Slow down
Trying to learn life’s lessons
Sometimes life keeps trying to tell you things.
Slowing down is a lesson I keep hearing from different parts of my life and keep continuing to try to learn.
A lesson from Kilimajaro: “Pole, pole”
25 years ago, my brother and I climbed Kilimanjaro together.
Kilimanjaro is a big mountain, the tallest in Africa, and way bigger than any mountain in Europe: Mount Blanc is 4805m; I live in the UK, where the tallest mountain is 1345m. Kilimanjaro reaches up to 5,895m (19,341 ft) above sea level. And, its peak is 4,900m (16,100 ft) above its surrounding plateau base, making it the tallest free-standing mountain in the world.
Getting to the top takes days. However, it’s not a technical climb and you don’t need any rope or special equipment. It is a hiking or ‘walk up’ peak, and you’ve ‘just’ got to keep going. The key piece of advice that the guides gave us was to go “pole, pole” (‘slowly, slowly’ in Swahili).
The final day of the ascent often starts between midnight and one o’clock in the morning. The reason is to avoid climbing in the heat of the day’s sun, and to have the added bonus of arriving at the peak for sunrise.
We had to walk REALLY slowly on that final ascent, taking very small steps, just one foot in front of the other, heel to toe. The guides kept reminding us to go ‘pole, pole,’ reinforcing its importance. We did that — we went slowly — and we got to the top of the mountain.
A lesson from the US Navy SEALs
That lesson from Kilimanjaro echoes a teaching from the US Navy SEALs.
As Chris Fussell, who spent 15 years in the SEALs recounts, they follow a mantra: ‘slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.’
Essentially, this mantra is a reminder not to rush. Because when you rush, you’re more likely to make mistakes. Whereas, counterintuitively, if you take it slowly, you’ll progress more smoothly — and that will end up being faster than if you had rushed.
“Rushing into action, you fail.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
[Or, as my mum used to say: ‘less haste, more speed’.
I’ve never linked in my mind before my mum, the US SEALs and Lao Tzu…]
Lessons from Kili #2: To move forward, sometimes the best way is to go sideways
I mentioned the final day’s climb up Kilimanjaro. As well as staring early, you also start high — at 4,730m — and that day you climb about 1000m, up a steep scree slope.
There’s no path, and the guides take you a massively indirect, zig zag route. Rather than going up, we would walk across in one direction, and then turn around and go across in the other direction.
Occasionally, I would think: ‘there’s a quicker way’. But I was wrong. Following an indirect ‘switchback’ route gave us two massive advantages.
First, it helped ensure that we didn’t set off too quickly, make some initial rapid progress and then then get tired and suffer from going too fast for our bodies and lungs at that altitude.
Second, walking directly up a scree slope is a case of taking one step forward that then slips half a step back down. That’s a lot of wasted energy, which is lessened by walking across the scree.
Lessons from Kili #3: Take a break
Something like 50% of people who try to climb Kilimajaro fail to make it to the top. And the main reason why climbers fail to reach the summit is altitude sickness.* Going slow allows your body gradually to adapt to the lack of oxygen.
The success rates of getting to the top tell a clear story:
- In 2006 only 27% of people who opted for the fastest trek (5 days) made it to the summit, whereas
- 85% of trekkers who spent 8 slower days on their climb were successful.*
Furthermore, the single most effective thing you can do to increase your chance of making it to the top is to take a rest day to acclimatize to the altitude. Often when people try to climb Kilimanjaros, they walk every day, but again the evidence is clear:
- Taking 6 days to do the 5-day route increases the success rate from almost 30% to about 50%, and
- Taking 7 days to do either of the 6-day routes increases the success rate from about 50% to around 70%.
Yup, when your goal is to keep going, the best thing you can do is to stop, take a break and rest.
A lesson from the British army
I remember from my early years working in the House of Lords a whole series of parliamentary questions on a rifle that had been supplied to the British Army — the SA80 A1/A2.
My search skills seem to have deserted me, so I can’t now find the questions, but the essence of the story is this: these new guns had been designed to quickly shoot bullets, to fire an incredible 610 to 775 rounds per minute. Only problem was, the firing mechanism kept getting jammed…
Lessons from Business
Given the benefits of slowing down on efficiency and effectiveness, reduced burnout, and increased productivity, it’s perhaps not surprising that people in organisations and businesses are spreading the news about these lessons. For example:
- I coach people and teams that we sometimes need to slow down in order to go faster/further. (See also Ed Batista.)
