57. CARL HONORE: Living at the Right Speed

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

[00:00:00] Carl: I am a naturally fast person, right? Faster is often the solution, but not always, and that really is the key to unlocking this slow revolution, if you like.

[00:00:12] Michael: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

[00:00:13] Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

[00:00:14] Michael: And you’re listening to the Double Win Show.

[00:00:16] Megan: Today, we are joined by Carl Honoré, the journalist and public thinker behind the global slow movement, and the rare author who has spent more than two decades on a single topic that has only grown more urgent, ironically.

[00:00:30] His books, In Praise of Slowness, which I have read and has been deeply meaningful to me, and The Slow Fix, have been translated in more than 30 languages. His TED Talks have been watched by millions, and the question at the center of his work is one that our audience is living with every day, which is what is the right speed to do things at?

[00:00:50] So today, we’re gonna be talking about why we’re still hooked on going faster, what the cult of speed is costing us, and what a different tempo makes possible.

[00:00:59] Michael: Let’s get into it.

[00:01:03] Carl, welcome to the show.

[00:01:04] Carl: Thank you very much. I’m thrilled to be with you.

[00:01:07] Michael: We’re super excited about the topic. Now, you need to understand something about me. I’m the guy that rides in the left lane on the interstate and is perpetually annoyed- … at the people that- … that stay in that lane and drive slower than whatever speed I’m driving.

[00:01:23] And I often say to my family, “You know, somebody that drives the speed limit is someone lacking in ambition.” Tell me I’m wrong.

[00:01:35] Megan: So welcome to the show.

[00:01:40] This should be fun.

[00:01:41] Carl: I was that guy. I feel your pain. I, I was the guy hovering over the g- the gas pedal, you know- Well- … honking my horn, trying to get past people. So I, I, I know the itch. I know the urge. I understand where it comes from.

[00:01:53] Michael: The crazy thing about it, I literally have timed this. Going to church, I know it takes 17 minutes, and it pretty much takes 17 minutes whether I go 83 or I go the speed limit, and I’ve timed it and it’s, like, maybe 50 second or a minute difference.

[00:02:14] Megan: Wow.

[00:02:14] Michael: For what? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe this will help me.

[00:02:18] Megan: But at least your blood pressure was higher the whole time you were going 83. Yeah,

[00:02:21] Michael: exactly. Well, confession’s good for the soul.

[00:02:23] Megan: Okay. So Carl, how did you end up being the slow guy? Like, how, how did that happen? Because if you were the guy that was the pedal to the metal guy, how did you become someone fascinated by the value of going slower?

[00:02:39] Carl: Well, I became the slow guy because I was the fast guy. Mm-hmm. That’s kind of the point. I mean, I was just… Back then I was stuck in roadrunner mode. Every moment of my day was a race against the clock, and I knew that I was rushing through life instead of living it, but I just couldn’t stop. I just felt like anyone said to me, “You need to slow down,” I would say, “On the contrary, I need to go faster.

[00:03:01] I need to cram more and more in.” And I had a wake-up call when I started reading bedtime stories to my son and, and back in those days I literally couldn’t slow down. So I’d be sitting on his bed speed-reading Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Picking lines, paragraphs, whole pages. I, I actually became an expert at what I call the multiple page turn technique, which I don’t know if you try to smuggle three, four pages- I’ve never heard of this

[00:03:22] Oh. Oh, yes. More, more pages at the same time, and it was just- Thank you for the hack. Yeah. But it wasn’t gonna work ’cause my

[00:03:24] Megan: son knew the stories back to front, so

[00:03:32] Carl: he’d say, “Daddy, you know, why are there only three dwarves in the story tonight?” “Where, where’s Grumpy?” And this lamentable state of affairs went on for some time until I caught myself flirting with a book I’d heard about, a book called The One-Minute Bedtime Story, so Snow White in 60 seconds.

[00:03:47] Megan: Oh, my gosh.

[00:03:48] Carl: Yeah. I mean, but when I heard about that book, at that moment I thought, “Yeah, I need that book now from Amazon drone delivery,” right? But then thankfully I had a second thought, which was real light bulb over the head moment. I just thought, “This is insane. I am racing through my life instead of living it. I need to slow down.”

[00:04:06] And that was really for me hitting rock bottom. I think for other people who get stuck in fast-forward and, and they’re, are racing through instead of actually living, the wake-up call takes a different form. Sometimes it’s an illness. You know, one day the body just says, “That’s it,” throws in the towel, can’t take the pace anymore.

[00:04:21] You have a burnout. You can’t get out of bed one day. You know, often the body is the one that sends us the bill when we’ve been living too fast. I was lucky. I think I could have been the guy who got the heart attack, but thankfully it was The One-Minute Bedtime Story that-

[00:04:34] Megan: Wow …

[00:04:34] Carl: rang a loud, rang a loud bell in my ear and turned things around for me.

[00:04:38] Megan: So how do people know that they’re going too fast? Like, what are some of the warning signs besides you might be almost ordering a book on Amazon for the one-minute bedtime story?

[00:04:49] Carl: Yeah. That’s a starting one. I mean, there’s a whole bunch. I, I think the first, I mentioned the body. I think if you’re in a constant state of exhaustion, right?

[00:04:59] If you can’t get through the day without six cups of coffee, y- you’re probably too much into the red zone, right? The, the, again, the body is very wise. It knows what it can take. And we kinda get separated from our bodies. We get up inside our heads, and we just- Mm-hmm … everything becomes our to-do list and the next thing we need to get done, and then we gotta do three things at the same time, and we just ignore the signals the body is sending.

[00:05:20] Fatigue is an early warning sign, right? So if you’re feeling tired all the time, that’s a good signal that you’re probably living too fast. I think if you’re making mistakes at work, you know, y- this is another thing. Hmm. I mean, people often think fast is productive. Sometimes it is, but not always. Too fast is often unproductive.

[00:05:37] We make mistakes. We get sloppy. We, you know, all that kind of stuff. So if you’re screwing up at work regularly, I think that’s often a sign that you’re, you’re stuck in road runner mode and that’s taking a toll. Pleasure, happiness, right? I mean, so many of the great things that give life meaning, texture, joy, take time.

[00:05:56] Sipping a glass of wine with your partner in the evening, making love, you know, w- watching a sunset, all those things you have to slow down and be in the moment. And if you don’t, if you’re racing through like a headless chicken, life just becomes a series of tasks that you, or, you know, hoops that you jump through.

[00:06:11] And I think you lose that sense of wonder, that sense of, of happiness really. And then I think another one that people often don’t recognize, but I’m gonna throw it out there anyway, is memory. The famous Czech author Milan Kundera once said that there’s an intimate bond between slowness and remembering.

[00:06:30] And what he meant was that when you get stuck in that- Turbo mode where everything is a blur. Everything just moves very fast, nothing sticks, and you don’t remember anything. Hmm. And I think a lot of us have that experience of you get to the end of the week, you get to the end of the month, your head hits the pillow, and you look back and you think, “Whoa.

[00:06:49] What happened? I mean, like, what did I have for dinner-” Yeah … “last night?” You know, we finished a Netflix series two days ago. How did it end? You know, I was on the sofa, but was I really fully there? That sense of memory slipping away from you, 99% of the time that is not early onset dementia, right? 99% of the time, that is living too fast because you can’t form memories.

