Overworked and Overwhelmed

The Mindfulness Alternative

Scott Eblin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118910665
• eBook ISBN: 9781118910580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leverage mindful awareness and intention to achieve better outcomes

Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative offers practical insights for the executive, manager or professional who feels like their RPM is maxed out in the red zone. By making the concepts and practices of mindfulness simple, practical and applicable, this book offers actionable hope for today's overworked and overwhelmed professional.

New research shows that the smartphone equipped professional is connected to work 72 hours a week. Forty eight percent of Americans report that their stress level is up and that the number one source of stress is the job pressure of a 24/7 world.

What's the alternative? Top leadership coach and educator Scott Eblin offers one in Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. While mindfulness is one of the "Top Ten Trends for 2014 and Beyond, " many professionals think it's just too hard to give it a try. In this book, Eblin shows that mindfulness that makes a difference doesn't require meditating like a Buddhist monk.

Overworked and Overwhelmed is a handbook for more mindful work and living that offers:

• "Must know" mindfulness basics that today's professional needs to thrive in a 24/7 world.
• Inspiring examples of mindfulness in action from dozens of leaders ranging from a U.S. Coast Guard Commandant to the CEO of Hilton Worldwide.
• A self assessment for readers to understand how they perform at their best.
• Simple routines to reduce stress and sustain peak performance.
• A personal planning framework for creating the outcomes that matter most at home, at work and in the community.

Even small increases in mindfulness can lead to big changes in productivity and quality of life for the overworked and overwhelmed professional. Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative is a guide for doing just that.

Part One

1
Reality Bites (or Does It?)
Why You Feel So Overworked and Overwhelmed

Does Any of This Sound Familiar?

At a breakfast joint in L.A., my friend John was telling me about the first full day of his business trip to the West Coast. John and his partner own a successful strategy consulting firm that they started in 2009 right in the teeth of the Great Recession. Since then, through business savvy and a lot of hard work, they've acquired an impressive list of clients and built a team of 10 really smart people. Much of their success can be attributed to days like the one John had the day before our breakfast meeting.

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What You'll Learn in This Chapter:

• Why you feel overworked and overwhelmed
• Why things feel crazier lately
• Why being present matters and what you can do about it

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“So, here's my day yesterday,” he began. “I'm up at 6:00 AM and in the rental car by 7:00 AM for a drive from my hotel in West Hollywood to an 8:30 meeting in East L.A. Of course, that drive could be anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on the traffic on the freeways. About 20 minutes into the drive, I hear, ‘Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!’ It's the phone. I get on a conference call while I'm driving that includes a client dialing in from Denmark. I sort of have this out-of-body experience while I'm driving, thinking, ‘How absurd is this that I'm driving at 7:30 AM somewhere in L.A. while I'm talking to people in D.C. and Denmark?’ So, the call finishes, and I get to East L.A. a few minutes before the meeting begins. It's an all-day session to close out a big project with a major client. Fortunately, it goes well, and by the end of the day, we've probably won some new business. Handshakes all around, and I get back in the car just after 4:00 PM. Now I'm driving a colleague to catch a flight back to D.C. out of LAX because she needs to get back to run a marathon on Saturday. Drop her off, take a deep breath, and am finally ready to chill a little bit on the drive back to the hotel in West Hollywood. Then I hear, ‘Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!’ It's the phone. A guy on the team in D.C. is setting up an emergency conference call to go over a spreadsheet that's critical to another client project. God, it was painful. We go over that spreadsheet cell by cell as I'm navigating the [12 lanes! Be careful, John!] 405 freeway. Finally, I get back to the hotel around 6:30 PM. Grab some dinner. Answer e-mails and prep for today's meetings. Go to bed at 11:00 PM. Typical day on the road.”

I had two reactions to John's story. First, I felt bad about asking him to come out to meet me for an 8:00 AM breakfast 45 minutes from his hotel after the day he'd just had. (He was right on time, by the way.) Second, I asked him if I could share his story in this book because it's the perfect representation of what I mean by overworked and overwhelmed.

If my math is right, John clocked around a 17-hour workday as he talked with colleagues and clients, drove around L.A., solved problems, delivered on commitments, developed new business, did favors for friends, responded to requests, stayed current with what was going on, and prepped for the next day's work. And, oh yeah, and found time to feed himself.

