EU396: Foundations: There’s Plenty of Time

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, There’s Plenty of Time.

It’s amazing how so many things that come up in our days can feel like emergencies, like they need to be solved as soon as possible. Taking a moment to consider whether the situation at hand is a true emergency can help us release so much of the time pressure that we’re feeling. Reminding ourselves that we have plenty of time gives us more space to explore the root of the issue. And with that space, we can imagine the possibilities with a curious, creative mindset.

We hope you enjoy today’s episode and that it helps you in your relationships and on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

Want the full collection of Living Joyfully Foundations podcast episodes as an audiobook (and the transcripts edited into an ebook)? Find them here in the Shop!

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

EPISODE QUESTIONS

1. When you imagine the idea that there’s plenty of time in the context of a disagreement with a friend, partner, or child, how does it feel? Expansive? Overwhelming? Just plain wrong? Why?
2. Do you recall a time when an issue bubbled up again and again because you didn’t take the time up front to more fully understand it?
3. Where in your life do you feel time pressure? What if you could release that? How would that feel?
4. Can you think of a time when feeling time pressure interfered with coming up with a creative solution to a challenge?

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are thrilled you’re here and interested in exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about the idea that there is plenty of time. Now, it has been such a helpful tool for me over the years when navigating challenges with the people I love, and I believe I first heard about it from you, Anna!

It’s amazing how so many things that come up in our days can feel like emergencies, like they need to be solved as soon as possible. I think taking a moment to consider whether the situation at hand is a true emergency can help us release so much of the time pressure that we’re feeling. Reminding ourselves that we have plenty of time gives us more space to explore the root of the issue, rather than throwing Band-aid after Band-aid at it just to quickly solve it. “I gotta get this, I gotta move through it.” It’s so fascinating just to consider having plenty of time.

ANNA: Yes. Oh my goodness. So, it has been one of my main mantras for a very long time. Our society likes to operate with this extreme sense of urgency about everything and I get caught up in that really easily. I feel like time pressure is just a huge trigger for me that kind of sets me on this path of not thinking and just being really stressed out.

And the thing is, I like to get things done. I like to check boxes. I like moving on to the next thing, and that can have its place. I can be super productive. But what I found was that carrying that sense of urgency around all the time did not help with my relationships at all. It takes time to navigate things in a relationship, and if you stop and take a breath, you can ask, is this really urgent? Is it an emergency? Does this need to be solved right this second? And often, you’ll find the answer is, no. It does not need to be solved right this second. I can calm down.

PAM: Right? And I find that even when we recognize that it’s not an emergency, I feel that time pressure can trigger our need to perform, if that makes sense. As I was thinking, it’s like, okay, yes, this is not emergency, but then boom, I still want to perform well. I want to solve it quickly and efficiently. I want to get an “A” in problem-solving, to be productive, because those are strong cultural messages we hear so often. But are they actually helpful goals in and of themselves, particularly when other people are involved?

Another question that I found very useful to ask myself is, are we looking for future approval or validation about how we handle the situation? That’s that performance piece, maybe from a person that we anticipate telling about the situation in the future. Are we looking at that more than we’re looking with care and compassion to the other person in front of us who’s involved?

And yes, being someone who jumped straight to problem solving for many years and still works on it, another consequence I found was that solving a problem quickly was often shorthand for implementing my solution, which relationship-wise, often meant pushing through the other person’s consent. And maybe not even obviously pushing through it, but more so by not even slowing down to ask them for their thoughts and ideas. Instead, just presenting my solution with an energy of, “Of course this makes sense and you’ll agree. Let’s do it.”

But I came to see that that approach definitely took a toll on my relationships, on my connections with the people in my life. Their trust in me dwindled because they felt less seen and heard by me over time, because I wasn’t asking them what they thought. I wasn’t asking them for their ideas. I was just saying, “Oh yeah, look, this happened. We can do this instead. Let’s go.” Just pulling them along with my energy.

