{"id":5056,"date":"2013-06-23T23:33:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-23T23:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inveske.co.uk\/when-life-is-its-own-metaphor-heavy-and-smelly\/"},"modified":"2013-06-23T23:33:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-23T23:33:01","slug":"when-life-is-its-own-metaphor-heavy-and-smelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/when-life-is-its-own-metaphor-heavy-and-smelly\/","title":{"rendered":"When life is its own metaphor: heavy and smelly"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"_MG_1207\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday I sat in my chair at the office and \u2013 yuck \u2013 realized I had smeared my boots with dog shit. On a closer \u2013 double yuck \u2013 look, or, rather, smell I figured it was a mixture of dog shit and carrion.<\/p>\n

It was almost 1AM, I was home from having dinner with my brother on a Saturday in which I had worked the whole day: I had a meeting in the morning\/lunch and then taught a class from 4-8PM.<\/p>\n

My dogs had killed an opossum, were obviously happy about it and I happened to step on it when I got out of the car, plus some shit.<\/p>\n

Things can hardly get any smellier and unpleasant.<\/p>\n

The whole week was not only full of frustrating failures at work, but a training disaster: I hit the bar with my head boiling with unsolved problems. Publishing houses sending automated messages concerning the manuscripts I failed to hand in, magazines politely reminding me they really would appreciate the article on time, seminars being brought out too late, overlapping dates, partners backing off agreements\u2026 and suddenly even the warm-up weight felt like a ton.<\/p>\n

Monday it was the squat day failure. Aborted training session; Tuesday it was the weightlifting day failure, all movements imprecise; Wednesday was the bench day failure: no pressing strength, no matter the angle, the grip, nothing; Thursday I gave up and decided to accept that I had lost control of things and it had all become one single mass of dog shit.<\/p>\n

Time to stop and analyze it all, set the direction right again. It is not only a question of bad time management. It is actually a turning point: the end of one way of doing things, the necessary substitution for another. Many of my colleagues in the US are equally multi-task people: high performance athletes, writers, coaches, bloggers, among other things.<\/p>\n

I am learning, and learning it the hard way. One thing I confirmed this week is that if I owe anything my pretty good performance, it is my athlete mindset. In spite of all the big and small problems I might have, I have always put powerlifting ahead and when I set foot at the training room, nothing invades my mind. Actually the high level of focus even fuels creativity in other realms, I think: inter-set conversations with my partners are quite productive because there is total mental interruption during the lifts. This week I was, for the first time, too weak. I succeeded in messing up my athlete-brain.<\/p>\n

I also learned that multi-tasking involves multi-teaming. While it is inherently hard to manage one team, managing many is Herculean. Now, I am a good team leader and a bad people manager. I manage professionals. That\u2019s what I learned during years of being principal investigator at the University. Not the case anymore! Now I have flexible teams of friendly people doing \u201cthings\u201d together. The natural tendency of anyone in such an environment is to optimize one\u2019s gain and time. If things are not very, very well and frankly discussed, it will happen at the expense of one or more of the team\u2019s members\u2019 time. Guess what happened? First I gave up personal time and finally even private work time.<\/p>\n

Disaster.<\/p>\n

Time to regroup and re-negotiate everything. That\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n

Today I am still feeling uncomfortable, the huge backlog (or is it my subjective perception that makes it bigger?) is an almost material presence having tea with me as I write this blog post.<\/p>\n

But I understand that feeling sleepy the whole day after the way things were going is welcome. It is f** Sunday, after all: everyone except me is using their own concept of \u201crest\u201d to, well\u2026 rest!<\/p>\n

I believe there are lessons to learn for all of us, multi-tasking athletes\/writers\/professors\/coaches\/sports leaders: first, there is no free lunch. You can\u2019t have the cake and eat it too, so if you eat the time-cake, you won\u2019t have it any longer. Second, no matter how friends you are with someone, they will look after themselves before anything else. Unless you assertively defend your interests, your time and your money, you will get screwed \u2013 and the project will go down the drain. Not because they\u2019re bad, but because they\u2019re human \u2013 time to \u201chuman up\u201d and let go of the irrational messianic mission, guilt-trips or whatever prevents you from defending your stuff.<\/p>\n

I learned the hard way that I was not being nice to my friends. I was actually fucking up all the projects by not putting limits and imposing fair task assignments for the team members. They needed me to do so \u2013 only I did not understand it before. It was hard to realize that when it came to the sports fed that fell like a bomb on my hands, the best way to manage it was almost dictatorial, deciding the main issues by myself, centralizing everything and distributing work according to where \u201ca\u201d or \u201cb\u201d could be counted on being reliable at.<\/p>\n

This was a time where all the loads suddenly became too heavy and my surprise with the warm-up bar at the squat session reflected my attitude towards everything.<\/p>\n

Time to scrape off the carrion of the previous life and the dog shit of past experiences from my boots and keep moving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I sat in my chair at the office and \u2013 yuck \u2013 realized I had smeared my boots with dog shit. On a closer \u2013 double yuck \u2013 look, or, rather, smell I figured it was a mixture of dog shit and carrion. It was almost 1AM, I was home from having dinner with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,20,1179,1120],"tags":[1245,1252,1880,15,1858,1881],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mariliacoutinho.com\/pt-br\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}