In Praise of Slow with Carl Honoré

Jacqueline Conway  00:00

The organizational peak is a perilous environment. It’s more complex and challenging than anything that’s gone before, and as a consequence, both executive tenure and corporate longevity are decreasing to survive and thrive at the perilous peak, executive leaders need to balance their functional leadership, a focus on execution with enterprise leadership that is ensuring the organization adapts in our new world. That’s what we’ll be exploring in the advanced executive leadership podcast. Welcome. I’m your host. Jacqueline Conway. I’m the Founder and Managing Director of Walden Croft, a consulting practice dedicated to helping executives and executive teams anticipate, navigate and lead at the perilous peak. Many of the executives I work with and myself too have come to learn the hard truth about how we can be most effective in our personal and professional lives. I bought a card recently for a friend that said, I’d love to go out with you to celebrate your birthday, so long as I can be home by 10pm and that kind of sums it up. I’ve come to realize that I can’t do everything that I want to that the answer to my limitations is not just work harder, just work faster. Instead, I’ve come to the reluctant realization that I have to pace myself. Now the great news is, is that when I do, I can get through a lot, and I seem to enjoy it a lot more, not to mention how much better the quality of my work is when it’s allowed to be done with enough time. But I’m still pulled in by a culture that wants us to maximize everything, not least our time. It’s now 20 years ago that my guest today, Karl ornery, published his bestselling book In Praise of Slow now in that second edition, and to celebrate the passage of time since then, Carl and I speak today about the benefits of taking things at the right pace, and we obviously start here with what this means for leaders and others working in organizations. But just as importantly, it has implications for many areas of our lives.

02:25

My name is Carl honorais, and I’m an author, a journalist, a broadcaster, and I’m probably best known as the voice of the slow movement, which is all about doing things better by slowing down and doing them at the right speed. My first book is called In Praise of Slow which came out now, 20 years ago, but became then and remains today, the handbook, the guidebook of what has come to be known as the slow revolution. So I’ve spent the last two decades traveling around the world, sometimes quite fast, telling people how wonderful it is to slow down. Right, very, very often in the corporate sector as well, right showing the way towards doing things better by finding the right balance between fast and slow. What brought

Jacqueline Conway  03:07

you to this interest of slow and of slowing down and savoring things? Can you tell us a bit about that? Sure.

03:17

I think that when we get stuck in fast forward, it often takes a shock to the system or a wake up call to make us realize that we’ve forgotten how to put on the brakes and that this is doing us real harm. And for many people, the wake up call comes in the form of an illness. One day, the body just says, That’s it. I can’t take the pace anymore, and you have a burnout. Say, my wake up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and back in those days, I just couldn’t slow down. So I’d be speed reading Snow White, you know, skipping lines paragraphs. I became an expert on what I called the multiple page turn technique, which I don’t know if any parent trying to smuggle four pages fast to get through it more quickly. But it never works, right? Because our kids know the stories inside out. So my son would always catch me. He’d say, you know, Daddy, why are there only three dwarves in the story? What happened to grumpy and this lamentable state of affairs went on for some time, until I caught myself flirting with buying a book. I’d heard about a book called The One Minute bedtime story, so Snow White in 60 seconds. And I remember thinking, hallelujah. You know, what a great idea. I need that book now Amazon drone delivery. But the second reaction was very different. It was like a light bulb over the head moment. And I suddenly thought, Whoa, has it really come to this? Am I really prepared to fob off my son with a soundbite instead of a story? At the end of the day, this is crazy. I am rushing through my life instead of living it. And it was a moment of genuine and pretty searing epiphany. And I thought, I’ve just lost my I’ve just lost my compass. I’ve lost my weight here. I need to relearn the lost art of slowing down. I need to reconnect with my inner tortoise, if you like. And that really was the genuine origin story. That’s how I got where I am today, and that’s sort of how the whole kind of slow thing got off the ground. Wow, very personal, very. Small

Jacqueline Conway  05:00

Yes, and I’m sure lots of parents can resonate with that, that sense of trying to hurry things up, that have their natural their own natural cadence and their own natural timing. You went one further than many of us. I mean, lots of parents just keep plowing through. Some people decide that they need to slow down a little bit, but you literally broke the book on it. Now, I guess, I mean, you’re a journalist by background, so you can make some of the connection there, but you must have seen that what was epitomized in that the title of that book about, you know, one minute bedtime stories was speaking of something that was more than just what was happening to parents and bedtime stories. And so, where else did you see it? Where else did you experience it? And I guess when you started to look at the book you may have, you must have uncovered where that was then happening in in so many places. Well,

