فصل دهم

CHAPTER 10

HARMONIZE WHITESPACE

The world will see you the way you see you, and treat you the way you treat yourself.

BEYONCÉ

My son, Jack, has stopped calling me Mommy.

There was no fanfare, no confetti, no bells going off the moment he chose to stop using that title with me. I have no idea what day was “the last day.” He called down the stairs to me—I don’t recall what he asked me, but I do clearly remember that he called me Mom. I looked over at John and said, “He called me Mom.” I sat there a little dumbfounded.

And I wondered, When did this happen? So I flipped through the card catalog in my brain (is it just me who imagines myself flipping through cards of information until I finally hold the right one up triumphantly?) and started feverishly tearing apart the stacks, scouring for moments when he’d referred to me as Mommy. I realized it had apparently been a while.

This is a good thing, I have to remind myself. Jack is, after all, a teenager—I should have known this was going to happen. It would be strange for a high school kid to call his mother Mommy. And let’s be honest, I wouldn’t want him at the age of thirty referring to me as Mommy.

It does make me think—we don’t know when the last time for anything will happen. Let’s make the most of these moments and slow down to enjoy them. We have to stop rushing through life and missing all the goodness that is there before us. We need to create space to soak in and enjoy the moments.

OWN YOUR CIRCUS

We’ve all experienced that vague sense of dissatisfaction with our day. Time passes in a blur as we sit at our desks without really paying attention to the tasks or even the people around us. We punch the clock, getting work done, but when the day closes we feel like we accomplished nothing. This is why we feel unsatisfied when we lay our heads on our pillows, why we wonder where the day has gone.

We complain we’ve got a million things to do, that our lives are like a circus. Only instead of flame eaters, jugglers, and sword swallowers in every ring, we’ve got overloaded schedules, overcommitted kids, and overbooked weekends. We’ve created our own circuses and we wonder why the clowns are running around with their hair on fire.

Let’s allow this to sink in for a minute, though. We are the ones who raised our hands to volunteer for the charity event, we are the ones who signed up our kids for ten weeks straight of out-of-town soccer tournaments, we are the ones who are spending our weekends aiming to win the Yard of the Month. We own that circus.

We are doing our very best, I know, but we can live better. We can live happier, but doing more won’t achieve this. In trying to chase down balance, we are trying to do it all. We are spreading ourselves paper thin.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: balance is bogus. Balance doesn’t exist, and we don’t want it to exist. If all things are balanced, there can be no movement or growth—everything would stand still. There is magic in the unbalanced because that’s when we begin to move forward. We need counterbalance to make our lives work—we need harmony.

CREATE YOUR OWN HARMONY

Harmony can be found in the 168 hours we have each week, but so many people choose to focus—almost hawklike—on just the 24 hours of each day. Twenty-four hours is such a tiny snapshot of the whole picture, literally one-seventh of our week. And yet each day is treated as if it stands alone, so there’s a tendency to look at this tiny snapshot as our chance at achieving this mythical balance.

This means all our priorities—all the things that matter the most—have to squeeze in and find time during this small window. Time management expert Laura Vanderkam calls this the “24-Hour Trap” because it’s simply not feasible. She shares, “Any given 24 hours1 might not be balanced, but the 168-hour week as a whole can be.” In other words, we have to stop looking at our lives as individual days and begin to look at the bigger picture.

When we zoom out and look at the week as a whole, we can begin to find harmony in unexpected places. We need to stop treating each day as its own scorecard to be checked for balance. Look at your week as a whole and see if maybe you are spending more time on your priorities than you realize. We have a tendency to beat ourselves up and to notice only the things we didn’t do well, when in reality we are doing much better than we think.

If we view the week as seven opportunities for success, we have a greater chance of achieving harmony. Look at time requirements with fresh eyes too. If we have a priority tugging on us because it feels like an impossible dream, we need to get creative with our thinking.

Let’s talk about a common balance complaint: “I work too much and never seem to make it home for dinner with the family.” We feel like our balance is out of whack and we must be doing something wrong.

If you have a job that requires occasional late hours or you travel for work, making it home for dinner every single night will be difficult. By setting yourself up for this rigid expectation of five nights a week, you are setting yourself up for failure. On the nights you don’t make it home, it’s easy to believe you have failed.

