Burn Like Stars – Rest

Gillian talks with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang about his book Rest. He is a Silicon Valley-based consultant and writer. Their conversation explores:

• Alex introduces his new book ‘Work less, do more.’
• He describes his curiosity about creativity that led him to write Rest. 
• His research led him to uncover the processes that a number of exceptional creative people used – including the importance of Rest.
• How do you make the kind of contribution that you want in the world or without burning yourself out?
• They talk about the skill of rest.
• What’s going on in your brain and the rest of you body, when you rest?
• Is burn out just the trade off for doing a good job?
• Work as a calling and identity.
• Where the word workaholic came from.
• Explore causes of clergy burn out.
• The most durable solution to burn out.
• Anti-burn out practices.
• A theology of work and rest.
• The one thing Alex recommends you do in order to flourish.

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Alex’s books.

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Gillian Straine: Welcome to the GoHealth podcast. I am Gillian Straine, chief executive of GoHealth, and we are an ecumenical organisation with the vision to see flourishing communities made up of flourishing individuals. And I am delighted that you are here. So welcome. You know, we’re coming to the end of the summer, but don’t despair, season four of the GoHealth podcast is just beginning. And in the GoHealth community we are at the beginning of our 12 week deep dive into burnout, you know, how to avoid it and more than that, how to create an holistic, healthy approach to work. So lots of tips, lots of practices, and some great theology to base it all on. We’re calling it Burn Like Stars. And just a heads up, it’s entirely free to join. So to kick this off, we have got a great guest, Alex Pang is a Silicon Valley futurist and the man spearheading a revolution in the four day working week. He’s also written a fascinating book called Rest. And so that’s where we’re starting our burnout season, thinking about that, how to rest well.

I really loved meeting Alex. He was really inspiring and I really hope you enjoy this conversation. 

[MUSIC]

So Alex, thank you so much for being on the GoHealth podcast. How are you today? 

Alex pang: Oh, I’m doing well, thank you. 

Gillian: And we’re chatting in person. We’re actually in the same room. This is exciting.

Alex:  Incredible, Yeah. In Penguin World headquarters. So. 

Gillian: Yeah. and you’re in London, so why are you in London? 

Alex: You know, do you really need a reason to be here? But, but the proximate cause is I have a new book out, and so I’m over here doing some stuff with that and a conference and also in my capacity with a nonprofit called Four Day Week Global. Work with a number of companies here and so I’m visiting a couple of them as well to see how they’re getting on.

Gillian: And tell us just firstly, before we dive in. Tell us about the new book. 

Alex: The new book is called Work Less, Do More and it’s about how companies around the world in a variety of industries, have moved to four day weeks without cutting salaries or cutting expectations around levels of service or, you know, output and it is a sequel to my earlier book, Rest. You know about the role of rest in the lives of really creative and prolific people and the new book is an effort to show how companies and organisations can put the lessons of rest into practice for everybody, not just, you know, Nobel Prize winners and famous writers and composers and other privileged people. 

Gillian: Yeah, okay, so four day week and I really want to talk about this because, as, as listeners of the GoHealth Podcast might know, I do a lot with, with clergy, who are, often work six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. And they never laugh at that joke. Everyone always say, oh, Sunday, that’s your busy day. Well, that’s only day you ever work. No one ever laughs at a joke because they all work so hard. So I want to pick your brains about four day week with regard to clergy when we get to it. So, a friend gave me your book. I really creative friend who’s doing work with our organisation to help us talk about our vision in a way people can connect into. Because we’ve got this, this vision at our organisation to help, communities flourish through the flourishing of individuals. So working at the intersection of faith with holistic health. So mind, body and spirit is important, right? But with science too. So taking science super seriously and putting them all together. And, the thing she told me about your book rest was that it’s all about, connecting together, work and rest and how rest is not being lazy. It’s about, a proactive thing you do to release creativity so that you can do your life’s work.That phrase, your life’s work, I thought, was really interesting. And I love the book because I’m susceptible. I’m former Scottish Presbyterian – still Scottish, no longer Presbyterian, but a huge work ethic in my background. And at times I often overwork and I’m, you know, prone to, occasional burnout as well. So, I really enjoyed it, and I just really felt that I want to get your book into the minds of people who listen to this podcast. So could you just summarise rest for the, the theory of it, right?