06:05

exactly as soon as I began scratching at the surface and digging and looking around and talking to people, it became very plain to me that we were as a society, stuck in fast forward, in Roadrunner mode. You know, every moment of our day had become a race against the clock, not just when we’re with our families trying to read bedtime stories, but everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom to when we’re driving and exercising shopping, everything became this dash to a finish line that we never, ever seemed to reach, and we had even back then, we’ve got a lot faster in some ways, since back when I was first playing around with this idea of, can we slow down? Does it make sense to slow down in the 21st century, we were already tipping into the absurd. So there was a gym near my house. They still offer it now in London here, which offers an evening course in speed yoga, right? So this is for time star professionals who want to salute the sun and bend their bodies into the lotus position, but they want to do it in five minutes instead of an hour, right? And I, actually, I thought that speed yoga had to be the most absurd manifestation of this go faster culture, till a friend of mine in the United States got invited to a drive through, right? Like a drive through funeral, right? I wish this didn’t exist, but it does. The church places the coffin at the entrance. The mourners pull up by car alongside the coffin, and they say farewell to a loved one through a pane of glass, right? It’s like picking up a Big Mac and it drives through McDonald’s. You know, it’s fast, but is it still a funeral? And the more I I looked around the world, because for this book, I it was, it was, it was a global enterprise, right? This is not a problem that is confined to the UK and the US or even just to big cities. This, this virus of hurry, has entered the ecosystem right across the planet. And wherever I looked across the globe, I was finding more and more examples of this just absurd obsession, this addiction, and I don’t think that’s too big a word for this, this addiction to speed, busyness, distraction, multitasking, all of which were doing us tremendous harm, and yet we kept on doing it. And that was the knot that I wanted to unpick. You know, it was so obvious, even back, you know, 20 years ago, to people, that there was too much speed in the system, that we were racing through life instead of living it, and yet we’ve still found it very hard to put on the brakes. And even today, you know, 20 years on, where the slow movement has grown very fast as it happens, right? You know, in leaps and bounds, but it still knocks up against this basic resistance, this inertia, this fear. I think fear is at the heart of it often that if we slow down, somehow we’ll miss out, we’ll get left behind, we’ll be roadkill. But of course, the opposite is true, that by channeling slow in a very smart, wise, savvy way, you end up doing everything better and enjoying it more. That’s the core of this slow philosophy I’m talking about now for 20 odd years. But I think still, people get stuck in this tunnel vision of thinking it’s all or nothing. I’m either all in on speed or I’m throwing away my iPhone, I’m quitting my job, I’m moving to the highlands to grow organic carrots and live in a ball thing, right? Because that’s what slow is. That’s one version of slow. It is not the only version, right? The whole idea is that there are a million different ways to slow down and thrive. You know, whether Edinburgh, London, Tokyo, New York, anywhere you can do it. Because at the end of the day, slow is a mindset. It’s a chip that you slip into your brain and you arrive at each moment thinking, how can I glyph this moment? Not as fast as possible, but as well as possible. Really simple idea, but one with the power to revolutionize in a good way every single thing you do absolutely

Jacqueline Conway  09:48

and it resonates a lot with mindfulness, doesn’t it? It resonates a lot with this idea of awareness and being present. I mean, do you want to say something about that? Because you do. Talk about that in the book.

10:01

Yeah, it’s funny, because the mind, the whole mindfulness revolution and boom came along after in praise with slow was published. And I remember thinking, when I first started reading about it and listening to podcasts and digging into it a little bit, I thought, in some ways, this is just another way of saying slow, right? Because if you dig deeper into the slow revolution, slow with a capital S, yeah. It’s about pace. It’s about choosing what musicians call the tempo, gisto, right, the correct tempo for each piece of music. So sometimes fast, sometimes that’s the way to go, is to speed up, but other times you need to slow down. So you’re finding the right tempo for the moment. But if you go deeper on slow, really, what you’re saying is that slow is about being present. It’s about being in the moment. You know, that’s another way of saying Being mindful, isn’t it? Slow is really about doing one thing at a time. Remember when we used to do that again? Also, I come back to what I said a moment ago. It’s about doing everything, not as fast as possible, but as well as possible. And I think people get there through lots of different doorways. You can go down the channel of mindfulness, you can get through yoga, you can get through the food. You can rethink pace in the workplace, and that can be your jumping off point to slowing down your whole life as well, even though that sounds like a paradox. So I think slow is there for everyone. It’s like this enormous smorgasbord. You choose the plate you want to sample first, but once you taste the benefits of slow in one walk of life, you don’t go back. And not only do you not go back in that walk of life, you start to spread it out into every single thing you

Jacqueline Conway  11:27

1. Yes, lovely. And so many of the things that you gave as examples there food and other things are things which individuals might have some personal control over. But when you talk about the pace in the workplace, that’s one in which people probably feel that they have less control over that in some ways, the the machine does, cranks into action and that they are part of a union, they become a cog in in that machine. So what advice would you offer to people who really like the idea of perhaps spending each moment better, doing better in each moment, and yet are pushing against a diary that’s absolutely packed from first thing in the morning till last thing in the afternoon. I mean, I remember a colleague, an academic, in fact, that I was speaking to just after lockdown started, who said that, I mean, he literally didn’t even have time for a kind of lubric during the course of the day, because it was so completely back to back with Zoom meetings that there was just no time to even have a bio break. Never mind, time to sort of think and reflect and do any work. So what? What do we do about that? Yeah,

