6. When there's nothing to do but wait: turn pauses into power-ups
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 6 | 05 November 2024
Notes
Today’s episode tackles a universal yet often overlooked skill: transforming those inevitable waiting periods that we face in the humanitarian sector into moments of power. Whether it’s waiting on a grant application, a response to a job offer, or even a delayed flight, these pauses can feel like lost time, frustrating and powerless. But what if these “in-between” .moments hold the potential for the best insight and growth?
Learn to turn passive moments into active self-research: it can change everything.
Transcript
Good morning, good evening, my friend. I don't know what time of the day you're listening to this, but, um, it's good to talk to you either way. What a week! I've been lying on my back, unable to do pretty much anything. Eyes not working properly, struck down by some stupid, undetermined neurological mess that no doctor seems to understand. And let's just say that I got to test my self-coaching skills to their limit.
I'm reporting back from the front lines of letting your brain run wild while you can do nothing but wait. And I am here to tell you the brain can go nuts and the brain can be managed, my friends, I can't wait to tell you all about that.
But first I want to thank you, all of you who took the time to send me messages this past week, asking how I am wishing me a speedy recovery. It means the world to me. I feel incredibly lucky and I'm really, really fired up to be here recording this for you.
All this waiting has gotten me thinking. We work in a sector where being good at waiting is a hell of a skill. It's not an easy skill for people who are as action oriented as we aid workers tend to be. And who are used to sort of making fast decisions, being in constant movement.
And the truth is that amid all that movement, amid all those quick decisions, amid all that action, there are times where we just have to wait. There's no choice.
If it's because you sent an application and you're waiting to hear back for a job or a grant.
Maybe it's your long-distance partner who is suddenly not really answering your messages and you're like, "what's going on with you? Talk to me!"
Maybe your flight is delayed and you don't know if you're going to make it home on time for the holidays. I can't tell you how many hours I spent waiting in Abuja, in Nairobi, all my layovers in Frankfurt and Amsterdam and other places. They have some cool clocks in a skip hole, Amsterdam airport guys. I filmed one of them one time. I'll have to post it on Instagram. It's so good. I was like, all right, if I'm going to wait, I might as well film time going by. Um, uh, we find ourselves sometimes eating food that we don't really need just to make time go by faster as we wait.
We face power outages, internet outages, and we have a deadline that we are running against, but there's nothing we can do but wait.
Sometimes we have to wait on colleagues to do their part of the project so we can move on with hours.
Recently, I was in a war zone where the amount of waiting to get in and out of that war zone to move within that area to, you know, pass checkpoints, endless hours of waiting, and we just...
I watched some colleagues have to wait for their medical scare that they have no proper diagnosis on no proper care. And that's it.
We just... there's nothing left to do, but wait.
And I think it's very easy in those moments to feel helpless, to feel like there's very little in our power.
And while I recognize that there is some value in the idea that there's nothing that we can do, but let go and wait patiently, I think there's an opportunity cost in believing that there's nothing we can do to turn that wait into added value for us.
And this is what this episode is about. How can we turn those waiting times, those pauses into power-ups for our existence on this planet, for our understanding of ourselves?
I wanna make it extremely clear that this is not an episode about productivity. This isn't an episode about how to make the most out of this free hour that you have.
No, no, this is an episode on when really you have nothing you can do, but wait. When that very state of waiting is creating things for you that if you were to pay attention to them would teach you a lot of stuff, right?
For the longest time I would have described myself as someone who is incredibly impatient. Waiting has never been my strong suit. But recently, I sort of realized that waiting doesn't have to mean loss of time, loss of growth, loss of power. There's actually no need to fight the waiting by replacing it with some sort of activity.
You can just invite whatever the waiting is creating for you in you as an opportunity to learn things about you, critical things about you that you wouldn't be able to learn if you were not waiting, right?
So I'm going to try to walk you through how I see us being able to do that.
I don't want to make you wait any further. See what I did there? I'm on fire today.