If you choose, instead, to look at the harmony of 168 hours, you might notice that while you didn’t make it home for dinnertime on Wednesday, you did spend time together on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and even Friday. You were together four evenings out of seven.

Why don’t we zoom it out even further, though? Let’s get to the heart of why dinner with the family is a priority. For most people, it’s not about the act of sitting down and eating at the end of the day that’s important. It’s the intentional time spent together that matters. So who says this has to happen around the dinner table? Could meaningful time happen in the morning? Is it possible to go into work a little bit later so you can have some time together before work happens? Or could you scoot away from the office and schedule in a lunch once a week with your family? What about weekends? If work keeps you burning the midnight oil during the workweek, can you schedule in some very intentional blocks of focused family time on the weekend?

The priority is enjoying time together as a family. We need to loosen up our narrow definition of how we spend time on our priorities. When we do that, harmony can flourish.

Remember the Squirrel Strategy from chapter 2? Let’s look at our weeks using this same strategy:

Need to do a lot of networking for your job? Who says it has to happen at happy hour? Why not try hosting some coffee meet-ups in the morning or midafternoon?

Don’t think you have time for date night with your spouse? Try meeting once or twice a month for lunch dates while the kids are in school. Maybe even throw in the occasional lunch at a hotel where you get sandwiches from room service and some “exercise.” No time for your favorite pastimes, such as reading? Carry your current read with you everywhere you go, and then grab those hidden pockets of time while standing in line at the grocery store or while waiting for piano lessons to be over. That’s how Stephen King reads2 five hours every single day while still publishing bestselling fiction of his own.

My point being, there are a thousand ways we can make our priorities sit front and center when we get creative. We just have to treat our priorities as priorities.

YOU DO HAVE THE TIME

We have to stop telling ourselves that we simply don’t have the time. If we are serious about creating space in our day, we need look no further than our calendars. When we look at our time in these 168-hour weekly blocks, and we allot 8 hours of sleep at night, we are left with 112 waking hours. Then, if we deduct our 40-hour workweek, we discover that we have 72 hours left. Seventy-two hours for us to choose how to spend—we can spend it in ways that we really want, or we can continue running a circus. Ultimately the choice is ours.

It’s all about effectiveness over efficiency. It’s not about micromanaging your clock so you become ten seconds more efficient at checking email. It’s stepping back and deciding whether those emails are important in the first place. If not, why are you filling so much of your day with them? Batch that task so it’s not a distraction. Give yourself permission to focus on what’s truly important. Time management is not about learning how to do things faster; it’s choosing where—and how—to spend your time.

Kali* is one of the brightest women I know, with born leadership qualities and an absolute passion for her work. She’s the type of person who thrives on big projects, complicated timelines, and managing teams. Over the past few years, since leaving her job to be at home, she has lost the shine in her eyes, her smile seems harder to come by, and her excitement for life itself seems to have waned. Knowing her love of her work, I pressed her about why she quit.

She admitted that her kids’ schedules were just too demanding—there was simply no way she could work. Both her kids were active in sports, one was taking acting lessons, the other was on a dance team, both were learning violin—the list of activities went on and on. She told me her afternoons were packed full to the brim. Weekends weren’t any better with the kids’ travel soccer teams. Traveling and sitting through game after game made her feel exhausted.

So I asked her, “If sitting at soccer tournaments all weekend long isn’t fulfilling and makes family time feel stressed, why are you choosing to enroll your kids in so many activities?” She looked at me like I was crazy and replied, “It’s not a choice. I don’t want them to be behind everyone else.” We are so committed to making sure our kids don’t miss out on any opportunities that we cram their schedules full to the point of bursting like overfilled water balloons. But have we stopped to ask if that’s what they really want? Have we stopped to ask if that’s what we really want? Or do we just continue doing it because that’s what we are supposed to do? Everyone else has their kids enrolled, so we should too.

This, my friend, is just another story we are telling ourselves. A good parent makes sure their kid never misses out—even if it means we are spending our entire afternoon speeding from one activity to the next, missing dinner as a family, and falling into bed at night, drained and frazzled.

