Why do we race to some action before we understand the full scope of a problem or opportunity?
I’ve been so guilty of jumping into action fueled by the notion that there is a real fire to put out — a false sense of urgency. A text message bubbles up on my phone and suddenly I feel called upon to respond to what appears to be a 3-alarm fire. But is it really?
In her latest book, Aiko Bethea weaves this thread of “false sense of urgency” through every story she shares to reveal to us just how prevalent it has become. We rush in where angels fear to tread, to solve a problem we know very little about.
Aiko reminds us that in this digital age, we have been primed to be so action-oriented that we rarely stop to ask ourselves some poignant questions. We douse a fire fast and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, only to discover later it was actually a spark of ingenuity, a much needed glowlight, or the source of some warmth.
We put out a fire that wasn’t a problem and created a bigger issue instead. We over-reacted and sprung into action without doing any real investigation.
We just assume a false sense of urgency.
It happened to me just yesterday. I had been out to lunch with a friend and as I drove her home, a text alert popped on to my car’s digital screen. I noted that if it had been from Cozy Earth, I would have disregarded it completely from my mind. But it was from someone that might need me. Try as I may to ignore it, I could feel the urge to read it and assess its content. After saying goodbye, I read the text. And yes, I got totally caught up in a false sense of urgency. I was just about to spring into action, when I recalled Aiko Bethea’s insights — and I stopped in my tracks. Was this really a 5 alarm fire that needed my immediate attention, or was I all too eager to resolve discomfort and uncertainty without having much needed context?
What I can tell you for sure is that I saw very clearly for myself in that moment that I am well trained at springing into action when I sense urgency. I took this experience as an opportunity to be a keen objective observer. An unbiased third party.
I could feel my nervous system sending some little shock waves through my body as I read the text. How curious – just reading words on a flat screen caused my body to have a well-trained reaction. Is this how the dog feels when she sees my hand reaching for her shock collar remote? She knows that surge is coming and she responds by behaving before I ever click the button. That very image had me laughing out loud. I am Pavlov’s dog.
I have no way of knowing for certain what energy, emotions or need is actually being expressed in that text. For all I know, the sender is laughing. But my interpretation is that there is an emergency, someone is in distress and I can fix the problem fast.
I was just about to hit the panic button.
But Aiko’s words echoed in my head and I stopped before taking action. I said out loud to myself: “You are in the midst of feeling a false sense of urgency. This is a chance to retrain yourself, Amy”.
Aiko recognizes that this false sense of urgency is so prevalent for all of us these days, that we need some serious intervention. It begins with unlearning. This is the retraining pivot. We have to stop in our tracks when that visceral feeling of a false sense of urgency surges through us. We have to get very curious about what we don’t know, yet. We need to become investigators before we become extinguishers.
The reality is that quite often our buttons are getting pushed.
Just like the dog who senses I might send a little shock to get her attention, I anticipate what might be going on and I could overreact, based on all my past experiences. I treat something as it is an emergency, when in fact it is rather benign.
It dawns on me as I am sitting in my car that as a lifelong (and now reforming) fixer, rescuer and people-pleaser, I have a certain amount of inner pride in being the Florence Nightingale of small emergencies. And I can acknowledge that I am not actually helping others learn to take care of their own business.
What really caught me off guard though was just how long my own nervous system remained buzzing with that sense of urgency. Again, I laughed out loud – and since laughter completes a stress cycle, I felt my body relax and the tension ease. I felt my feet on the floorboard (some salience that grounded me in the present moment) and I took a few deep breaths. OMG – I was letting a rather benign text message put me on high alert, draw me into a false sense of urgency and clearly, I could have easily over-reacted. I brought myself back to reality. I was so grateful to be grounded and clear-minded.
As I shared, all throughout Aiko’s book entitled Anchored, Aligned, Accountable, she shares very familiar stories of how we all succumb to a false sense of urgency. We do this at home when we are rushing around in the morning, fearful of being late for work. We do it at work in a group meeting when someone lobs an issue into the conversation that can derail the momentum on a real opportunity at hand. We fall prey to it when we are deeply focused and a ding on our phone distracts us and pulls us far away from the task at hand.
Aiko tells us that a false sense of urgency is so compelling that it can feel like an out of body experience. I observed this quite viscerally yesterday when my nervous system was activated. And because collectively, we’ve all been operating like this for eons, we jump into action instead of pausing.
Those false senses of urgency are some of the best places to practice pausing and pivoting. They will spring up multiple times throughout a normal day. When they do, we can stop in our tracks and remind ourselves to untrain, unlearn. We don’t know what we don’t know. Is this a five alarm fire, or a small distraction? Is this a raging wildfire or the spark of a new idea and better way?
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me personally yesterday was recognizing that my body has been well-trained to overreact to someone else’s perceived emergency. You think by now I would know for certain that not everything is truly a 12 on a scale of 1 – 10 level of importance. I can level set myself BEFORE I assume a sense of urgency. It might be false.
Aiko has opened my perspective up to understand that a false sense of urgency is in fact a well-honed learned behavior. It is a habit I fall back into when I stop being curious and self aware. A Pavlov dog response to resolve for my own activated nervous system BEFORE I assess if I am dealing with a real emergency.
If you want to retrain yourself not to be so reactive, use life’s little moments of a false sense of urgency to practice being an investigator, a third party observer. Pause first, calm your nervous system and then assess the real level of perceived urgency.
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