Purposeful Momentum: Working Well Without The “Slog” with Liz Mackevicius [Episode 305]

Liz Mackevicius | 00:00
Yes, I was an urban planner for nearly 20 years. I worked in state and local government, and in consulting. What I noticed was that there were all these clever, smart people who were really passionate and really committed to making good communities and good places, and doing a good job — but we don’t really teach people how to work. We focus on the technical aspects, and there’s just not a lot of resources. We don’t teach kids at uni how to think, or how to manage their mindset. So I saw a lot of frustrated people — people who struggled to deal with the day-to-day and weren’t having the impact they knew, and I knew, they were capable of.

Christina Canters | 00:43
Where did you learn how to work?

Liz Mackevicius | 00:46
That’s a good question. I think I’ve always thought about how I think — there’s a lot in there, but like, how am I thinking at the moment? You were talking just before we started about mindset, and noticing what’s coming up. I think there was something around seeing other people, and I’m curious about alternative views on this — that there’s a bit less of that now in workplaces. We’re so busy, and meetings are online, and I think working from home is amazing. I think flexibility is incredible. But I also think that maybe we see a little less of that, and we have fewer opportunities to learn that stuff in the workplace.

Christina Canters | 01:28
Right. It’s so interesting how you say we’re not taught how to work — because my whole spiel is that we’re supposed to know how to communicate well, or how to present, but we’re not taught that at university or at school. It’s just expected. And you’re taking it a step further, saying we actually weren’t taught how to work well.

Liz Mackevicius | 01:48
Yep, a hundred percent. And they’re sometimes called soft skills — I prefer to call them cognitive skills. Universities are great for teaching technical skills, but we’re just not setting our future leaders up, really. And what can often happen, particularly when people are approaching that middle-manager, middle-leader stage in their careers, is that it just becomes a slog — it’s just do more, and more, and more, and try to figure it out themselves. There are ways we can overcome that.

Christina Canters | 02:29
So tell me — instead of just slogging, slogging, slogging — what could someone’s career or work environment look like without the slog?

Liz Mackevicius | 02:43
Well, I think learning some skills about how to manage yourself and the people around you — communication is definitely part of that. I was thinking about this before: the most rewarding thing isn’t sitting by the pool with umbrellas in our drinks, having a lovely time. That’s nice — that’s okay for a little while.

Christina Canters | 03:09
Yeah.

Liz Mackevicius | 03:09
But actually, what’s sustaining and most rewarding for us is when we’re overcoming a challenge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote this wonderful book, Flow, and he talks about an axis between your skills and the level of challenge.

Christina Canters | 03:26
Okay.

Liz Mackevicius | 03:26
So we want to be in that sweet spot — pushed a little bit, otherwise we get bored.

Christina Canters | 03:31
So we want it to be within our skill set, or pushing our skill set?

Liz Mackevicius | 03:36
Yeah, just a little bit of a stretch — a little challenge. If we’re doing the same stuff over and over that we’ve done for years, that’s kind of boring. So we want to be learning a little bit more — a bit of a challenge, but an achievable one. Daniel Pink talks about this with intrinsic motivation — one of the key elements is mastery. We love getting better at things. We love seeing our own progress, looking back and going, wow, I couldn’t do that six months, a year, two weeks ago, and suddenly I’m a little better at it.

Christina Canters | 04:12
Yeah.

Liz Mackevicius | 04:15
And I’ll draw a parallel here to our shared CrossFit background — this is one of the best things about CrossFit and training: you’re like, oh, I can lift a little more this week. You see your progress, and that’s part of what’s rewarding for us. So we want to be in jobs and careers where we’re a little challenged, but not in a way that’s overwhelming. I guess that’s a big part of the work I do — helping people navigate into that, and also helping people manage their teams so everyone gets to have that, not just for themselves but for their teams as well.

Christina Canters | 04:54
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll mention that Liz and I have known each other — I think we first met about 12 years ago, at CrossFit, where we were both being pushed really hard physically. And I know you also went into, and still do, a lot of marathon running and trail running, and you draw a lot of your own —

Liz Mackevicius | 05:15
Yeah.

Christina Canters | 05:17
— lessons and things you share with your clients, you draw a lot from that as well. What’s been one of the biggest learnings for you from pushing yourself with these — physical, but I guess mental too — these physically challenging events?

Liz Mackevicius | 05:31
Yeah. Endurance events. I think the key thing for me is that we’re all capable of more than we think. You start out thinking, I don’t know if I can do this, and you just chip away at it a little bit. I think maintaining presence and being really in the moment — we kind of joke sometimes: left foot, right foot. You just keep doing that over and over again. If you’d told me five or six years ago that I’d be doing the sorts of races I do now, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But we’re all capable of more than we think, and sometimes we just need that little challenge, to be pushed a bit, and it’s amazing what we can achieve. That can compound over time, and little consistent efforts can really add up to a whole new shift in your baseline.

Christina Canters | 06:32
I’d love to talk more about that and how it relates to someone in the workplace. But before we do, I want to ask — when you say endurance events, give me an example of one. How long is it? Where are you running?

Liz Mackevicius | 06:45
Well, my favourite events are probably around 50 to 60 kilometres, up in the high country. I’ve done 100k ones — they take a long time for me, anyway. But yeah, like 50 to 60 Ks.

Christina Canters | 07:00
How long does 50 to 60 Ks take?

Liz Mackevicius | 07:03
Oh, like 10 to 12 hours.

Christina Canters | 07:05
In one go?

Liz Mackevicius | 07:05
Yeah, you start early in the morning.

Christina Canters | 07:09
My God.

Liz Mackevicius | 07:12
You eat a lot. People joke that these events are often eating and drinking competitions with a bit of running thrown in. You’re out there for a long time, but you’re in the most magnificent landscapes. I did a couple earlier this year — over the summer — from the bottom of Mount Bogong all the way to Hotham, across the high plains. And other ones up around the Victorian High Country — it’s just spectacular scenery. You’re out in nature, in the wilderness, pushing your body.

Christina Canters | 07:47
So what goes through your mind — let’s say you’re 30k into a 60k journey and you’re like, oh my god, I’m only halfway. What goes through your mind that gets you through?

Liz Mackevicius | 08:00
Get to the next aid station. What’s my job right now? It’s a lot of almost meditation — a lot of being very present. What decisions do I have to make now? You can slog out these races, but you have to make good decisions for your future self. That’s probably one thing.

Christina Canters | 08:17
Tell me more about that.

Liz Mackevicius | 08:19
So, I did a race a couple of years ago in really bad weather. We went up to Mount Feathertop — didn’t actually reach the summit — up this summit three times, and the third time it was dark again, drizzling, cold. My future self was like, okay Liz, you need to stop now and put on your pants — put on a layer, your jacket, your gloves. I didn’t need them right then, but my future self was going to thank me for that. I’ve been reading a book called Chatter — I can share the author with you — it’s about this idea of a little distancing: what would my future self say to me right now? If we’re drawing this back to a workplace context —

Christina Canters | 09:15
Yeah.

Liz Mackevicius | 09:18
— what advice would my future self give me right now? I think that’s a really helpful mindset. If something’s a little hard — we’re doing a presentation, or we’ve got an awkward conversation, or something that feels a bit icky —

Christina Canters | 09:34
Yeah.

Liz Mackevicius | 09:34
— what would my future self say to me right now?

Christina Canters | 09:37
Yeah. Will my future self thank me later? I sometimes think that way — like it’s nine o’clock at night and I’m like, should I watch another Netflix episode, or go to bed? Is my future self going to thank me when I’m up at 5:30 in the morning when the baby gets up? And usually my future self says, you should bloody go to bed.