Alex:  Sure. So the book grew out of an interest that I had in what makes creative individuals who they are and, and and what allows them to do the work that they do. Literally, the first class that I had my freshman year of college was about creativity in the arts and sciences. So this is kind of something that I’ve been chasing for for a while. And very often when we try and try and understand creativity, we focus on the work that people do, right? What are their daily routines and sort of their engagement with materials or, you know, the things that that are obviously them at work. Consequently, we tend not to sort of to pay attention to their like leisure activities or downtime and so on. And, you know, actually, maybe the key to understanding the lives and the success of people like Ludwig van Beethoven and Charles Darwin and Barbara McClintock, the Nobel laureate in genetics, that, you know, rested not just in understanding how they work, but also how they rested and how the interplay of those in their lives allowed them to have great ideas and to have longer, more sustainable careers and lives and looking through all of the biographies of sort of famous people and then looking at, recent work in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity. What emerged was a couple things.

You know, number one, that really famous people often work a lot less than you expect, like doing what we would regard as work for about 4 or 5 hours a day. And that’s about it. That seems like a shockingly low number for one of today’s workaholics. The other thing was that there are consistent patterns in the way in which they design their days. In particular, they layer these periods of intensive, focused work of usually a couple hours because it turns out that’s about how long most of us reasonably can focus with periods of what look like unproductive time going on long walks, spending time in the garden, etc. but which turns out to offer both an opportunity for mental and physical restoration to recharge the batteries that you’re spending, spending consciously working. But it also gives your mind a chance to, your creative subconscious, a chance to work on problems or work through ideas that you haven’t quite solved. And, you know, even while your attention is devoted elsewhere and it’s often in these moments when we give our creative minds a chance to, you know, to turn over ideas that we will come up with new approaches or ideas about, you know, what if we approach it this way, or when I’m having trouble with when I’m writing, you know?

Well, we could flip these paragraphs, introduce this first, and then go this way. And that’s not the sort of idea that, that, that you necessarily have at a keyboard. It’s the one that you have when you’re off walking the dogs. And what really creative people do is create a sort of structure that makes space for both of those. So what this tells us is that we should not see work and rest as competitors in the way that we so often do. And we’re, you know, and we’re and we’re taught to do, but rather particularly if you are someone who has found something that you are really passionate about, that you want to be good at, and if your impulse is to do a lot of it right, to spend a lot of time doing it, then, you know, that’s, one of the challenges. How do you do that? How do you make the kind of contribution that you want to the world without burning yourself out? And that’s and the answer is to recognise that you can actually do your best work by taking rest seriously, by seeing it not as a kind of not as something that you do when the work is when you know, but when you’re done with all your work because we’re never done, but rather see work and rest as partners, both of which can help you do the kind of work that you want to do, and also make your careers and lives longer, better and more sustainable.

I think that the, you know, another important thing that this teaches us is that rest is actually kind of a skill, right? It’s something that we can learn how to do better in the sense it’s a bit like breathing, in the sense that there is a completely natural quality to breathing. But if you’re an athlete or a singer or even, let’s say, a Buddhist monk, right, you can use your breath to get a little more energy or stamina to project to the back of the auditorium or to help calm your mind and body.

So yeah, so I think, you know, again, for your kind of busy, workaholic, perfectionist types, the idea of rest actually is something that they can cultivate and get better at, but have maybe has a little bit of a hook, an appeal to it that or of, or that would encourage them to try it and then finally that practicing this kind of rest is a way of helping us have both, do better work, but also, you know, fundamentally have better lives. So that’s what the books about. 

