Author: Tony Schwartz

I woke up one morning about four weeks ago and realized in a flash that I’d hit a wall. Most days I can’t wait to get to work. On this day, I struggled to get myself out of the house.

The first three months of the year had been intensely demanding, between hiring a series of new employees for a rapidly growing business, working with colleagues to develop several new products, traveling frequently, and taking on multiple writing assignments.

One of the primary principles of the work we teach at the Energy Project is that the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for recovery. I needed a vacation, but what I needed most of all was a period of total digital disconnection. My brain felt overloaded and I needed time to clear it out.

My wife and I made reservations to go to our favorite hotel for nine days. But I knew that getting away from my office wouldn’t be enough if I remained tethered to my online life and my work. I decided not to bring my laptop, my iPad, or my cellphone. I left an away message that made it clear I wouldn’t be checking email.

I was determined to eliminate temptation to the maximum extent possible. I had learned from past experiences how easy it is for me to succumb, given the opportunity.

As Daniel Goleman writes in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, a fascinating new book he’ll publish this fall: “Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.”

From the moment I boarded the plane for our trip, I noticed a shift. Ordinarily, I would have skittered between reading the newspaper, magazines, answering email, and surfing the web (if it was available). I’d brought along a pile of books, mostly novels, and none of them related to work. I began reading the first one, and I very quickly became absorbed. For once, nothing else was competing for my attention.

The first time I felt a distracting impulse, it was to Google something I’d read. The initial pull was compelling, but I let it pass. Over the next several days, it happened perhaps a half-dozen more times, and on each occasion I simply observed the feeling without responding to it. By mid-week, that impluse evaporated, and I realized how much richer and more satisfying any experience is when it’s not interrupted — even if the interrupter is me.

It turned out there were no newspapers at our hotel. My first response was a bit of panic — I’ve read The New York Times daily since I was a teenager — but soon, I realized I was giving up the fix of more information that I didn’t really need.

Instead, I became increasingly aware that the relentless diet of information I ordinarily consume leaves me feeling the same way I do after eating a couple of slices of pizza or a hot dog and French fries — poorly nourished and still hungry.

What grew each day was my capacity for absorbed focus. For months now, I’ve wanted to read Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon’s book about the challenges of parenting children with disabilities such as dwarfism, Down’s syndrome, and deafness. The problem is that it’s nearly 1,000 pages long, and who has the time or the wherewithal for that? But with my mind freed of distractions, I found it easy to dive in, and read most of the book over a couple of days. The book was fascinating.

I had a similar experience on the tennis court. I’ve been taking lessons and working on my game all of my adult life, but on vacation last week, I was able to slow down and analyze my strokes with a wholly different level of patience and unhurried interest. It was the sort of learning you simply can’t do when you’re thinking about 10 other subjects.

By the end of nine days, I felt empowered and enriched. With my brain quieter, I was able to take back control of my attention. In the process, I rediscovered some deeper part of myself.

If there had been an emergency while I was away, I could have been reached. The humbling truth is that not a single thing demanded my attention. Most everything can wait.

I did finally feel ready to return to my everyday world — even enthusiastic to read my email and check my favorite websites. But I also felt less anxious urgency about dealing with what ordinarily feels so pressing.

The break deepened my recognition that chunks of time away from digital life are critical both to renewal and to work itself. In that spirit, I’ve committed to two rituals going forward. Twice a week — including this morning — I’m spending the first several hours of the day at home, working on projects that require focused attention, with my email and internet turned off. At the end of each work day, I’m going to spend at least a half-hour reading — and savoring — a book. The key to being more fully absorbed is to regularly and fully disconnect.

If you had told me, when I was attending college during the height of the Vietnam War, and the heyday of the counterculture, that several of the most inspiring days of my life would someday be spent with a group of CEOs of large companies, I would have said you were nuts. But that’s exactly what I experienced last week, at a small gathering sponsored by an organization called Conscious Capitalism Inc. and held at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Even today, “conscious” and “capitalism” remain unlikely bedfellows. Both are freighted words that have come to stand for fundamentally different worldviews. Capitalism is associated with individualism, personal ambition, the accumulation of wealth and power, and an identity grounded in external accomplishment. The word conscious, or more specifically consciousness, is associated with self-awareness, personal development, the greater good, and a worldview that eschews competition, hierarchy, and materialism.