Liz Mackevicius | 09:59
Yes. See — and a little bit of distancing. It’s one of my other favourite coaching questions: if our roles were reversed, if a friend came to you with this challenge, what advice would you give them? It creates a little distance to look at our situation with a different perspective. And the other thing, back to ultra running — you just have to get to the next aid station. You try not to be too overwhelmed at the start of a race, or halfway through, going, oh my god. You’re like, okay, I just have to get to the next aid station. What am I going to do there? How am I going to restock? What am I going to eat? And then, okay, then the next one. So I think there are parallels for that in the workplace too — what do we need to do this week? What do we need to do right now? Let’s not get too overwhelmed with this enormous project. There’s a time and place for zooming out and asking, are we actually on the right track? Are we doing the right things? Asking those big questions. But then it’s about getting back into just doing the thing that’s in front of you right now.

Christina Canters | 11:05
Let’s talk about that — I was really excited to talk to you about this, because I’ve been feeling overwhelmed myself the last couple of weeks. I think it’s a combination of Easter shortening the weeks, so everything feels piled up, and I find myself unsure what to do next. I’ll start one task, remember another one, jump to that, do that, then go back to the first. Is that common? Do you see that with a lot of your clients?

Liz Mackevicius | 11:40
A hundred percent — that mental load happens all the time. We’ve got so much going on. And going back to where we learned how to work from — our workplaces today are really different places. There are notifications, there’s so much information thrown at us. So how we manage that mental load — whether it’s a notebook, or an app on my phone for tasks — I try to be disciplined. I’m not perfect, but you chuck those “oh yep, I’ve got to call that person” thoughts somewhere, so your brain can go, I don’t have to remember that, it’s somewhere. But staying focused —

Christina Canters | 12:24
Can we talk about the difference between being busy and being productive? Because everyone wants to be more productive, right? No one wants to be more busy. So let’s start off talking about the difference between those two.

Liz Mackevicius | 12:43
Yeah — busy isn’t necessarily contributing to our big end goal. Sometimes it’s a bit of a procrastination tool, and I’m as guilty of this as the next person — doing something that doesn’t necessarily need to be done because it’s less challenging than the big thing that does need to be done. So busy can look like all sorts of different things to different people, depending on the context. But it’s being in that reactive state, where your diary or to-do list is governed by someone else’s crisis — it’s coming from all directions, not from what you want to do. I think if we want to be more productive or impactful, there’s something around the impact we want to have — what does that look like for us? I think we have to do a bit of thinking to figure that out, and define it for ourselves, before we work out how to get there.

Christina Canters | 13:46
Yeah. And when you talk about having a to-do list governed by other people — I think about the days where I sit down to focus on an important project I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and then I go, oh, I’ll just quickly check my emails for anything urgent. And we all know how that ends, right? The important stuff doesn’t get done. But what if there’s stuff where someone genuinely needs my response today — time-sensitive stuff? How do we squeeze in the things we actually need to do now, versus the important stuff that gets us closer to our end goal?

Liz Mackevicius | 14:31
Yeah — and you’re a hundred percent right, it’s not about not doing the things that demand our attention. We’ve got to be pragmatic about that. But it’s about being a bit more intentional with how we split our time — whether that’s batching our emails, or setting a limit for just checking them: a quick scan, is there anything I need to do today? Otherwise, I’m closing it down and getting stuck into my project for the day. I like to think about it as a triangle with three layers. At the bottom, we spend some time being reactive — particularly as early-career managers, or even those of us who run our own business, we do need to react. It’s not that we can do away with that, but it’s about how we put some parameters around it — I’m just going to do it for this amount of time. And it’s about the mindset we bring to it — maybe it’s shifting from panic, “oh my god, all this stuff,” to a prioritised response. How are we delegating, triaging, working through all those tasks so we can tick off the ones that need to be done? We’ve all seen the Eisenhower Matrix of important and urgent — some stuff probably doesn’t need to be done, but for the stuff that does, how do we put some parameters around how we spend our time doing it?

Christina Canters | 16:03
What do you find works for you?