Gillian: What I enjoyed about it, was both the historical account of people in the past, but some of the science as well. A friend of mine done some work around creativity and the overlap in science and poetry. You know, how are in which way are these creative actions? And he sort of he took a lot of scientists out was where where did you have your aha moment, you know, where did you have that that breakthrough, that you were able to make a significant leap? And, he finally told me the story around his research. It was very funny. He said, oh, they didn’t. First of all, it was very difficult to get people to trust me, because science, you know, scientists base of work on research and having big brains and doing all the process. But he said the amount of them that had that breakthrough moment coming out of the shower or getting off the bus. So I started collecting breakthroughs that happened when I was getting off the bus, when you weren’t thinking about it. And and so what I’m curious about is it’s the, the subconscious processes that are going on in our physiology and our neuroscience that backs up some of what you’re saying. 

Alex: Sure. So about 30 odd years ago or so for scientists who work on, fMRI, right. Those machines that produce those cool coloured pictures of the brain doing various things. Discovered that when they put people in these machines and told them just to sort of clear their minds and think about nothing, right. So you can kind of calibrate the machine. It turned out people’s brains didn’t really get quiet. It feels subjectively like sort of your brain is sort of shutting down when you just kind of let your mind wander. But in fact, what’s going on is that a whole bunch of areas are activating that connect together, the, that you’re just not aware of, but are actually doing a whole bunch of cool stuff. So they call this the default mode network, because it is something that your brain kind of wants to default to. It can switch on in the time it takes, like to blink your eyes, and the default mode connects together parts of the brain that research tells us are associated with thinking about the past or thinking about the future. so kind of reflection or rumination or projection. And it also connects together parts of the brain that are associated with visual thinking and problem solving. And in particularly attracted to problems that we’ve been working on that were kind of running around in our minds but we haven’t been able to solve it operates all the time. And it’s something that is working, working for us constantly. So, you know, if you have the experience of you’re trying to remember the name of the actor who is in the movie and that you know, that play that you saw in the commercial and you can’t remember. And then five minutes later you’re folding laundry or something and their name pops into your head. That was Hugh Jackman, right? That’s the default mode network continuing to work on problems even while you know you’re occupied with something else. So, you know, while that kind of thing sounds fairly trivial, the same set of mental and cognitive processes seem to be at work in what we call small C creativity, the version where you’re kind of solving everyday problems and kind of big C creativity, the one that you know, produces Mahler’s Fifth Symphony or, you know, the whole, you know, or Finnegans Wake and so the fact that so many accounts of, or creative breakthroughs are ones that, as you say, involve, you know, having these sort of epiphanies when you’re getting out of the shower or, you know, if you’re out on a hike but are preceded by often these long periods of, you know, working intensively on the problem and not getting anywhere and then putting it aside. Gives us, gives us a clue about the way in which the brain solves big problems. And Graham Wallace, who was one, who wrote a book called the Art of thought in the 1920s and was actually one of the co-founders of the London School of Economics, talked about or going through the problem solving, going through four phases where you’ve got this period where you’re working intensively on a problem, and then you reach a point where you can no longer make progress. And so you went and so you set it aside. You have this period of incubation where, you know, somewhere, as he put it, some mysterious process that we don’t understand is at work turning over ideas. And then you have that and then it does its thing and, and reveals an answer in a moment of illumination. Right. That aha moment. 

And then there is the kind of the last chapter is basically the cleanup where you’re proving that this idea works right. It’s like back into the laboratory and you run a bunch more tests and you confirm this insight, and there you go. It’s no surprise you know, I think that, you know, scientists are reluctant to talk about that because even though there are plenty of stories like Henri Poincaré has, you know, had several really well, sort of, you know, or well worked out accounts of this sort where he has made where, you know, he had major, major breakthroughs in his work in pure mathematics while, you know, walking on the cliffs or in one case, actually stepping onto a bus, there is a sense that, you know, science is something because it is a logical, organised activity it’s almost like you’re cheating a little bit because, you know, you’re using a process that or if, that maybe you can’t really completely trust. And I think it speaks to what, you know, it speaks to kind of deeper misunderstandings about the, you know, that assumes that great ideas must be the product of, of intensive labour, right? We have to see that work has happened in order for this sort of for this idea to have kind of scientific validity, but in a sense also to, to not being kind of morally questionable. 