12:56

well, that, that description there, you’ve just given us, of the academic unable even to go to the loo, is, I mean, that is, that is fully on an epic scale, any organization that is over scheduling and overburdening its staff to that level, it’s not it’s going to pay a price, right? Maybe not today, maybe not next week, but that that employee is going to make more mistakes. They’re going to be less creative. They won’t be able to communicate. Those health will suffer. So at some stage there’s going to be there’s going to be harm done, right to the bottom line. So I say that as a prelude to suggesting that in every organization, you need to make a macro shift to the way you’re thinking about the use of time, delegation of tasks, making sure people have enough time to do things, enough time between activities, to reset, reboot, recharge, process, what they’ve done spring into the next task, rather than everything being squashed together into some enormous blob of hyperactivity. That’s the collective thing you’ve asked the question, which I think is a very pointed one, and one that I get asked all the time, and is there, you know, on most of our minds, right? Is, what if I can’t change the macro, right? What if the macro takes time? And I still think that there are ways that for most of us, we can carve out little oases, or little injection moments of slow during a day that can allow us to tap into this deeper, richer, powerful way of being present in the workplace. So even something as simple as thinking about how you manage the messages, you know, inbox and so on, rather than having your notifications switched on, switch them off, right and that flips the script, because if your notifications are on, what you’re effectively doing is allowing the rest of the world to control your time, and not only your time, but your attention. If you switch them off, you then decide when to move away for some deep work or some concentrated thinking. The time comes to take a break from that. Then you turn to your inbox, deal with the things there, and then swing back again to the deep so you’re in the fast, the quick, you know, emailing, answering back, forth and the slow and so on. Now, obviously each person will. Find their own version of doing that. Some people can’t be switched off as much or, you know, you find the right formula that works for you. But I think most people in the workplace can, if they have the imagination and sometimes I think the courage just to stand up and say, You know what, I’m going to turn off the flow a little bit, turn off the faucet, create some slow space for myself, and then I’ll come back and be able to deal with those emails much more efficiently because I’ve had the time away from the coalface, the electronic, cyber coalface. I mean, I think sometimes as simple as I mean, they’ve done some interesting research that shows that if you take two minutes to contemplate a problem, look at a big question, you’re dealing with, just two minutes, right? That’s enough to short circuit a lot of those biases that we hear about all the time, like confirmation bias and the tendency to go for low hanging fruit, to shut out and not see the details, not join up the dots, make connections simply by looking at a problem slowing down for two minutes, you can short circuit those biases and get past them and make a better decision, whether that’s A short, tactical move in the workplace or a deeper, big picture, strategic decision, it’s going to be a better decision, and that’s not two days two hours. It’s just two minutes, right? Most of us, I think, can find two minutes somewhere to to have some of that slow thinking fold into our the equation of our daily lives at work, another suggestion I would make to people is, you know, we’re creatures of the physical world. We inhabit bodies and to stay, you know, glued to your desk. It’s just so counterproductive in the long run, sometimes you got to sit down and just bash something out, but you’re going to be so much more efficient through the span of a day or a week, if you build in little moments to pause, to get up and I’m again, I’m not talking about taking an hour off, right? You could just walk around the office for two or three minutes, or do some stretching by your desk for 30 seconds. Just change gears, shift into that sort of slower gear where you get away from the Hurly burly and the sound and fury of your Slack chat, and just kind of find that slower groove, and then you return to the slack chat or the Zoom meeting, or whatever it is, fired up, right? You reset, you recharge your batteries, and you’ll be a better employee, a better leader, a better colleague, a better human being, just thanks to those little slow moments.

Jacqueline Conway  17:20

Yeah, I can agree more. I for myself. I realized, as I started to read more about, you know, how to regulate your own nervous system and polyvagal theory and things like that, and I started to really become curious with what happened with me between those times was that when I, when I spent this of liminal space between meetings, sort of rushing or trying to fill that time with more emails, I went into the next thing, not as productive, not as focused, whereas, if I allowed, You know, if I gave myself permission. And actually, so much of it was about permission and about accepting kind of vulnerability and humanity, and the fact that, you know, I just had to go and sit and perhaps breathe or do a kind of yoga thing, which is legs up the wall, which I’m the Houser nervous system, to do a very different thing. My husband has walked into the room before, you know, sort of lying there with my legs up. My next zoom. Meeting’s happening in three minutes. It’s like, it’s fine, it’s fine. There’s a method to the madness, but, but there’s something about that permission that granting ourselves, that permission to allow us to just work effectively with their nervous system, and the fact that we are human beings and and we can’t constantly be on in the way that we would like to, or the organizations assume we ought to be,

18:54

yeah, well, this is, I mean, you put your finger on it, we are. We are. This is what the speed culture does, right? It dehumanizes us. It treats us like machines, algorithms, bots, who can just be on 24, hours a day, seven days a week, and that’s fine for the machines. It’s not so fine for us, right? It simply doesn’t work. That’s not how we’re built. We’re built to change gears. You know, sometimes we can be in turbo mode, but in order to make the most of turbo mode we need sometimes to shift into tortoise mode, right? Whether that’s a little bit of breathing, as you said, whether that’s going and having a cup of tea in the in the in the SAF canteen, or your home kitchen, or what or or sitting, you know, with, you know, whatever it happens to be, or playing with the dog, anything like that. That just allows the nervous system to reset, allows even a kind of metaphysical reset allows you to process what you’ve just gone through in the last Zoom meeting, the last business encounter, to make some put it in context, to make sense of it, and then reset so that you can fire yourself into the next chapter. And that really is, I think, in the workplace, what slow comes down to. It’s about. Relearning the lost art of shifting gears. So sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re off, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re slow, sometimes you lean in. You know, we’re always being told to lean in, yeah, but sometimes you just need to lean back. And it’s in those moments of leaning back that you recharge, you refuel, you reinvigorate, and then you’re able to lean in with a vengeance right afterwards. So I love the way you said the word several times permission, because I think that’s often what stands between us doing the right thing here. You know, we can feel in our bones that would be good for us to slow down in a non stop workday. We’re yearning to find some slow time, and yet we don’t do it. And I think it’s very often, it’s fear. You know that slow is, there’s such a deep taboo against slowness in our culture that slow is, it’s a four letter word. It’s a by word for stupid, lazy, unproductive, unmodern, for being roadkill. And so even when we do have this strong urge. We can tell our body our mind, both are crying out for a reset and a bit of slowness. We don’t do it because we’ve we feel ashamed or or guilty afraid. We feel embarrassed, and that’s that often, I think, is what holds us back. That’s why it’s so important, I think, just to have this conversation you and I are having now, or to do all the work I’ve been doing just getting out there and saying, You know what? It’s okay to slow down. It’s it’s a it’s good for you. It’ll be good for you, but it’ll be good for the people you work with and work for as well. We, we all have skin in this game, but we are so wound up into this culture that venerates speed and it’s woven into our vernacular. Think of all the expressions that trip off our time. Trip off our tongue without even thinking about it. You know, the early bird, catches the worm, lunches for wimps. You know all these phrases that tell you okay. You may be feeling a little tired, a little distracted, you’re not working at full capacity, but the you must keep going right. Just put power through. No, no. Sometimes powering through is the only option. But very often, the worst thing to do is to power through. The best thing is to slow down, reset and then come back with more power