The thesis of conscious capitalism — outlined in a new book of the same title by John Mackey, founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods, and his thought partner, Raj Sisodia, a business professor — is that capitalism can be a force both for economic and social good. Or as Bill George, former CEO of Medtronics, puts it in the book’s introduction: “Well run, values-centered businesses can contribute to humankind in more tangible ways than any other organization in society.”

I don’t kid myself about the unenlightened and even cruel ways capitalism has been practiced by many companies: accumulating wealth for a few while paying most employees subsistence wages; fighting regulation while blithely degrading the environment; avoiding taxes and ignoring responsibilities for the communities in which they’re based. The truth is I meet few CEOs or senior executives at large companies who seem to have a vision much beyond the next quarter’s earnings, or a sense of responsibility and commitment to their employees, customers, suppliers, and communities that equals their focus on their shareholders.

But I did last week. Even more than anything the eight CEOs I met had to say — and much of it was inspiring — I felt moved by them as people. They made no demands to be treated as “special” during the conference. We all stayed in simple quarters, with no access to cell phone service. They listened when others spoke. And they invested three days with one another for no other reason I could discern than to learn, and build a community of like-minded colleagues.

At the most basic level, consciousness simply means being conscious of more. That begins with self-awareness — the willingness to look inside, to acknowledge our limitations, uncertainties and fears, and to take responsibility for our actions. Mackey has drawn some critical attention for his libertarian views, and I found myself debating with him frequently over the three days. But I also found him to be open, real, vulnerable, and deeply committed to growing and becoming more conscious. How many leaders would be willing to say, as Mackey does: “The company was unable to grow until I was able to evolve — in other words I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company also to evolve.”

I also admire leaders who put their money where their mouths are. The Container Store’s CEO Kip Tindell explained why he pays full-time sales employees a minimum of nearly $50,000 a year — approximately double the average for retail stores. Put simply, Tindell believes the best and most motivated employees, which he says the store is consistently able to attract, are three times as productive as an average worker. One of the payoffs is a turnover rate under 20 percent — a fraction of the turnover that most of his retail competitors endure.

Consciousness is also about being socially conscious — recognizing and taking responsibility for the needs of the larger community. Blake Mycoskie, who founded Tom’s Shoes at age 26, talked about the profitable business he’s built on a model of giving a pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair of shoes the company sells. Shubhro Sen, who leads people development for Tata, the huge, privately-owned Indian conglomerate, described the founding tenet of the company that endures to this day: “We earn our profits from society and they should go back into society.” Most of the company today is owned by philanthropic trusts.

I took away from these three days a very clear and inspiring message. It’s not necessary to choose up sides between consciousness and capitalism, self-interest and the broader interest, or personal development and service to others. Rather, they’re each inextricably connected, and they all serve one another.

Raj Sisodia looked at 28 companies he identified as the most conscious — “firms of endearment” as he terms them — based on characteristics such as their stated purpose, generosity of compensation, quality of customer service, investment in their communities, and impact on the environment.

The 18 publicly traded companies out of the 28 outperformed the S&P 500 index by a factor of 10.5 over the years 1996-2011. And why, in the end, should that be a surprise? Conscious companies treat their stakeholders better. As a consequence, their suppliers are happier to do business with them. Employees are more engaged, productive, and likely to stay. These companies are more welcome in their communities and their customers are more satisfied and loyal. The most conscious companies give more, and they get more in return. The inescapable conclusion: it pays to care, widely and deeply.

For more than a decade now, I’ve struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment — not just on behalf of the large corporate clients we serve, but also for my own employees at The Energy Project. Perhaps nothing I’ve uncovered is as important as trust.

Much as employers understandably hunger for one-size-fits-all policies and practices, what motivates human beings remains stubbornly complex, opaque, and difficult to unravel. Perhaps that’s why I felt so viscerally the shortsightedness and futility of Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo employees who had been working from home to move back to the office, and Hubert Joly’s to do the same at Best Buy.

Here’s the problem: Employees who want to game the system are going to do so inside or outside the office. Supervising them more closely is costly, enervating, and it’s ultimately a losing game. As for highly motivated employees who’ve been working from home, all they’re likely to feel about being called back to the office is resentful — and more inclined to look for new jobs.

At its heart, the problem for Mayer and Joly is lack of trust. For whatever reasons, they’ve lost trust that their employees can make responsible adult decisions for themselves about how to best get their work done and add value to the company. Distrust begets distrust in return. It kills motivation rather than sparking it. Treat employees like children and you increase the odds they’ll act like children. You reap what you sow — for better and for worse.