Gillian: Okay.When you were talking there, I felt you really sort of rubbing off into the real edge of science, you know, the real fuzzy edges of, of where human knowledge is at the moment. Things like the study of human consciousness or, quantum mechanics and what does that really say about, our material universe,  fuzzy edges right. And when you speak to scientists who are at the fuzzy edge, you know, the word there’s in my head as you’re talking was inspiration, you know, are they trying to tap into big like formula, a book of knowledge. Somewhere over here, they’re trying to make the leap or are they genuinely open to to finding out new knowledge. And how do you know you’ve got new knowledge? And many of them will say, well, it just felt right. It was a felt experience. And some of the early scientists, who were largely religious men, mostly men, that’s just a way that’s a whole different conversation right. They will talk about finding the mystery of God and, you know, and there’s some kind of felt sense that it was supposed to be beautiful. Right. so that it feels like some of your work into neuroscience and tracking the history and, and the new science around this is really rubbing up against the creative edge of humans discovering knowledge and where that knowledge comes from.

Alex: I think that obviously new ideas, new theories or go up against those edges. But I think also that I should introduce the caveat that, you know, for all the cool stuff that neuroscientists and psychologists of creativity or of Earth have done, there’s still plenty of stuff that they’re still learning and connections that still need to be made in order to understand even better, more clearly how these mechanisms really work. For example, autobiographical stuff that suggests that when people you know are working on these practices for…or balancing periods of deep, intensive work with periods of sort of rest that it take it, it seems to take them a couple of months to kind of get good at this and in a way that my sense is that, as with anything that we learn, what seems to be happening is that as we practice this part of our creative minds or subconscious sort of get better at recognising that we’re actually going to have the next couple hours of where I can do my thing, but we don’t know how habit building or long, you know, or longevity of practice play into with, the, the ability of the default mode network to do its thing. It’s just, you know, we just haven’t gotten there yet. Yeah, but it seems like, you know, from, you know, reading the likes of, you know, of Poincaré or Ernst Mach, who said, you know, the thing about it is that my subconscious mind is actually a better mathematician than I am, because it can come up with answers to problems that no matter how hard I work, I cannot arrive at through conscious volition and effort. And so, you know, we’ve got a good picture of how this works. 

Gillian: So I want to, I want to talk a bit about why this book is so needed. So yesterday I was at a conference of church leaders. There was hundreds. And, there’s lots of things church leaders agree on and lots they don’t agree on, but one thing everyone agreed on in the room was everyone’s on their knees, everyone’s exhausted, everyone’s tired. I spend a lot of my life going around speaking to groups of clergy and lay leaders and other Christians and it’s a constant theme. I looked up some stats before meeting with you today, and I read that the majority of adults feel stressed every month, particularly young adults 18 to 24, and that nearly half of the youth workforce here in the UK, according to the survey survey, is, close to burnout.

So it feels like the need is really high. Alex, for us to reassess why why we’re in this situation where so many people are feeling burnout. Is burnout something that’s driven your work and could rest be part of the solution? 

Alex: Absolutely. No. Okay, first off, you say you’re not the person this was written for, but maybe not you specifically, but you are exactly the kind of person who I imagined as a reader for this. Yeah, right. I mean, the people, people who are passionate about their work, but of who, you know, who want to do a good job, but who are doing things that they think matter but who are at risk of essentially destroying themselves in order to do it well, and who think that this is actually a trade off that I’ve got to make. Right. You know, for there is, I think, for lots of creative people, a sense that we do our best when we are doing our best work, when we get into flow, you know, our sense of ourselves kind of vanishes. And it is just some essential part of us and, you know, part of and this thing that we are creating in our own minds are kind of out of the way.