Here’s a hard truth for us to accept—we are choosing this. And if we choose it, then we need to own it. It’s our circus—complete with the juggling clowns. Stop complaining about it, stop fussing that there’s no time, because we are choosing this lifestyle for ourselves whether we mean to or not.

It’s easy, though, to understand why this happens.

WE NEED TO SLEEP LIKE A SHARK

“I’m like a shark—I have to keep moving. If I stop, I die.”

Those words were tossed out lightheartedly by a good friend of mine recently during a call. We were discussing all the never-ending tasks and events filling up our days. I laughed when she said it, but her phrase stuck with me long after we hung up.

We all feel busy—overbusy, if we’re being honest—and we feel as if that’s normal life. It’s what everyone does—just scroll through your social media feed. It seems like everyone is doing it all and, according to their camera roll, doing it well. We are under an extraordinary amount of pressure to keep up that pace.

And that’s created a lot of sharks in the water—people who think that if they dare to stop moving, if they quit rushing from one task to the next, they will just cease to exist. They will lose their importance—their place in the world.

Sharks glide through the salty water at the top of the food chain, but they are burdened with the constant task of movement. For sharks to breathe, oxygen-rich water must continually flow over their gills. Their fins act like the wings of a fighter jet, giving them lift. If a shark stops moving, it will sink to the sandy bottom of the ocean floor and suffocate. Sharks are predators in constant motion, which has led scientists for years to wonder, If sharks can never stop moving, how do they sleep?

It wasn’t until a recent expedition3 to Guadalupe Island that the mystery was solved. Scientists were tracking a large great white shark named Emma. During the daylight hours they watched as she stayed deep in the warm waters, stalking her prey swimming above. But as night fell, Emma’s behavior began to drastically shift. She settled her giant body near the sandy bottom of the shallow waters and placed herself directly into the oncoming current. With jaws gaping open, she appeared to go into a sleeplike state. The swift current passed effortlessly over her gills, keeping her alive while allowing her to slow down and conserve her energy.

If the ocean’s apex predator can learn to slow herself down to allow some time for rest, surely we can too. This is an animal that truly cannot stop moving, and yet she’s found a way to recharge. This downtime, this whitespace, is important for the shark to thrive. We need that too.

When we are busy, there’s very little time for quiet—the noise begins to feel so natural, we don’t even notice it. And then, when we finally do have some quiet, it can be unsettling because we’ve gotten so used to the steady hum. But this is the whitespace you want—strike that—it’s the whitespace you need so you can dive deep into who you really are and who you want to be.

CARVING OUT TIME FOR YOU

When we think about being productive, we believe we need to fill our day completely so we can do as much as possible. In reality, to be truly productive we need to give our brains a little space to play and explore—some unstructured time.

And I get it. We feel like we can’t disconnect—it’s become an expectation to turn around emails and texts at all hours. We’ve lost sight of our own boundaries. Before smartphones, we clocked out on the weekends, we weren’t expected to always be available 365 days a year, and we could go on vacation without worrying whether our bosses were going to call. Smartphones are designed to connect us, but rather than pulling us closer to those we love, they are chaining us to our work. We have to choose to carve out space.

I know what you might be saying to yourself. I don’t have time to play. Other people do, but not me. Who has time for play? But I would challenge you and tell you that we all have time for whitespace. We do. We have spaces of time in our schedule already—we just don’t purposefully carve them out. And because we don’t create this space with intention, we aren’t reaping the full benefits of our whitespace. I’ll show you what I mean: Raise your hand if, in the last twelve months, you have binge-watched a TV show or taken a silly online quiz, maybe to find out which character in Star Wars you are most like or which Hogwarts house you belong in. If you chased away boredom by playing a mindless game on your phone, your hand should be up too. I’m betting we all have our hands raised (and, yes, mine included—after all, I know I was sorted into Ravenclaw).

We have the time, but the idea of intentionally creating space for this unstructured time feels uncomfortable. It feels silly because we are grown-ups and we don’t think we need recess. But we do. Whitespace is essential for our own well-being.

