The Wisdom of Going Gentle

Sticking with the theme of small actions, I recently discovered a fitness app I love called Go Gentler. As a “rebel” in Gretchen Rubin’s model of how we adopt habits, I have struggled to find a motivational app that doesn’t just make me want to tune out. Being a “rebel” means that you can’t tell me what to do, and I can’t tell me what to do, which creates a bit of a conundrum when trying to adopt new habits. (Yes, I did throw a FitBit across the room and into the trash bin once.)

When I first started using the app, I thought it was a little ridiculous because it was telling me that I was “overreaching” when I didn’t really do anything but a short walk with the dog around our neighborhood loop. But the idea behind the app is to “grow a fitness habit for life.” I had noticed in the past that when I had a renewed commitment to working out, I would enthusiastically jump on the Peloton or go for an extra long hike, but I would overdo it, take a while to recover, and then lose my motivation altogether. 

I think the same thing can happen when we’re facing trauma. We think we have to go “all in” or jump into the hardest parts of what we experienced without working our way into it, building stamina as we go. We need to be able to “go gentler” into working with trauma by taking on a small bit, and being congratulated for going on a short emotional “walk”— even if we think we should be doing more.

The Go Gentler app creators say, “Constant comparison to others or even your past self may force our physical activity beyond our capabilities or make us give up entirely.” We also don’t want to give up on our healing process, which is why, at the Center, we do things in small stages. When we talk about grief, we talk about it for five, ten, or fifteen minutes. We allow the feelings to come, and then we focus on rebuilding, on relationships, on strengthening our resilience muscles. We need to know that we can repair and rebuild, even from short emotional “workouts.”

In Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodalls’s book Nine Lies About Work, they address the span of control question ­— meaning how many people should directly report to a leader — by addressing the issue of attention. What are leaders capable of paying attention to in a consistent way?  After studying the habits of the most effective leaders, they explain, “By pinpointing the weekly check-in as the single most powerful ritual of the world’s best team leaders, we can now know the exact span of control that’s right for every single leader: it’s the number of people that you, and only you, can check in with every week. It’s a practical, function-of-team-leader’s-capacity-to-give-attention thing. Your span of control is your span of attention.”

We are not all the same, we do not have the same levels of energy or stamina, we do not have the same thresholds before burnout kicks in. Some of us come to our jobs with a history of trauma, some of us have been dealing with trauma or vicarious trauma for years. We need to know ourselves and “go gentler” so we can be more effective. What is our ability to pay attention to ourselves, our emotional states, the work at hand, and the health of our teams?

One way the Go Gentler app works is to check as many biometrics as possible — your sleep quality, heart rate, temperature, monthly cycles. What are the metrics we use for tracking our emotional health? We talk about “early warning signals” or our “check engine lights” to understand when we need to regroup. For example, I start swearing like a sailor when I am stressed — even with clients or on coaching calls, I’ll start dropping f-bombs. That is not how I want to show up, and is always a clue for me that I need some rest and recovery time. I need to stop and pay attention to the right things in order to keep going.

What are your early warning signals? How can you “go gentler” when addressing your traumas or the pace at which you heal? How can you give yourself what you need, without judgment?

For me, “going gentler” has meant that I’ve actually done more over the same amount of time, even though it looked and felt like less, and am more likely to keep going.

Know that you’re in good company — at whatever pace is best for you.