And I think that for creative people that, that can unfortunately lead to the idea that, you know, if created, you know, if great creative work involves a kind of dissolving or erasing of the self, then, or then kind of doing, doing your work in a way that’s likely to burn you out will, therefore, you know, will therefore make for better work, that there’s a kind of trade off that you can make of, you know, you destroy a certain amount of you and then or the work gets better and it doesn’t actually work that way, likewise, unfortunately, there are you know, I think there are lots of professionals who are in the same kind of boat, right? One of the aspects of professions is not just that there is, you know, we’ve got a lot of like expert knowledge that we have and a certain amount of status that comes from that. But there’s a sense that this is not just an occupation, but rather as a calling, that it should be sort of a defining feature of our identities as well as a source of income. And that all too easily can lead to a sense that we need that or, you know, we should not protect our time or protect ourselves in the course of doing that work, right. The term workaholic itself was one that was coined by a guy named Wayne Oates, who was a professor of theology at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. And he coined it after, you know, studying ministers. 

Gillian: Waow. 

Alex: And so, you know, so this is the original professional group, of that, you know, that that yielded yielded that term. And I think that, you know, for so many of us, the burnout has become, you know, has gone from or a risk for certain professional groups to being a kind of public health hazard for a whole bunch of structural risk of structural and cultural reasons. Yeah. Around, you know, we’ve had a couple generations now where success or idea of success isn’t, you know, is not based on people, you know, starting in the mailroom, working their way up, you know, paying their dues and eventually reaching the tops of their professions. But rather is something that happens, as in finance and, you know, the tech world, incredibly quickly, right? You know, you are you work titanically long hours, the markets right and then you’re you know, you are you are a billionaire overnight. It’s not it’s not something that happens sort of slowly and deliberately.

Gillian: So I was thinking about church leaders. So often when clergy get together you get sort of this competitiveness, competitive tiredness. “Oh I have got four funerals.” “Oh, I wish I only had four funerals, I had 12 and somebody died during the funeral.” “Oh that’s nothing…” says the next one that goes on and this they wear their exhaustion like a badge of honour.

And part of me thinking about it compassionately is that often they have no other way to measure their success of what they’re doing. So moving from a, from, a system that really values the creativity that produced by Rest is a bit of a leap of faith. We need we need a way to feel confident, in a world where we feel we’re getting judged to to work in a different way.

So, a vicar, I heard a story an apocryphal story really. The vicar retired. Moved away. Oh, God, he was always in his garden, pruning his roses. What work did he do? Got a new vicar now, she’s much better. And after a few months, “all she does is sit in front of her computer. We never see her. She’s always so busy and they suddenly realised the vicar, who was in the front garden pruning his roses, was available to have conversations. He worked in a different way. So within the clergy world, you know, there’s this competitive overwork that leads to workaholism that isn’t healthy. But to make a shift to a different way of work takes a bit of bravery and courage wouldn’t it? 

Alex: Absolutely. And, you know, there is the same set of challenges with clergy in the US, right? There’s, I had a conversation with someone who works with evangelicals, and they talk about, you know, the strain of the of, you know, counting noses and nickels, you know, day in and day out. Yeah. Right. Trying to grow the church or have, you know, it’s a and, you know, doing a I think, you know, often, often it involves work that is not directly related to ministry. The ministry or the spiritual side of, you know, the profession, which is, you know, what a lot of, you know, a lot of people envision themselves spending time doing right, not updating the newsletter and, you know, etc. The most durable answer to the question of how do you, you know, how do you change your own behaviour or your own way of working when you’re part of a system, that of valorises over work, that encourages you, in a sense, to kind of compete with others on the basis of how many hours you’re doing and how tired you are. The most durable solution is to work together and change the system. 

One of the great things that we have to overcome is the idea that these problems with burnout and overwork, challenges with work life balance, are individual ones. That happens to us as individuals. But that doesn’t mean that every single one of us is burned out, because every single one of us is doing it wrong, right? We’re all burned out because we exist in a world that has essentially been attuned to inflict moral injury upon us, or to make, unreasonable demands of, you know, of professionals, you know, and, and to seek to extract as much labour out of people as possible and changing the system, like, or fighting back against a system like that is very difficult to do as or of just one person.

