The Evolving Worker

This article is a follow-up of Tina’s “How to delete email addiction” post.

Addiction starts when “someone suffers from his/her behaviour, is willing to stop it, but cannot do so without help”.

I believe this is an interesting definition of addiction, don’t you think ? (I’m translating Valleur and Matysiak in Les nouvelles formes d’addiction – l’amour, le sexe, les jeux vidéo).

Overcoming addictions (email, internet surfing, ...) is very beneficial as it helps us to:

• achieve more at work in less time
• get more time with our family
• reach our goals
• feel more confident and happy at the end of the day

While some tricks can help to reduce the addictions (and I’ll give you a geeky one at the end of the post), I believe the most efficient way to overcome them is to understand your addictions root causes and work from that point.

NonViolent Communication to the rescue

When I feel addicted and want to stop it, I use a method based on NonViolent Communication.

In NonViolent Communication – a very powerful tool to enhance your personal and professional relationships as well as your self-esteem -, the communication process is cut in four parts. I’ll build on those four parts to understand and overcome the addictions.

Step 1 – Observing

First take a step back and notice the concrete actions you are observing that are affecting your well-being.

Eg: Damn it, I’m checking those blog traffic stats again. I’ve been doing it 10 times today already! Why cannot I manage to finish my blog post ?

Observing can be quite hard and requires to think out of the box. Try your best to escape denial!

Step 2 – Feeling

Next, check how you are feeling in relation to what you are observing.

Eg: I feel guilty, because I’d like to finish this blog post… I also feel worried about what people will actually think about this blog post ! Will it be as useful as I’d like it to be ?

Describing feelings is difficult at first, because we’re not trained to recognize them with accuracy. That’s why in NVC, we use a list of feelings to help us (no, you won’t need to use this list every time you try to communicate :-).

Step 3 – Needing

Each feeling is the consequence of a need, value or desire. Once the feeling is identified, we can track the underlying need.

Eg: I need to contribute to make the world a better place by sharing valuable techniques. I also need to get appreciation from my readers.

Referring to this list of needs can be helpful.

Step 4 – Requesting

The last step is made of the concrete actions we request in order to enrich our lives. Because we’re introspecting here, we will do a request to ourselves.

Eg: To myself: would it be ok to finish the blog post now, then to only check stats once a week ? I would accomplish a lot more and feel a lot better!

Try it out and see what’s working for you ! After a bit of practice, you’ll see patterns appearing and you’ll get a better understanding of why you develop specific addictions, if you do so – and it’s very common.

A geek trick worth knowing

Once you know how to track the root causes, some tricks can help. For instance, how to block a specific site like your web mail from being visited ?

One solution is to add this specific entry to your hosts file to make all your requests to the site fail:

127.0.0.1 www.mywebmail.com
127.0.0.1 smtp.mywebserver.com

You may want to remove or comment (start with a #) the corresponding line when you decide to really read your mail – if you follow the 4-Hour Workweek advice, that will be twice a day !

If you want to learn more about NonViolent Communication

The first time I met NVC, I thought it was a bit complicated to analyze what’s happening. But with time and training, I have to say that it is the single most powerful communication technique and the most positive one I’ve been practising.

After a while, things get very smooth and it’s really a new language you learn, where you learn to listen to people needs and your needs to find a good way to satisfy yourself and the people you communicate with.

If you want to learn more, I warmly recommend reading Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg, creator of the NVC process. You’ll get a good understanding of how NVC can change the way you work and live.

You can also check out the NonViolent Communication website for more information.