[00:07:10] You can’t forge a kind of experience of what was there because you were just skimming the surface. So those are some of the signs that I think we all recognize, and when we do, it’s a sign to take a step back and begin looking for our inner tortoise.

[00:07:22] Megan: We have some people on the other end of this recording feeling very uncomfortable right now.

[00:07:27] Michael: Or maybe it’s good news because- Yeah … I’ve been thinking I might have early onset dementia, and maybe it’s just I’m, you know, going a little too fast.

[00:07:35] Megan: Yeah.

[00:07:36] Michael: Okay. So maybe I have an idealized or romantic view of the past, but it seems like A couple hundred years ago, this wasn’t the pace. And if that’s correct, and I, you’re not that old to have personally experienced it either, but what has changed, and what’s the driver behind this relentless pursuit of fast?

[00:08:00] Carl: I think, again, there’s a, there’s a range of things in play here, and one of the things that I found the most fascinating when I began my research into our relationship with speed and pace and rhythm and so on, was that a lot of it comes down to time, right? So if you go back even as far back, you said 200 years.

[00:08:16] We can go back 2,000 years to the Roman Empire, right? In Rome, when the first sundials arrived in Rome and began dicing up the day. What that did was that it created schedules and deadlines, and you find these texts of ancient Romans complaining about life speeding up because suddenly they’ve got a schedule in their hand.

[00:08:34] They gotta be at the toga party or the … the Senate meeting by c- by a certain time because the sundial is telling them to get, get on their horse and, you know, get moving quickly. So th- this goes back a long way. I think it’s kind of tied up with an, an, an unhealthy, sometimes even toxic relationship we have with time itself, that we see time as this limited resource, time’s arrow flying remorselessly from A to B.

[00:08:57] It’s always rushing away from us. And what do we do to get the value from time? We go faster. We go faster and faster. We squeeze more and more in. But then, of course, that just turns us into a, a hare rather… We move away from the tortoise, and we end up in hare mode, right? So everything becomes a, a dash to the finish line that we never, ever reach.

[00:09:13] So that’s kind of the deeper sort of time thing. I think we get into the modern era. 200 years ago is a good marker. You get to the Industrial Revolution, machines allowing us to do things faster and faster. In the factory, suddenly they got linked up with productivity, so the faster you could produce something, the more money you made.

[00:09:30] Clocks in factories, you know, began schedules, people clocking in. The first reaction against the speeding up of life in the 19th century was people tearing down clocks, right, in factories, right? They were rebelling against time grabbing them by the neck and yanking them forward faster and faster. I think what happened was that that productivity ethos in the factory seeped out of the factory into every corner of our lives.

[00:09:52] Mm-hmm.

[00:09:53] Megan: So you get

[00:09:53] Carl: into the modern era, where we are now, and we’re obsessed with optimizing. We want to optimize everything from the way we eat to the way we exercise, the way we make love. I mean, there, there are ways to speed up everything. We, when you turn around, there are podcasts telling you how to optimize your sleep, right?

[00:10:08] You know, every single second has to be squeezed till the last drop of productivity comes out of it That just puts us on a hamster wheel, right? 100%. A hamster wheel we all recognize in our lives.

[00:10:20] Michael: I wrote on this recently. I’ve been deep into the, uh, AI rabbit hole for the last couple of years.

[00:10:25] Carl: Hmm.

[00:10:25] Michael: And an ex- extensively used AI.

[00:10:28] And I realized that one of the challenges of AI is that because it makes things that we used to think were impossible for us to do, it makes it possible for us to do, that any time savings we get because of AI, we rapidly fill up with more AI projects because- Yeah … what’s possible now. And so I, I, I sort of came to the conclusion, an article r- I wrote a couple weeks ago, that, uh, if any of these technologies don’t lead to more freedom, which footnote, none of them have, but if it doesn’t lead to more freedom, then why are we using it?

[00:11:04] Yeah. And I think there’s a way to use technology that leads to that, and it’s probably what you’re talking about. Going slower, allowing ample margin in our lives so that we can focus on the things that are truly important.

[00:11:15] Carl: Yeah. I mean, I, I’m not a Luddite. I love technology, and in many cases I think technology is neutral, right?

[00:11:21] It’s what- Yeah … matters is how we choose to use it. And throughout history, as new technology has come online and allows us to save labor and to save time, we’ve always faced a choice. We could take that time and invest it in slowing down and not working , in, in reading bedtime stories to our children and going for long walks.

[00:11:40] But every step of the way we’ve chosen the other option, which is to work more, spend more, consume more. So we find ourselves on this endless treadmill of more and more and more, and this is the big question facing us now, a big existential question, I think, with the arrival of AI. Because it does, you could say threaten, it could be promise, to free up incredible amounts of time.

[00:12:02] Are we gonna make the right decision about how to use that time? And that’s the question mark hovering over all of this at the moment, I think. And it’s, it’s an exciting time because I’m an optimist, and I do think that-

[00:12:11] Michael: Me too …

[00:12:12] Carl: I think that we will at this point. Because we’re bumping up against the limits of how much we can consume, how fast we can go- Yeah

[00:12:19] how many things we can cram into the average minute. I think you’re starting to see the tectonic plates shifting below the surface in the culture, and people starting to ask that question that you did a moment ago, which is, what really matters? You know, what really matters? And once you identify what really matters, the next step is to devote to that thing or those things the time and attention they deserve, which is another way of saying, “Slow down,” right?

[00:12:42] Yeah. So I do think that the culture, we’re tilting in that direction. We’re not there yet, but I feel hopeful that it- A good tipping point is n- just around the corner maybe

[00:12:51] Michael: What psychologically drives this? I mean, do we… Have we convinced ourselves that if we just run hard for the foreseeable future, that we’ll get to the place where we can slow down and enjoy life?

[00:13:04] Or is there something deeper at work? I mean, ha- have you thought about that, the psychology behind that?

[00:13:09] Carl: Yeah. I think there are a couple things in play. One of them is what you nodded t- towards there, which is the culture’s constantly telling us to go faster, do more. So there’s a deep and abiding taboo against the very idea of slowness in our culture, right?

[00:13:24] Slow is a four-letter word. Literally. It’s, it’s a, it’s a dirty word. It’s a byword for lazy, boring- Yeah … stupid, unproductive, all the things nobody wants to be associated with. And this taboo works like this. It means that even when we can feel in our bones that it’d be good for us to put on the brakes, even when we’re yearning to slow down, we don’t do it, because the taboo makes us feel ashamed, guilty, afraid.

[00:13:48] You know, we’ve just lost the habit of slow. So even though every part of every cell in our body might be crying out for us to hit the brakes, we just put our head down and go faster and faster. So I think that’s part of what’s driving a lot of this. But there’s another thing as well, which is even deeper, and I think that one of the motors of our fast forward culture, it’s a kind of metaphysical motor in the sense that for many people, a fast- Very busy, very distracted, constantly stimulated, over-caffeinated lifestyle is a form of denial.