Liz Mackevicius | 16:07
Definitely the diary — planning that out, because separating the what from the how. If this week my three things are X, Y, Z, this is where I’m scheduling them in, and then getting really clear on what the task actually is. If your task is “I’ve got to write this report,” that’s pretty vague. So instead: what am I going to do when I have that time? I’m going to sketch out the structure of the report. I’m going to write the key messages for each section. I’m going to do a list of maps or tables, and then I’m going to start dot-pointing the conclusion. So you’re really clear about what you’re going to do, and you’re not spending that time thinking about what to do — you can just get in and go, okay, this is what I’m here to do.

Christina Canters | 17:03
Do you do that planning at the start of the day, or the night before, or on a Sunday before the week starts?

Liz Mackevicius | 17:10
I like to do it on a Sunday, but not everyone should work on a Sunday — if you don’t want to, that’s totally fine. But I do like to spend a bit of time thinking about that at the start of the week, and also at the end of the day, so I know what’s on for tomorrow. And going back to what you said earlier about mental load and that list — if, at the end of the day, you can say, these are the three things I did today, these are the two or three things for tomorrow, and here’s all the other random bits and pieces I thought of during the day — then you can separate that out. You’re not taking it home going, oh, there’s that thing. You’re not ruminating on it as much. It’s almost like a closed-down process at the end of the day that can be really helpful, to make sure all of those things in your brain have got a home somewhere that’s not in your brain anymore.

Christina Canters | 18:01
Yeah, I love that — rehoming the thoughts somewhere else that’s not your brain. You know what I find myself doing? I open my laptop on a Monday morning, and there’s all my tabs from Friday, still open. And I’m like, oh, there’s that thing, and there’s that thing — I’m reminded of all the stuff I was working on and hadn’t quite finished. One of my clients is a flow and productivity expert, and she has a checklist for closing out the day — a shutdown ritual — it might be taking a walk around the block, or playing a song, or changing your shoes, something to indicate the workday’s over. I thought that was really cool, and it’s something I want to start implementing.

Liz Mackevicius | 18:52
Yeah, I remember — this was a leadership course I did ages ago — it was about the journey home from the office. This was obviously way before hybrid working, but what’s the point on your journey home that signifies you’re now your home self? Maybe it’s getting on the train, or getting off your bike, something like that. There’s a point where you go, okay, I’m no longer work-person, I’m home-person — it’s the same kind of thing. But for those of us lucky enough to work in our spare rooms, it can help to have a little ritual like that.

Christina Canters | 19:28
Yeah, absolutely. Can we talk about purposeful momentum? What is it, and why is it great?

Liz Mackevicius | 19:38
Purposeful momentum is about being deliberate with our time — creating a bit of space to do that important thinking, while acknowledging there are also lots of other things we need to do, coordinate, and react to. But how do we create a bit of time so we’re reflecting — maybe at the end of the day, the end of the week, or the start — to be more thoughtful and deliberate about how we’re spending our time, because that’s what we don’t have any more of. Our time is very limited. So how do we make the most of it?

Christina Canters | 20:15
So let’s pretend we’ve got someone listening who manages a team, and has a boss who likes to just put meetings in her calendar at the last minute — just drops them in there. What advice do you have for someone whose calendar is pretty much being governed by someone else — even if they’ve scheduled in deep work or thinking time, say from 8 to 10am, and people don’t respect those boundaries? What advice do you have for someone dealing with that kind of workplace?

Liz Mackevicius | 20:53
Well, I think the first step would be to have a conversation about it. Maybe their manager isn’t able to carve out time for them to do that strategic thinking, and is kind of panicking themselves. So I think it is a conversation to start with.

Christina Canters | 21:10
I know you’re big on mindset — what kind of mindset shift needs to happen for us to first approach this conversation? Because if someone’s never had this conversation before, it’s going to be really uncomfortable — we might be setting boundaries for the first time. So tell me, firstly, what mindset shift needs to happen, and then how we might frame up this conversation.

