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On a Friday night in 2017, with a glass of cabernet in her hand and her husband beside her on the couch, high-flying executive Erin Coupe found these words of anguish tumbling out of her about the pressures of her life:
“Why do we do this to ourselves? What’s the meaning of any of it?”
Her life seemed a masterclass in keeping everything together. She held an executive position, spent 10 hours a week commuting, managed her kids’ needs and schedules, maintained a spotless house and the endless projects of home ownership and engaged in strenuous workouts that matched the intensity of her overloaded nervous system. And yes, there was also that early evening glass of wine to take the edge off.
“Every day felt like Groundhog Day – relentless, dutiful, numbing. I had ignored it for years, spending far too much energy and time looking everywhere outside myself for the answer: The next promotion, the new company, a higher salary, a bigger title, better vacations. I was never satisfied, always chasing something just out of reach – trying to rearrange the external world to make my inner world feel better,” she writes in her book I Can Fit That In.
It turned out to be a crucial moment. She realized she wasn’t living her own life and wasn’t happy living what now felt like someone else’s life. She had deprioritized herself.
She had to find herself. She had to rebuild her life from the inside out.
It was a dramatic, explosive moment but the changes evolved slowly, in what she calls “countless tiny defiant acts of presence and grounding amidst the relentless current of the world around me.” It might be morning coffee savoured in stillness, reclaiming a few moments of quiet reflection or pausing to breathe in and out slowly as the day wore her out. “Autopilot gave way to mindfulness,” she says.
As part of the mindfulness, she began to make space for the right things – the truly important things, the nourishing things that fed her purpose. “You can’t fit more into a life already bursting at the seams. But you can fit in what truly matters,” she insists.
That involves what she calls “the simple but painful step” of allowing yourself to feel where you have previously gone numb. You now have routines that allow you to get through life – helpful routines, but also harmful because they are like sleepwalking, distancing you from yourself.
In particular, busyness has been masquerading as a virtue. It keeps you trapped in perpetual motion and leads over time not just to physical exhaustion but to a chipping away of your creativity, purpose and sense of connection with others and yourself.
Ms. Coupe, now a leadership coach, tells of one of her clients, Rachel, the global head of finance at a large company, who confided she was always racing but no longer knew what she was racing toward. Rachel began to insert purposeful pauses between meetings. She stopped measuring her worth by her output. She carved out space each morning to reconnect with her breath, her body and her relationship with herself first.
“She intentionally slowed her pace and stopped the autopilot. Then, something remarkable happened: As she created space in her schedule to connect with herself, her creativity returned,” Ms. Coupe writes.
Her quiet journaling morphed into drafting and, eventually publishing, a children’s book. As she described it: “I thought I had to race to feel productive. But creativity made me more productive because it made me feel whole.”
Today we tend to equate busyness with accomplishment but Ms. Coupe says we are rewarding outward hustle while ignoring the inner cost. The people we most admire are rarely sprinting from task to task. Instead, they move through work and life with presence, clarity and reserved power.
“True success is about how much of yourself you bring to what you choose to do. Not how many hours you grind through, but how deeply you feel alive while you’re doing it,” she says.
Quick hits
- Performance consultant Amy Brann urges you to embed 10- to 15- minute buffers after cognitively intense meetings in your calendar – publicly if possible.
- Authors and Deloitte consultants Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach note that people frequently speak to each other at the level of a conclusion rather than sharing the data that went into their thinking or how they interpreted the data. As a result, when they disagree, that may be because they aren’t looking at the foundational information that drew them to different conclusions.
- Author Mark Manson says the two fundamental skills of life are: Focus on what you can control and let go of the rest.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.