[00:14:19] It’s a way of running away from ourselves, right? Mm. Because, I mean, Socrates, 2,000-and-odd years ago told us that the secret to living a life worthy of the name was to live what he called the examined life. And what he meant by that was slowing down, taking the time to look inside, connect with yourself, and ask yourself, grapple with the big questions such as, “Who am I?

[00:14:42] What is my purpose here? Am I living the right life for me, or am I just in autopilot?” Those are frightening questions- Mm-hmm … to reckon with, but they are the questions that… They’re essential, right? That is, those are the building blocks of building a life that you feel proud of and happy living. But it’s much easier to fill your head up with distraction and gra- and sweat the small stuff.

[00:15:02] So instead of slowing down and reckoning with those big questions, we speed up and content ourselves with the small questions like, “Where are my keys? I have a Zoom at 11,” right? Yeah. That’s not a frightening question to deal with, and it also gives the illusion of living fully and being productive and engaged and active and productive and dynamic and all the stuff everybody feels they wanna be.

[00:15:23] So we just find ourselves betting on the superficial horse rather than-

[00:15:28] Megan: Hmm …

[00:15:28] Carl: climbing on the more deep horse, if you like.

[00:15:30] Megan: So Carl, just kind of shifting gears to a little bit of the practical here. In your book, The Slow Fix, you tell this story about going to the acupuncturist, where he basically says to your face, I think, “You will never get better because you’re a man who wants to fix his back quickly,” which-

[00:15:47] Carl: Yeah.

[00:15:48] Megan: I mean, oh- I love that … that’s, like, dagger to the heart level, you know? That, I think that’s an indictment on a whole generation of ambitious people who are… Two of us are looking at each other right now. But what did he see in you that you couldn’t see in yourself? ‘Cause I mean, man, that quote is piercing.

[00:16:04] Carl: Yeah, it pierced me as well. In fact, it was really the spark for writing that book, I think- Yeah … actually, because all, up until then, I’d been… You know, I’d, I’d already written about slow, and I was traveling around the world telling everyone how wonderful it was to slow down and feeling that I was really living it myself.

[00:16:19] But that ripped off the, the last sort of shred of self-deception there because it was so, it was so true. I mean, he put his finger on something very real, which was that even though I was managing to channel the power of slowness in pretty much every other aspect of my life, I’d had this back trouble for many years, and I had never got out of the habit of trying to fix it with a quick fix, right?

[00:16:42] Hmm. And it was just having it said to me so sh- crudely and so sharply- … just completely, I went home shaking, right? ‘Cause it was so true. I just kept going to see him when I had a problem and get a, a bit of relief of symptoms, and then that would be it. I would just, that would be it. I’d carry on with my life, which I think is a really- It’s a, it’s a metaphor for the way we approach so much of our lives these days.

[00:17:04] Yes.

[00:17:04] Michael: We

[00:17:04] Carl: stay on the surface. We bring Band-Aid solutions, you know, just add water remedies. We, we deal with the symptoms without taking the time to slow down, go deep, and attack the root cause of the problem. And for me, that was just a moment of searing epiphany, right? Mm. Just to think, oh, here I am. What a hypocrite, right?

[00:17:22] Here I am telling everyone how wonderful it is to put on the brakes, and I can’t even do it with my own back, right? And my own body. So, um, yeah, that was, um … I’d forgotten about that. But yeah, thanks for bringing that up.

[00:17:31] Megan: Such a great story.

[00:17:33] Michael: Well, you know, it, it kind of explains why Americans are overmedicated.

[00:17:38] You know why- Mm … we reach for these pharmaceuticals, because-

[00:17:41] Megan: Right …

[00:17:41] Michael: much easier to take a pill than to actually do the work that’s the underlying problem-

[00:17:46] Megan: Yeah …

[00:17:47] Michael: that produces the symptoms.

[00:17:48] Megan: Yeah.

[00:17:49] Michael: I mean, I’m definitely guilty of that. Yeah.

[00:17:50] Megan: Well, and Carl, you know, you basically make the argument in The Slow Fix, it’s not just that a quick fix is likely to fail, but it actually tends to make the underlying problem worse.

[00:18:02] Which, I mean, I think that’s hard for… It’s, it’s a hard reality for our audience to wrap their heads around. But I’d love for you to just talk about why that math fails over and over, the quick fix.

[00:18:15] Carl: Well, an- another way to think of it is this. People often say, in the moment we say, “We don’t have time for a slow fix.

[00:18:22] We only have time for a f- a quick fix,” right? So we reach for the quick fix, get it off the shelf, apply it, and move on. But then later on, when the quick fix proves to have failed and blows up in our face, we always find time then to pick up the pieces and deal with- Yeah … the fallout, don’t we, right? Wow.

[00:18:39] Megan: So true.

[00:18:40] Carl: 100%. I mean, that just always happens. So I guess what I’m arguing in that book, and across all my writing, is why not invest the slowness up front, right? Why not say, “Okay, we actually probably have more time now than we think we do.” We’ve wound ourselves up into the hysterical state where we constantly feel like everything is a race against the clock.

[00:18:59] Sometimes it is, but not always. And very often you do have more time than you think to just pause, look at the big picture, join the dots, and go deep, right? To get down to the root cause of what caused whatever the problem was. So that you end up saving time later on, and also resources, right? Because picking up the pieces from a failed quick fix today, tomorrow, usually costs you more on the bottom line as well, not least the time you waste, but also the resources that get s- you know, sucked up putting things back together again.

[00:19:29] Megan: You know, we were just talking this morning about a problem we’ve been trying to solve, and that one of the challenges seems to be, and I’m just really curious what your thoughts are on this, Carl, but is that you kinda have to recalibrate your nervous system for slow fixes. You know, because it doesn’t have…

[00:19:49] I mean, first of all, you don’t get the big adrenaline rush at the beginning of the Hail Mary pass, which is just like, you know, you get kinda high on it, you know, when you do it. Yeah. Thrilling. It, it’s- So … kind of thrilling in a terrifying sort of way. And then you don’t get the payoff of, you know, see ball, hit ball real fast.

[00:20:07] You know, you don’t get that kinda home run feeling, um, or the promise that maybe you could, even if it doesn’t normally work. And so- First of all, do you think that’s in play in, in terms of getting ourselves to acknowledge and pursue the slow fix path? And then second of all, like, how do you do that? How do you, how do you retrain yourself to be willing to go slow instead of take the bait for the quick fix?

[00:20:33] Like, what’s the hack or what’s the mindset shift that needs to happen for that to be

[00:20:38] Carl: tenable? It’s interesting you used a couple of metaphors. You talked about a hack and a mindset shift. In my mind, a hack is a quick fix- Yeah … usually, right? But the mindset shift is the slow approach, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:20:50] Which is what you advocate for, right? I mean, I think it’s very true that in this road runner culture, we are all marinated in adrenaline. I mean, we’re just… I mean, there’s a biological… I think we are addicted, and I know that’s a big word, the A word, addiction. But I think we are now chemically, emotionally, physically, biologically, s- you know, i- all these ways addicted to the rush of speed, and that drives us into the arms of the quick fix.

