“Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear and not bothering”
Winnie-the-Pooh
What I’ve realised over the last couple of weeks
I’m not quite sure how to start out this post, this last fortnight was a doozy, not because a crazy amount of things happened, but instead because almost nothing happened…
This is because I had a hard lesson on the importance of one thing – Rest.
I didn’t think that I would be writing about this now, if you read my previous post you may remember that I planned to talk about self-doubt as it applies to my work.
However, not long after my previous post, Monday I think it was (my sense of time is kaput thanks to all these lockdowns), my partner helped me realize that I have become obsessed with Deliberate Practice. I didn’t want to hear it at first, but I did end up taking the time to reflect on what she was telling me and seeing what she was saying, she was right, surprise surprise. She is pretty amazing in that way, it’s a blessing to have someone care about you so much that they’re willing to tell you what you won’t want to hear, when they know you won’t want to hear it, I likely wouldn’t have realised what was happening otherwise.
It’s a funny thing – I perhaps expected that I would receive another lesson on the importance of rest after getting totalled by burnout at some point, but it appears that DP has helped mitigate burnout, but more on that in a later post. My point is given that burnout hasn’t slowed me down, I have used the lack of apparent burnout as an excuse to keep working; only fuelling my obsessive streak with DP.
I would reinforce to myself that there didn’t seem to be much downside to what I was doing, effectively using this as my main excuse to keep working, working and working. The thing is, these excuses chipped away at me so gradually that it seems I didn’t notice what was going on. I was spending gradually more and more time on social media (DP groups), more time talking about DP, reading about DP, reflecting on DP and writing about DP; I have noticed that my blog posts had gradually become longer and longer. DP was starting to get into my time to unwind. Again I didn’t seem to be burning out, so why not keep at it?
So that afternoon after my partner and I had more of a chat about what I was doing, later while on our stationary bike I told her my realisation that I need to take Rest just as seriously as my time Working.
I later sent an email to Nathan (my DP coach) about what had happened and what I realised, he suggested an experiment – that I until today (which was about 1.5 weeks) to not engage in any DP whatsoever. Nothing. Nada. Zilch… So I did just that.
What I’ve managed to do since my last post
What a plot twist. So I have done virtually no DP whatsoever since my last post. I say virtually because I did have one catch up over video with great folks in the DP/FIT Psych’s of Aus FB group; thank you Mel, Mitch and Peter 🙂
I have simply rested. Except of course doing my usual shift work in seeing clients. I have incorporated more rest into my life and came up with some points about how I want to continue to engage in regular rest:
- Schedule it (at least an hour a day)
- Have a pool of rest activities to pick from (so I don’t get bored with one)
- Pick a different kind of activity each time I rest, so I don’t obsess and then get bored (e.g. only listening to an audiobook for a week)
- Include active activities in my list of rest options (e.g. going for a walk)
- Eliminate distractions when I rest (pause what I’m doing if I have to, as I don’t want to multitask)
- Put rest into my calendar (e.g. at least one period of rest before my work shift and one immediately after)
I am doing this because with all my talk previously about the importance of rest, it is clearly very easy for me to take it for granted, especially over time, so I decided that I need to be stubborn about protecting my time in rest to ensure it happens. Exactly like I was doing with the other components of DP.
I had also been listening to a book by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang called ‘Rest’ (again, surprise surprise). I’ve found it to be an interesting argument in the importance of rest, I’ve enjoyed hearing some of the proposed scientific findings on how rest works for our brain and the anecdotes of famous people in history and their relationship with rest, like Charles Darwin. Though I had to stop listening to it the other day because of course it started talking about Deliberate Practice! How Rude!
I plan to keep going now that my time off DP has ended.
“You put the beer in the coconut and throw the can away!”
Homer Simpson
How important is Rest?
A final thought on this, the importance of rest – athlete’s talk about it, musicians talk about it, those on social media talk about it and the research talks about it; but we don’t do it very well.
I’ve been wondering – if so many signs (including research) point to the importance of rest; including when engaging in practice or trying to improve one’s effectiveness, should rest then be a part of the proposed structure of DP, as below?
Because in my experience, albeit anecdotal, it seems that without rest the whole DP system could quite easily collapse.
Below is an image of the proposed structure of DP from the Better Results book
Till next time and as always – thanks for reading.
Deliberate Practice Psych 