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Do you ever feel like you’re just a few steps behind everyone else in the office? Or have you ever felt like you were dragging everyone around you to get something done? Does the fact that friends have already completed their Christmas shopping throw you into a panic attack and a sense of impending doom? Well it might simply be that you’re used to living your life at a different pace or different rhythm than the people around you. And the holiday season is a great time to start to learn how not get sucked into the rat race and instead to evaluate and maximize your own pace for living. Here are 5 basic rules set to help you synchronize your pace with those you interact with daily.

Know Thyself

• Daniel Goleman, the Author of Emotional Intelligence taught that one of the keys to being emotionally intelligent is to know you.
• The brain can learn and succeed with anyone, you just have to know your parameters, your limits, your strengths, and your weaknesses and adjust yourself.
• Quit trying to make everyone else work to change for you and instead you change for others.
• Find Your Sweet Spot
  • What time of day are you most productive?
    • Morning person or night person?
  • What location really helps you do your best thinking?
    • Is it during mundane activities like cleaning the house?
  • Don’t waste your best energy doing mindless activities.
    • Are you offering your best work at the optimal time?
  • Are you introverted or extroverted?
  • How do you best take in information? Visual? Audio? Kinesthetic?
  • What happens when you’re over stimulated? Do you get angry or withdraw?
  • When have you been at your best level of output?

Let Your Breathing Be Your Guide

• Our breathing is the best sign of whether we’re at the right pace or not, so tune in to your breathing.
• The #1 sign of anxiety is our shortness of breath. It really does impact our system, because when we’re stressed, the stress hormone kicks in and gets our bodies ready for fight or flight. Our diaphragm thickens a bit and we don’t end up taking as deep of breath.
• Long slow breaths slows down heart rate. They pull in more air and oxygenate our air which makes us feel more relaxed. Shallow breathing keeps us amped up.
• Breathing is supposed to be automatic, thoughtless so focusing on our breathing helps us to become more present.
• If you don’t own your own attention, than someone else does.
• If we don’t train our brain we default to reptilian brain.

Honor The Pacing of Others

• If you are merging onto the freeway and you are traveling at 40 miles an hour and another is travelling at 65, someone is going to have to adjust. You’ll either need to speed up or they’ll need to slow down. By doing so, we can learn to work together to safely maneuver the roads.
• Don’t expect everyone else to adjust to, when you could just as easily adjust to them.
• Working with people who work at a faster pace than you.
  • You may need to speed things up with certain people and this can stress you out.
  • Anticipate surprises that your boss tends to throw on people.
  • Spend some of your quiet time looking for patterns of how your boss works and anticipate their needs.
  • Create key projects that you could specifically work on that fit your speed and style better. (You might be better at cleaning up the mess after dinner than being in the chaos of socializing. One spouse may love the idea of being at the malls, socializing throughout the holidays, while the other agrees to buy the majority of presents online).
  • The key however is to understand what others need and prepare for that. Make contingency plans.
  • Example: If you work with someone who works at 100 mph than you might want to prepare yourself before you go in and talk to the boss. Perhaps you’ll need to get your numbers ready and not just try to come up with them on the fly. You might also need to make sure that before and after meeting with the boss, you take time to destimulate and process what just happened with them.
• Working with people who work at a slower pace than you.
  • Give them some warning ahead of time of what you want to talk to them about, so they can get up to speed.
  • Minimize surprises.
  • Give them assignments to come back and talk about things on another day.
  • Surface the fact that you have different paces and styles and that both are important and valued.
  • Ask them how best to integrate their style and yours.
• If couples would honor the pace of their partner, they’d both do better in conversations.
• Use the neo cortex to build relationships with others. Don’t step on others people’s pacing but instead, introduce

Own The Power of Your Pace

• Don’t feel a need to conform to the pace of others, show others that you’re pace is truly the best way to get the best out of you.
• Remember that in every beautiful accomplishment we need both the power of speed and the accuracy of slowness to make good things happen
• Don’t make everything binary. Life is not either good or bad, right or wrong. Effective or lazy.
• Don’t assume that doing more is better, when doing the right things is just as important.
• Learn to say “no” once in a while and blame it on your understanding o of you.
• Remember that in the end superior results are what will get you noticed not only the pace that you turn things in.
• It’s not a choice of either Relaxed or Productive…but the reality is that you need to be working at your pace and you need to get results regulary.

Celebrate The Dance When It Works

• Point out regularly how your two different styles and pacing actually work together.
• Notice how you work well with opposite rhythms helps you to know how to do it again tomorrow.
• Notice that it is the slower pace moments that only matter in contrast to some of the fast paced experiences of life.
• Have you ever noticed that the quiet incessant practice of an athlete when no one is watching or going through the routine in their head helps them deliver the amazing fast paced deliver on the court.
• We really need both paces to make life work. Having one with the other is useless because we don’t value it. If life is always faced paced than we can’t value the slow times and if life is always slow, then we don’t value the fast times.