Don't get me wrong. Not every single day is like that for John and other high-capacity professionals like him, but many are. Perhaps your typical day doesn't include taking meetings and conference calls all over Los Angeles but is more like Monica Oswald's daily routine:

Monica is a well-respected vice president in a well-known financial services company. She is also a mom with a full and busy life. She and her husband have two kids—a daughter about to graduate from high school and a son in middle school. Her typical day starts at 5:00 AM. She gets up an hour or so ahead of the rest of the family for some “quiet time” while she perhaps does some things in the kitchen or the laundry so, as she told me, she “can get things going” for the day. Of special attention is organizing things for her seventh-grade son, who has a mild learning disability. Monica makes sure “that everything is all where it needs to be so he can pick up and go in the morning.”

Her next move is to drop her son off at the bus stop, and then she's in her office between 7:00 and 7:30 AM. She tries to take the first 60 to 90 minutes of the workday to organize herself, answer e-mails, make follow-up calls, review her calendar, and set her priorities for the day. At 8:30 or 9:00 AM, the meetings begin and pretty much continue throughout the day. As we'll hear more about from Monica later in this book, she takes a 20-minute walk outside or around the building around midday to get a physical and mental break from sitting in conference rooms.

If no evening events are planned at work, she's typically home by 6:00 PM, unless one of the kids has a school event. If not, then it's dinner and helping her son with his homework. She tries to wrap things up by 9:00 PM, check a few e-mails, and attend to anything she needs to with the goal of being in bed by 10:00 PM and asleep by 11:00 PM. Then, as she told me, “it starts again.”

Like I said, a full and busy life. Don't get me wrong; from talking with her, I can tell that Monica loves her family, her job, and her life. Still, that's a lot to keep up with on a daily basis.

As I've been working on this book, I've been sharing some ideas from it with clients and friends who, like John and Monica, are in demanding leadership or other professional roles. When I share the title of the book with them, it's usually what I call a Jerry McGuire moment—“You had me at hello.” As soon as most people hear the first three words of the title, Overworked and Overwhelmed, the reaction is something along the lines of “When can I read it?” or “Can I read it while you're writing it?” My favorite response was from an executive who, when she heard the title, exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, if I had that book, I'd jump in bed with it and not get out until I finished it!”

The Situations You Find Yourself In . . .

If you're reading this book, chances are you feel the same way (although I won't press you on where you're reading it). Why is it that so many professionals feel so overworked and overwhelmed? If you're like almost all the people I work with, it's because your calendar is racked and stacked with very little white space between all of the work, family, and community commitments on your plate. But is that calendar the cause or the effect of being overworked and overwhelmed?

These are questions I've been paying a lot of attention to over the past five or six years. During that time, I've given an average of 40 to 50 presentations a year to groups of high-potential and senior leaders who read my first book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. When I first wrote that book, the next level I most had in mind was making the transition from manager to a more senior manager or executive role. That's clearly a next-level situation, but the more I talked with people, the more I realized that just about everyone in executive, managerial, or other high-capacity professional roles is experiencing next-level situations on an almost continuous basis, whether they've been recently promoted or not.

Let's say we have a roomful of 100 professionals, managers, or executives, and I ask them to raise their hand if they've experienced the following scenarios in the past year:

• Promotion? That's usually around 20 percent of the hands.
• In the same job you were in a year ago but the scope has gotten a lot bigger? That'll be around 50 percent of the hands.
• Working in a situation where the performance bar is significantly higher than a year ago? Ninety to 100 percent of the hands go up.
• Operating in a rapidly changing competitive environment? That's 100 percent of the hands.

So, if you're doing the math at home, you've realized that most people are raising their hand more than once. Many of them are raising their hand three and even four times.

. . . And the Denominator They Have in Common

So what do those scenarios have in common that make all of them next-level situations? In all four cases—promotion, increased scope, higher performance bar, and changing competitive environment—different results are expected. When you have to get different results, you need to take different actions. For the majority of leaders and other professionals, their circu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Overworked and Overwhelmed
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: Overworked and Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Mindfulness Alternative
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Appendix Coach's Corner Compendium
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement