: I met up regularly with good friends, enjoyed long weekend walks by the Thames, went to my local market to buy my favourite cheeses etc. But I didn’t have a clue what else I might want to do outside of those routines and outside of work. Work was literally taking up 80-90% of my headspace whether directly, when sitting at my desk, or directly, when work was buzzing in the back of my head. There wasn’t much space left for anything else to brew or to emerge.

One thing I did know was that I didn’t want to do my life away so I decided to step out of my work constraints for a while. For me that meant going on a twelve-month sabbatical at the beginning of 2022. It also meant not filling my time while on sabbatical with a bunch of things to do. 

Basically this was an invitation for the overachieving doer in me to stop doing. 

Be still for a while. 

And listen to what my heart wanted.

I did not find this easy. In the beginning, I wasn’t able to hear anything my heart had to say. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure it was saying anything. After all, I’d been keeping myself busy doing so much for such a long time that I was completely out of practice at expressing and listening to my own wants.

Despite that, I kept going. 

I kept my calendar open and my to-do list as short as possible. 

Every time I got bored, ideas of things to do would come up: write an essay, listen to a podcast, go on a day trip somewhere, read this book that people were raving about etc. 

And every time one of those ideas came up, I would sit with it for a few seconds, sometimes minutes, sometimes even more, to figure out whether it was coming from my heart or whether it was another one of those things that the doer in me was trying to get me to do to quench its thirst for achievement.

It took me a few months to start not only doing, but feeling and thinking differently from what I had experienced up until then.

My heart started taking up space to feel emotions as they were arising instead of letting my head shut them down and bury them deep in my body to fester because I was ‘too busy’ to process them. It started helping me to think about problems in a more holistic and sustainable way rather than in ways that only felt efficient and beneficial here and now. It started inviting me to do things that I hadn’t realised were meaningful to me, like stretching, learning a new skill or even simply taking a rest. 

With a bit of practice, some of my wants started being so vocal that I didn’t even need to go looking for them any more. 

Not only has this been a fun way to discover more about what is truly meaningful to me, I now get to act on it which feels incredibly liberating. I even get to bring that sense of meaning and energy back into the work I choose to do, for my benefit and the benefit of those around me.

If you’ve kept on reading until now, I guess it’s probably because some of the experiences I’m writing about are resonating with you. 

So I’d like to invite you to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing too much of.  

Just for a while. And make space for stillness to come in. 

Feel, think or do not because you are on a treadmill of human experiences that forces you to take step after step without ever stopping. Instead, feel, think or do like you’ve stepped off of the treadmill and are strolling through the forest. Like you’re following your own invitations to explore this clearing. Or to head into one direction or the other. 

Around that tree. 

Over that rock.

I’m not suggesting that you never do anything ever again. Simply that you do from a place of being.

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Photo is an extract from a photo by David Cohen on Unsplash