Jacqueline Conway  22:12

Absolutely. And you know, one of the things I’ve noticed about some of the executives, in particular, chief executives that I work with. Now, if anyone in an organization ought to have control over their diary, you know, it’s those kind of operation ones, isn’t it? You know, once you get to the C suite there. Now that’s not to suggest that people don’t have huge amounts of responsibility for things that are just in there, but one of the things I’ve noticed, and it is just anecdotal, is that some of the most thoughtful, creative, innovative, inspiring chief executives that I’ve worked with are the easiest to get hold of. That when you contact them or you contact their EA, you know, there’s a slot available for you the next day, in a couple of days. You know, you might have to do a little bit of moving around, but it’s relatively straightforward. And for others, there’s this sense of, Well, you can have, you know, 20 minutes, six weeks on Tuesday at 330 or take it or leave it, and there’s there’s an energy that goes along with that, where, once you get them in the room, you know, to get them to be sort of fully present and engage with what’s at hand is much harder. And I’ve really noticed that those things, that those things go hand in hand, that the capacity for presence in the moment comes with having a diary that is just a bit more open and where you don’t feel that you have to have every moment of every day sort of diarized to the hilt, even though a chief executive could quite easily do that. They OPT. Some of these chief executives that I work with OPT,

24:00

not too well. Famous example is Jeff Bezos at Amazon, isn’t it? I mean, he’s known for not scheduling any meetings, for leaving just free every morning up to 10am and he takes that time to have a leisurely breakfast with his family, to get a bit of reading, a bit of exercise. He’s just got that time to himself for slow, right? And some of the merchants, the Sultans of speed, would look at that and say, well, that’s two three wasted hours, right? You should get out of bed at five in the morning and hit the ground running with a pack schedule every 10 minutes. Something in there. I mean, Jeff Bezos is doing all right, at the top of Amazon. And Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the history of the world. I think that’s so true. I’ve had a similar experience traveling around the world, working with companies of all shapes and sizes, in every sector you can imagine. And the ones I find who have that deeper, richer presence and gear to bring to the table are those who are not over scheduled, right? They’re just they’re not on a treadmill. You feel like. They control their schedule, rather than that, they are at the mercy of their schedule. And I think that that’s something that we can all take on board. And let’s be honest, not just at work, but at home as well. A similar thing happens we find ourselves. And I think if you dig deeper here, what we’re talking about is is of a really unhealthy, neurotic relationship with time. You know, we in the modern world, we see time as as a precious resource. You know, time is money. We think, well, what’s the best way to make the most of our time? Well, it’s to speed up and do more and more with less and less time, to cram every tiny, little crevice, every little crack in our diary with more activity. But that’s the opposite of what the case should be, right? The truth is that the most sensible and the most wise way to make use of your time is is to do less right to to focus on what really matters and let all the other stuff go. Because let’s be honest, any of us, if we picked up a diary from six months ago, and looked at it, the things we did, most of it, we wouldn’t even remember, right? And the stuff we remembered, we probably think, Well, that wasn’t actually that useful. I mean, there’s very little stuff that we do day to day in the workplace that is essential, and yet we still find ourselves falling into this trap, this vortex of busyness. And again, it’s a cultural thing that being busy has become a badge of honor. You know, you meet someone in the workplace or on the street and you say, how are you doing? They say, busy, right? And it’s almost a, it’s almost a kind of humble brag, in a way, isn’t it? It’s sort of saying, Well, you know that subtext is, I’m so busy because I’m so sought after, I’m so terribly important that every second of my day must be given over to the service of humanity, because without it, if I took three seconds or three minutes to step back and slow down, the holes in sky would fall in but let’s be frank here, right? None of us are that important at all, though we may sometimes think we are, we aren’t, and we’d also bring a much better version of ourselves to the table if we took that three minutes and stepped away and did nothing. Sometimes just do nothing, right? I mean, that’s another thing we should be flying the flag for here as well. Not just stepping away from the hamster wheel to do a bit of yoga or make tea or, you know, a slow activity, but sometimes just simply doing nothing, right, just sitting in a chair and letting your mind wander. I mean, you talked a little bit earlier about you mentioned the creativity. I mean, there is, and always has been, a deep and intimate bond between slowness and creativity. The greatest thinkers in the arts, science and business, have always understood this. And in fact, just think about it for a second. If you I ask this question to audiences of every stripe all over the world. When I’m doing events, I say, Think for a moment now, when do your best ideas usually come to you, and I’ll tell you what I’ve asked that question in every kind of forum you can imagine. And no one anywhere has ever said my best ideas come when I’m juggling 45 emails or racing to meet a deadline with a boss or a client breathing down my neck? The number one answer you get to that question, When do my best ideas come to me is actually it’s in the shower, right? Or walking the dog or swinging in a hammock on vacation. You know, it’s in those slow moments, sometimes moments where you’re actually doing nothing

Jacqueline Conway  28:18

at all, to one of your earlier points around doing nothing and and I wondered if part of what the reason we don’t want to do nothing is where that takes us, where the being alone and being in this stillness and the silence of ourselves is quite difficult for some people. And what you make of speed and and going at an absolutely frenetic pace is actually avoiding, you know, the psychology of what is it we’re trying to avoid?

