7. Speeding up vs Slowing down - what is the cost?

In this episode we explore Speeding up vs Slowing down – what is the cost? 

In a world that constantly tells us to go faster, do more and be more efficient, omnipresent AI - the latest productivity tool - only amplifies that message. 

But what if the wiser question isn't how to do more, but to ask - at what cost? 

In this conversation, we explore the tension between slowing down and speeding up and why our own inner wisdom - not the tool - must remain the guide for how we live. 

In this episode we explore Coming Home: the InsideOut understanding  

Today we go a little deeper into what is at the foundation of our work and life.  

What if we've been trying to fix ourselves and the truth is we were never broken? What if we are already okay at the core of our being? 

In this conversation we share the understanding that changed everything for us – and how it felt like we were coming home to our true nature. For a woman this is the most reassuring, liberating and empowering of experiences. 

About this podcast

We believe the voice of the older woman is medicine for the world.

Elizabeth Lovius and Liz Scott are two women post-55 with a combined century of living, loving and learning. Although opposites in personality, pace and lifestyle, we share a deep passion for inside-out transformation. Our individual career journeys have led us to inspire, coach and teach people to reconnect to their own inner wisdom in business and community settings.

In The Wild, Wise Feminine, we share our unfiltered conversations about what it really means to come into your own, be seen and hold the line for love.

Whether you're navigating the territory beyond menopause yourself, or simply curious about the wild wisdom that emerges when women start trusting what they know - we'd love you to pull up a chair.

If you want to get in touch - contact us at:  lizscottcoaching@me.com

For more about and how to work with Elizabeth Lovius www.elizabethlovius.com 

For more about and how to work with Liz Scott www.lizscott.co.uk

Transcript

Liz Scott 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Wild, Wise Feminine.

Elizabeth Lovius 0:09

We believe the voice of the feminine elder is medicine for the world. We are Elizabeth Lovius and Liz Scott. Two women with a combined century of living, loving, and learning.

Liz Scott 0:26

In the Wild Wise Feminine, we share our unfiltered conversations about what it really means to come into your own, be seen, and hold the line for love. We'd love you to pull up a chair. In this episode, we explore speeding up versus slowing down. What is the cost?

Elizabeth Lovius 0:57

In a world that constantly tells us to go faster, do more, and be more efficient. Omnipresent AI, the latest productivity tool, only amplifies that message.

Liz Scott 1:09

But what if the wiser question isn't how to do more, but to ask, at what cost? In this conversation, we explore the tension between slowing down and speeding up. And why our own inner wisdom, not the tool, must remain the guide for how we live.

Elizabeth Lovius 1:39

Well, hello Liz. Here we are again, together, having a chat, women talking.

Liz Scott 1:44

Oh, I love, I love my conversations with you, Elizabeth, because I spend a lot of time, as you know, walking and I'm reflecting on things in my own little world, but it's so good just to bounce things off. Someone who is interested in the same things as me. So it's a real delight to connect with you on this podcast.

Elizabeth Lovius 2:02

Yes, well, we've been noticing that we've been our differences have become so complementary. And I think at times we can bump up to each other, but if we stay present and connected, we discover the rub is actually that creative tension that makes everything better. And we've really learned that. So it's been a really um rich journey of working with somebody who is bringing balancing you, you know. I f I feel it's that's been really nourishing, which kind of brings us to this topic today, because we were like kind of wondering both where we stood and how we felt, and would would the other one agree, and where where would it, you know, would this be one of those rubs? And, you know, we were just really examining something, and I'm sure everyone listening is examining the exact same thing. And the headline that we've come up with with this uh little talk today that we're going to explore, and and honestly, we really don't know fully what the other one's gonna say. So, as we never do, but especially on this topic, it's this this juxtaposition of um this urgent need at this stage of life and intuitively and the messaging that we receive from the land, from those around us, this imperative to slow down, to to slow down, to be present, to see more. I call in my workshops, I call get on the barge, get off the speed boat of life, get on the barge of life, because when you slow down, it's fun and exciting on the speed boat of life, but what are you seeing? And what's the purpose of the journey? Is it to get from A to B as quick as you can? Or on the barge, you're not going very fast, but you're seeing more and experiencing more richly. So this is the slowing down our element that nourishes our souls, and then juxtaposed against that is go faster, do more, be more efficient, be more productive, use tools that are gonna help you make your life easier. I'm gonna call those productivity tools. And since the industrial revolution, but frankly, since the wheel, there have been productivity tools that have helped us go faster. You know, the wheel is literally we can track a lot back to that. And so go faster to be able to do more, and then but at what cost? And now, of course, you know, began in 2010 with smartphones, but we've now exponentially we're all facing it, AI is another productivity tool. And as a wiser woman, we have to slow down enough to listen and feel into what it is true about that for us? What are we noticing about that? What is our wisdom saying about this idea of productivity and AI? And and then don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's something there too that's useful, but but what is it and what isn't useful? And this is the place we found ourselves in. So, Liz, I'm gonna throw it over to you. What what's alive for you about this subject right now?