But it’s possible to change if you act or if, if you act together. This is the great lesson of the companies that I’ve been working with, right? These firms that have been moving to four day weeks without cutting anyone’s salary, without cutting expectations around, you know, quality of service and what they teach us is that while, you know, you can make, sometimes you can make some individual accommodation and while there are, while there is some benefit to things to individual solutions, like, you know, the yoga class or the, you know, or the gym membership, the way really to fix the problem that we all have is to fix the system that is behind it. That collective action turns out to be the most potent form of self-care.

You know, what I’m seeing is this kind of organisational change happening in, you know, in law firms, in Michelin starred restaurants, software startups, right places where intense work, perfectionism, you know, these are just, you know, part of the trade. These often are led by people who did more than their share of 80 hour weeks in world famous kitchens, you know, dodging pans and learning the perfect way to, you know, sort of to make this reduction right, who’ve carried the best of those lessons into their own work, but want to create worlds that are less destructive and abusive and believe that it’s possible to do so.

And I think that the, you know, if you can see it, see leaders in these, these fields and we are beginning to see them, sort of saying that, you know, the way that we were trained for all of its intensity and romance can be made better without, you know, and and that we can still do great work in the kitchen without ruining people’s lives and ruining people’s careers.

Gillian: I wonder if you could sort of like, zoom out a bit or generalise it a little? Because, burnout is not just reserved, for people in high end professions and people, you know, lucky enough to be able to do really creative stuff, there’s a general sense of not quite burnout but people being disconnected, and feeling low and fractured in their lives, disconnected from themselves or from their communities. With the environmental movement we see how much we’ve destroyed the world that we live in. And that’s causing, people, depression and mental health problems as well. And the thing I got from your book, Alex, was through rest I could find ways to reconnect. So, by taking a nap, you had a whole chapter on taking a nap, which I just loved. You’ve got to get up early, yeah. And, but, you know, which suits my body. So that’s reconnecting with the needs of my physical body. Going for a walk. I was fascinated by that chapter as well, that you can measure the creativity impacts of going for a walk, even if it’s in a room on a walking machine, which that blew my mind because you didn’t even need to go for a walk outside.

Reconnecting, if you are outside with nature and working at a pace that allows you the freedom to reconnect with your family and your community and, and, and other kind of reconnections we want to talk about. I wonder if there’s, you know, outside of high level jobs and things like that, whether you’re kind of approaching the four day week offer something broader, which is about reconnecting with ourselves and who or what we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to live.

Alex: I love this question. I did, okay, first of all, one of the things that both for four day week companies and and creatives who had great ideas out walking teaches us is that to fight against one form of that disconnection, which is the assumption that, you know, essentially as knowledge workers, we are kind of just brains, you know, brains connected to yes and hands doing stuff on keyboards that are, incidentally, that, you know, also have bodies. That’s wrong, right? Thinking is actually a pretty physical thing for us. And that, you know, the studies of walking and creativity which showed that the basic the top line there is that the physical act of walking seems to sort of do things to sort of stimulate the mind that help us be more creative, whether or not we are in nature or, you know, or we are like facing a concrete wall.

So it’s not just the walking outside, it’s the walking that is, you know, that begins to get the creative juices flowing. You know, I think that, you know, likewise, if you’re in, if you’re in a meeting in Silicon Valley for longer than about ten minutes, someone’s going to get up and start pacing and start writing on the whiteboard. And it’s not just that people are bored, it’s that, you know, it’s that that movement can help unlock ideas, can help people, and sometimes help people stay focused in ways that are sort of or are valuable for cognitive processes. Now, I think when you look at the way in which people spend their time, when they get four day weeks, it turns out almost without fail, people do disgustingly wholesome things with more time.

Yeah, right. It’s not that they’re going on three day benders instead of two day benders. They talk about, you know, what they talk about is being able to spend more time with their family, being able to do community stuff to also, you know, get back into shape or, you know, you’ve got more time to cook rather than where, you know, or get takeout. There’s a little bit of sort of gender differential differentiation here. Men are spending a higher percentage of their free time with kids than or women are, which reflects just the imbalance in the way that sort of that that the that they had been spending time previously. In Iceland, which is whose public sector moved to, a shorter workweek a couple of years ago. It seems that broadly, the pattern is men with more free time are spending more time with the kids, women with more free, free time where moms are spending to do so are spending more free time with each other. 