28:56

I That’s so true. I think very often when people talk about living it fast forward and being a roadrunner and all that, it’s often less about what you’re running towards. It’s often more what you’re running away from. And very often what people are running away from is themselves. Because what you gain, and at first, it can feel not like a gain. It can feel like something very frightening by slowing down, is that reconnection with yourself, you’re there’s no distraction, there’s no social media feed. It’s just you and you, and that is frightening for people, especially those of us who’ve spent a lot of time avoiding that by being busy, by being distracted, by multitasking, by looking at our phone as soon as an uncomfortable thought surfaces, but leading what Socrates called the examined life, taking the time to step away, to look inside, to ask yourself and grapple with the big questions such as, who am I? What is my purpose in this world? Am I living the right life for me? Yeah, you have to. You have to reckon with those questions in order to design the right life for you. Otherwise, you’re just going to be living on autopilot, following someone else’s script. So there’s a big, deeper question, almost a metaphysical one here, attached to the whole idea of slowing down. You can start off by thinking, okay, slowing down will be good for my health, for my productivity, for my company, for my relationships, all of which is true and all of which is wonderful, and we should embrace every single side of that slow equation. But if you go right down deeper, I think it gets to that gnarly Gordian knot of of the self, right? And that’s ultimately what a life worthy of the name is, is knowing who you are and showing up in the world on your terms, and that is impossible to do when you are constantly distracted, constantly multitasking nine things. If you never slow down, you have to slow down and be with yourself. Yes, scary at first, but worth it in the long run. Yes, absolutely.

Jacqueline Conway  30:58

And so we’ve talked about that from from the kind of midlife perspective, if you if you assume that most people in kind of Upper, upper echelons are in midlife. But of course, that’s really important for our young people and our children as well, isn’t it? And yet, one of the things, and I know that this is an issue that’s very close to your heart. You’ve written about it, maybe can tell us a bit more about the the way in which the dominant style of parenting, certainly sort of middle class parenting, is to have our children super busy diarized with all of these extracurricular activities and the impact of that, because in some ways, notwithstanding what we’ve said about the way that the organization has an impact on our diaries, but I think you and I are both recognizing that we have more say in that than We often give ourselves credit for but our children have really not very much see in that if a parent chooses to push them and where is that a positive thing, and where isn’t it? So they you and I are recording this as the as the Paris Olympics are ongoing, and what we see is we see, you know, the absolute pinnacle of people who have taken something to its very best. So we know that, in some instances, driving people from childhood onwards can lead to amazing things. But the vast, vast majority of us are not going to be Olympians, or children are not going to be Olympians. So we’re see if you could say a bit about this idea of slowness as it relates to children, but also where the where the line is between helping people, helping our young people achieve greatness, are also or just pushing them far too hard? Well, gosh, there’s

33:04

a lot. There’s a lot in that question. As a general observation, I would say that every society ends up with the childhood that reflects the strengths and weaknesses and the neuroses of that society. So we live in a society where as adults, we are over scheduled, overstressed, over caffeinated, over connected online, over busy, and we have just passed that on to the next generation, right? So a lot of kids now come out of the womb, and they just hit the ground running, right with Baby Einstein DVDs, baby sign language classes, baby goes pro sports clinics, Mandarin lessons in the Moses basket, and there’s sort of endless extracurriculars. There’s and I think for a lot of parents, and I suspect that nobody signs up for this as a mother and father at the beginning, but somehow, we just get caught up in the swirl the sound and fury of modern parenting, so that for a lot of us, parenting becomes a cross between a competitive sport and product development, where we are treating our children, not as little human beings who need and thrive in having time and space to move through the world on their own terms and at their own pace, to discover things, to make mistakes. We are treating them like a project. You’re thinking, my child’s born today. I want them to get to this in 20 years time, and then we invest every ounce of energy, every spare pound note, every bit of bandwidth and thought and trying to drag them there, when, in fact, the real secret sauce to parenting is not saying, I want to fashion you into this thing that is going to make me feel good. It’s to say here, let me take your hand and together, let’s discover who you are. It’s a process of discovery with all of the slowness of that inquire implies. And it’s interesting that you mentioned the Olympics. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think that we take examples from the culture. Sure around us, and we draw the wrong conclusions, right? So two things there from the Olympics, if you look into the biographies in the background, and the rise to the top of many Olympians, sure from, often from a young age, but sometimes, sometimes not so young, they start off, and they’re very single minded, and they’re doing a lot of time, but outside of that activity, their parents, many of them, will have given them time to just play, to hang out, to rest. They’re not pushing them to become an Olympian and then at the same time to, you know, be in Mensa and become a chess champion and take, you know, they’re focusing on one thing, and at the same time making sure they have plenty of time of rest. Any elite athlete will tell you. And you look at, you know, top footballers, hockey players, whatever it is that rest, unplugging is absolutely crucial. They sleep incredible amount of time. Elite athletes, right? They’re slowing down, right? So, so. And yet, I think a lot of parents who are ambitious for their kids, and there’s nothing wrong with that, we’re all ambitious for our children, might see the Olympics Olympians and think, Well, the the lesson of that story is that, you know, no more resting, no more play time, right? It’s just no use knows the groundstone, all that, and that’s just the wrong conclusion to draw. So that would be my first observation there. The second is that, and you’ve said it yourself, not everybody is going to win a gold medal. They love things, right? Really, especially when it comes to things like sports and extracurriculars. What we’re trying. I think what we should be aspiring to do for our kids is to give them, expose them to the widest possible range of activities the world is this enormous buffet of things to try, much more than when I was younger, when you were younger, let them try them all, but teach them at the same time the very, very crucial life lesson of triage, of winnowing down, of saying, Okay, I like this, but I haven’t got time for that. These are the two or three activities I’m going to focus on, maybe just one activity, and then go deep and hard and slow, in a way, in the broadest sense of that word, on that activity, and the end game being not to win a gold medal, but to fall in love with that pursuit so that you’re still doing it when you’re 50 years old. I play. I’m Canadian by upbringing, although I was born in Edinburgh many moons ago. So I’m a big hockey player, ice hockey, ball hockey, which is a version of ice hockey. I’m now 50. How am I 56? In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be playing in the Legends World ball hockey championship in Canada for team, GB, right? This is a sport that I have loved playing from early childhood, right? And most of that time, especially ball hockey, which is another way of thinking of it, is street hockey was not formal. It was just kids playing in the street. And I’m still that gets my heart racing in a way that nothing else does in my mid 50s. You know, that’s what we want to give our children, absolute, luminous, limitless love for an activity they can carry all the way through their lives, rather than something that’s going to look good on a CV or a LinkedIn profile. Let those things, those chips fall in other ways. In the 20

