by Eddie Pipkin

A couple of mornings ago, I took my coffee out to the back porch and balanced it on the little table beside my favorite chair for reading the newspaper as the sun comes up.  I studied a few articles, took a sip, then, no doubt distracted by whatever engrossing story I was absorbing, I clumsily hit the side of the table with my mug as I tried to set it down and spilled hot coffee all over myself, the chair cushions, and the deck.  This wasn’t the first time I had made that particular mistake, and you can’t be mad at physics.  I had ignored the number one rule for congenitally awkward klutzes: slow down and pay attention to what you’re doing.  As ministry practitioners, it is also good practice to slow down and pay attention to what we’re doing.  Lots of metaphorical coffee might remain unspilled.

Summer is a traditional time for slowing down in the sense of taking some time off and relaxing (or hopefully recharging, which is different than just relaxing – recharging involves doing things to refill our gas tanks, be it much needed rest without stress or tapping the reservoirs of the kinds of reading, reconnecting, and adventuring that fills our soul and gets us back in touch with the things that originally energized our journey.  I hope you are seizing opportunities to do that kind of slowing down.

But summer is also a great time, with its built-in slower periods of work for most of us, to do a different kind of slowing down, the kind in which we evaluate our processes for making decisions, executing plans, and pursuing creative endeavors.

In all these areas, in the thick of the busyness, we can get into bad habits, fall back on troublesome scripts, and resort to emotionally based, hair-trigger decision making that leads us down a path where we never intended to travel.  Slowing down can be both a strategy for thoughtful analysis and a new emphasis for moving forward.   We can undertake a formal process for reflecting on how we’ve been making decisions for the past 12 months, and see what patterns define our process, whether healthy or deleterious.  Having paused our work momentarily, we can draw a line on the calendar and say, starting now – even if only as a test approach – I’ll slow down my responses in the upcoming months, especially if my standard style is to shoot from the hip.

I’m not advocating that we drag things out – decisions often need to be made judiciously with corresponding celerity – but I am advocating that we’re more thoughtful about when to go fast and when to go slow, and for some of us, slowing down will be a virtue that others around us will celebrate.  (Granted, we all know someone in ministry who could benefit from a more brisk leadership pace, but there’s a difference between sloth and careful cogitation.  We know that difference when we see it.)

Way back in 2011, psychologist Daniel Kahneman popularized the concept of fast thinking versus slow thinking, contrasting the two systems of thought which co-exist in our brains (System 1 being instinctive and emotional, System 2 deliberative and logical).  There are pros and cons to each mental approach, and each has evolved to serve specific purposes for human needs:

[Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow] delineates delineates rational and non-rational motivations or triggers associated with each type of thinking process, and how they complement each other, starting with Kahneman’s own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to people’s tendency to replace a difficult question with one which is easy to answer, the book summarizes several decades of research to suggest that people have too much confidence in human judgment.

It’s fascinating stuff, and one of the many takeaways from Kahneman’s research is that there are times when fast thinking is needed and times when slow thinking is needed, and it’s useful to know the difference.

I have always moved too fast for my own good, impatient with myself and others and rushing projects along, often to the detriment of whatever organization I was trying to serve at the time.

These days, I move more slowly and carefully.  I don’t mean that exclusively in the sense of physically being more careful, although as an active person, I practice diligence when running, hiking, and bike riding, even doing yard work – we are all just one trip on a wonky piece of sidewalk or one pulled back muscle from being laid up and out of commission.  It turns out that such attention to detail in physical movements pays dividends in counteracting natural klutziness.  Would that I had learned this truth 40 years ago.  There would have been so many fewer broken coffee mugs!  The principle applies in conversational responses, day-to-day work surprises, and assorted other ministry challenges.  Slowing down and thinking through the next step, then taking the time to execute that next step with precision, enhances any work that we do.

Proofreading is a classic example of this technique in practice.  As a person who has been a writer as a profession for a long time now, I know the value of editorial review.  Yet as an impatient personality, it has always been a struggle to take the time to re-read and revise.  One always schemes for a shortcut.  Never does such longing lead to better work.  (I am not entirely sure that a typo or two didn’t make it into the blog you are currently reading.  If you are the first to spot a glaring and obvious typo and note it in the comments section, I’ll send you a Starbucks gift card.)  The proofreading process provides an example of the value of team feedback.  Slowing down to get input from multiple sets of eyes always makes a product stronger.

Patience is a holy kind of slowing down.  Not every issue has to be resolved right now.  Not every problem has to be addressed aggressively.  We short circuit the processes of good communication, collaboration, and even healing when we act hastily and without adequate thought.

It can feel like patience is a luxury, but like prayer, like sleep, like quality time with loved ones, it turns out that patience is not an optional add-on feature.  It’s a necessity if we are to be the best leaders and partners we can be.

Occasionally, my son (he’s 29) and I will talk about the benefits of getting older.  He is skeptical, of course.  If we’re lucky, this conversation takes place on the lake on a beautiful, clear morning when we are paddling together.  I give him the list of gifts that come with age: the realization, for instance, that so much that seemed worth fighting over when I was younger seems so silly now; the lack of pressure to always be one-upping one’s adventures; most of all, for me anyway, embracing the virtue of slowing down.

Really it’s more about leveraging time in the appropriate way for the given moment: going fast when a task can be done with efficiency; going slow when a deliberate approach is counter-intuitively more productive.  My household chores with maximum speed to check them off the list; also checking the email and picking up the groceries.  Conversations with a loved one, on the other hand, require putting my phone away and making eye contact and genuinely listening and responding.  Meeting with team members can go either way.  The key is to know which time is which.

How do you do at slowing down in the right moments?  Do you have good “pace discipline,” consciously adjusting your fast thinking and slow thinking to accommodate the right approach for the right situation?  Do you encourage team members to slow down and correct course when they are getting out over their skis?  Do you celebrate the virtues of slowness when slowness is the wise and healthy choice?  Share your own experiences and observations in the comments section below.