Gillian: Hallelujah. Let’s all move to Iceland. 

Alex: Exactly. I have one company co-founder who introduced a four day week in his design firm. So, you know, again, another professional, lots of, you know, lots of all nighters, you know, lots of, we’re a very intense work demanding clients. You know, I asked, you said that, you know, what do people do with their free time? Or if they take care of themselves or of they spend time with their families, they spend time with the community?

So fundamentally, what people do when you give them more free time is they care. 

Gillian: Waow. 

Alex: And right. Thus end the lesson. And I think that, you know, it speaks. You know what this what this suggests to me is that, you know, you read people like Thomas Merton, right? Talking about the necessity about, you know, finding God in stillness. Right. That’s proof that you need stillness and quiet in order to connect with the Divine. So too I think that, you know, that the, the experience of, the four day week companies and, and how people, how people use their free time tells us that. But one of the things we need to do in order to give, give people the ability to reconnect with communities, to reconnect with families, and so on, is simply to give them more time to do so. And if you do that, they will…

Gillian:  It opens up time to care. 

Alex: Yes. 

Gillian: I think that’s what’s going to stay with me from our conversation. Although, I don’t know what you’re going to say next …but because that that is, isn’t it? I think from the Christian perspective, part of the vocation, is to be the person of Christ to those we meet.

And that takes space and time. Often, Alex, I do a lot in clergy well-being, speak to groups of Christians, ordained or not. And, we promote the idea of human flourishing, which has got roots, huge roots theologically, roots in the Hebrew Bible around whole person health, where we’re not just souls trapped inside naughty bodies. we are created as whole people. So it’s really good theology. We’ve got the theology of the Sabbath rest. Which is a Christian version of a four day week, a ton more science in there. You know we’ve got good stuff, that I’m basing this whole charity on. Yeah. This, this is good stuff. We should be doing this more and it can change the world. That’s our big vision. But every time I do a group, there’s some version of, of a theology that gets in the way. So I remember doing, a group of clergy and, a parish priest, black African background, who was a, a great priest, very dedicated. and he said “Gillian you know, I’m really curious about what you’re saying because I have brought up by missionaries in my country, they came from the West, they came to Africa, and they converted me that’s the bit of his journey, he shared. And they came, Gillian with these boxes that were about six foot long and 2.5ft wide, and they had all their stuff in them, and they took their stuff in these boxes because these boxes doubled up as their coffins, because they knew they were coming to that my country to die, to work themselves to death for our Lord Jesus Christ. So he said, I’ve got some things to think through…” You’re thinking oh man, that is a story and a half! That’s your lived experience. But they were right up against things, some theological ideas that we are here to expand our lives for Christ. Linked in with some aspects of the Protestant Reformation that we are saved through the works that we do. I remember being in the West Coast right up the west coast of Scotland. It’s very it’s very Protestant up there. The more north you go in, the more west the more Protestant it gets. I remember picked up a leaflet from, you know, the parish church or whatever, and the ministers – they’re all ministers – the ministers inspiring thought for the day was this: this poor widow, she lost her husband. Her son had left her. She was all alone, but she still had the floor to sweep. She still had. And she knew she would say…waow. So this big theology here within it as well. So I don’t know if you could speak into that, like what’s going on and, and how, how do we sort of counter that, when I meet people? I mean, this is deep stuff. This is salvation. 

