life-iu-news-awareness-3.1.22-laundry

Hey ,

You heard that right – stop “folding your laundry.”About a year ago, I was hiking in Costa Rica with my wife and Handel Method Expert, Marnie Nir, and my sister-in-law and Handel Group co-founder and chairwoman, Lauren Zander.Marnie and I were talking about how borderline giddy (to an embarrassing degree) we were that our rental house came with the wildly awesome perk of our laundry being done for us.We noticed that Lauren had a puzzled look on her face... She was a bit baffled (not an easy feat) as to why we were so overjoyed at having our laundry done and folded. We barely understood her question. She informed us that she hadn’t folded her own laundry since she was in her twenties.  Twenties?!  Mind you, not because she was so well-off.Just wiser about her time, about what gives her joy, and about what actually produces results in her life.And delegating tasks was part of how she made those results happen. As human beings (human doings?) we get stuck with doing things that we used to do at different stages in our lives, that we do well, or that we do automatically or by default, even though at our current stage in life we should no longer do them.Worse than not giving us pleasure, they deplete our productivity.The notion of bypassing tasks we loathe and that usurp a lot of our time and energy never even occurred to Marnie and me.Instead, we tolerated doing laundry as a given, and did it, like many of us do: begrudgingly, while watching Euphoria.Leaving me to wonder, not just because of what Lauren said, but because she also charged me with looking where else in my life I was caught in the weeds, being a good soldier, not big-picture thinking, and acting like a “kibbutznik.”A what?I grew up in the south of Israel on a kibbutz, an intentional communal settlement, typically a farm. I loved it. My parents were founding members and lived there their entire lives.Hard working, head down, do your tasks…whether you loved them or not. Whether or not you were caught in the “weeds” and minutiae…or in my case, the potato fields.We all worked hard in our own distinct areas to make things run smoothly as a whole, period.It’s what made me, me. As with any trait, this one has its good side (where it works) and its dark side (where it doesn’t).The good? I’m the salt of the earth kind of human. I create community. Rock my apple farm. Take care of people. Am generous and giving. My hardworking, head-down kibbutznik trait helped put myself through business school, while working a fulltime job.I’ve competed in Ironman triathlons, even after I broke my neck. And eventually, it got me to become a partner and CEO, and live my dream at HG.Where it’s not so nice? I do, do, do for others, not so much because I’m simply generous and hard working, but also because (see: Israeli), I do it better than you.By the time I tell you how to do it as well as me (ha), I’d have done it already. Easier to do than ask.But is it...?