The importance of integration time
As you may have heard us speak about before, every year CCI takes the month of August as a pause from external client meetings, facilitation and coaching for our own strategic planning, professional development and self-care. It feels like we’ve always done it that way, but actually, looking through my calendar, it seems that 2021 was the first year we implemented this “retreat month” along with “retreat weeks” every two months, probably as a result of the kind of year 2020 was on multiple fronts.
In 2021, even though we weren’t meeting with clients, we spent most of the month working on client deliverables. Although I went on vacation for two weeks, there was literally only one day when I actually took off. I realized then that wasn’t ok. I committed to doing better in 2022… and I did. I had an amazing vacation, the best in several years, but as I neared the end, I realized I still had worked more than I intended.
This year my intention is to not have to do any work at all for my two week vacation at the end of August.
The fact that this feels like a shocking and radical concept is quite a sad reflection of how we view work and vacation… well, I should speak only for myself but I know I’m not the only one. Nor is this by accident. It’s very much part of corporate culture/racial capitalism, rooted in the long past necessary obsession with production resulting from Northern European cultures surviving in colder climates with limited time periods for harvesting (see Dr. Ed Nichol’s Model for Understanding Cultural Differences).
This year though I’m planning ahead… and I’m also taking some inspiration from my kids both for this year and as we plan forward for future years.
I’ve always loved the summer, but this year in particular, perhaps with enough distance from the trauma of a year or more of remote learning (which we are still recovering from by the way - and by we I mean that I believe we collectively are still recovering from it) and with both of my kids now in middle school (one soon to start high school) I’m seeing it with different eyes. I’m seeing how much my kids are growing, both literally but also emotionally. Freed from the constraints of the regular school year, they are trying new things - newfound independence, new activities, hanging out with new friends… it’s really quite incredible.
And I thought to myself, for all that is toxic and constraining about academia, what if one of the things they have right is the whole semester system, including winter break and summer break???? What if we structured our “main” work with organizations around semesters, and then winter break (January) and summer break (not just August but June and July as well) are for smaller group work, more creative and exploratory programs and… integration time.
We need time to process what we’ve learned through our entire bodies. It needs time to sink from “head to heart to hands”. We need time to practice in different contexts, to take a pause from the “intake” part of learning and engage in the “putting it into practice” kind of learning.
And sometimes that doesn’t look like “work.” Sometimes it looks like a different kind of cadence or rhythm from what kind feel like an endless repetition of week upon week upon week when we enter the working world and lose that cyclical structure of the academic year.
I’m not just talking about us, I’m talking about our clients too. We can’t necessarily change the cadence of their work life, but we can create an ebb and flow to our work that allows for time between, say, an intense series of workshops, to sit with, reflect and put into practice what they’ve learned from engaging with us, just as we do.
We haven’t formalized this idea as a team yet (it’s on our list to reflect on in August) but I’m liking it.
How do you build in “cycles” into your work life? Do you have built in periods for integration?
Banner photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
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