‘Less haste, more speed’ is a well-known and oft-quoted proverb, but how often do we forget the wisdom on which it is based? Modern life tends to be very busy and can be highly pressurised. A common reaction to this is for people to speed up, to try to do things in a rush. However, this is a big, big mistake. Rushing is at the root of many of the problems people experience in life.
This is for a variety of reasons. First, rushing means that we are much more likely to make mistakes – and, at times, those mistakes can have major consequences. Consider, for example, when you have made a mistake or you have been on the receiving end of someone else’s mistake. How often did the mistake arise because the person concerned was rushing, not paying sufficient attention to what they were doing?
Second, one of the key factors in stress is control. People can generally cope with a high level of pressure, provided that they have sufficient control over the demands being made on them, while even a relatively modest amount of pressure can produce a stress reaction if control is lacking. Rushing takes away our sense of control; when we are rushing, we tend to feel that we are losing our grip, that control is slipping away from us. Rushing can therefore be very counterproductive when trying to avoid stress. It can contribute to a vicious circle. The more pressure we are under, the more we rush; the more we rush, the less of a sense of control we have; the less of a sense of control we have, the more stressed we are; and on it goes.
Third, we have to consider what message rushing is giving other people. For example, a sales assistant in a retail context who is rushing in serving a customer is likely to be giving (unwittingly) a message to the effect that they do not have time for the customer, and therefore that the customer is not important (or even that the customer is not welcome). So, next time you are rushing, think carefully about what message you are likely to be giving to other people involved in the situation.
Rushing, despite being highly counterproductive for the reasons outlined here, can easily become the ‘default’ setting for some people. They become so used to rushing that this becomes their normal response to the demands they face. For some people, rushing gives them a sense that what they are doing is important, so important that they can’t hang around and just have to ‘get on with it’. So, they get self-esteem from it. This is highly dangerous, of course, because it means they are unlikely to be thinking carefully about what they do, are doing minimal planning, are not anticipating potential pitfalls and are therefore missing opportunities to be creative and are highly unlikely to be learning or developing.
Avoiding rushing does not, of course, mean going to the other extreme of dawdling or wasting time. It is, rather, a matter of balancing the pace at which we work with the attention the tasks concerned need for us to do them properly.
So, the temptation to rush is one that we very much need to resist. The more pressure we are under, the more we need to be thinking carefully about what we do, about how best to manage those pressures, how best to draw on the support available to us, and so on. Simply trying to get things done at an unnatural pace creates far more problems than it solves. By avoiding rushing, we can become more skilled in managing pressures and more confident in doing so.