If we don’t purposely carve out this space, our brain automatically fills it with meaningless tasks like checking our phones and social media, which can feel like a good way to distract ourselves in the moment but doesn’t help us in the long run. Recent studies show that the average person4 will spend five years and four months of their life on social media. What could we do with that time instead? Well, you know that marathon you’ve been saying you want to run but just don’t have the time for? In those five years you could run hundreds of marathons.

Recently we went on a five-day whitespace vacation with my best friend’s family—and absolutely no technology. Two families: four full-time working parents, two tween girls, two teenage boys, and zero devices. None. Crazy, right? You know what happened, though? Our kids sat up late and had deep conversations with one another, they collected grasshoppers in a Pringles can, they studied ants gathering together cracker crumbs for two hours. They laughed. They interacted.

For five glorious days we were all untethered from our computers, from our televisions, from our phones. During this whitespace, I realized we are often so focused on our screens we forget to look around. We forget to interact with the world around us—we don’t look up; we walk, eyes down, hunched over our phones like addicts. We have lost the ability to truly connect. Connect with others and connect with ourselves.

We have to turn off the phone so we aren’t tempted to peek at the screen, we have put our email on pause (you know you can do that, right?), and we have to trust that our teams at work can carry on without us checking in on them again and again. The bonus of disconnecting is that it helps ensure our systems are working and it empowers our teams to feel confident in making choices and moving forward on work without us. That is a good thing.

STAKE YOUR BOUNDARIES

Boundaries are key when it comes to creating this space. We have to carve out this time for ourselves because it will not magically appear unless we put in some effort.

Kelly, a student in my liveWELL Method course, is a great mom who struggles with the many roles a single parent has to play. It’s not easy being the sole provider and being in charge of everything at work and home. It’s easy to forget to take time for yourself. Kelly shared, “My boundaries for self-care5 always go by the wayside when I don’t feel like I did enough to earn the time.” I don’t think Kelly is alone in feeling this way, so I challenged her by asking, “When do you feel you’ve earned the time?” I was curious because for most people, the feeling of having done enough is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it—it’s never filled.

Kelly decided to track her time and discovered that her problem wasn’t whether she had done enough; it was whether she appeared to do enough. She realized she “was so focused on if other . . . people thought [she’d] put enough hours in at the office.” It wasn’t about her own expectations but her feeling that others didn’t think she had a right to that time.

I know you are nodding your head with me here as we realize that this is yet another story we are telling ourselves. But the beauty of acknowledging our stories is that we have the ability to rewrite our own endings. A few weeks later, Kelly shared this win: Woo Hoo! Today I sent the kids6 to play outside for 15 minutes after dinner while I sat down and read a book! For pleasure! I decided after completing an awesome meeting and taking care of my girls it was ENOUGH. I deserved it.

I think my favorite part is that last sentence: I deserved it. She does deserve it, and so do you, but often our inner critic tells us otherwise. It barks loudly at us, telling us we should be busy and reminding us we have to achieve certain tasks to be worthy. It’s the voice that tells us anything we do for ourselves is selfish. But giving space to ourselves is self-care, and self-care isn’t selfish.

AM I BEING SELFISH?

That word selfish comes up all the time when I start talking with women about making room for ourselves. We are taught by society—by our upbringing—to be givers. We give, we give, we give, and we feel guilty taking.

Guilt lies in wait, lurking around the dark corners of our brain with an air of superiority. When opportunities arise, it swiftly stands and rushes to whisper in our ear reminders of why we are not worthy. And then with a curved, cruel smile, it snakes its way back to the shadowy nooks to wait again for more prey.

When it comes to taking time for ourselves, when we allow ourselves to recharge and recenter, our guilt stops whispering and begins to shout. You might be wrestling with this concept of giving space and time to yourself because it challenges so much of what you know about who you are and your role in this world.

You are a giver, I know. You love to give to others, even at the expense of yourself. If I were there next to you, I would take your hand at this moment and look you in the eye and tell you this truth: when we make time for our wants and needs, we are able to give our fullest selves to the world around us.

The things that matter—like love, happiness, and compassion—need to be cultivated in your own life before you can make a difference in the world by extending those feelings to others. John Maxwell said it best when he reminded us, “To bring out the best in others7, I first have to bring out the best in me. I cannot give what I do not have.” This is a mantra I often need to put on repeat in my own head.