- I know a CEO who uses the matra ‘pause to perform’ to encourage people in his business to take time out every week to dedicate to themselves in order to improve how they perform
- McKinsey, the global management consultancy firm, advises leaders on the need to pause to go faster and slowing down to speed up (HT Helen).
- You can find Harvard Business Review articles on the topic, such as ‘Need Speed? Slow Down’ and ‘Speed Kills. Slow Is Fast’. And slowing down to speed up is put forward as the key to successful strategy exceution in this HBR video.
- Computer science professsor & author Cal Newport has written a bestselling book on Slow Productivity that highlights the benefits of avoiding burnout and getting more done (HT Jack).
Lessons from my stroke #1:
5 years ago I had a stroke. I was 44.
Maybe life was teaching me to slow down. I’ll never know.
I do know that it was 8 months until I could return to work full-time.
I do know that since my stroke I’ve become much better at slowing down and managing my time and how I pace myself — and I’ve still got a long way to go. There are no signs that this has adversely affected my productivity or performance at work. In fact, I’d argue the opposite. Indeed, I’ve been promoted in that time. So certainly my personal story reinforces the lessons above.
But that’s only half the story, because…
Lessons from my stroke #2:
As I lay in bed my hospital after my stroke, unable to walk unaided and unable to move my left arm, my biggest concern and regret was that I hadn’t appreciated life’s simple pleasures enough: the ability to stretch my arms, the feeling of the warmth of the sun on my face and body — things I questioned whether I’d ever be able to experience again.
Life is not a race.
Slowing down is not just about going faster, making fewer mistakes, being more efficient, more effective, or more productive. Those things are great. And…
Slowing down is also about truly experiencing more of life.
A lesson from Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination: Slowliness
This second lesson from my stroke is echoed in something that I’ve learnt from Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination (CCI)— an award-winning arts and wellbeing charity that helps children and young people and their communities to thrive, whose board of trustees I’m fortunate to chair.
As Rob Hopkins put it, CCI work not only with curiosity and imagination as their name suggest, “but also with awe, and magic, and wonder”.* This is connected to the fact that one of CCI’s core values is ‘slowliness’. Slowliness involves “a generosity with time and space”*; it “envelops us with time and space to (re)connect”.*
Ruth, CCI’s former Director, with whom I was lucky to work with for five years, explained that this beautiful word “encapsulates the idea that actually, if you slow down, that brings in space in all sorts of metaphorical and real ways to give you a chance to notice.”*
Whilst out walking together yesterday, I asked Emily, CCI’s current Director, what’s this wonderful word means to her. And she emphasised that:
“It’s not about doing something, it’s about a way of being.”
Shortly after she said this, we paused to listen to the sound of ice melting on the nearby plants.
Slowing down helps open us up to more of life’s wonder:
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
Slowing down helps us be more fully ourselves, more richly alive.
A lesson from Somatic Experiencing
Slowing down is the biggest lesson I continue to try to learn from Somatic Experiencing (SE) and my training to become a professionally qualified SE practitioner.
The first step towards slowing down is recognizing when we’re speeding up. What does the experience of speeding up feel like?
When you can recognize that feeling, you can then (if helpful and you want to) catch yourself, interrupt that pattern, and change it and slow down.
(SE has lots of exercises, tools and techniques to help with this.)
A lesson from Zen:
After my stroke, one of things I explored to help me slow down was meditation. By an accidental but fortuitous path, this took me to practice zen. And as zen master Henry Shukman explains, becoming a meditator, opening up to a life in zen, can be viewed as
“slowing down and going through life at a pace where we can actually experience the sensory detail of every step we take.
Imagine you’re walking down an old track up a long valley. There are tufts of grass at the roadside, and you notice them clearly. There are stones underfoot embedded in the dirt of the track. Here and there, there’s a puddle, a pothole. The soles of your feet, even through the leather of your shoes, feel these variations in the texture.
Sometimes you’re in the shade of trees. Other times you move through sunshine. Clouds come over, and the surface you’re walking on becomes dull. Then the clouds part and the little rocks embedded in the track glint.
You hear birdsong. You hear insect sounds. Little creatures whir by your face, and zing past on their way from hedge to hedge. It’s a rich sensory experience, full of detail.”*