As an employer, I stay focused on one primary question about each employee: What is going to free, fuel, and inspire this person to bring the best of him or herself to work every day, most sustainably? My goal is to meet those needs in the best ways I can, without undue expense to others.

In the end, I’m much less concerned with where people do their work than with the value they’re able create wherever they happen to do it. The value exchange here is autonomy (ground in trust) for accountability.

As CEO, I myself work from home for an hour or two in the mornings most days because it’s quiet and free of distractions. I find it’s the best way for me to get writing and other high-focus activities accomplished, and I know that’s true for many other business leaders.

One of the senior members of our team is a 35-year-old woman with three children under the age of nine. She lives 90 minutes from work. I’d love to have her at our offices every day, because I enjoy being able to interact with her around issues as they arise. I also just like having her around as a colleague.

But to make that possible she’d have to invest three withering hours commuting each day — a huge cost, not just in time, but also in energy, for work and for her family. Demanding that she make that trip every day would only prompt progressive fatigue, resentment, and impaired performance.

Instead, we settled from the start on having her come to the office two days a week, which is when we schedule our key meetings. Those days also provide time for spontaneous brainstorming of ideas across the team.

Another one of our team members, a woman with two teenage kids, travels frequently in her role. When she gets back from trips, she typically works from home the next day — both to recover, and to have more time for her family.

Two of our other staffers — one male and one female — work mostly at the office out of personal preference, but also have young kids and work from home on some days when their kids are on vacation, or get sick.

Two younger, married team members recently requested permission to move to Amsterdam for eight months — for no other reason than they wanted to experience another culture. For a moment, I bridled. But since technology makes it possible for them to do their jobs from anywhere, we were able to make it happen. They agreed to work during our regular office hours, and to visit our office for a week every two months. So far it seems to be working seamlessly.

Every one of these people is highly productive. I do have moments when I find myself wishing all of our team members were in the office more, and even wondering what they’re doing when I haven’t heard from them.

When those feelings arise, I take a deep breath and remind myself that my colleagues are adults, capable of making their own decisions about how best to get their work done, and that all good relationships involve some compromise.

It gets back to trust. Give it, and you get it back. In over a decade, no employee has ever chosen to leave our company. The better you meet people’s needs, the better they’ll meet yours.

“I believe this is a very special moment in history, a kind of perfect storm. There is a growing recognition — to borrow language from AA — that our world has become unmanageable.” Those words have been reverberating in my head ever since Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, said them over the weekend during the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco. She was introducing an iPhone app called “GPS for the Soul,” which is designed to measure heart rate variability as a window into your stress level at any given moment during the day.

It seemed fitting to me that Arianna described the challenges so many of us face in our work — and in our lives more broadly — by using the language of addiction. Her words rang especially true because I happen in the midst of reading a book by Bryan Robinson titled “Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics.”

The addiction of our times is digital connection, instant gratification, and the cheap adrenalin high of constant busyness. The heartening news is that more and more leaders in big companies are beginning to recognize the insidious costs of moving so relentlessly and at such high speeds.

Wisdom 2.0 focused on technology — a primary driver of the increasing unmanageability of our lives. The conference was launched three years ago as a meeting between people from the meditation community and the tech world in Silicon Valley to discuss how to use technology more wisely.

Paradoxically, the most important solution I heard is to use technology less frequently, and more intentionally. Or, as Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, put it in her talk: “There need to be places in our lives and in our organizations that are device-free zones.”

Just below the surface of our shared compulsion to do ever more, ever faster, is a deep hunger to do less, more slowly. I saw proof of that a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote an article for The New York Times titled “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive.” It focused on the growing scientific evidence that when we build in more time for sleep, naps, breaks, and vacations, we become not just healthier and happier, but also more productive. The piece prompted an avalanche of response, much of it poignantly describing the sense of overwhelm people are feeling at work.

The search to find ways to deal with these issues was evident at Wisdom 2.0. Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco, described in compelling detail the behaviors she’s built into her life to take her out of rapid-fire analytical, “doing” mode. She meditates for 20 minutes every day. On the weekends, she paints and takes photographs. Even when she tweets, she often does so in haikus — as a way to put herself in a more creative mode.

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, talked about how compassion has become a centerpiece of his management style. More specifically, he described how compassion requires slowing down and taking the time to truly listen to others. It means understanding where they’re coming from, caring about the struggles they’re facing, and the baggage they’re carrying.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, talked about the harrowing experience he went through when Ford nearly declared bankruptcy several years ago. Taking time to meditate each day was critical. “The practice of mindfulness kept me going during the darkest days,” he said. He also took time each morning to “set an intention” to deal with whatever arose that day with a sense of compassion and kindness.

