BUILDING IN MARGIN
GETTING RID OF FRUITLESS FRENZY IN LIFE
"We must have some room to breathe. We need freedom to think and permission to heal. Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has the time to listen, let alone love. Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high-speed good intentions. Is God now pro-exhaustion? Doesn't He lead people beside the still waters anymore? Who plundered those wide-open spaces of the past, and how can we get them back? There are no fallow lands for our emotions to lie down and rest in. We miss them more than we suspect."
Richard A. Swenson, M.D., Margin
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Swenson's Axioms:
"Axiom #4: The profusion of progress is on a collision course with human limits. Once the threshold is exceeded, overload displaces margin.
Axiom #5: On the unsaturated side of their limits, humans can be open and expansive. On the saturated side of these limits, however, the rules of life totally change."
When we sacrifice our souls and our very lives and most precious relationships to faulty premises and no margin, we live hapless lives, but when we correct those faulty premises and stop those faulty behaviors, our lives transform into what they can be.
When we make progress "subservient to our greater goals and needs, especially relationships: We once again practice economics [or achievement] 'as if people mattered.' We once again agree that things [or other people's agendas] do not own us and are not even very important...."
"Until we find ways to guard our mental and spiritual health... we will only compound our troubles. Only when 'progress' begins to show discipline and restraint, as well as a respect for the inward and transcendent needs of human being - including our need for margin - will we again be able to trust" our spiritual integrity and life.
[Source of the quoted items: Richard A. Swenson, M.D., Margin.]
HUMANS HAVE LIMITS
Humans (and organizations of humans) have a limited amount of capacity.
I like to call this the equivalent of a pipeline that we can put things through. In this way, I can see that if I put something through the pipeline that it will take up space and leave less space to put other things in.
If I put so much in the pipeline that I have no space left to allow for misestimations of time, new things coming in or emergencies, then I will be stressed, possibly "to the max". The cost is emotional turmoil (and "hyperstress") and health and perhaps a loss of quality in the work - and those, in turn, fill up alot of the pipeline, as we seek relief and recovery in some way. In any case putting so much in the pipeline that there is little room for error or variation stresses the pipeline, almost always at a high cost.
THE BIG ERROR: WHAT GETS PUSHED ASIDE
We have limits as human beings. But what is available to us is unlimited. It is up to us to use our higher brains, when calm and in high energy, to have us decide and set limits.
It is "very unsmart" to not build in a margin. But few of us do - until we learn how truly vital it is to living a good life!
"But if I don't fill up every moment, I'll lose productivity." The common belief of people who keep themselves busy but are not truly effective.
And then they proceed to kill their lives by filling it to full of "do's".
THE COST OF NO MARGIN
People who do not leave sufficient margin cause themselves lots of pain, mostly emotional pain but eventually the physical effect will cause physical pain or harm of some sort. It even builds hypersensitivity to threats into our brain, so that it causes even more emotional pain.
Emotional pain, besides its physical effects, saps our time, as we have to spend so much time recovering and/or "getting relief", we work less effectively because alot of our pipeline is taken up with trying to return to balance, with escaping, with lower productivity.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN...
"Marginless is fatigue; margin is energy...
Marginless is hurry; margin is calm.
Marginless is anxiety; margin is security....
Marginless is the disease of the new millennium; margin is its cure."
Richard A. Swenson, M.D., Margin .
Marginless living throws life into a state of pandemonium, multiplying by bad effects causing more bad effects, causing a downward spiraling into a Hell of sorts. Pandemonium begets more pandemonium - and living on the edge of "low sanity".
We experience more and more disappointment in ourselves, as our failures increase and our lives dissipate down into a lower level of quality.
We seek to have more and more faster and faster, but never quite getting to "enough".
YES, EVEN IN THE LAND OF ACHIEVERS...
The first thing Dan Sullivan does in The Strategic Coach is to "create space" and margin for his highly ambitious and successful entrepreneurs, most of whom are running themselves into the ground and emotional exhaustion. (I did his excellent program for a year.)
He introduces the very foreign, for super achievers, concept of Rejuvenation and "free days". And their net productivity skyrockets within a year, with vastly greater numbers of days off and an incredible reduction in anxiety, all at the same time as they are doubling their income!
They spend far less time but they end up producing more than they did before - and they do it "with margin".
SWENSON'S FORMULA
The formula for margin: Power minus Load = Margin.
Power is made up of factors such as: energy, skills, time, training, emotional and physical strength, faith, finances and social supports." [The development of power is what we focus on on this site. I call it "life capability", at the core. To develop that we need a strong, prioritized program to develop it, with a good chunk of time devoted daily to this vital learning.]
Load is made up of such factors as: work (of any sort), problems, obligations and commitments, expectations (internal and external), debt, deadlines, and interpersonal conflicts" [and holes in relationships]. [On the site, we seek to expeditiously get rid of the barriers and all that causes excess loads and leaks.]
"When our load is greater than our power, we enter into negative margin status, that is, we are overloaded. Endured long term, this is not a healthy state. Severe negative margin for an extended period of time is another name for burnout."
WE NEED TIME TO...
We need to time to manage and to "have" our margin, or, rather, our plural margins - and we can tell when we're headed too close to the limits, as we begin to "feel" it in whatever area that is being shorted in margin: emotional, relationships, physical (energy, how we feel, nutrition), rest, time. We kill the golden goose (or parts of it) to get the eggs - which is tremendously, grossly irresponsible of us, robbing our body, our mind, our finances, our emotional peace and good feeling, our relationships (we "free ride" our relationships with a giving partner who does not ask fair exchange of us).
And, so it is that I ask you to commit to living a whole new life with plenty of margin and a learning of life that so increases our power and diminished our load that we can have all of what is really important in our lives and live a life as if it is heaven on earth.
THE PLEDGE
I hereby commit to do whatever is necessary to rapidly gain a true margin in which I can live a great life and have great relationships and much happiness.
Committed this ___ day of _______________, ______
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Signed
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HOW MUCH OF A TIME MARGIN?
Although the best road to go at some point will be to notice how you feel and if it is good and your life feel spacious, then you are at the right margin. However, the violators of the rules of margin are generally insensitive to what is going on (even though they feel the pain!), such that their sense of what is right is grossly off - they will run too close to the edge, without sufficient margin and then keep on suffering the consequences, unaware that they must not keep repeating the same mistake.
So, for them, and to perhaps make it more clear, your time margin should correspond to this:
A scheduled hour and a half for exercise and personal grounding, including personal reading. They should also have schedule 7 hours a week of "life learning", which will accelerate their life capability such that their power increases and their load declines rapidly. They should have full evenings for social and leisure, at least 6 times a week.
Of course, there would be a full night's rest.
These set aside hours are, of course, a good sized buffer, like a potential shock absorber on a rutty road, in which to absorb variations as needed. However, the greedy achievement person will infringe frequently into the buffer. So, the limit is that one not go into the buffer at least 48 weeks of the year. Anything less than that margin level is fooling yourself.
Yes, this is a big difference from your current life and you'll have to learn Life Value Productivity techniques, habits, and practices to increase one's productivity in terms of achievement and/or money - and you'll need to let go of ego, having to please people, "approval sucking", seeking acclaim, and useless actions and spending. But life will be transformed to a point that is far beyond what you could have imagined!