Alex: You know, I guess, like, my first caveat is that, that I’m not particularly religious and whatever sort of, stuff on spirituality and theology has been kind of fairly random. But, you know, I think that the that, that I have always, you know, when I was, when I was writing, one of my other books, I discovered Thomas Merton’s work, but also this amazing book by Abraham Heschel called The Sabbath, which is…Heschel was, a rabbi. He had a PhD in theology from, I want to say Vienna or Berlin, you know, managed to get out of the 30s, came to the US, but he was, you know, he was a very deep thinker. And the and the Sabbath is an exploration kind of built around sort of the idea that, okay, there are lots of holidays in the Jewish calendar, but the Sabbath is the only one that’s a commandment, right? And that, you know, and he builds this, builds this amazing vision of the Sabbath. It’s distinctive because it locates holiness, not in a particular place, right, or of a sacred grove or a mountaintop where the gods live, but rather located in time. It’s not just a day of rest. It’s a day in which you can experience some of the time in the way that of that, that God does. It struck me as or, you know, an incredible argument about both the varied ways in which we experience time. But the absolute necessity of sort of making making time for this kind of, this kind of really profound rest. You know, one of the reasons that I’m doing that, that I do this work with Four Day Week Global is it feels like the way in which I can make a difference in the world. Right? But my route to being able to claim that I’ve done something good with my life, that I’ve made some sort of difference, it does not mean that, you know, I would make 40% more difference if I did it seven days a week rather than, you know, four.

You know, I think that the other thing is that looking over the course of one’s life, that there’s a strong argument to be made, that working in ways that are designed to burn you out early opens a big question of what do you do with the whole rest of your life? If you have this thing that you’ve discovered, let’s say in your 20s, that you really like and you work in a way that allows you to do it and to really enjoy it only for, you know, let’s say 10 or 15 years before you’re completely exhausted. What are you left with? And I think it is, you know, you are going to be able to do more good in the world and, you know, to, to in a sense, sweep more floors. If if you have a vision of that work and of a vision of how you can balance it with rest in ways that let you do it for a while, you know, for more of your life rather than less!

Gillian: And you described there your work I mean, I mean, thank God for you and for your work and what you’re doing. It feels very clearly a vocation – a kind of Christian word isn’t that vocation/ a calling to make a difference in the world I was speaking with a group of clergy quite recently about vocation. And, I think it’s Karl Barth’s got this lovely definition – ‘we discover our vocation where we, when we’re able to align our mind, body and soul’ and, and then Bart and Bonhoeffer then say that if we carry out our vocation we will flourish, you know, flourish in life and, you know, make it, if so, where it’s all great stuff and I love it. 

Alex, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I want to ask one more question. And, so, so one of our big themes in the organisation GoHealth is flourishing. If people have been listening to your, our chat today, apart from going out and buying your books, links will all be in the, blurb. What what one thing can you suggest to people to do today. Having listened to what one thing could people do to, think about rest and, living the good life? 

Alex: One thing you can do here, you know, I think that, turn off your phone and go for a walk. I mean, I did that sort of, you know, there’s a there’s a reason that, you know, that philosophers for, you know, for millennia have talked about or of, you know, sort of, you know, having insights or solving problems by walking, and as, you know, it’s something that, you know, most of us can do. It doesn’t require, you know, we already know how to do that, doesn’t require sort of a lot of extra equipment, but which can open up you at least open up a crack for, for seeing a different way in which we can, you know, in which we can live and we can balance work and rest. I think that’s, you know, that’s a that’s a great place to start. 

Gillian: I love that crack. I have in my head that quotation from Rumi, which was then, misquoted by Leonard Cohen. ‘The cracks is where the light comes in’ So, like, going for a walk, letting the crack, letting some of the light in…Thank you so much. your book has been a huge blessing to me in my work life. I know it will be for others. And thank you for giving us, your time today. I really appreciate, and I’ve just loved meeting you.

Alex: Thank you very much. Me too. 

Gillian: Cool. Thank you. 

Alex: All right. 

Gillian: So that was my conversation with Alex Pang. What did you think? We are picking up the conversation as ever over in the go House community.

You can find us on GoHealth.org.uk/burn like stars. And at the moment as I mentioned before, we are running, a free membership offer join for free, get all your burn out resources for free. All the resourcing that you need it’s our gift to you and everyone is welcome. We are really grateful for our sponsors for this episode.

Saint Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, one of the guilds healthy healing hubs, and you can check out their work at Saint Paul’s knightsbridge.org. Once again, a million thank yous to my colleague Wendy Lloyd for all the work she puts into this podcast. And big thank you to you too for listening. I hope you will check out the next episode and don’t forget to like and subscribe to us. It makes a huge difference. I means you won’t miss anything.