This month I've had more unstructured time than I've had in a long while. It’s given me the space to notice how much of my own awareness – especially of myself and what’s going on around me – I tend to ignore in my quest to get ‘stuff’ done. I think about it, and only really access awareness when I’ve created the time and have stopped for long enough to let it catch up with me.
So, awareness isn't something I'm managing well day-to-day. It's something that sits in the gaps and pops up when I have time for it to come to the surface. Which isn’t ideal.
Austin Chan, unsplash
I’m definitely not the only one experiencing this.
Most of us fill any unstructured time we have almost instinctively without realising – we add on another task, we pick up our phones to scroll or tick something off on our to do list. It’s really rare that we’ll stop and gaze into space and see what pops up. And that means that whatever might have arrived or surfaced for us, just never does. So, we lose out.
If I'm not making space to notice what's actually going on for me, I'm probably not bringing much of that noticing into a room either. Whatever gets missed between people probably starts in exactly this kind of gap where no-one has the space to notice. It’ll make collaboration trickier, relationships potentially harder and lots of good ideas never seeing the light of day.
It’s made me wonder about workplaces and specifically, whose job it is to build that space in? I don't think it's solely a leader's job to protect everyone else's capacity to notice things. And I don't think it's solely an individual's job either, done alone and privately. It's probably a bit of both - and I suspect most of us, myself included, never even think about this and why it matters.
It really means that the answer isn't, "someone needs to sort this out." It's more like, each one of us needs to repeatedly make that time in small ways, every day and encourage others to do the same – and that includes everyone we work with.
Where have you been protecting space to notice, for yourself or for the people around you, and where has that slipped away, never to be seen again?