Jacqueline Conway  37:57

years since you wrote the book, Carl, what reflections have you got so well, perhaps, before we go there, the counter to fast and frenetic activity is a slow movement. And you talk about the slow movement in its various guises and its various places in the book, but it might be good just for you to say a little bit about that, and in particular, slow food.

38:29

Yeah. I mean, once you arrive at an activity with the slow lens, thinking, how can I how can I get through this, being present, doing it, giving it my full attention and and the time it deserves, everything just improves, right? So that’s in the workplace when you’re filling out a report or doing a meeting or a quarterly review or whatever it is. But it also applies to exercise love making. You mentioned food. I mean, food is one of the pillars of a life well lived, and we so often eat badly because we eat fast, we’re wolfing down food with our attention on our phone or on Netflix, or we’re walking down the street eating lunch, and we’re eating food that’s been pumped through industrial farms, that’s got a lot less nutrition than it used to 50 years ago. And I think for a lot of people, a starting point for slowing down, because it’s somewhere where we feel at least that we do have some autonomy, some control over the pace that we’re moving through the world. At food is a good place to start, because we all have taste buds. We can all taste the difference. We can all feel the difference when we slow down and take more time with our food. We CR we make food that real food, rather than something, you know, that Marks and Spencers has banged together in a factory off the motorway near Leicester. You know, we can feel the joy and the pleasure of that, but we also feel the payoff in the health and the wellness and just the energy that we have in our bodies and so on, and then the human connection of breaking bread with other people sitting around the table, no phones, conversation, human beings have always gathered together around. Food, and that’s another wonderful benefit we get from taking a slower approach to food. So I very often find when people write to me having read my book or been to an event or someone, they start slowing down their own lives. They say, I started with food. I started in my own kitchen. Started small, and then it spreads out from there, right? They begin to think, okay, the slowing down thing is paying some pretty rich and happy dividends at the dinner table. Maybe I could apply the same ethos to the way I exercise, to the way I shop, to the way I talk to my colleagues, the way I do email, right? And then it just kind of filters out from there, yeah, yeah.

Jacqueline Conway  40:35

And I know that the slow food movement grew up in Italy, and it was, and Italy, as we know, has a really strong food culture. And is it is it as easy for us in the UK, who perhaps don’t have as strong a food culture, and there’s much more fast food in the UK than there is even now in Italy. So Is it doable in the UK or in countries that perhaps don’t have as much of a food culture.

41:04

I think it’s a heavier lift in the UK, because we are so alienated from the land and so distant from the idea of a regional cuisine or local food, many of us grow up in homes where there’s very little cooking. Young people come in to the workplace and take their first flat and don’t know how to do anything more than a, you know, an instant noodle. So clearly, there’s, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a bigger heave to go on. But, but, I mean, just look around what’s happened. I mean, look at the renaissance of the farmers market. We didn’t have farmers markets in the UK that I can remember 20 years ago, and now they’re dotted all over the place. You could you could argue two ways on cooking programs. You could say that some people are just eating takeaways while watching Nigella whip up homemade dishes. And there’d be some of that as well. But clearly, people are cooking much more than they did at home. They’re thinking about their ingredients. We’ve seen an enormous explosion in organic food vegetable boxes from local producers and so on. So we can move the dial, but it is, I agree with you. It’s harder in cultures like the Anglo Saxon culture. I would include Canada and the US in that as well. It’s a bigger jump, but not an unbridgeable gap, right? Because we’ve seen it. We see it happening. It’s happening more and more. I I look at, for instance, I look at my my children, my own children, and their friends, and they are so interested in food, right? They’re constantly getting recipes off tick tock and going to markets. Or sometimes they’re just going to Aldi, right? You know, the cheapest supermarket they can get to to get some raw materials to go make something from scratch at home. I tell you what. I go back to the 80s, when I and my friends were the same age. None of us could cook. We didn’t do it. We barely did anything. So we’ve come a long way. There’s been a great leap forward gastronomically in the Anglo Saxon world. Still a long way to go, but I feel optimistic.

