“SUMMER WORK”: UNDERSTANDING THE POWER OF REST AND RELAXATION

After living a life predicated by the school calendar for 31 years, first as a student, then as a teacher and principal, I have strong associations with the seasons. Fall is a busy time, full of priorities, systems and new people. Winter is a time for stamina and continuous improvement followed by the celebration of making it through the dark months of October and November to Thanksgiving vacation and then winter break. Spring is a time of no-holds-barred efforts for completion, celebration and farewells. And summer—summer is just a glorious haze of sunshine and vacation.

I’m writing this post on June 21, the Summer Solstice, which is one of my favorite holidays. The longest day of the year! Long days mean time outside and all that extra golden energy from the sun to power our adventures.  I can tell you where I was on each solstice many years back—Maine, Denmark, Greece, Prince Edward Island. These places pulled me out of my accustomed routines and into a new state of wonder and exploration.  Though I wasn’t doing anything that resembled work, these summer travels represented a crucial part of my personal evolution—rest, relaxation, and a break from thinking about things analytically. A chance to just absorb the sweetness of a place, to let chance and a completely clear calendar take the helm. Often I left for vacation exhausted, an eye twitch and a sloppily packed bag the evidence that I left it all on the field, but I’d come home refreshed, with all of the priorities for the coming year having clicked into place while I traveled.

I don’t know about you, but I always view my vacations as the thing I do to reward my brain and body for the good going 11 months out of the year. But the other day, I came across the term “non-strategic awareness,” and all of the sudden an opinion that’s been percolating for some time bubbled up into conviction. I’ve always thought that getting sufficient rest and relaxation was essential for good performance (as a two-sport D1 varsity athlete I know that this is true). And then I realized that not only does rest and relaxation recharge our batteries, but it also opens up a chamber of wisdom that is not available to us when we are leading from our strategic minds.  

Let me explain. Strategic awareness is a general term used in the business world to describe taking in all of the stimuli of the team or organization you’re leading to help inform good decision-making.  I am all for good strategic awareness, but I noticed that in myself it held sway in a very quantifiable way: for 11 months of the year I was in strategic awareness mode, and when I was on vacation I thought I was “doing nothing.” 

Instead, I think I was slipping into “non-strategic awareness.” This term is coined by Bill Plotkin, an author in the literature of eco-awakening and purpose. According to Plotkin, non-strategic awareness is about paying attention to our experiences and surroundings in a “fresh and direct way, opening to how life may be inviting us, communicating with us, animating us.”  It’s about understanding and living from wholeness instead of separated knowledge.  Instead of using top-down, cranial thinking, it means perceiving things in the lower body, the gut or the legs and feet.  It includes experiencing right-brained connectedness vs. individual identity, engaging in fluid interaction with life rather than handling life in a strategic, linear way. 

With this definition of non-strategic awareness in mind, I tried to recall when I had lived in this state of being and what those experiences were like.  Reading books under a tree in the summer with a large bowl of cherries as a child. Being present with my mom during her final days and hours. Falling in love. Becoming a teacher. Moving to Greece for a year on a Fulbright. Realizing that the person I loved was not right for me. Moving to New Hampshire. Getting a puppy. Starting my own business.

Interestingly, so many of my major life milestones have come from a place of intuition rather than analysis.  I’ll give you an example. In June 2010 I went to California for a final round interview with Google. I interviewed on a Monday. Then I went backpacking in Yosemite for four days. When I came out on a Friday and got service somewhere south of Sonora, I had a voicemail from Teach for America stating that they needed to know by end of day if I’d be accepting my position in the Connecticut Corps. I had one bar. It was 2 pm California time. I looked at the horizon ahead for a few minutes. I smelled the dry grass, the whiffs of pine, I felt the wind on my face.  Then I called them back and told them I’d be ready to start on Tuesday. It’s laughable to me to think how much that quick decision has shaped my life. While I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I waited to hear what Google would say, I feel a sense of calm that I made the best decision I could at the time. I am content with my choice. 

Having thought about where my non-strategic awareness has led me, it struck me again how little time I actually spend in this way of being. For me, there’s a strong correlation between traveling, especially wilderness backpacking or camping, and existing in this non-strategic state.  So I can probably give you a pretty good sense just based on vacation time:  3 weeks in the summer, maybe 4 long weekends during the year, and one week of spring break. That’s just 32 days, a measly 8.7% of my year. And all of the times have been when I am taking personal time, away from work. I’m not sure I’ve ever dared to use my non-strategic awareness on behalf of a team I’ve led. What if something goes wrong and you can’t explain why you did something? What if your intuition was actually an expression of your bias? No, the stakes are too high.  

As Sarah Dimock, a coach who uses Plotkin’s writing, puts it, “It is possible to know things directly and deeply without filtering them cognitively. This intelligence is in us elementally. Although most of us in Western culture are taught to override or denigrate it from an early age, it is possible to shift into an elemental way of experiencing ourselves.”  For me, that elemental way of experiencing myself has been present at many of the big life decisions, especially ones that seemed different or unprecedented. And as surely as they lack logic, they also lack any sense of regret.

For me, the next challenge is to bring non-strategic awareness into my work.  As a small business owner with a roster of 1, I not only can do more of that, I have to do more of it because there aren’t other opinions to consult, precedents for how things have been done before.  We HAVE to trust our guts when further data gathering is not possible. When we allow our minds to observe and relax, we are better able to get those "senses" of what to do that are actually built on subconscious processing. I use non-strategic awareness when I’m listening to clients in coaching conversations. I use it when I’m deciding what to write about in my next journal piece. I use it when I am deciding what marketing approach to take or what segment of my business I want to expand most.  When I am in this state of non-strategic awareness, the time horizons are different. Sometimes I ask a question, like, “How will I find the right clients?” and the answer takes months to manifest. I’m walking around all those months knowing it’s an open question and I must be patient for the answer. Other times I find clarity in less than a day. In both scenarios I often find a solution that wasn’t even in my initial set of possibilities.  (And it’s possible to choose a direction from an instinctive state, and follow through on it with logic and planning.) 

As Martha Beck writes about Wordlessness, a concept I think is adjacent to non-strategic awareness,  “To master Wordlessness...you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow attention field — something animals only use in the moment of ‘fight or flight.’” While I’m not (yet) a neuroscience expert, I know from my training as an educator that when fight or flight is activated we can’t absorb new information and understand its possibilities.  It makes me wonder in what ways I might have been blind to elegant solutions in my professional past.

I have it easy when it comes to integrating non-strategic awareness right now because while it’s just me, these are very personal choices. On a larger team, or when I’m supporting a family, it might not be so easy to do. When I imagine myself leading a large team again, I can picture how the opinions and needs of others would become data points around which I would construct an ideal solution. Or if I’m lucky enough to have children one day, any decisions I make for myself must also be best for their wellbeing. So I believe I have to practice now, because as Plotkin writes, “Our accustomed, culturally-determined roles and identities are inadequate to navigate the sea change of our time. Our collective journey requires a radical shift in the human relationship with the community of all life — a cultural transformation so profound that future humans might regard it as an evolution of consciousness. Safe passage requires each of us to offer our full magnificence to the world.”