[00:21:18] So it’s, it’s not enough just to, say, read a book about the quick fix or hear that a quick f- or slow fix would be a good thing because you’re going to b- you’re gonna go for the low-hanging fruit, the excitement, the adrenaline rush of the quick fix. So I think that there’s a, there’s a whole sort of range of things we need to be doing and to change to bring about that mindset shift.

[00:21:36] So there’s the intellectual work. You read about it. You get big stories. You realize, yes, intellectually, this is a solid case to go for the slow fix. But I think we also need to change ourselves almost chemically, right? We need to reconnect with slower rhythms, and, and that can be something as simple as…

[00:21:50] I mean, people do a lot of things like slow forms of exercise, whether it’s yoga or tai chi or meditation, breathing exercises, just kind of resetting, rebooting the body, getting out of that fight or flight mode that so many of us find ourselves in, right? You know, you’re in the office. It’s a much more of a combative environment.

[00:22:08] You get into that sort of fight or flight mode. You come home. You’re serving dinner to your children. You’re still in fight or flight mode, right? Yeah. And you just never get out of it. And, and I think we need to build in little rituals, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s reading a bit of poetry. It might be sketching, whatever it is, you know, just some little ritual you build into your schedule that reacquaints you with slower, deeper rhythms and also acts almost like a…

[00:22:33] It kind of inoculates you against the virus of hurry, so you have those slow moments, whether it’s during the workday where you just step away from your desk, you go sit in a quiet place and, and read a novel for a couple of, you know, a couple of pages. Whatever it is, you know, that just shifts you out of that fight or flight mode and allows you to come back into the fray with a, a mindset that is more still, more calm, more focused, more able to see the big picture and step away from the, let’s face it, intense temptation of the quick fix.

[00:23:03] It is, it is what it is, right? I mean, we, we, we go for them because they’re very… It’s, it’s a bright, shiny thing, and it gives us a, a rush.

[00:23:17] Michael: One of the things I appreciated in your work is sort of the nuance that it’s not entirely binary. It’s not either fast or slow. No. And you talk about Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, who told you if you’re always slow then you’re stupid.

[00:23:33] Carl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:23:34] Michael: Could you unpack that a little bit?

[00:23:36] Carl: I mean, when we talk about the slow movement or slow philosophy with a capital S, it’s definitely not about doing everything slowly, right?

[00:23:42] I am not a fanatic of slowness. I love speed, right? I mean, faster is often better. We all know that. I am a naturally fast person, right? Faster is often the solution, but not always, and that really is the key to unlocking this slow revolution, if you like. It’s about doing things at, at the right speed.

[00:24:00] Musicians have a beautiful term for this. They call it the tempo giusto, right? The correct tempo for each piece of music. So sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and just playing with- I love that … all the different rhythms and tempos and cadences in between. And actually, if you go deeper with this slow mindset, with a capital S, it’s, it’s a state of mind, right?

[00:24:20] It’s, it’s a way of being. It’s- putting quality before quantity. It’s being present, being in the moment. It’s doing one thing at a time, if you remember those days. Ultimately, for me, slow is about doing everything not as fast as possible, but as well as possible, which really is a very simple idea, but at the same time, an immensely powerful one.

[00:24:41] Because if you arrive at each moment thinking, “How can I get through this moment not as fast as possible, but as well as possible?” I mean, that is a game changer with a capital G, because you’re gonna do everything better and enjoy it more.

[00:24:52] Megan: Yeah.

[00:24:53] Carl: Which is why you mentioned slow food, which was really one of the original slow movements, if you like.

[00:24:59] Since then, the slow movement has mushroomed out into every field of human endeavor. So there are movements now for slow travel, slow fashion, slow education, slow medicine, slow media, slow poli- you name it. People coming to whatever it is and saying, “How can I do this better, enjoy it more by slowing down to the right pace, finding that tempo giusto, that correct tempo for the moment?”

[00:25:20] Michael: You know, I’m sitting in here in our video studio, and I’m looking at the soundboard, and there are these sliders where you can adjust the volume. Mm-hmm. And it seems like it’s more of a slider than a switch, and the appropriate sound, the appropriate volume, is what’s appropriate to the situation. I like what you said, do it as well as possible.

[00:25:40] That’s a mindset- Yeah … shift. And if you… And if it requires you going much slower, and it usually does, great.

[00:25:47] Megan: Well, and I think the thing we don’t have the cultivated ability to do is go slowly. Like, fast comes naturally, you know, in our- Right … context. Like, that’s the one that we’ve all, like, overdeveloped.

[00:25:59] We’re like the bodybuilder with the teeny tiny calves and the giant biceps, you know? Like, the biceps are- … That’s a given. We got that. Now we need to work on the legs, you know? And so I think that slow is, like, the thing we have to practice often because we’re so overdeveloped on speed. It’s atrophied.

[00:26:15] Yeah, it’s atrophied. And in my own life, you know, what I have found is that I need intentional practices that involve my whole body- Mm-hmm … because I gotta s- I gotta get out of floating head mode, you know? Like, in my professional life, I can just be like a floating head, and I need to engage my body if I’m gonna go more slowly and downshift and have access to a different speed.

[00:26:39] And so for me, that has been gardening and beekeeping and walking, which I used to do for, like, exercise. Mm-hmm. And now I, I walk very slowly, and I absolutely love it, and I normally walk without listening to anything, and I’m watching birds, and I’m talking to the neighbors. We have a bunch of neighbors that walk.

[00:26:57] You know, I’m looking at animals. The other day I was walking, and there was this baby bunny that was right on my walking path, and I just… It, it was not scared of me. It was, like, too young to know that, you know, humans could be a threat. And it just sat there munching on some clover, and I just stood there and watched it for a few minutes, and I was like This is so great because it, it’s training my attention and training my body.

[00:27:19] It’s like slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles. You know? Mm. It’s like I’m, I’m training the slow-twitch part of myself. But I don’t think that happens by accident, and if we wanna have access to a different ki- If, if we wanna be able to decelerate as well as accelerate, we’ve, we’ve gotta have things in our life where we practice so that when we get in the high-dopamine, high-adrenaline environments, it’s like we actually have some muscle memory there.

[00:27:44] Otherwise, man, it’s just hard.

[00:27:46] Carl: I love that. Uh, I, I mean, walking, I think, is one of the supreme act of slowness, right? It’s, it’s a wonderful way to reconnect and find your rhythm. ‘Cause I was talking about slow and finding the right pace and so on, and you were saying it depends on the context, which it very much does, but it also depends on the person, right?

[00:28:02] Sure. Each of us has our own internal metronome. So what’s fast for me might be kind of a little bit too slow for you, and what’s slow for me might be super fa- You know? So it, it’s kind of very much a personal thing. Mm. And I think we get infected by other people’s impatience and their pace rather than taking that time to step back and reconnect with our bodies and say, “Okay, what’s wor- what would work for me in this moment,” right?

[00:28:23] And I love just, well, the idea of that, the little ra- rabbit, was it you saw? Yeah. Sort of munch. See, if you’d gone, if you’d arrived a- a- along that pathway power walking, you know? Yeah. I suspect that rabbit probably would’ve fled, right? You would not have had that little magic moment-

[00:28:37] Megan: Yep,

[00:28:37] Carl: that’s right … of connection with nature.