Liz Scott 5:14

Well, you I think you've touched on so much actually, and I I guess where I'm at at the moment is that it feels quite present for me to reflect on this in my life. Slowing down, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up. And every single day there is something I am engaged with which makes my life easier and speeds it up. And I guess what I'm really reflecting on at the moment is at what cost. That's what I'm really reflecting on. So it can be as simple as, for example, we we get some lovely um boxes of food delivered, recipes in them, and all the correct ingredients in them, and we just follow the men, the uh recipe card and create a lovely meal. But even that takes away the aspect of thinking, what shall we eat tonight? Have I got all the ingredients? Um, in a way, because all I do is read the instructions, I'm not really learning how to cook. I'm just learning how to what to do and what to put in the pan at this time and that time. It feels as though, on the one hand, I'm getting some really good quality food, which is important for me. And then on the and I'm making it, which feels that's another plus. But on the other hand, I'm losing that sense of going and choosing the veg, going and thinking about herbs and spices, about understanding flavors. I mean, that can be just one simple example, all the way up to, as you say, AI. And as you know, I'm writing a book at the moment. And I've found AI hugely helpful in the absence of uh an editor of just asking questions of um grammar, of language, of flow, and then using it as a tool to and I have been very much mindful of improving my writing, thinking, how might I say this differently? Or it might say, you've repeated this word quite a lot. And I'd like, great, thanks for pointing that out. How might I explain this without using the same word so often? So it's been a really useful tool. And and then it feels as though I'm kind of moving into a place now where I'm like, well, at what cost? At what cost? Well, I tell you what the cost is. Um my first book, I had a coach stroke editor, and we we worked through it ourselves, and that was an enjoyable learning process. So the cost is that I don't have a human being that I'm doing this with. I'm doing it with AI, and that is a cost, and there's a benefit. So I'm all the time I feel as though we are. Let me just talk about myself. All the time I feel as though I am up against this urge to do things more quickly, and the carrot is so that I have more time to do what I want to do. But what seems to happen is I do things more quickly, and then I just do more and more things more quickly. And and that for me seems to be the the trap I keep coming up against myself, and I have to keep going to myself, at what cost speeding up? What am I losing? And and and and finding that balance because I live in this world. So it's not like I'm gonna go and live off grid in a in a little hut and grow my own veg. I'm not, I'm not gonna do that. So, how do I live in this world? But then it feels as though I'm in balance and it feels as though I'm being true to myself. So that's how it turns up for me. What about you?

Elizabeth Lovius 9:03

Yeah, it really reminds me of when my kids uh they were 10 and 12 when iPhones came in. And I knew we all knew exponentially this was gonna, this is a computer in your hand that they've been talking about forever. Exponential productivity, you know, and we've all been used to iPhones in our hands for a while now. And we are starting to see the problems with that. And I remember thinking, I'm not gonna win this with my kids. I am not, they are gonna be in a world where iPhones are. They didn't grow up with them, but they are from now on. And I decided that what I needed to do was introduce the balance. I didn't really address the phones because they were all slight, they were slightly older, so they they weren't it not everyone had phones yet, you know. It was a we were able to keep the phones back till the right, you know, sort of age, I think 15, 16. But I introduced what humans need to thrive, and that is social, and in my kids' my boys' sports. So if they were having social interactions with other human beings, now sometimes that was FIFA in the front room with the dog, you know, or the dog sort of taking up half the room and the and the more boys, but they were physically together, chatting, laughing, eating pizza, you know, as long as there was social interaction and then they were physically playing sports, those were the priorities, those were the things I encouraged. Those, and then they felt the value of those things and they wanted more of them. So I didn't go the direction of limit, limit, limit. I went maximize the human thriving and, you know, stuff like when people come around for dinner, we're at the dinner table. This is how it is in our house. You know, we play games on a Sunday afternoon. You know, we the other bring other things in that are sort of intrinsically nourishing for the human soul. And I feel like that's the way I went then, and that's the way I want to go now with AI. But it brings us back to what we've talked a lot about on this journey of the Wild Wise Feminine. What feels right and what feels off. And there's no logic to it, it's just you know it. You know, I've had a few moments where I felt, oh, I've been cheating with AI, you know, you know, it it made something easier for me. And I I knew I it was something that gave me that feeling of cheating. And I I I think I probably was cheating then, you know, that's the feeling. And then there are other times when I know that it's made my thinking more robust, and I really it's been an invaluable tool. It's it's helped me see the wood for the trees. And yeah, so what I see is our own human wisdom is the arbiter of the tool, not the tool. So the tool, the wheel, uh fire, let's go back to fire and the wheel, and then the industrial revolution, bit of a gap there. But you know, I'm sure tools were used in the meantime, certainly in war. If you watch war, that's where you see the tools exponentially. Oh, that's that makes yeah, of course, you know, that's where the tool and money goes. Um, and you see it all the way to, you know, um in the internet, which was a massive revolution, and then of course, here we are with smartphones and AI. And so the human is the decision maker, not the tool. And that has got to remain. And that requires us to listen to our own wisdom of when it's okay, it feels good to use a tool, and when we're compromising something. And I think the question that we haven't asked ourselves as human beings, which you're asked, is at what cost? We say we do it for efficiency, so have more time, but what do we do with that time? Do we fill it with nourishing human soul connection? Or do we get busy? And that's got to be a question we ask ourselves. And it is a territory of the older woman to say, hang on a minute. This doesn't feel right. So I'm just wondering what you heard in that.

