Hello, my name is Adrienne, and I’m a workaholic.
If you’re a close friend, work colleague, or my nearest and dearest, this won’t come as a surprise to you. You’ll be nodding your head and know that I wear my busyness with pride.
If we’ve never met, you’ll typically learn this about me in our first conversation – at least you’ll see clear signs of it. I only talk at length about two topics, which I’m ashamed to say I love in equal measure: my daughter and my job.
And this is most definitely why, at the end of my second full day in Bali – a trip I deliberately made sure was devoid of any planning other than getting to and from the resort – I’m really struggling with sticking to the main point of the holiday: doing nothing.
Surely not, you say. Not in Bali. Well, let’s examine the evidence.
First, this is the fourth blog post I’ve written since arriving a little under 48 hours ago. That’s a facepalm, right there. I may be enjoying the solitude and tranquillity, but I’m going to make damn sure I dragging all my Slack, Facebook, and Instagram friends along for the ride, and regularly checking that you’re all liking my posts in return.
Second, when I got out of bed this morning, I was annoyed to discover that housekeeping had taken the welcome letter from my room which listed the times for all the activities I could do at the resort. I actually went down to reception at 7.00 am to ask for another copy!
Third, I went to the gym this morning and completed one of my PT’s typically vicious upper body workouts. In fact, I think I combined two versions of her 30-minute routines into 45 minutes and did a few extra sets. Ever the overachiever, good girl, I said to myself. Now you can justify relaxing today.
And just to break up this diatribe with some visual content, here’s a video of the resort’s gym which I recorded on my first morning here (yes, that would be only yesterday):
And finally, once I was actually doing some active relaxing – i.e. soaking in my turquoise-tiled private infinity pool – I popped my phone into my new dry-bag (Christmas present from my daughter, thank you Michayla!) and set my timer for five minutes of rigorous kicking while holding onto the poolside and 15 minutes of steady laps up and down, alternating between:
- breaststroke (good for the shoulders and arms)
- backwards butterfly kicks (good for the flabby tummy), and
- doggy freestyle (arms under the water, legs rigorously kicking again, hitting all the key areas).
To be fair, I’m an ex-competitive swimmer, so it’s hard for me to be in a pool and know how to do anything other than laps. Some 35 years later and I can still hear the voice of my first coach, Ken Keys, screaming “MY GRANDMOTHER COULD DO BETTER THAN THAT!!!” May the old bugger rest in peace, coz I’m clearly not!
Now, I said earlier that I deliberately made sure this trip was devoid of any planning. Well… that’s not quite true. What I did do to prepare for my seven days and eight nights of effortless, active relaxing was to download two +11-hour audiobooks to my Audible account.
One of them is Mel Robbins: Work It Out, which I discovered today actually comes with a workbook. Ah, self-help homework. Yes! <fistpump> Do as my daughter does and just call me Hermione Granger.
So, here I was at 10 am this morning, stomach fully sated after my four-course Parmana Experience Breakfast, body fully sated after my gym workout and pool laps, fully intending to do some solid work on relaxing. And it wasn’t working. I was fidgety. My brain was itchy.
I know what, I said to myself. I’ll listen to an audiobook. Weary the mind, they say. Yes, that’s what I needed to do. So, I popped on my new white, Bluetooth, noise-cancelling, JBL headphones, booted up Mel’s book and closed my eyes to focus on listening.
Now I’ve listened to one of Mel’s other books before and I love her whole no-bullshit style of coaching. But, oh the irony. I couldn’t have picked a better book to listen to, right at this moment.
In the first chapter, Mel introduces us to Rebecca. A Chief of Communications at a high profile USA university who, with Mel’s help, discovered that her pattern of overworking and always adding more to her plate stemmed from her childhood desire to earn approval from her father. When Rebecca looked at her patterns, she discovered that the way she gets attention is by staying busy and accomplishing tasks. Essentially, she’d developed the habits of a workaholic.
Not sure if you’re a workaholic or just someone who really, really, reeeeally loves your job, like me? Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have a consistent internal feeling that you should be working?
- Do you feel guilty when you are not working?
- Is that pressure coming from you and not an external source?
- Do you have a hard time saying no when asked to do something?
- Is it nearly impossible to turn off work thoughts outside of work?
- Do you keep working beyond what is reasonably expected of you?
- Does your busyness fill some kind of emotional void?
If your answers are mostly “Yes”, then you’re a workaholic. And, no surprises, I said “Yes” to ALL of them.
Mel says the first step is to own it:
“Any addiction is a bond with something that gives your life meaning. We all are programmed to bond with things. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Remember, you are not broken. You have habits that are broken.”
The second step is not to ask “why” but to explore when it all started and what happened that lead to you creating these habits. The research shows that, for most people, they began these habits in response to childhood experiences. I’ve been doing a bit of childhood exploration myself this afternoon. It’s been both confronting and affirming.
So, I guess I have some work to do on this trip, after all – starting with breaking myself of the habit of seeking validation. As my very insightful daughter told me yesterday, I deserve this holiday, I deserve this level of luxury, and I deserve some peace and quiet.
I’ve decided, as Mel would say, to pull the plug on my holiday validation-seeking habits. I need to stop aiming to blog every day, stop photographing and posting every meal on Instagram, and stop checking Instagram and Facebook every five minutes and responding to your comments. From now on, when I do post or blog during my stay in Bali, it will be to describe something interesting that I think is worth sharing.
Now, would somebody just convince my brain of that?!
Hello, my name is Adrienne, and I’m a workaholic.
sidalscapes 