WHEN WE MAKE TIME FOR OUR WANTS AND NEEDS WE ARE ABLE TO GIVE OUR FULLEST SELVES TO THE WORLD AROUND US

If we do not have compassion for ourselves, how can we give it willingly to others? If we don’t treat ourselves with love, how can we truly love others?

We speak to ourselves in hurtful, angry tones. We hurl insults—things we would never say aloud to anyone else—but we think nothing of saying these poisonous words to ourselves. The grace we give to others greatly exceeds the grace we offer ourselves.

I understand that the idea of self-care can feel a little too warm and fuzzy for some people. If you are like me, you were taught when you fell down to “rub a little dirt on it and get back up.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but we do need to make sure we allow for some self-compassion too.

Self-care is important and as soft as the idea may seem, there’s a lot of hard evidence to back it up. There are studies proving it increases our problem-solving abilities8, research showing it helps us bounce back9 after adversity, and evidence affirming it even increases10 self-motivation.

Get the idea? In other words, when we practice self-compassion11, it boosts our overall satisfaction with life (and yes, I have a study to prove that one too). It’s important to take care of you.

ASK YOURSELF: When we are satisfied with life, doesn’t that bleed into all the areas of our world? How we treat our families? How we connect with our friends? How we interact with strangers on the street?

Being mindful and taking time to give yourself the space you need is an investment in yourself. I think so many women struggle with this because whitespace might feel like a waste of time—after all, you aren’t running around and doing things. You are being still.

But giving yourself whitespace and taking care of yourself isn’t a luxury, and it’s not pampering. It’s essential to higher productivity, creativity, and concentration. Because our brains are constantly stimulated, giving ourselves space allows us to do our best work. It seems counterintuitive, but space allows12 for increased focus. Whitespace is where ideas, innovation, and ideals are born and nurtured.

Remember the CLEAR framework? That came about as a result of whitespace. I had been struggling with how to talk to others about what is important. I was finding that, again and again, people would come to me frustrated, wondering how they could discern what needed to be on their priority list. I was stumped, to be honest, because how do you tell others what is important—especially when the answer is different for everyone?

I decided to wrestle with the issue on a three-hour plane trip. To make sure I didn’t get off track, I put nothing in my carry-on but my notebook and pen. No book to tempt me to read, no computer to lure me to work. I had nothing but a notebook, a pen, and three hours of whitespace.

I sat on the plane with an open notebook and an open mind. By the time the wheels of the plane hit the tarmac, I had designed a model for how to define what is important. The CLEAR framework was born from that open space because I was able to let my brain explore.

Our lives are a series of moments, one after the other, that we can fill with being busy. Or we can try using a few of these moments to be still and silent, allowing ourselves to grow and find deeper meaning. This is when the quiet voice inside our head whispers to us so softly we must strain to hear it. When we don’t make this space and allow this quiet voice to be heard, we feel disruption. We wonder why our lives feel turned upside down, when really it’s just our path calling to us from the wild.

When we leave whitespace available—open spaces of unrushed time—we can slow down and fall deeper in love with our priorities. That’s the joy of missing out. As I type this, the word unrushed is underlined in an angry slash of red on my computer because society says it really isn’t a word. We have a thousand words for busy13 but no single word for the true opposite—at least not a positive one. There isn’t an English word for slowing down and savoring time. Isn’t that ironic?

About a week after that incident, when I learned I was Jack’s mom rather than his mommy, I was rushing into the store with Kate trailing behind. I was hurrying and walking too fast, so she called out and reached out her hand for mine. There had been a time, if I’m being totally honest, when this would have exasperated me because it slowed me down. I had to tamp that feeling down for a split second to realize, This could be the last time she reaches for my hand. And so I slowed down my pace, took her hand in mine, and lived in the moment. And I hope you will too. Be present for your tasks and events, give space for the people you love, and take good care of yourself.

Let’s stop running around being busy and create some whitespace so we can slow down to enjoy life. I know this chapter has been filled with some tough love, but know that is what it is—love. I want you to have that space you need. You deserve that space, and I want to dive right to the heart of how to do that in our next chapter.