ANNA: Exactly. And as you’ll hear us say so many times, everyone wants to feel seen and heard. So, anything that’s short circuiting that is going to be an issue. And that’s the thing. When we are holding speed and efficiency and production ahead of people and connection, it’s going to take a toll. Period. And again, I like to be efficient and get things done. So, this isn’t about just stopping all the things, but for me, it’s about being aware of the energy I’m bringing into a situation.

And if another person is involved, am I taking the time to really hear them and understand them, especially if we’re talking about our most important relationships? It’s key to avoiding conflicts and misunderstandings to give ourselves time to really hear one another. And I’m one who likes to fix and solve and to be fair, I have some very good ideas, Pam.

PAM: You do. You do.

ANNA: But no one wants to be dragged along, even for my really good idea. And so, remembering what we’ve talked about in the past on the podcast, how different everyone is. We see and process the world differently. So, my really good idea might be a really good idea for me and not for the person I’m in relationship with. But if I push through their consent with this intense sense of urgency, it ends up just leaving us feeling so disconnected.

PAM: Yes. And when I’m feeling time pressure, particularly self-imposed time pressure, I’ve found that I am much more apt to take that conventional straight-line path from A to B to solve the problem, because it feels like a race against the clock to me. But when I can realize that that’s happening and remind myself that there’s plenty of time, I feel more expansive and free to be curious. I feel I have the space to more creatively navigate a challenge, because you know what? And that’s fine, too. If it was just me, I could take my straight-line, A to B and do it and move on, but as I chat with the other person or the people that are involved, I can give them that space and just slowly map out what’s going on. There are signposts of everyone’s needs.

Maybe there’s lines of trees representing the constraints that we’re discovering. Maybe environmental constraints, maybe time constraints, maybe capacity constraints. Maybe there’s hills for aspects that feel a little bit harder. And flower gardens or some beautiful art in spots that we’d like to pass by if it works. And from there, once we kind of start to fill in that map, we can more fruitfully begin exploring paths through the space of the challenge that hit most of the need sign posts, navigate around many of the hills, and maybe even take some time to stop and soak in the view of a sunflower field in bloom.

I know, maybe that sounds a bit sappy. But in my experience, our lives are so much richer when we give ourselves the time and space to be open and curious about the situation, to chat and ponder a bit more to get creative.

ANNA: Yes. I love that image. Honestly, I can feel my body slowing down just thinking about it. And so, I think finding what helps you stay present in the moment and slow yourself down. Even to notice the sense of urgency and slow it down. So, what kind of imagery, what kind of breathing, what kind of things in the moment help bring you down? And again, that mantra of, “There’s plenty of time,” this vision of a map of all the possibilities we have, like whatever that is.

And I think another aspect of peeling back the layers related to this is to look at where is the sense of urgency coming from? What is its purpose? Who is it serving? And asking those questions really helped me kind of deconstruct this a little bit, because the truth of it is, when we’re rushing from task to task, there’s very little time to question anything.

And I think sometimes we think that sense of urgency is coming from within us, but I don’t think it is. I think we’ve been trained to rush, to value efficiency and productivity above all else. And I think humans naturally want to connect, and the two just don’t really work well together.

So, the question for me becomes, do I want to sacrifice or harm my relationships so that I can be a better producer for society? And I would argue that people in strong connected relationships actually bring more to the world and end up producing the most amazing things. And so, how this looks in practice for me is, when I find myself feeling frustrated or trying to rush someone along to my chosen outcomes, I just stop and I take that breath and I say, “There’s plenty of time.” And I feel it. The energy instantly changes.

And if I’m still struggling, I will ask myself, “Where is the sense of urgency coming from? Is it even real? And is it helping? Because even if we feel there is some real time constraint, there is some real thing that’s driving it, is it helping me make the choices in the moment? Is it helping the two of us get through this situation? Because if it’s not, we still need to set it aside, even if it’s a real thing, because we’re not getting anywhere.

And, as I mentioned, so often this applies to our relationships with both kids and adults. Rushing a child out the door frustrated or pushing a partner to get something done on a timeline without regard to their experience of it, it just doesn’t feel good to anyone. So, reminding myself there’s plenty of time just grounds me back in that moment.