Liz Mackevicius | 21:32
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of ways we can shift our mindset, and the one I like is naming our fears. We have this fear, this grey cloud over the conversation, and we’re like, “oh, I’m just a bit nervous about it” — which is totally fair and reasonable. But what is the real fear? What are you scared about? That your manager could get upset and say that’s not good enough? That it could get really confrontational? What are the really specific things? Because naming our fears gives us power over them — then we can manage and mitigate them. So that’s the first thing: be really specific about what your fear is about going into that conversation. What’s the worst that could happen? Some coaching questions — like, what advice would our future self give us about having this conversation?

Christina Canters | 22:26
Yeah. Are we going to be fired for having this conversation? Highly unlikely.

Liz Mackevicius | 22:32
Yeah — if you’re fired for having a conversation like that, you probably need to talk to a workplace lawyer, honestly.

Christina Canters | 22:32
Or has it happened? True — it’s probably not the best workplace for you.

Liz Mackevicius | 22:44
Yeah, well, and that would be one of my other points — if there’s other stuff going on where you don’t feel like you can even open that conversation, then what’s going on there a little bit would be something I’d ask. But in terms of your other point, about what practically you can do — I think it’s how you frame this conversation with the person you want to have it with. If we reverse the roles, it’s not about surprising them with it — maybe it’s a bit of forewarning. Hey Steve — let’s just call him Steve — I’d love to have a chat with you about how we manage our diaries going forward. I’ve got a couple of ideas, I’d love to share them with you. I’ll put some time in. So maybe — sorry if there are any Steves out there listening, not that Steve’s a bad person — but maybe Steve’s got a bit of time to think and reflect and go, I wonder what this person wants to talk to me about. And then it’s that initial framing before you’re even in the conversation, but also how you open it up at the start — coming at it from the benefits for both of you. I want to help you do your best work, Steve, but it’s difficult for me to do that when I’m trying to juggle all of these things. And then the benefit to Steve is obviously that he gets a worker who’s able to manage their time, energy and attention a bit better. And then maybe saying something like, let’s trial doing this for a couple of weeks — little trials can work really well, because it’s not about wanting someone to completely change how they’re working forever. In that instance, maybe it’s, okay, let’s have a 15-minute chat at the start of the day, and you can give me a little download of what’s on your mind. I think having regular times with your manager — if you don’t have that, it’s really important to have them. And if you’re managing people, having a regular time for them to bring you things, so you don’t get stuck with random messages all the time.

Christina Canters | 24:58
I’m curious to know — this popped up for me as you were speaking — have you ever seen this, where someone’s afraid to share that they’re struggling? Because maybe they’ve just been promoted, or they’re new to the role, and they don’t want to appear like they can’t handle it. Has that come up for you with your clients?

Liz Mackevicius | 25:22
Oh, a hundred percent — that happens all the time. In that instance, it’s about, what is reasonable here? Again, if our roles were reversed — if a friend was asking me this — what would I say to them with this kind of challenge? And, like I said at the start, when we were talking about running — we’re all capable of more than we think. So there’s definitely an element of, you don’t have to be perfect at it. Sometimes you just have to give it a go and do it. We’re sophisticated humans — we can hold two ideas at the same time: I don’t want people to be overwhelmed in toxic work environments where they’re given too much to do, but I also think people are capable of far more than they often give themselves credit for. So sometimes just jumping in and having a go can work wonders, and surprise you.

Christina Canters | 26:18
How do we know the difference between a task, project or situation that’s a good challenge for us — where it’s getting us out of our comfort zone and pushing us a little, to help us grow — versus one that’s just toxic and overwhelming, making our life worse?

Liz Mackevicius | 26:40
Yeah, that’s an excellent question — and I don’t know that I have a straight answer for it. I think you don’t want to be challenged all the time. If you’ve got some projects, or some aspects of your role, that are stretching you a little, that’s fine. But if you feel exhausted at the end of every week, constantly physically tired even though you’ve been sitting down all week — if that’s a recurring thing, particularly if you’re working in consulting or somewhere with swings and roundabouts, busy and busier periods — I think it’s the chronicness of it, if that makes sense. If it’s just a constant thing, that’s not cool.

