Give Me a Break, or Rather, Take One

One of the perks of working at a dot-com consulting company during the late-90s Internet boom was the clichéd ping pong breaks. Sure, we had coffee, too, but having the ping pong table in the office felt youthful and carefree. Who didn’t love hitting something during the day amidst busy projects?

My ping pong table—both literal and figurative—is catching dust in our basement. As much as I have been striving for better balance, I still get caught up in the crazy, chaotic busy-ness of our days and weeks. But that’s not healthy. In my head I often hear Nell Carter sing the theme song from the 1980s TV show, “Gimme a Break.”

Are we too busy coordinating our kids’ lives? Working? Running to the grocery store? Doing laundry? That we can’t squeeze in mini breaks for our sanity’s sake?

Last week my graceful yoga instructor made an off-hand comment, that in yoga we do a series of poses, and then we recover with a rest, like child’s pose. And she remarked, “Wouldn’t it be nice in life if we took more breaks like in yoga?” Which, of course, got me thinking.

Then a Harvard Business Review article popped up in my Twitter feed, “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which puts another spin on the need for downtime. They liken high performance athletes with power executives, recognizing the need for energy renewal for business leaders to be more successful—just as those in sports need rest to be better on the field/court/turf. They write:

In the living laboratory of sports, we learned that the real enemy of high performance is not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined, intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance.

Anyone ever feel burnout? No need to undermine our lives, because, let’s face it—we perform all of the time. We may not be on the cover of Fortune or Sports Illustrated, but our lives move at a pressured pace. The importance of rest still remains. In this rat race of life we are all high powered executives, all super athletes, striving, on some days, to simply survive. I just think of Ivan Drago pounding on Rocky’s scarlet boxing gloves saying, “I must break you.” And I suppose… better to take a break versus feeling shattered ourselves.

 

For additional reading...“The Making of a Corporate Athlete” article:

The Making of a Corporate Athlete