Because the truth of it is, if we’re five minutes late, if we miss the thing altogether, if the project doesn’t get done, the world does not end. Most likely, a year later, it’ll be hard to even remember what the issues were. But if we continually push past the people in our life, if we push them along this arbitrary timeline, it will absolutely impact the relationship, and that’s something I want to avoid.

Again, back to priorities from episode one, I want to keep my relationships as the priority. And if what’s being handed to me by society is in conflict with that, then I want to question it and ultimately set it aside.

PAM: Yes, exactly. With relationships as my priority, I want to use that lens as I navigate my days. And it’s fascinating to discover how often cultivating connected relationships is at odds with the societal messages that we hear or even just infer from how people are moving through and navigating their days all around us.

ANNA: So true!

PAM: The immense value given to having power and influence over others, the call to create strong boundaries to protect ourselves from others, the importance of being productive members of society at the expense of others, it is just so interesting to think about how relationships, while talked about so often as being an important part of our lives, in reality, are often expected to take a backseat.

So, with that, here are some questions you might want to ponder as you explore the idea that there’s plenty of time.

Our first one is, when you imagine the idea that there’s plenty of time in the context of a disagreement with a friend, partner, or child, how does it feel? Just bring that idea, that lens of plenty of time in. Does it feel expansive? Does it feel overwhelming? Does it feel just plain wrong? “No, I don’t have time.” “Why?” is a great question to ask yourself at that point. What is it that’s making me feel like I don’t have time in this situation?

The next question is, do you recall a time when an issue bubbled up again and again because you didn’t take the time up front to more fully understand it? I find things can bubble up and we can solve them. We can put that Band-aid on them. But if we don’t take the time to get to the root of things and really find out what the underlying need is, or play around with the process through which we move through things that come up regularly in our lives, we can just see it happening again and again.

ANNA: I think that one can help people that have the efficiency piece, because really it is more efficient to take the time and deal with it and to actually figure out how we want to move through it, versus the plugging the holes or the Band-aids that we end up having to revisit and revisit and revisit the same challenges.

PAM: Exactly. Exactly. It is so interesting to think about that, that we think we’re being efficient, we think we’re being productive, but so often, maybe it bubbles up over and over, but maybe it has relationship implications that I have to spend time with later. So, you can start to discover that it’s really a choice of, where do I want to put my energy in the process? In the space up front or into the, going through it again and again.

Okay. Okay. Question three. Where in your life do you feel time pressure? What if you could release that, how would that feel? I think that could be a big one, too. And if you release that, how would that feel? And where is it coming from? Is it something that I am putting on myself? Because so often, it’s something that we’re doing.

ANNA: So often, it’s something we’re putting on ourselves that again, we kind of think is coming from somewhere else, maybe our job, or maybe school, or maybe something else.

But really when we look at it, it’s our interpretation of that that’s putting this super intense sense of urgency and time pressure on it.

PAM: Yes, yes. And sometimes we’re just feeling that we have to bring somebody else’s framework or approach and be the voice of them, whether that be society or a boss or a teacher, and that I have to be them now, because they’re not here to say it, but is that how I really feel?

All good stuff. Okay. Our last question. Can you think of a time when feeling time pressure interfered with coming up with a creative solution to a challenge? And this is one I just would love people to think about, because what I discovered over time is that even when it is just me, it can be so useful to take the space not to just go with A to B, the first thing that comes to mind.

I have found there are so often more creative ways that that feel even better, that may be even more fun. There are so many possibilities. So, when I just let myself play with these things, take that time pressure off myself of something that I need to do, like the bathroom thing. It’s like, just do the damn bathrooms and get it done. I can tell myself that story, but it’s so much easier or so much more fun when I can just give myself some space to play with it.

ANNA: Yeah. And I think the time allows us to bring in the context that we talk about so much, because if we’re just going point A to point B, we’re really missing a lot of context around us. And then that can inform us, because again, maybe it helps us make a decision that saves us some work down the road or that keeps a relationship intact that we might be running over. And so, taking that time for ourselves to take in that context, to me, just makes it easier, more fun, and a lot of times, even more efficient.

PAM: Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Thanks so much for listening, everyone, and we will see you next time. Bye!