Jacqueline Conway  43:00

So that’s one example of where we’ve moved since the book was first published. Where else have you seen shifts happen positively?

43:10

Well, I’ve seen a lot. We talked a bit about parenting there. But another side of that prism is education. There’s been a huge push towards what’s called Slow education around the world. So you’ve seen countries like Singapore, which have been famous, really for many years, for fast education, embracing the idea of slowing down, giving children more time to reflect, to make mistakes, to have conversations, to work in teams and so on, rather than just teaching them how to pass exams very quickly and very successfully. There’s been a kind of slow education revolution, if you like, in Singapore, countries like Estonia, Finland, which have traditionally been the home, in some ways, of slow education have become meccas for educationalists around the world. Have gone to those countries, taken away ideas of how to slow down the pace in the classroom. You’re starting to see now across the world, schools and whole school systems banning mobile phones screens in the classroom to get children to be able to focus, to be present, to slow down and listen and be able to talk and communicate and let their minds wander, tap into that deep, slow creativity and communication so and I noticed just in my own work as a public speaker. When I look at the kind of pie chart of who’s inviting me to speak, I’ve really noticed in the last sort of 567, years, a big surge in schools and educationalists. Because I think the slow revolution has really hit hard there, especially since the covid moment. Because the whole pandemic, what was it, if not a giant workshop and slowness, right? We were all forced to slow down. And in many ways, it was a complete nightmare, but in other ways, I think it reminded us at a deep cellular level of the benefits of slowing down when people and this wasn’t the case for everyone. We all had different pandemics, right? But for many people, it was the first time they. Actually just hung out with their kids at home, or their children had time to just to play, because there weren’t 30 million extracurricular activities to go to. They were all canceled, right? So you found, I think parents coming out of that thinking, Well, maybe it’s a different way of thinking about the pace in the home and family life could be a bit slower. We could do a little bit less and and live a little bit more. Teachers seeing the pressure on children doing class through zoom. Come back and think, Well, look, you know, some of that slowness that was there in families, we could maybe import some of that into the classroom. So I think we’ve seen some big changes in education in the medical world as well. I mean, there’s a big push just simple things like GPS, trying to get more time with their patients, to be able to listen and connect, to do a proper diagnosis. I mean, we’ve seen, also in the in the technology world, a big push towards, there’s, there’s now a whole movement for slow TV. Slow radio. On BBC has its own slow radio slot, if you go, I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and it’s amazing to me there, you see, you know, we’re talking about people who work for Google, alphabet, Microsoft, all these big companies. They are all doing things like with their families as well, things like meditation. They’re not giving their kids iPads and phones. They’re holding them back. They’re sending them to schools that are much slower, that don’t have screens in the classroom. And they’re also beginning now to rethink the pace of technology itself. So we’ve seen in operating systems Many more levers to pull, to slow down the flow of information. It’s easier to turn off notifications, to have Do Not Disturb, buttons, all those things that would have been heresy, unthinkable, 1015, years ago. Now people need them, and they’re demanding them, and they’re getting them as people look at their gadgets and say, Yeah, I want the speed of my iPhone, but I don’t want it to hijack my whole life and turn everything fast. I’ll just give you one more example of the technology side. It’s a lovely new social ritual, which has come up called stacking. I don’t know if you’ve come across it. It’s when young people, particularly, go out for a coffee. They’re all sitting around the table together. They pile up their phones in a stack in the middle of the table, and whoever grabs the phone first to look at Snapchat or Instagram pays the bill for everybody else. Right? So it’s just a it’s just a fun way to say we have this moment here together. Now we’ll never have this moment again. Why spoil it by trying to be in several other moments at the same time. Let’s just slow down and be together and that, that stacking ritual, that’s not something that was invented by maybe Boomers, Gen What am I a Gen X, yeah. We didn’t grow up with screens, right? This is something from the digital natives themselves, who are saying, Yeah, we like the speed of social media, but sometimes we need the slowness of just being with our friends, undistracted, unfiltered, just there in that very slow human moment. And that gives me real hope to think that even because we’re always being told, Well, we’ve lost the battle for speed and tech, because young people, no human beings. A human being born today in London or Edinburgh or Paris has the same brain as a human being born before social media, right? What’s different is the childhood they’re growing up in. They have the same basic strengths, weaknesses, but also needs, and one of those key needs is stillness, it’s serenity, it’s slowness, it’s quiet, right? We need those slow moments. And it’s to me, it makes me feel hopeful to see young people themselves signing up for the slow revolution in such big numbers. Yeah,

Jacqueline Conway  48:25

wonderful. I love that Carol. I just want to ask one last thing that might feel a little bit like a curveball. It might, it might not make it into the to the podcast episode, but I just had just, I’m curious about it. So I mean, in the book, you talk about time and how, when we coordinated time, then, you know, we all started to move fast. It happened, you know, the Industrial Revolution, and we’re all scientific management, all of that stuff’s happening. And what we’ve got is we’ve got we’ve got British Summer Time. We’ve got GMT, you know that this idea of daylight saving time, where we change the clocks so that, rather than us sink into nature, we we artificially see that the time is a different time, so that we can work in a way that is, you know, so that the whole kind of industrial machine can carry on with the least amount of disruption, irrespective of what time of year it is. And I just wondered if that was a thing that you had a few about.

