Several years ago, I often found myself leaving work in the company of a particular colleague. As we would chitchat our way to the parking lot, I’d ask something akin to, “How was your day?” Without fail, the person would offer a shake of the head, a heavy sigh, and say
I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped.
There will always be more to do. I often talk to nonprofit leaders and they tell me that there is more need than we can meet. I also observe that we (myself included) rarely weigh the cost or estimate our capacity well enough to set reasonable expectations. If anything, the expectations we put on ourselves have grown in recent years:
Do more. Do it better. Do it faster. And then move on to the next thing.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Brené Brown offered this insight from her book, Daring Greatly:
The expectations of what we can get done, and
how well we can do it, are beyond human scale.
Let that sink in…not just beyond you or beyond me, but beyond human scale. The quantity of work we expect to accomplish simply cannot be done. This applies to our job as well as our responsibilities at home, in volunteer situations, with hobbies, and other endeavors that fill our To Do lists.
Each of us digs our own habitual ruts, so we need to find our own unique way out. As we seek to let go of over-reaching expectations and shift focus to our deeper intentions and priorities, we may hold these guiding questions:
Do I love well? Do I live fully? Am I learning to let go?
Quote
All life is meditation, most of it unintentional. Joseph Campbell
Web
Here’s the brief interview with Brené Brown from The Washington Post (read now)
There will always be more to do. I often talk to nonprofit leaders and they tell me that there is more need than we can meet. I also observe that we (myself included) rarely weigh the cost or estimate our capacity well enough to set reasonable expectations. If anything, the expectations we put on ourselves have grown in recent years:
Do more. Do it better. Do it faster. And then move on to the next thing.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Brené Brown offered this insight from her book, Daring Greatly:
The expectations of what we can get done, and
how well we can do it, are beyond human scale.
Let that sink in…not just beyond you or beyond me, but beyond human scale. The quantity of work we expect to accomplish simply cannot be done. This applies to our job as well as our responsibilities at home, in volunteer situations, with hobbies, and other endeavors that fill our To Do lists.
Each of us digs our own habitual ruts, so we need to find our own unique way out. As we seek to let go of over-reaching expectations and shift focus to our deeper intentions and priorities, we may hold these guiding questions:
Do I love well? Do I live fully? Am I learning to let go?
Quote
All life is meditation, most of it unintentional. Joseph Campbell
Web
Here’s the brief interview with Brené Brown from The Washington Post (read now)
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