In my own life, I’ve found that both my productivity and my sense of well-being depend more than ever on building more time into the day to renew, reflect, and connect with others. Two such experiences at Wisdom 2.0 had to do with taking time to get away from the activity of the conference itself. The first was wandering over to a chill out room sponsored by Google, lying down on a mat next to several others doing the same thing, and taking a nap. When I got up 45 minutes later, I felt refreshed and able to fully reengage in the conference.

My second revelatory experience was a lunch I shared with two new friends who were also attending the conference. We ended up spending more than two hours together, free of digital interruptions, just talking, reflecting, laughing, and hanging out. How often do most of us take the time to truly connect with work colleagues — much less friends — and how much richer are we for it when we do return to our work?

Speed, distraction, and instant gratification are the enemies of nearly everything that matters most in our lives. Creating long-term value — for ourselves and for others — requires more authentic connection, reflection, and the courage to delay immediate gratification. That’s wisdom in action.

We were sitting around a table, talking about someone we all know, who is very successful in our field. Instinctively, I started in. “He’s incredibly full of himself,” I said. “And kind of a phony.” One of my colleagues, a great mimic, did a spot-on imitation of the way this fellow speaks. We laughed uproariously. The Greek chorus chimed in and piled on. A dig here. A jab there. In minutes, we had taken this competitor down to size, made mincemeat of him. We felt clever, bonded, and if truth be told, superior.

Except that when I left the room, something didn’t feel quite right, which was surprising. Over the years, I’ve had hundreds, maybe even thousands of these conversations, with scores of friends and colleagues. They’re so commonplace I rarely give them a second thought.

But on this day, I unexpectedly found myself wondering about the competitor we had trashed, and how he might have felt if he heard our exchange. At a minimum, he would have been stung, and so would I, if others said those things about me, as they surely have. Then I started thinking about whether I actually believed what I’d said. I realized I actually had a broader and more nuanced set of feelings about him, including admiration.

I put down this competitor so I could feel better about myself — raised myself up at his expense. To avoid feeling “less than,” I defended myself by moving to “more than.” I assumed a false position of power — not just this time, but on countless previous occasions — to ward off some experience of inadequacy. I covered up my feeling of weakness with a thin gloss of strength. Above all else, I was careless.

Envy, I’m abashed to say, lay at the heart of it. For more than two decades as a journalist, envy was a steady hum in my life that sometimes turned into a roar. No matter what I wrote — even a bestselling book — it never felt good enough and neither did I. The feeling is endemic among writers, as I suspect it is in many professions. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” Gore Vidal once famously remarked. Speaking of his fellow writers, the novelist Pete Dexter took it a step further: “Jealousy is the wrong word for what I usually feel. It’s closer to hoping they get hit by a car.”

Funny, yes, but also kind of horrifying, and toxic. When I finally left journalism, it was in large part to escape these feelings. But wherever you go, there they are. We’ve all felt them. Not smart enough, not accomplished enough, not thin enough, not rich enough, not admired enough. At the most primitive level, it’s the feeling that we’re still living in the savanna, fighting for our survival in a world of scarcity. If you get yours, then I won’t get mine. The war over food has evolved into one for self-worth. The problem is it’s a zero sum game you can’t win. Constantly compare yourself, and no matter how good you are, eventually you’re going to come up short.

The truth is I’ve had enough of not enough and I’ve also had enough of the smug superiority I’ve sometimes inadvertently assumed as a shield against feeling the opposite.

The first step has been to raise my awareness. That means noticing these feelings when they arise — both “not enough” and “better than,” which, after all, are just two sides of the same coin. It helps a lot, I’m finding, to simply observe my feelings, rather than getting lost in them, or compelled to share them.

Two questions strike me as helpful here. When you’re feeling “less than”, the question is, “What do I truly appreciate about myself?” Or, as the family therapist Terrence Real puts it more lyrically, “How do I hold myself in warm regard, despite my imperfections?” When you find yourself beginning to feel “better than,” the question is, “What do I truly appreciate in this other person?” Or as Real says, “How can I hold this person in warm regard, despite his/her imperfections?”