[00:28:38] It’s like it would’ve gone scurrying off into the undergrowth. But because you were moving at a natural pace… I mean, this is a, I think, one of the best ways to find that deeper, slower, healthier, richer rhythm, is spending time in nature. Mm. Because nature is the, the ultimate- cradle of slowness. I mean, nature, everything happens in nature at the right pace, at the tempo di slow, right?

[00:29:01] Yes. I mean, as humankind, we are constantly trying to accelerate nature, and it always ends badly, right? Right. Usually for us. Sometimes for nature as well. But nature, that’s one of the great lessons that nature can teach us, is slowing down to find the right rhythm and pace for the moment. And so, and, and actually, there’s a huge library of research that’s been put together recently that shows that simply spending time in green spaces slows us down, right?

[00:29:26] It reduces stress. It sharpens concentration. It helps us sort of be more fully in the moment, and it also allows us to step back and think about the, the, the, the horizon and the bigger picture and, and feel less obsessed with the small stuff. I’ve talked earlier about sweating the small stuff. I mean, that’s one of the great…

[00:29:44] I find as well, personally, I’ve spent a lot of time in nature, that getting out into, especially big-

[00:29:49] Michael: Mm-hmm …

[00:29:49] Carl: capacious landscapes, all the things that are whizzing around in the back of your head, those little worries, suddenly just vanish, right? They seem so minuscule and so trivial in this place of scale and majesty, right?

[00:30:04] And I think that scale and slowness of nature is such a gift to us, right? Especially if you live in a country… I mean, I live in London, England. We don’t have a whole lot of big nature here. We have parks and so on, so that’s something. But I grew up in Canada. You guys are in somewhere in the States, I’m assuming.

[00:30:17] Yes.

[00:30:17] Michael: Nashville.

[00:30:18] Megan: Tennessee.

[00:30:18] Carl: Yeah. I mean, in North America, it’s all around us, right? So these, these… It’s, it’s something there. It’s free most of the time too, just to go out and spend a bit of time. You know, take your shoes off, sit in the grass. Mm-hmm. Lean up against a tree like Isaac Newton did, right? You know, tap into those deeper rhythms.

[00:30:33] Michael: Well, speaking of England, you know, I, I think one of the first times I ever experienced this sort of expansive horizon and everything was in Scotland.

[00:30:40] Megan: Ah.

[00:30:40] Michael: Hmm. Because the sky is so visible. You know, it’s not like they have huge mountains or, uh, even a lot of trees.

[00:30:47] Megan: Right.

[00:30:48] Michael: But there was just something about it that allowed me to catch my breath, and I love that.

[00:30:54] The Slow Fix is built around the Andon Rope. And I want you to explain that whole situation with Toyota and how it applies to us today.

[00:31:05] Carl: Yeah. Well, the Andon Rope… I was actually gonna call the book The Andon Rope, but my… It was a long discussion about whether that was too obscure or not, so I lost that battle.

[00:31:13] Uh, but the Andon Rope is this: the, in Toyota factories, they came up with a system whereby a, literally a rope, an Andon Rope was hanging in all parts of the factory. And if any member of the team spotted a problem on the assembly line and couldn’t fix it sensibly in the moment, would pause, you know, and ask questions about whether, and, you know, what’s going on or what’s going…

[00:31:34] Any- whatever your rank in the factory, you could pull the Andon Rope and stop the whole production line, right? Hmm. So that people would stop, slow down, go deep, and get to the root cause of the problem, right? Which is not something you find in a lot of factories. Often, it’s just a quick patch-up job. And then of course, as we said earlier, the quick fix now turns into a big mess later on, further down the production line.

[00:31:55] So this was one of the secrets to Toyota partially taking over the world when it did all those years ago, right? It just had this incredible culture of everybody was empowered, everybody was invited to slow down when they saw a problem, and to seek the deep, slow fix rather than to skim along the surface with a quick fix.

[00:32:14] And, and I think that’s a useful metaphor. You me- asked for life in general. I think that’s… I, I, I think the idea of pulling the Andon Rope is a, is a helpful image or a helpful metaphor for us because very often we don’t do that. We just, you know, we put on the Band-Aid, we get the duct tape out, we, we go full MacGyver, right?

[00:32:33] And we try to look for a quick solution. Uh, which sometimes, of course, you know, I come back to what we’ve been saying all along. Sometimes the quick solution is the best solution. But very often it’s not, especially in this immensely complex world we inhabit now, and so many factors and things are in interplay and interwoven.

[00:32:49] You really very often need to stop, join the dots, take a moment, take a beat to find what’s going on wrong, and then put it right. And, and that Andon Rope, I think, is a really… I often use that in my own mind when there’s a problem in my own life and I can feel myself, you know, perhaps I’ve got a team of people around me, they’re all itching to get a solution quickly.

[00:33:09] I say to myself, “This is a time to pull the Andon Rope.” It’s a, it’s a helpful metaphor, I think.

[00:33:13] Megan: Mm.

[00:33:14] Michael: I was wondering if there are any businesses that you could point to that have tried to make slow a strategic asset? And how do the leaders in those organizations do that when there’s so much pressure from shareholders and the competition and just this moment with AI and everything else to speed everything up?

[00:33:37] Mm-hmm. I mean, everybody I know, every business owner that I know, and certainly the ones I coach- And that’s a

[00:33:42] Megan: lot …

[00:33:42] Michael: that’s a lot. They feel- Mm … behind, perpetually behind. And so there’s this constant game of catch-up. But I ju- I just… It’d be helpful to know if there’s people that are doing this well, and if they’re doing it well, how are they doing it well?

[00:33:57] Carl: Yeah. Well, there was, there was a big study that the Harvard Business Review did. I think they surveyed 343 companies across all sectors, and they found that companies that embrace this slow approach, that took the time when y- it made sense to take the time, over the medium term were, you know, in operating profit, sales over…

[00:34:14] were beating the fast companies hands down, right? Mm. Right across the board. And this was across every sector of the economy. So there’s, there are examples out there. The funny thing of course is that, maybe not that funny, not that surprising, is that a lot of companies now will embrace slow, but they won’t, they won’t say it out loud.

[00:34:29] It’s almost like a, an in-house secret or, because of what you were talking about earlier, that kind of shame or the guilt- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm … that they feel, they think th- they don’t want judgment, or if they’ve got to talk to investors and investors hear, “Well, we are slowing,” “We don’t want you to slow down.” But they realize on the inside that a bit of judiciously applied slowness can fire up creativity, can supercharge innovation, can deepen communication and esprit de corps in the company, can avoid costly mistakes.

[00:34:54] They understand it inside, but to explain it to people outside is a little scary. So I’ll just give you an example. I can’t give the name of the company. It was an American-based company, and it’s one that I did some work with, um, a couple years ago. And one of the things, one of the levers they decided to pull in-house was to create a monthly prize for the slowest employee of the month, right?

