Work detox: 5 coaching questions that’ll change your life

I was running on Wimbledon Common this morning and noticed that the personal trainers were out in force. It’s amazing how many people, realising that their beachwear is going to look better without the bodily overhang that’s developed during the winter, embark on a bikini programme round about now. Whether or not this is true of you, I wonder if your work life ever feels a bit tired and flabby; whether parts of it spill out in places where, if you thought about it, you’d really rather they didn’t?

There’s no bodyweight index to measure yourself against with this one, no trouser belt digging into you warning you it’s time to take action. But the signs are there if you want to look at them. The most obvious one is the hours you’re putting in: sixteen, maybe eighteen hour days aren’t unheard of for the work obese. Maybe you’re spending them in your office, or maybe you’re one of the world’s Road Runners, constantly travelling at home or internationally. One of my friends knew it was time to quit consulting when the people he saw most of were the cabin crew on his regular international flights. You long for the weekend, only for it to pass in a fog of sleep, chores and arguments with your other half.

“Sixteen, maybe eighteen hour days aren’t unheard of for the work obese.”

Your BlackBerry is never off. If you still have a social life, you’re checking for e-mails, texts and calls – and indeed responding to them – as your friends and family watch on resignedly. Most of the time, however, you probably avoid planning social things – they just get in the way. Or if you do arrange a coffee or a drink with that friend who’s been persistently trying to get in your diary, the chances are you’ll call or text at the last minute and call-off. “Something’s come up at work,” you say, even though the “something” is probably just more of the same. Home or away, you’re in the office early most days to get a head start on things before your back-to-back meetings begin, and you stay late at night to keep abreast of what’s happened when you’ve been away from your desk. You fuel your body with a mixture of pastries, cakes, sandwiches, pizza and chocolate snacks, washed down by as much caffeine as you need to keep you alert. And the chances are that the only form of exercise you do is, indeed, that blitz you give your body right before the summer holidays.

But it doesn’t have to be like that and the power is in your hands to change it. So, how do you? Well, for starters, here are five questions to get you thinking.

1. What are your work goals?

Every diet or exercise coach will ask you, right at the beginning of a new programme, ‘what do you want to achieve by embarking on this regime?’ Goals bring focus to our intentions and attract into our lives what we consciously or otherwise desire. If our intentions are unclear and our goals along with them, what we attract to our life and work is equally unclear.

Goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound.  “To weigh 58kg by 14th August 2009”, you might tell your personal trainer. It’s really obvious what that goal is. As that date is six weeks away and you weigh 64kg at present, it should be achievable with a bit of work. But if that date is next week, or you weigh 80kg, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

So, if work is feeling a bit lardy to you at the moment, find some time to stand back from all your activity and ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve in the work that you do. Perhaps you’ve got goals that have been set by, or in conjunction with, someone you work for. Maybe you’re self-employed and have goals that you’ve set yourself for this business year. Have a look at them now. Are they the right goals? Do they encourage the right things in you? Do they inspire you? Are they clear? Do you feel clear in your role in trying to achieve them?

2. What things should you be doing to achieve your goals?

With a beach fitness campaign, there’ll be a number of things that you’ll think of doing in order to achieve your goal. They might be: follow the Patrick Holford GL diet; follow my personal trainer’s programme; do one detox massage a week between now and when I go on holiday.

What tactics will best help you achieve your work goals?

3. What are you currently doing?

You might find it useful, before you begin your diet and exercise campaign, to take stock of current habits and rituals. After all, if you’re going to follow Patrick Holford’s fabulous and healthful diet, but your fridge is empty and you’re currently living off caffeine and sugar, you’re going to have to make a few changes.

Here’s a little “habits and rituals” review for the work detoxers amongst you. It’s easy but takes some discipline. Get yourself a notebook, and find a watch or clock that’ll prompt you on the hour every hour you’re awake (you might find that your mobile phone will do it for you). The thing to do is, when the alarm beeps, write down briefly what you’re doing, the purpose of what you’re doing, and how you feel about it. For that last point, it’s helpful to have a scale, where, for example, 0=”depressed”; 5=”ambivalent”, and 10=”ecstatic”, and you just write a number rather than words. The point is that for a week, including at weekends, you keep a personal record of how you’re spending your time. At the end of the week, look at your data and see what it’s telling you.

• How are you spending most of your time?
• How does that reconcile with your goals?
• What patterns do you see in how you feel about things? What do they say to you?
• What starts to stand out as needing to be different?

4. What needs to change?

What, for example, do you need to do more of? To get the beach body you want, sticking with the Holford plan, you’ll need to eat more slow burning carbohydrates, for example, along with more fruit and vegetables, good sources of protein and good oils. What’s your work equivalent? More thinking and planning time, maybe? More delegating? More cutting to the chase in all your communications? How are you going to achieve that?

What do you need to do less of? Less coffee, way less alcohol, and less bad fats might translate to less hanging around the office because your boss does, less picking up tasks, or interfering with tasks that are strictly other people’s, less challenging of things that you should entrust to your direct reports. And how are you going to achieve these things?

And what do you need to stop doing all together? Back to Patrick, if you decide to follow him, you’d be ditching sweets and cakes for a few weeks whilst your blood sugar balances itself out. Again, what’s the work equivalent and how are you going to achieve it?

Whether you’re doing more, less or stopping things all together, there are a number of things you can do to stay on track. As with diet and exercise, self-discipline plays a part, as does asking for other people’s support. A lot of it is about creating boundaries for yourself. Deciding what is and isn’t okay for you in the context of meeting your revised, appropriate goals. If it makes no sense to be hanging around the office at 8pm, engaged in doing a piece of work that one of your direct reports would bite your hand off for, leave and decide to brief him or her first thing in the morning. Put appointments with yourself in your diary and keep them. Block out time during the day to do some of the thinking tasks you normally save for the evening. Put in dates with yourself in the evening, even to go to the gym or watch something you fancy at the cinema or on TV. If anyone quips, “Off early tonight?”, simply say, “Yes, I have a social engagement.”

5. What beliefs do you need to change in order that your detox is successful?

For a fitness campaign to be successful in the long term, you have to fundamentally change some of the ways you think about yourself. For example, you have to know that you’re OK as a person, fat or thin – making your confidence and happiness dependent on what the scales say is a recipe for making yourself miserable. Waiting to be thin to wear the kind of clothes you want, or live the life you dream of is an equally flawed strategy.

What assumptions do you make about yourself in relation to the work you do? Perhaps you’ve allowed yourself to believe that you’re indispensable to your company? That you need to be involved in lots of different things if the company is going to get things right? Maybe you think you can only do a good job if everything you do or put out there is perfect? Or that, unless you work in the same crazy way that everyone else works in your organisation, you’ll lose respect, or fail to get the approval of people around you. What importance have you given the organisation if this is the case? What if you were OK irrespective of the hours you work or whether the organisation seems to esteem you on any given day or not? How would that change things?

So, if you’ve woken up this morning feeling that work is weighing just a bit too heavily on your life, it’s time to take action to slim it down to size. Check the symptoms. Do they describe you? If so, decide to carve out the time and space to ask yourself the five coaching questions above. It’s a small investment that yields big payoff.

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