So we're going to enter your waiting space, making the wait work for you instead of against you, using it to find out things about you that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn if you weren't in this passive, helpless, sit-back, basically non-action position.
For people like us who like to roll up our sleeves, get stuff done and be proactive, there's a lot of very interesting stuff that can come up by being basically kind of forced to take a seat and chill.
There was this Spanish scientist the other day in one of the quadrillion podcasts that I ended up listening to, since there was nothing else for me to do, and she was saying there's two ways of learning in science. The first one is through observation. And the second one is by asking questions to whatever it is you're investigating.
So, for me, there's an opportunity when you are waiting for something else to happen, when you're waiting for someone else to make a move, to go and observe what happens with you in that waiting phase and ask yourself good questions in relation to the observations that you make.
I'm going to give you examples of things to observe and examples of things to ask yourselves.
You can do this absolutely anywhere. You can do this anytime. It's not time consuming. You don't need any tools. You don't need a pen. You don't need a paper. You don't have to be alone to do it. You don't have to sit in silence. I mean, it's probably best if you're not like at a heavy metal festival, but we don't need any special conditions for this to work. You can be at your airport gate. You can be waiting for your food to be served. You can be taking your shower. It can happen during your commute.
Really. It's a bit of a ongoing process that doesn't need to have a beginning and an end. And that is just an invitation for you to keep in the background of your mind as you go through your waiting period. Right.
So the first thing that I want to invite you to observe maybe is your posture: we are architects of our bodies at all times, how our body is shaped by the posture that we adopt. Are you rounding your back? Are you sitting straight? Are you in a defeated posture or are you ready to go? Are you in a relaxed posture or are you in a sloppy posture? Are you in a tense posture or are you in an empowered posture? All those things are so different.
And I suggest you think of your posture as this sculpture, an embodiment of your attitude that you are adopting in the face of this wait.
How are you occupying space on this planet while you wait? What is the relationship between your body and the outside world, the chair, the table, the desk, the people that surround you? What is your physical attitude in this moment?
The second thing that I want to invite you to observe is your internal sensations, right? Some spike in your heart rate that comes and goes? Is there some saliva building up in your mouth more often than usual? Are your eyes tearing up? Are you feeling restless? Your legs, are they feeling restless? Your arms, your hands, do you feel itching? Is your temperature in your body pretty uniform or are there variations? That's such an interesting thing to observe as well.
Of course, if you know me at all, you know I'm going to invite you to observe your thoughts and where they're going and where they're taking you in this sort of vulnerable waiting position.
What associations are you making? Are you equating not getting this specific job with you not being able to have the career that you want? Are you letting the people who make decisions on this grant decide for you, whether or not you're going to get that PhD that you are dreaming of? Are you associating the silence of your partner with a problem in the relationship?
Again, just pure observation, just like be like, "okay, it's so interesting that my head went there. It's so interesting that that's where it went". That's it. That's all we want to know.
And then you of course you want to observe the emotions that those thoughts are triggering. You want to go beyond the "glad, mad, bad, sad" sort of usual suspects and get a little bit more granular, right. Are you feeling neglected? Are you feeling unseen? Are you feeling misunderstood? Are you feeling vulnerable? Are you feeling lonely? Are you feeling lost? Are you feeling concerned? Are you feeling afraid? Are you feeling insecure?
There's no need to like go extra fancy on the vocabulary, but like freaking make an effort! And spoiler alert in these moments of waiting, when you feel like your power and your control are a little bit diminished, you're probably going to experience some sort, some intensity of worry.
Again, you know, we've been through this. This is just an increase in your cortisol levels, probably a lowering of your serotonin, oxytocin, and other happy chemicals that can happen in your brain, we'll do a whole episode on neurotransmitters, but all of it is perfectly normal, right?
If something's not under control, you're going to worry. "What if I don't get the money? What if I don't get the contract? What if he wants to break up? What if he met someone else? What if he's reuniting with his ex? What if I have a terminal illness? What if I caught an STD? What if I don't make it home for Christmas, right?"