[00:35:16] Exactly. You hear that and you laugh and you think, “Well, I don’t wanna be the slowest em- you know, I win that award in April, you fire me in May,” right? That slow clap. What they found was when they, they did it in the context of a, of a re- calibration, a rethink, a, a revolution around the idea of time. And they were asking staff and having t- you know, workshops and dialogues and stuff about when it made sense to go fast and when staff felt that they were more…

[00:35:39] They were thriving and doing things better when they could slow down. And that got out in the open as an open dialogue. Hmm. And having that little monthly ritual allowed people to say, “Okay, this month, this employee wins the award because he took the time to reread a big report, and as a result of that, spotted an error that saved the company, you know, $500,000,” say.

[00:36:00] Or, or next month- Wow … it was an employee who landed- That’s big … a big contract because instead of just trying to win over the client with a Zoom call, she drove across town, took a couple of hours, sat, had lunch with that person, and brought that business to the company, right? So you’re sort of every time you just pull out another story, you put something else on the table and say, “Look, slow allowed us to power up.”

[00:36:23] I love that. “Allowed us to hit a home run. Every… And here are the examples.” That’s the sort of thing that helps people get away from the taboo we were talking about earlier, and to embrace slow when it makes sense to embrace it.

[00:36:33] Michael: Well, you, you know the magazine Fast Company?

[00:36:37] Carl: Hmm.

[00:36:38] Michael: How about a magazine called Slow Company?

[00:36:40] I don’t know if there’d be-

[00:36:41] Megan: There actually is, um, there-

[00:36:43] Michael: I don’t think there’d be a market for it …

[00:36:44] Megan: there’s a journal or a magazine that, that I subscribe to. I think it’s called… It’s either called Delayed Gratification or Slow- There is, there is Delayed Gratification. It’s, yeah, it’s- Yes. Okay. I, I’m not surprised you know of it.

[00:36:53] Yeah. It… I think it’s a, a British-based publication- It is … if I’m not cor- Yeah, yeah … and their, their whole premise is they’re gonna report the news a quarter after it happens. It-

[00:37:02] Michael: Most news wouldn’t survive the weekly news cycle.

[00:37:05] Megan: Right. Isn’t that fascinating, though? But they do, like, this deep analysis on…

[00:37:09] I’ll have to bring one to show you.

[00:37:10] Michael: I’d like to see

[00:37:11] Megan: it. Um-

[00:37:11] Carl: Really helpful- Yeah … because so much of the modern media now is just hot takes. Yeah. And you get a barrage of hot takes over a couple days, and then that story vanishes, and a couple of weeks later you think, “What? What happened there?” And you don’t- Yeah

[00:37:22] there’s no follow-up, right? Which I think explains why a lot of our democracies are falling apart at the seams. Nobody knows what’s happening. They can’t fasten onto-

[00:37:30] Megan: Yeah …

[00:37:30] Carl: a narrative. It’s just this sort of constant- You know, bombardment of, of hot takes and- Yeah … and distractions. You can’t

[00:37:36] Megan: process it in real time.

[00:37:38] It’s like the,

[00:37:38] Michael: it, it’s like the hot takes de- demand that you respond to the news as it happens.

[00:37:42] Megan: Yeah.

[00:37:42] Michael: But then the other half of the news is critiquing the people who had the hot takes that were wrong.

[00:37:47] Megan: Yes. Right. Never mind the fact that we don’t have all the facts by the time… You know, we, we don’t, we can’t- Yeah

[00:37:53] possibly assimilate and synthesize all the information that quickly.

[00:37:56] Carl: Let me give you another example- Yeah … of a, of a company, right? So again, this is a, a, this is a c- a big company in, in the US where the CEO has a practice where every day he, in his, his diary, his schedule that everybody can see in the company, he blocks off 15 to 20 minutes every day to have a, an, an interview with…

[00:38:15] And each day it’s a different name. So one day it’ll be, I don’t know, Sally Shawcross and, and next day it’s John Brown or something. These people do not exist, right? They’re just 20 minutes where he can shut the door and nobody can interrupt him for those 20 minutes, and he just has time to slip into that kind of deep, richer, more nuanced slow thinking, right?

[00:38:36] Psychologists call it slow thinking, where you get into the weeds, you come up with creative ideas, blue sky thinking. He also uses that time sometimes to slip out of his office, walk around the company and have conversations with people he would not normally speak to. Hm. He’ll just turn up at someone’s desk and say, “How’s it going?”

[00:38:52] And, and that, those are those little connections that fire off, that cross-pollination. You learn what’s happening inside the company. If you’re just… You described earlier those, um, heads of companies who just felt like everything was a, just a rush and they need to m- Often people are trying to do too much, right?

[00:39:07] Rather than focusing on what’s important- Yes … uh, they’re focusing on what’s urgent and that is such, that’s a crucial life skill, well, in life, but especially at work, is being able to distinguish b- between what’s important and what’s urgent because the culture is constantly telling us, “You need to attend to what’s urgent.”

[00:39:24] And what happens? Well, what’s important just falls by the wayside.

[00:39:26] Michael: Well, and I think, you know, when you couple that with the desire or the drive for more, it’s like I gotta have more stuff and I’ve gotta have it faster.

[00:39:35] Megan: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:35] Michael: And it’s just like this ambition that’s out of control.

[00:39:38] Megan: And not self-reflective.

[00:39:40] Michael: Right.

[00:39:41] Megan: It, it’s a compulsive kind of ambition that we don’t even know why. Like, why do I want or need that, and will it really make me happier? Like, what, what are the things that are actually gonna make me Have more joy, and meaning, and purpose, and significance in my life. And I’ve really come to believe that almost everything that matters has to be done slowly, you know?

[00:40:01] Yeah. Except maybe saving somebody’s life, like, you know, uh, if they’re, you know, stopped breathing or something. But like, whether you’re raising children, or building a business, or a home, or a legacy, or a, a garden, or, you know, anything. Anything worth building is just gonna take time over time, and there’s not really shortcuts.

[00:40:23] Carl: There’s a wonderful, there’s a wonderful quote, which you’re pretty much echoing there, one of my favorite from Mae West, the screen siren of the early 20th century, who said famously once that, “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” And that’s pretty much- Yeah … what you’re saying there.

[00:40:35] Megan: Yeah. That’s

[00:40:36] Michael: a great quote.

[00:40:36] Megan: Yeah.

[00:40:43] Sadly, we are about at the end of our time. I can’t even believe it. It’s just gone so fast. Right. But I would love to just, uh- Yeah, ironically, ironically, our slow time has gone fast. But I would love to make this practical for- Mm … our listeners, for the people who are probably listening to us in their car, or maybe they’re at the gym.

[00:41:03] Right. Um, they’re sitting in a car line, you know, whatever it is. They’re on their way to the next thing, and they, they feel that tightness in their chest, and the next thing they’re a little behind on, and yet they yearn for a slower pace. They want to downshift. It’s not working like it used to. What’s the next best right step for them that can- Yeah

[00:41:27] move them toward this kind of life?

[00:41:29] Michael: Asking for a friend.

[00:41:30] Megan: Asking for a friend.

[00:41:31] Carl: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the, the first thing I’ll, I’ll… Definitely, I’ll give you a few, uh, quick hacks for slowing down as we, as we close out. But before I do that, I just wanna sort of underline an important data point here, which is that, I mean, we’re all so impatient now that we even wanna slow down fast, right?