49:36

I do, yes, that’s a lovely question. There’s a movement that started in Barcelona and Spain called the time use initiative, which the declaration was signed sort of three or four years ago. I was one of the original signatories. And what it does is it pushes time use policies in cities, so rethinking how we use time. So you might change the times that schools. Start, or the shops are opening all these so that people can live at a more, at a slower, more human pace, right? And one of the key planks in the time use platform is to abolish the time change right, to get away from this frantic artificial swap we do two times a year. And I agree with it. I think that it probably, I mean, there are, there’s so much inertia, right? So will we ever be able to change it? I suspect we think we will. I think we should, because we want to move. I think this is what the slow revolution teaches us, is that we want to be living closer to the harmony and the pace and the tempo of nature, right this? What’s gone wrong here is that we are living at the speed of technology, the speed of software. And insofar as we’re going to create a slow world with a capital S, where people are living fully, doing things well, in the moment, all that good stuff, we need to forge a healthier, more natural relationship with time itself. And I think a good starting point is to move away from this frantic bi yearly ritual where we change the clocks and everybody dreads getting off. We’re going, you know, an hour earlier and so on, and just roll with the punches. Right? Roll with Mother Nature, because Mother Nature doesn’t do speed, right? Mother Nature doesn’t hurry by the by her very nature. I mean, we try to speed up nature, but it always ends badly. And I think there are many lessons we can learn from from nature. And I think a good way to start that learning would be to get rid of the time change definitely. And just as a final addendum here, as another tip for slowing down Mother Nature, you know, just go out into green spaces. I mean, obviously wonderful to go for a long hike in a wood or the mountains, but sometimes it’s enough just to go sink your feet into the grass in the park around the corner from your office, right? We know that being in green spaces, being in nature. Nature, the the avatar of slow it slows us down. It changes the body, all kinds of things chemically in the mind and the body. It brings a kind of tranquility. So even if you just go out of your office and sit on a bench or up against a tree for five minutes, do it, because that will help you slow down in the best sort of way. And you’ll come back to the office where things are moving fast, and you’ll be on your game.

Jacqueline Conway  52:22

Absolutely. Isn’t it strange that so many of the the technologists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are the people who try and stop the technology juggernaut with their own children, and try and and see, see the benefit of nature, see the benefit of of holding these things back. And I, as you say those things, I know that within my own life that resonates very deeply for me and as a kind of midlife woman, I’m really leaning in now to having more slowness, more balance, a greater sense of connection with nature and with where I am and this kind of overall journey. And yet, as you see those things, I also have a sense of the technology Juggernaut, which is runs counter to it, and how those things will play out, and whether or not it won’t be that one wins or one loses, but that people will perhaps those people who are able to make decisions for themselves because they have some autonomy or means within their lives to do the things that they need to do to slow down. Are able to, but that for whole swathes of people that that continues to be, and you’ve spoken very elegantly today about lots of ways of which people can do, even in a small way, but that, but that some people operate in a life that is much harder to even take those moments than others, yeah,

54:01

well, it’s so true about the technology that Juggernaut is coming, and it’s coming with a vengeance. Now, if you think of the artificial intelligence, the AI revolution, I mean, we’re getting to that point now where humans machines. I mean, we will have to find some new Entente Cordiale, right, some new living arrangement with the technology, because we can’t get any faster, right? We’ve lost and we’re losing the battle for speed in so many realms of life. And I think the solution that is not to try and go faster, it’s to double down on what we do best, which is the slow stuff. It’s the empathy, it’s the listening, it’s the that kind of messy, open ended creativity. That’s where humans bring magic to the table, and that’s what we have to put our chips down on, and that’s the slow stuff, right? So I think we’re coming to one of those coming to a head moments. Really, as the tech gets so much faster, we’ve got no choice now. But to you. To go to go slow and and I think that, and you mentioned being in midlife, I think this is something we’re seeing, you know, right the way up and down the age chain, right? People, younger people coming into the workforce now, you talk to HR departments around the world, and they’ve just got different priorities, right? They’re looking at our generation and thinking, I don’t think I want that. I don’t want to sacrifice my body, mind, health, soul, on the altar of what right they’re thinking. I want to go home and read bedtime stories to my new child, baby, or whatever, you know, without deploying the multiple page turn technique. And if I can’t do that, I won’t work here. I’ll go launch a startup, or I’ll join another company that will let me do that. So the tectonic plates are shifting here, and they’re shifting in the direction of slow and if you the slow train is pulling out of the station, we all got to be on it right if you’re either on it or you’re getting left behind,

Jacqueline Conway  55:53

I’m into that. Carl, thank you so very much for coming on to the podcast today. I think there’s so much in here, and it’s definitely a subject that I want to continue to explore. I know that I’ve been touching on it in my own life, but it’s something that I want to continue to do. So thank you so much. Let me just ask, Where can listeners to the podcast find out about you? Where can they tell them a bit about your you know you where you can, where they can get access to you, where you sure can you your books, etc. That’s very

56:25

easy. I’m all my links, anything you could, probably more than you would ever want to know about me, videos, books, courses, everything is in one link. It’s, it’s,

Jacqueline Conway  56:32

it’s

56:35

just my link tree link, it’s In Praise of slow.com Okay? Or Carl lanare dot info, either. Those will take you there if I if I may. I just like to leave our listeners with a couple of quotes and thoughts. The first is, for me, it’s in a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower. And the final quote comes from Mae West, the starlet from the 50s, black and white era, who said, once anything worth doing is worth doing, slowly,

Jacqueline Conway  57:10

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