Your brain's going to want to go to the worst case scenarios. Just let it do it. Try not to fully believe those thoughts and take a bit more of an observation, you know, standpoint so that you can actually see them for what they are versus dive with those beliefs, but let it happen. Don't try to stop it.
"How interesting that of all the outcomes that my brain is preparing for, this is the one that I am preparing for". "And how interesting that I thought of John when I was actually, um, having a problem with Paul", like... just take note of it.
And then when that happens, notice the urges that your brain is bringing up. What is it making you reach for? Do you want to eat chocolate in this moment? Do you want to have a smoke, a beer? Do you want to reread your application for the 20th time, even though it's been submitted and there's nothing you can do to change it? Do you want to text your ex? Do you want to see how many likes you got on that social media post?
What, what's going on, right? What are the urges? What is your brain reaching for to numb the discomfort of the worry and of the insecurity and of that sort of waiting phase that feels a little bit out of control, right? Are you wanting to watch a TV show? Are you wanting to blame someone else for what you're going through or blame yourself?
Your brain wants to get relief. How? How is it looking for that relief? I think that is such key information on us.
And then the second part of the learning is of course asking the good questions, right? Like any good scientist: why is this happening? Why do I feel that I need this? Why am I reaching for this? What am I actually waiting for? What am I actually looking for?
You don't need very good answers to those questions. The questions are more important than the answers. Cause when you have good questions, the very presence of the question itself can help you unlock insane levels of understanding on your life and where you're at.
That discomfort in the impatience, in the waiting is going to point the finger at what you're yearning for and where that could come from, what you're making things mean.
So for example, why can't you just be okay with someone rejecting your application? Why are you so concerned because someone's not answering your text right away?
Why is your health not being perfect such a problem? What are you making it mean about your worth, about your place on this planet, about your role, about your added value, right? About what you can and can't do.
Is your brain lying to you? What will your best friend tell you instead? These are just all such excellent questions to ask in response to whatever observations you make.
A final very good question that I really like to ask myself is "what if it all works out"? I mean, our brain really doesn't like to imagine best-case scenarios. It really likes to prepare for the worst ones, but it's so, so important that we redirect gently every so often. Don't let the worry just drive all the way and just spend a teeny tiny bit of time answering the question of what it would look like if things did work out. And what would you do then? And what would your life look like?
So that's sort of what I wanted to invite you to do this week, if you find yourself waiting for something, it's an observation-question cycle that can be used in any kind of pause, waiting, sort of passive time that you're facing.
I do want to say that there is no judgment involved in this process. Okay. You may find yourself judging yourself.
And my invitation is to observe that too. Just be like, oh look, it's so interesting. I'm judging myself for this. I'm blaming myself for this. I think I should have done better. I think this is the wrong thing to think. I think this is the wrong thing to feel. I think this is the wrong thing to ask or to answer.
Make the judgment part of your observation, but please don't fall into the rabbit hole of judging yourself because there's very, very little added value there. There is so much you will miss if you're busy judging yourself versus observing yourself and having curiosity for yourself.
That's what I want to offer you this week, my dear, dear humanitarian friend, don't miss the opportunity to learn from the discomfort of sitting back and having to wait with no action to take.
The effects of those times on you can tell you so many things about you. Being in the waiting room in this day and age where there are so many opportunities to distract ourselves, to act, to do, to look away, to seek something else, is such a rare opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
This is an opportunity for you to use the highest part of yourself, to increase your consciousness, to increase your awareness of where you are and where your work on yourself stands.
Be curious, be gentle and kind. You can get so much higher-quality dialogues with your own thoughts if you keep judgment out of it.
Again, I can't thank you enough for showing up, for listening and for being in touch.
I send you a big hug wherever you are, wherever you're headed, whatever you're waiting for.
I cannot wait to talk to you next week. Until then, please continue to take excellent care of yourselves.