[00:41:45] So- … so people who think… They’ll, they’ll hear the podcast, think, “Yeah, man, I, I’ve gotta reconnect with my inner tortoise and slow down and thrive at w- ” And then so, you know, they sign up for yoga, and then they run across the street to do some meditation. They rush home. It

[00:41:57] Michael: doesn’t work

[00:41:57] Carl: that way, right? And also, the thing about slowing down, if you’ve been like I was, a card-carrying roadrunner, it’s a process, right?

[00:42:05] You, you don’t achieve the inner calm of the Dalai Lama tomorrow morning. It’s, you, you take a few steps forward, then maybe you slip back. You have withdrawal symptoms. It’s a process, but the direction of travel is clear, and you will get there. So let me just give some straight-up levers to pull, right?

[00:42:20] Let’s talk about tech, right? We haven’t talked about phones.

[00:42:23] Michael: Mm.

[00:42:23] Carl: Turn off notifications wherever possible, right? Just turn them off. Because if you leave notifications open, what you’re effectively doing is letting other people control your time and attention. You turn them off, you decide, “In this moment, I’m giving my full attention to, I don’t know, this conversation or reading a bedtime story or this piece of work or this sunset,” right?

[00:42:41] And then when it’s time to look at my inbox, I look at it. And as someone, I’m a natural person, not as a journalist, but training, I wanna know what’s happening everywhere all the time. For me, turning off notifications, game-changer. Another suggestion with phones, you know, going to gray mode.

[00:42:56] Michael: Yes.

[00:42:57] Megan: Yeah.

[00:42:57] Carl: This is a wonderful thing.

[00:42:59] Whatever phone you have, there’s a function somewhere to drain all the color from the screen. Why would you wanna do that? Because one of the things that makes our phones so addictive, so alluring, so attractive is, is color, right? Take away the color, and it just loses its seductive charm. It loses that grip it has on.

[00:43:16] It’s incredible. I guarantee you, scrolling through TikTok in black and white is just no fun, right? So take a day next week, maybe tomorrow, and go gray. Like, just go gr- And I guarantee if you’re a power user of your phone, you will claw back… I was gonna say time. You will claw back hours of time that you can then invest- Mm

[00:43:34] in balancing out the rest of your day- Being able to slow down when you wanna slow down because you’ve just got that time back. Those phones are a black hole if we don’t use them wisely. So true. Couple more quick ones. Again, with phone, this is a game I call hide the phone. Very simple. Based on research showing that when two people are in a conversation together, two friends, two colleagues, parent, child, whatever, if there’s a phone visible during the conversation, just visible, doesn’t have to ring or light up or vibrate, just visible, those two people keep the conversation at a more superficial level.

[00:44:06] So the next time you’re in any conversation in the real world with anyone, hide your phone, right? Stick it in a bag or under a- I like that … magazine, whatever. And that small act of slowness will have a big, big effect on the depth and texture and richness of the conversation you have with the other person.

[00:44:22] Coming back to doing le- I think do less, right? We’re chronically trying to do too much, and one way to do that is to keep… We all have a to-do list. Keep a not-to-do list.

[00:44:32] Megan: Yes.

[00:44:32] Carl: And use it like this. So every day, or, you know, look at your calendar, find the least important thing, right? There will be something for all of us.

[00:44:40] There’s always one thing at least in a day or two. Get it off your to-do list, put it on your not-to-do list, and then keep those not-to-do lists in a drawer or your phone somewhere, and revisit them from time to time. Because what you’ll find is that things that today you think, “Oh no, I can’t not do this. The sky will fall in.

[00:44:57] My career will go up in flames. My partner will hate…” Six weeks from now, you’ll look at your not-to-do list and think, “Man, I don’t even remember that.” Yeah. Because it wasn’t that important. And having a not-to-do list and using it over a longer term just gives you some perspective and allows you to realize that so much of the stuff that we rush to squeeze into our schedules is not that important.

[00:45:18] It really isn’t.

[00:45:18] Michael: I

[00:45:19] Carl: believe it. And this just allows you to free up time for what really, really matters so you can slow down into those moments and work better and live more fully.

[00:45:26] Michael: Carl, thank you so much for this conversation. I really feel challenged and stimulated and eager to go more slowly in my life.

[00:45:36] If people wanna connect with you and with your work, where would you suggest they start?

[00:45:39] Carl: That’s easy. Uh, I’ve got a single link, which is my name, carlhonore.info. Okay. So Carl, C-A-R-L H-O-N-O-R-E.info. And all… got courses, videos, Ted Talks, books, everything there. Ev- Great … more than you could ever want to know about my work in one, in one place.

[00:45:56] Michael: We will link to that in the show notes.

[00:45:57] Megan: Fantastic.

[00:45:58] Michael: Thanks again.

[00:45:59] Megan: Thanks, Carl.

[00:46:00] Carl: Been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:46:11] Michael: I don’t know about you, but I feel like I do better at this at some times in my life than others.

[00:46:18] Megan: Yeah.

[00:46:19] Michael: Now, that’s probably true for everybody, and it’s probably gonna be true Till I die

[00:46:24] Megan: Yeah, I feel like I have done consistently better more often for the first time in my life since I started incorporating what we would call practices of flourishing into my life.

[00:46:37] Michael: I’ve noticed that about you, too.

[00:46:38] Megan: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think this has come naturally to me. I don’t think dispositionally, you know, like if you had known me as a… Obviously, you have, but you, our audience, if you had known me as a 20-year-old or a 10-year-old or a 30-year-old or a 40-year-old, you would not say, “There’s a person who knows how to go slowly,” and quite the opposite, actually.

[00:46:56] And yet, and I hope this gives hope to all of you, I think this can be learned.

[00:47:02] Carl: Yeah.

[00:47:02] Megan: But, but it’s a kind of retraining. I don’t think it can be learned doing the same things we’re already doing. It’s like we kinda have… Uh, this is my opinion. I should have asked Carl if he agrees with this, but I think we kinda have to practice it in a different environment, and then use that as a transferable skill in our current environment.

[00:47:20] You know, like, for me, at least, my experience has been that through some of these flourishing practices, spending time in nature, for example, that’s been the biggest one for me, tending to myself, my body, and oftentimes I’m doing those things at the same time, have given me a mechanism to slow down that’s not just like I’m saying to myself, “I need to slow down.”

[00:47:42] I’m actually doing activities that require slowness inherently, which is a kind of retraining.

[00:47:48] Michael: I 100% agree with that, because I think it’s tempting to say, “Okay, I’m not gonna work in the evenings. I’m not gonna work on the weekends. I’m not gonna work during vacations.” But what happens is nature abhors a vacuum.

[00:48:00] Megan: Right.

[00:48:00] Michael: And so the s- the stuff comes rushing back in.

[00:48:03] Megan: Right.

[00:48:03] Michael: You have to choose something- Right … to spend that time doing. And whether it’s putting the phone away, like we did last night and sat on the porch, and Gayle and I had had a glass of wine and talked-

[00:48:14] Megan: Yeah …

[00:48:14] Michael: or if it’s, you know, the weekends we’re gonna go golfing together, or we’re gonna spend time lingering after church and just having fellowship with, with the people that we’re in community with.