Sheryl Crow gets this just right in “Soak up the Sun”:

“It’s not having what you want
It’s wanting what you’ve got
I’m gonna tell everyone
To lighten up
I’m gonna tell ’em that
I’ve got no one to blame
for every time I feel lame.”

In Buddhism, the Second Noble Truth is that all suffering is caused by craving. I’ve never interpreted that to mean we should let go of desire, which is quintessentially and inescapably human. Rather, we need to hold desire more gently, so we can acknowledge it, and conjure with it, and even enjoy it, without feeling consumed by it, or dependent on its being satisfied.

For two years now, we have been holding regular “community” meetings at our office to give team members an opportunity to check in about how they’re doing, not just professionally but also personally. Each person answers several questions beginning with a deceptively simple one: “How are you feeling today?”* The rest of us simply listen.

It was only when we faced a sudden crisis that I finally understood why these meetings had been so important. On a weekend last October, the 23-year-old son of one of our team members died unexpectedly and tragically. On Monday morning, I called our team together in our conference room.

The feelings that surfaced that morning were raw — grief, bewilderment, fear, an acute awareness of the fragility of life and the preciousness of our own loved ones, and empathy for our grieving colleague.

The emotions ran even higher at a community meeting on the first day our colleague returned to work several weeks later. Painful as it was for all of us, we were able to create a container for our colleague’s heartbreak. Sharing our feelings also made them feel less burdensome. We held her, and holding her held us. It was cathartic, and that helped each of us to go back at the end of the meeting and focus again on the work at hand.

It dawned on me that day how powerful and liberating it is to say exactly what you’re feeling, and to feel truly listened to without judgment.

The impetus to hold community meetings came to us from something called “the Sanctuary Model,” developed by a psychiatrist named Sandra Bloom as a way to help people deal with chronically stressful and overwhelming circumstances — mostly in the world of mental health.

Increasingly, however, the everyday experience of corporate life can be overwhelming in and of itself.

In addition to whatever stresses we bring from home, including not getting sufficient sleep, we’re deluged with email, running from meeting to meeting, skipping meals, and working longer and more continuous hours than ever. Is it any surprise we’re struggling? Worse yet, in most workplaces the unspoken expectation is that we will check any strong emotions we’re feeling at the door.

You know the drill. You put on your game face when you walk into work. “How are you?” a colleague asks, by rote and without real interest. “Fine,” you respond, automatically, regardless of how you’re actually feeling.

“How many of us,” Bloom writes, “have ever felt truly safe in a social setting … [meaning] cared for, trusted, free to express our deepest thoughts and feelings without censure, unafraid of being abandoned or misjudged, unfettered by the constant pressure of impersonal competition, and yet stimulated to be thoughtful, creative, spontaneous and solve problems?”

To the contrary, as demand grows, we feel more anxious, more isolated, and more vulnerable.

Each of us has a tipping point — a moment when we feel so depleted that we fall into survival mode. We’re often unaware of it, but when we move from feeling calm and secure to anxious and under siege, we literally become different people.

Our fight or flight physiology kicks in. In turn, our focus automatically narrows to protecting ourselves. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively, respond to others with care and consideration, or consider the long-term consequences of our choices. Instead, we do whatever we think we need to do to survive in the moment.

Community, I’ve come to deeply believe, is the cure. It does indeed have the power to serve as a sanctuary — to protect, ground and encourage us, not just in extreme circumstances, but also in the face of countless everyday challenges. Support in a community can also give us the strength to forego immediate gratification in favor of choices that uphold shared values, serve the collective good, and generate long-term value.

I’m convinced that it’s the strength of our community at The Energy Project which has allowed us to become a truly high-performing team. The safety and trust we feel with one another has freed us to focus our efforts on our mission. We have a small full-time staff — 14 of us, along with another dozen working part-time — but we’ve been able to work at senior levels in some of the world’s largest companies. One reason is that we squander almost no energy on internal politics. We’re in this together, including when one or another of us is struggling and needs help.

I’ve always thought of our core team as a living laboratory for the practices we teach our clients — whether it’s the power of renewal, or focusing on one thing at a time, or learning to deal more skillfully with conflict. What I now realize is that I’ve been overlooking one of the most powerful elements of our work.

Each of us is far less likely to succeed by forever pushing to stand out from the pack than by building communities of care and trust committed to raising the bar for everyone.

Transformation takes a village. None of us can truly do it alone.

* The other questions we ask at community meetings include “What’s the most important thing you learned last week?” “What’s your goal for this week?” and “What are you feeling most grateful for?”