Why High Achievers Can’t Switch Off | Boarding School, Burnout & “The Train” Habit | Piers Cross

Okay, welcome. So today I wanted to offer some reflections about how, as ex-boarders, we struggle to stop, and this idea that we're almost on a train, and this train has just been going since we were at school. And I'm just going to talk a little bit about timetabling. Talked about this in other videos, but I just want to unpick it a little bit, that, and a little practice we can do for getting off this train. So, okay, so I was in a client session yesterday and just this idea came up about, you know, coming from nix idea in Wounded Lead— not Wounded Leaders, it's in Trauma, Abandonment, and Privilege. You can't read that, but Trauma, Abandonment, Privilege by Nick Duffell and Thurston Bassett. And he's just saying about how basically we call it timetabling, and it is one of the universal curses of ex-boarders. Though of course it can be useful at work, but when it rules domestic life, it is a calamity that therapists will need to spot, name, and do their best to help tame. It affects all ex-boarders. George Orwell's memoir of his prep school, Such Were the Joys, reveals him well prepped for doublespeak and totalitarianism before the age of 12. And he just talks about this: Whether Orwell knew in what ways he himself had been affected by boarding is doubtful. He seems not to have been very good at self-care, and he certainly smoked himself into an early grave. So I just think this is important just to see this idea That if you imagine you arrive as a child in boarding school and it's almost like there's a train and it's going and it's timetabling, right? You've got to go to this lesson, you've got to do this, you've got to get up, you've got cubicle inspection, you've got, you know, maybe marching into lunch, you've got all of these things. It's like a Momentum that you're carrying. Now, as Nick Duffield says, it's useful in work. Exactly. But the problem is, is that we really struggle not just in intimate relationships, but just when we're not at work. It's like we're on this train, we always got to be doing so. Just time with ourselves, we struggle To just sit. And I remember the time that I tried to get off the train. First time was my 20s, being in a Buddhist monastery, and I'd just sit in this chair, and it'd be after lunch, and I'd been busy, but I'd just stop, and I'd be trying to get up again, and I'd sit again, and I'd go try and get up. And I just started to train myself to just sit and stay there and just focus on a point. Meditate, be with this discomfort, this momentum. So I think, you know, it's a powerful metaphor, and why it's powerful is that the feeling side, the emotional side, the what I call— well, Jung and Robert Moore, they talk the lover archetype— that part of us doesn't live on the train, doesn't live It's like we've got to step off the train. It's Cal Newport in his book Deep Work talks about shutdown complete, right? 6 o'clock, at 7 o'clock, all emails, it's off. Phone is off. It's family time or it's time for myself or time with friends. It's shutdown complete. It's we get off the train. But most of us don't get off that train, especially if we're ex-boarders. We'll be on our phones, we'll be doing stuff, and we'll be doing work emails, work, do that over the weekend as well. And what happens is we're not giving our attention to our families, we're not giving our attention to ourselves, and what that leads to is burnout. And so part of our work is But you can just visualize that at the end of the day or weekend, is just see yourself stepping off the train and see it speeding on. And it's like, oh, I'll get it again tomorrow. But just notice how that feels. And you can just do that now. It's like settling into the body, how it feels maybe to sit in a safe place. Find a safe place in nature in your mind's eye, and you can see the train going, but you're now here. And just notice what you feel in your body. Part of you is going to want to get back on that train, like I said with my experience in the monastery. Just come back, sit. Okay, begin with 5 minutes, then do 10 minutes, then do 20 minutes. And it links into Brad Stuhlberg and Steve Magnus's work in Peak Performance, their book. They talk about this equation, I've mentioned it before, but stress plus rest equals growth. So the stress is the train. There's nothing wrong with stress. In The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal. She says stress, if we label it, we reframe it from threat response to challenge response, so we see it, okay, it's good, yeah, bring it on, it's good for us. But she says we've got to rest, we've got to stop. So this is the train and this is, yeah, being still, being in that quiet, still place where we can connect to others. We're not going anywhere, you know, the Lover, Archetype. There's no destination. There's no one thing. It's just being. It's enjoying nature or being in gratitude, being in joy. And so this is really key, is giving ourselves that space to get off the train. And it's not a bad thing. We need to be on the train when we're working, when we're doing stuff. It's like, right, boom. Go and do this, we've got that to do, right, this, it's like, got to be on the train. But if we never get off, it then leads to burnout. And I see this a lot with the leaders I work with, is they get to a point where it's like, right, I've just got to slow down, I've got to stop, I just can't keep driving myself to this. And what happens is when you have a rest, then you can be that much more on And then you're off. So it's like what we call an ultradian rhythm, 90 minutes on, 30 minutes off, or 10 minutes off. Then we do another one. But what happens at the end of the day? We're not burnt out. We've got off that train for that period of time. For me, what does that look like is I leave this room where I work and I'll go for a walk, or today I've been for a run, and I'll Have a meal. When my wife was alive, I would go and spend time with her. And then at the end, say 7 o'clock tonight, I'll finish. And that's it. Shut down completely. Computer goes off. My phone generally goes off about 8 o'clock. And I just write. So that's what it looks like getting off the train. And so I just think it's useful thing for us just to become aware of. And this is all we're doing. We're bringing awareness to a habit, a habit that kept us safe because at school if we weren't on that train, if we were just sat daydreaming, we'd get in trouble for daydreaming, or what I found in my school is I'd be sat doing nothing, daydreaming, and that's when other people would come in and give you work. Right, you're not doing anything, Cross, go make me a cup of Tea or a slice of toast or go and do this chore. And you're like— So I learned that, right, got to be doing. So I'd be playing sport, I'd be, you know, playing table tennis. I would always be doing an activity. I would always be on the train because it wasn't safe not to be on it. And often I would hear or see boys who were off in the change room when they weren't meant to be in the changing room. And people would all go in and laugh at them. Well, what are you doing in here? It wasn't okay to get off the train and to daydream. But we know now psychologically that rest, so important. Play, so important. Just almost boredom is good for the brain to develop. So, um, yeah, please do. you've got any reflections, whether this resonates, you can see this and try it and then, you know, comment below. Oh yeah, that really helped me. So last week I had a great conversation with Jessica Boston, which went live, about shame. Please do go and watch that if you're interested in shame and boarding school, especially from the female perspective. And then this Friday I have an interview with Jane Barkley, who Who is a leading psychotherapist, counsellor, and has done a lot of work. She was, she's done, started creating this play. We're talking about creativity, we're talking about her experiences at boarding school, and also a little bit just about, yeah, this play that she's written, this musical. So yeah. Really fascinating. So have a wonderful week, and yeah, I look forward to speaking soon. Take care.