Is Busyness your Comfort Blanket?

We all know that our best learning takes place when we are ‘outside our comfort zone’ – but not so far out that we want to run for the hills. I know my deepest and most long lasting growth has come when I’ve had to confront something I’ve been avoiding or take on a challenge that felt new and scary.

I also know that for me and for many of my clients it’s easy to stay under the safety blanket of busy-ness’. And whilst we say ‘I’d love to be less busy’ or ‘I’d love to have more time for myself/my family’ we just keep on doing ‘stuff’ that we’ve always done and not getting round to the other ‘stuff’

So why do we say we want one thing and then do everything we can to sabotage ourselves?

Easy.

Busy-ness is safe (exhausting and overwhelming but safe)

We can do it.

We’re in familiar territory.

We’re experts.

And if I’m busy, I’m important; valued; valuable.

And whilst we moan about ‘too much to do and too little time’ and how exhausted we are (and many people wear exhaustion, it seems to me, as some kind of badge of honour) we stay stuck on that treadmill that never stops.

So what’s going on here?

When we lift up the safety blanket, we’re novices.

Or we’re vulnerable.

Or there are soul-searching questions that we daren’t even ask ourselves in case it opens Pandora’s box.

Or we can’t imagine what we would do if we weren’t busy being busy.

Busy-ness means we don’t have to think too much, feel too much and ask ourselves the difficult questions.
So what to do?

More on that next week