Practice, Ritual, and Capacity for Living and Leaving Well
Over the past decade (even longer, if I’m being honest), my body has been through a lot of change. I quit smoking in 20010, went through menopause in 2017, had a motor scooter accident in 2019, and quit drinking in 2020.
Accidents, addiction, and aging all create changes in the body. And I had to face the facts that smoking and drinking were affecting my body, my body’s hormones have changed, and I have long-term damage in my right leg and knee that affect the ways I can move.
Not to put too fine a point on it, these changes suck. But they are also my reality.
I had Carrie Melissa Jones on my podcast a couple years ago, and she said something that really impacted me:
“There are no definitive metrics that are going to tell you whether something’s working or not. And so we often are going off of our gut. Unfortunately, our gut is often influenced by outside culture and all these other things. And outside culture is telling us more is better, try harder, rest is not productive, all these things.”
I had to stop and reflect on what messages I was receiving from outside myself and internalizing. Maybe you’ve gone through this too, as you’ve lost mobility, gone through menopause, or dealt with other body changes. Our society upholds a very narrow view of the “ideal body,” and the further our bodies exist from this (false) ideal, the more we receive messages of shame and unworthiness. Our society celebrates hustle and overwork, and it looks down on rest and recovery.
These messages are difficult to overcome, but we have to accept the reality of the circumstances we have.
With the limitations I have from my accident, I’ve been prioritizing strength building and an intentional movement practice that allows me to work with the body I have. Simultaneously, I want to be more consistent and thoughtful about the food I eat.
All of these things that I want to do require a deep devotion to practice and ritual. It requires that I experiment with how my body responds to certain foods. It means I need to incorporate my dietary changes with my real day-to-day life, not just following a meal plan that nutrition gurus preach. It also means I need to ritualize things like my bedtime in order to have the type of morning that I most desire.
Carrie’s words have stuck in my head and come back to mind as I’ve been paying so much more attention to my own gut–both my actual stomach and my intuition. When we are influenced by outside things, our internal culture can be impacted. When we allow outside culture to interrupt our ritual and practice, we don’t reach the desired outcome we have for ourselves.
“I always say “We decide” and it’s so true.”
I always say “We decide” and it’s so true. It’s true when it comes to the way we practice and embed ritual into our lives–including in the workplace. If your gut is telling you that you need something different, what practices and rituals can you start working on today to help support that future decision? Can you track and notice where you have Worthy Work or Warm Fuzzies moments? Can you create a set of data points around any opportunities that exist in your current role? Can you begin to notice ways you can practice injecting new rituals into your mornings, or the way you schedule meetings, or how you navigate hard conversations with your boss or team?
Our Relationship with Capacity and Burnout
When we want to make any decisions or changes about our circumstances, it’s important to determine our actual capacity for those changes. Capacity requires a combination of time, interest, skillset, and energy. You could have the skillset and interest, but if you don’t have the time or energy, it won’t be fruitful. If you have the energy and skillset, but not the time or interest, the project may fail. If you have the energy and time, but not the skillset or interest… you get the point.
When we try to push ourselves into growth, into change, into a next phase, without the actual capacity to do so, we risk burnout.
Burnout is one of the most common reasons individuals start to think about a career change, and it doesn’t often matter whether the burnout is self-inflicted or a result of the workplace.
A quote from Bethaney Wilkinson from Episode 30 of the Leaving Well Podcast is also relevant here.
“Part of the reason transformation takes so long is because people are already at capacity in life, typically. We are leading full lives with partners and kids and homes and communities and things happening all over the globe. I think that our capacity tends to be limited, at least in modern times. The amount of space it takes to think deeply about the shifts needed in our organization, that space tends to not be there unless we create it.”
How Management Can Address Workplace Burnout
What do you do when your team is obviously struggling with burnout? It’s not an easy fix, but it’s a hugely impactful culture shift. Getting to the bottom of workplace culture that may be causing or contributing to overwhelm and burnout will take a lot of time. It will take a lot of listening and navigating multiple sets of needs and expectations.
If you do nothing else, spend some time individually with each of your team members and find out the main sources of their stress and overwhelm when it comes to their role and responsibilities. Putting on your detective hat, think broadly about where there are intersecting dots and connections. Does one employee feel underutilized and undervalued when it comes to their work, while another employee has shared a consistent feeling of having too much work on their plate? Can some of your unfinished projects be navigated as a sprint with new team members joining to round out the skillsets brought to the completion?
As it relates to delegation, we stymie finding additional capacity because of some of the following issues:
Trust, and the lack of it with those we maybe should delegate to
Trust, and the fear of losing it or having it degrade from strong relationships
Reliability
Competence
Sincerity
Deliverability
Even though some of those things may feel scary, consider the power that comes from the reasons TO consider better delegation such as efficiency and scale. Another way to think about growing your capacity is by inviting folks into your work to support needed outcomes.
Consider the following folks:
Advisors–people who agree to leverage their expertise and brand to support your org
Ambassadors–people who help raise awareness for the org, ask for donations on your behalf, and/or increase connections to community / interested parties.
Junior board members–people who offer time, skills, and services to help increase awareness and resources for your org
Strategic partners–other mission-aligned orgs that leverage their resources alongside your own to achieve a program objective
In the instances where you’re ready to grow your organization’s capacity by introducing or elevating your delegation muscles, consider these questions:
How will you assess readiness? What needs to be in place to feel confident in this person’s ability?
When you delegate, what support can you offer to the person who is taking on the project?
How much context should be provided with regard to the reason for the project, or what’s already been done?
What expectations do you have, and what expectations do they have?
What worries come up? What is the best outcome and the worst outcome?
What needs to be deprioritized in order for this person to take on the new project?
What values does this offer to the work, when effectively delegated?
The Importance of Documentation
When we think of practice and ritual, something they both have in common is a requirement to notice, track, and assess what’s working.
As I’m working to increase my strength, more intentionally consume foods that fuel my body, and prioritize sleep and movement, it doesn’t do me much good if I am not paying attention to the outcome of this effort. It also doesn’t do me much good if I’m not tracking the effort to begin seeing those patterns and then making adjustments as needed.
The same goes for our impact together in the workplace. Documentation of our practices and rituals allows us to have a record of our efforts. Tracking this data also offers us opportunities to manage the agreement we have with each other about what work we will do, how we will do it, and what the finished product will look like. Another benefit to documenting our procedures and policies is that it provides and allows ease, and enables trust building and reliance on each other.
What correlations are you noticing between the idea of practice, ritual, and capacity?
What connections can you draw to your own work?
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well Assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype at naomihataway.com/assessment.
To listen to a podcast version of this article, listen to Episode 39 of the Leaving Well Podcast: Leaving Well, Practice, Ritual, and Capacity.