[00:48:25] Those have to be intentional practices.

[00:48:27] Megan: And they have to be slow by nature.

[00:48:28] Michael: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:48:29] Megan: You know what I mean? Like, you could, you could go race cars on the weekends. I don’t know, something that

[00:48:34] Michael: was

[00:48:34] Megan: like- But there’s no way to do that slowly. But there’s no way to do that slowly, so it’s not gonna help you.

[00:48:35] I mean, you, you gotta do something that sort of, like, makes you go slow, where, like, by virtue of just showing up and participating in the thing, it will recalibrate your s- your speedometer, so to speak. Um, one of the things I’ve loved about beekeeping so far… First of all, if you go fast around bees, you’re gonna get stung.

[00:48:52] They literally translate quick movement with threat. And so one of the ways that you can keep bees while not being all suited up necessarily, conditions may vary, you know, but not have it be a stressful thing, is that you move very slowly. It’s almost like Tai Chi. And it-

[00:49:11] Michael: Well, isn’t it, isn’t it the bees can, and like a lot of animals- They can smell or sense stress

[00:49:17] Megan: They can, but it’s actually just that, like, predators typically move fast- Hmm

[00:49:20] in their case, and so they’re sort of wired naturally to see anything moving quickly over them as something that might wanna eat them, and so then they go, like, into attack mode. And so the, the bee mentor that I have has taught me to be very slow. Can

[00:49:34] Michael: you stop?

[00:49:34] Megan: I know. It’s a thing.

[00:49:35] Michael: A bee mentor?

[00:49:36] Megan: Listen, it’s a-

[00:49:37] Michael: Seriously?

[00:49:38] Megan: Listen, if you’re a beekeeper, you know you probably have a bee mentor or you are one. I mean, it’s like everybody does it. Wow. This is a thing. But, you know, like I’ll just go s- kind of crouch in front, into the side of my beehive, and I’ll just watch the bees come in and out. Because part of how you know if they’re doing well is not necessarily getting into the hive, it’s actually that you just watch their behavior day after day.

[00:50:00] Same with my birds that are outside my window. And it’s given me so much joy because what it does, as we’ve talked about with nervous system regulation and other things, it widens your field of vision.

[00:50:11] Michael: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:12] Megan: All of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, I’m hearing the birds.”

[00:50:14] Michael: Makes you more resilient, too.

[00:50:15] Megan: Makes you more resilient.

[00:50:16] Anyway, so to me, the best way to become comfortable with slow is take up activities that are inherently slow.

[00:50:25] Michael: You know, I think one of the things that could be really helpful, too, is to esteem the virtues of slowness in our communities, whether that’s our family Or in our churches or places of worship, in our neighborhoods, because there is this shame factor that’s around it.

[00:50:44] And if we’re just talking about it like, you know, slow is the virtuous thing. You know, we’re… You know, fast is not that cool. Slow is cool.

[00:50:52] Megan: Fast is easy.

[00:50:53] Michael: Yeah.

[00:50:53] Megan: Slow is hard. Yeah, I, I agree with you. It’s kind of, we, we need to rebrand slow.

[00:50:59] Michael: That’s it.

[00:51:00] Megan: We need to rebrand slow.

[00:51:01] Michael: Well, you know, uh, two years ago, my screensaver, uh, was a single word: downshift.

[00:51:06] Megan: Yeah, I remember that.

[00:51:06] Michael: Yeah. And I, I really tried to focus on it that year. I actually even tried to drive the speed limit.

[00:51:14] Megan: Wow.

[00:51:14] Michael: Which, um, you know, I may or may not have reverted to my old behavior on.

[00:51:19] Megan: Yeah.

[00:51:19] Michael: But I’m willing t- to give it another shot.

[00:51:23] Megan: So what other practices in your life do you think you might wanna incorporate that would help you?

[00:51:28] Michael: Well, you know, it’s, it’s funny because I, I think that part of what goes hand-in-hand with me, and what I’ve been trying to practice more, is presence. Yeah. Because when I’m thinking of the future and I’m distracted by all those things, that’s what gets me in a s- in a situation where I feel overwhelmed. You know, I’m borrowing trouble from the future.

[00:51:46] But if I think what’s mine to do today, and to be fully present-

[00:51:50] Carl: Mm-hmm …

[00:51:50] Michael: and if, for example, if I’m eating dinner, I don’t bring my phone to the table.

[00:51:54] Carl: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:54] Michael: And I do talk to the people I’m eating with.

[00:51:57] Megan: Yeah.

[00:51:57] Michael: And I’m fully present for them. If I’m in a coaching situation, same thing, I wanna be 100% present there.

[00:52:04] So-

[00:52:04] Megan: Yeah …

[00:52:05] Michael: I’m trying to esteem presence, but I think slowness and presence go hand-in-hand.

[00:52:10] Megan: I know you love fishing and you like walking with Mom, and I, I know you like golf, so I just didn’t know if there was anything else you were thinking of- Yeah … adding to your life that was kind of a… You’ve also done music.

[00:52:20] Michael: I have, and you know, one of the things I just started doing was taking vocal lessons again. Oh, yeah. You know, basically what my new vocal coach told me, and he’s genius, is that the problems you need to fix are gonna take time. Right. You gotta retrain your brain. Yes. And it’s simple exercises he’s given me to retrain, like, tongue placement-

[00:52:42] Carl: Mm-hmm

[00:52:43] Michael: and the use of my jaw, and diaphragm- Oh … and all this stuff, but it’s… He said, “This isn’t gonna happen overnight. This is gonna, this is gonna take a lot of training.”

[00:52:51] Megan: One of the gifts, I think, of midlife is that we kinda know this is true.

[00:52:55] Michael: Right.

[00:52:55] Megan: You don’t believe this when you’re in your 20s usually, when you’re just naturally faster, you haven’t come up against your limitations maybe quite so much.

[00:53:03] Uh, but one of the things that I, I love about working with our community and our audience and coaching people in midlife is I think we’ve all had enough experiences of, like, the, the liability of fast, and we crave slow more, so we’re kinda ripe for this in a way that maybe 10 or 20 or 30 years ago we would not have been, which is a, a helpful thing.

[00:53:25] We…

[00:53:25] Michael: You think about it, it fixes so many issues too. Like we crave connection.

[00:53:28] Megan: Yeah.

[00:53:29] Michael: But that can’t happen when we’re going the speed of light.

[00:53:32] Megan: Right.

[00:53:32] Michael: You know, we gotta slow it all down. Well, speaking of rushing to the next thing.

[00:53:39] Megan: Lunch.

[00:53:39] Michael: That’s right. Guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. It’s been challenging for me.

[00:53:43] I know it has for you, too, Megan.

[00:53:44] Megan: Yeah.

[00:53:45] Michael: And, uh, we look forward to next week. In the meantime, I’d love for you to share this episode with a friend-

[00:53:50] Megan: Yes …

[00:53:50] Michael: who maybe needs to go slower or maybe somebody that could be a companion with you on your slow journey.

[00:53:56] Megan: That’s a great idea. Yeah. See you next time.

[00:53:58] Send it to somebody.