Going Slow with Geoff Small
Started off with a hectic day yesterday. Up at the crack of dawn after a bad night’s sleep. Answered a few emails before breakfast. Got the kids out of bed and ready for school. Oldest had to be there by 7.15 am. He might have been there by 7.20 am. The other two were at school by 8.10 am. Came home again, did a bit more online work. Called in to see my sister and brother in law who are staying on the Coast. Sorted out a new mobile phone SIM card for them. Called in to the bank to arrange the last bit of finance for the party tomorrow (reason for sleepless night). And headed into work. Which is when I got to listen to the ABC Queensland conversation hour - Steve Austin and Val French talking with Geoff Small on going slow.
Geoff’s linked up with LifeSmart and is based in Forest Lake in Brisbane.
Here’s the blurb from Steve’s Conversation site:
Do you enjoy life? Are you happy, or do you feel constantly pressed for time and wonder why life is passing you by? Geoff Small is the co-ordinator for the Society for the Appreciation of Slow in Australia. Their aim is to improve the quality of life in a hectic world, by striking a balance between fast and slow.
Geoff was once a high-flying CEO. “I spent most of my life in very high level positions. I worked as a manager and got to the point where I knew the girls at the Qantas desk better than my family,” he says. “I did some career coaching when I quit my job, and found that 50 per cent of people were looking for other alternatives to life. So I moved into a business to help teach people how to get more out of their life.”
But Geoff says slowing down does not mean doing everything at a snail’s pace. Rather, it is about being able to manage the pace of life such that you go fast when you need to and go slow when you want to. In Europe there are now 65 “slow” cities, as well as a large following of the slow food, slow exercise, and slow sex movements.
Geoff maintains that despite telecommunications, media overload, and ecomonic conditions, it is very easy to stop to smell the roses. “If you’re living on tight deadlines, you’ve got to stop thinking about them. If you are forever fast, you never slow down. If you know what it means to be slow, you have the ability to get slower,” Geoff explains.”One thing I do is take the watch off on Saturday morning and then don’t put it back on until Sunday night,” he says.
Geoff disagrees that slowing down is only achievable for the wealthy. “No, I think that’s a major misconception. I think that people who don’t have a lot of money can change their circumstances as much as those who do.”"We have been trained on a system over the years that success is based on material gain. And we have also been taught that we need to set ourselves some high goals in terms of career, money we can generate, how big a house we have, are we going to have a wide-screen TV,” he says. “That causes high anxiety in people and that causes unhappiness.”
The 1-hour conversation is available to hear online at this ABC Radio site, Real or WMV.
