Does it feel to you like life is changing more rapidly than ever? It’s not just technology leaping forward at an ever-increasing pace – although the seeming ubiquity of iPads and Kindle e-book readers really has struck me recently. It’s the wider feeling that the world is changing fast, especially for those of us privileged enough to have grown-up in Western liberal democracies who are used to the underlying stability of the last half a century.
Of course, this acceleration is a long-term phenomenon that some would trace back as far as the industrial revolution. However, it’s only in the past 50 years or so that for most people the situation has fundamentally changed from requiring us to adapt to a broadly accepted status quo (e.g. a job / career with one employer; marriage and creating a nuclear family unit) to one where as individuals our lifespan is far greater than the time it takes for society to change pretty significantly.
If we look at this from an evolutionary perspective there’s a parallel with diet and health. Currently there are several fashionable diets based on the idea that for millennia humans evolved eating a diet largely consisting on foraged (i.e. involving a lot of legwork) foods where carbohydrates were mainly sourced from roots and leaves (and were reasonably laborious to digest) and fat and protein more infrequent treats. Evolving over millions of years to consume as much food as we can manage and store it for as long as possible in order to survive potential famine, we arrive at a situation where, with the ease of modern foraging (i.e going to the supermarket) we shouldn’t be surprised that at least in western societies we have an obesity epidemic. We’ve only been cultivating crops such as wheat and rice for a few thousand years and that is no time at all in evolutionary terms. We just haven’t had time to adapt. The solution: go back to basics – eat like a caveman.
In our heads, the situation is subtly different but no less profound in its impact. We’re simply not designed to cope with the constant change and competing pressures of modern life. Consequently we struggle in some aspects of our lives from time to time as we attempt to juggle competing needs. As we juggle, we easily lose sight of the broader backdrop of life and end up in situations where we are variously confused, frustrated, bored or simply at a loss to know how to make sense and do something to move forward.
However, the solution in this area of our lives is certainly not to regress to stone-age behavior, although in business particularly we often see the impact of everyday stresses on people – particularly leaders – resulting in styles of management and attitudes which are frequently described by others as ‘Neanderthal’. Should we really be surprised?
Coaching is perhaps the key discipline today where we are effectively dealing with these types of issues. Coaching is effective in life scenarios and business /organizational scenarios because it gives us the space and focus to think through where we are and what we want to achieve. To extend the juggling metaphor, we can start to look beyond all the balls…
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