Christina Canters | 27:35
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a really good point — it’s like having a safe, comfortable home base you can return to, and then occasionally jumping out to do a challenging thing. So it’s doing your stuff at work, where you’re leading your team and doing things you feel fairly comfortable with, but then occasionally putting your hand up to do a presentation, or represent your company at a conference, or take on a different kind of project — doing those things occasionally outside your comfort zone, but not feeling like you’re constantly out of your depth. Because I’ve worked with clients before who are just constantly — there’s no comfort zone whatsoever.

Liz Mackevicius | 28:20
Yeah. And when we think about our bodies — if we go back to the training analogy — there’s stress and recovery. We put ourselves under a bit of stress, do a training session, then rest, recover, recover, then go again. And what happens over time is the line goes up, because we’re getting fitter, stronger, we’re training. So it’s the same kind of thing — you need that space to reflect, and to build your confidence back, and do all those things to —

Christina Canters | 28:55
‘Cause isn’t it that your muscles, when you do a hard workout, are actually breaking down — but then they get stronger because they reconnect? This is a very unscientific explanation —

Liz Mackevicius | 29:16
You’re the tallest sports scientist out there.

Christina Canters | 29:17
Yeah, definitely not — but the muscle fibres come together and build, they get bigger, but they have to break apart first in order to —

Liz Mackevicius | 29:21
Yeah.

Christina Canters | 29:26
— come back together, and the rest period is when that happens. So I really love that analogy. It’s like we do this scary thing — yes, it might make us anxious, and freak us out a little — but then you come back to your day-to-day safety net, where you can recover and rest, but you’ve built up your base level of confidence because you’re like, oh, I did that thing. And then that helps you for the next time you get pushed out of your comfort zone. Oh, I love that so much.

Liz Mackevicius | 29:53
Exactly. And I think, just to add to that — the idea that we’re feeling a bit nervous, a bit like “oh my god, I don’t know if I like this” — that’s a signal that we’re learning and developing. So if we can reframe that — there’s a wonderful study. There was a sports coach whose athletes had big exams coming up, so he split them into two groups going into the exam. One group was told, in the last minute or so before going in, that the anxiety they were feeling was actually a bit of excitement — that it meant they cared about this, that they were switched on and ready to go. The other group didn’t get that. And you can guess where this is going — the group that was given that prompt performed way better on the exam, because they were acknowledging that the feeling was okay to have. You know what it feels like — your heart gets going, it’s a physiological thing, you feel it in your body. But that’s an okay thing to have, as long as you don’t have it all the time — because that’s basically what burnout is: having that all the time. So we don’t want that all the time, but having it occasionally is a signal that we’re doing something that’s going to push our skill and our capabilities a little.

Christina Canters | 31:23
Awesome, I love that. Well Liz, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Can you share with our listeners where they can find you, and do you have anything exciting out at the moment, or coming up, that you want to share?

Liz Mackevicius | 31:36
Yes, I do. You can find me at lizmac.com.au — I’m sure Christina will put it in the show notes, but yeah, you can find me there. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn as well. And one thing I’m going to have available is a little workbook about how to navigate this react zone, this coordinate zone, and this shape zone — this idea of purposeful momentum — and you can jump on my website and download that. You’ll get a couple of emails over the subsequent few weeks, with little tips, questions to ask yourself, prompts that will help you reframe how you manage yourself at work.

Christina Canters | 32:17
Love it. And I can say I’m on your email list, Liz, and you share really, really well-written and thoughtful emails with tips on leadership and confidence, and also stories from your endurance events. So I get to experience the endurance events without actually having to do them myself. So I like that. Thanks so much, Liz.

Liz Mackevicius | 32:39
Thanks, Christina. I really enjoyed it.