Liz Scott 13:15

Well, uh actually it reminded me of um the walk I did, the pilgrimage, which is still informing my my life so much. Uh walked over 600 miles across England following energy currents. And I remember early on as I were I would I wasn't able to exactly walk the currents because you can't, because it's on private land. And but the currents go through particular places. They go through holy wells, churches, stone rows, stone circles, all that sort of thing. And I remember I would plot my route each day, depending on the places I wanted to visit, where these currents went through. So, for example, there might be a church. And walking is slow, it's really slow. And I remember walking and feeling that excitement of knowing I was walking towards the church, for example. And there was one church in Cornwall called St. Germo Church, and I clearly remember this standing on a stile between two fields and seeing the church tower, and realizing I was seeing this church tower probably as thousands of humans over the hundreds and hundreds of years had seen it too, kind of coming across it like I was. And it felt like I was seeing an old friend. And I walked to the church with this sense, you know, when you you you've got a friend that you're going to meet, and maybe you're waiting at the airport or you're waiting for the train to arrive, and you're you're feeling that sense of expectation rise in you. And it was like that as I walked towards the church, and then I met the church, and I walked into the church, and I sat in it, and I felt the peaceful energy, and I was with it. And then when the time was right, I walked out of the church and I closed the door and I left it behind me, maybe looking back one or two times, and I savored the memory of that church as I walked on for maybe the next hour. And I I think for me, I was really being shown the the deliciousness of simplicity, which is the expectation, which is not, you're not, it's not, you don't get it seen straight away, or that that kind of sense of wanting something, and then you press a button and it arrives at your front door a minute later. It was like, no, it's delayed. This delayed expectation, which is rich in its own right, the meeting, which was delicious, and then the memory of all of which was over a period of maybe two or three hours in a day. And how even just a year on, how little I I engage with that slowness in the same way. And maybe that's why it feels so important, or my wisdom is really saying, you need to listen into this, Liz. Because I think I was given a lesson there, not even a lesson, I was just given a gift in the pilgrimage, and I might lose it in the speed of doing stuff in my life when actually I know that there's actually the doing of something is the gift. It's not it's not the getting of it. So that's what came to me as you spoke.

Elizabeth Lovius 17:15

I love that. And I feel like I again want to end with a little story because it's so inspired me. And I'm just gonna check, but I'm pretty sure you've read Braiding Sweetgrass, haven't you? One of my favorites.

Liz Scott 17:27

It's my favorite, it's on my top of my favorite book list.

Elizabeth Lovius 17:31

Of course it is. Of course it is. Well, then you will know this story very well, but it really speaks to it. And uh for anyone listening, just Google Braiding Sweetgrass, it's everywhere, and it's an it's a seminal work that returns us back home to our human relationships with the land, the earth, each other. It's an incredibly beautiful book written by a biologist, but it's written with such heart and soul. I it's mandatory reading. And this idea of more, more than we need, more, more, more, that productivity points us towards do more, have more, be more, is questioned in this book in such a beautiful way by the way that the indigenous people of Native Americans have lived for millennia. And this is one story that really speaks to what you're talking about here. And it's a story of a young man who who go who tags along uh with the uh Native Americans when they go to harvest the wild rice. And the he comes along and he watches it all and he sees it all, and he realizes that they they waste a lot of rice in the in the harvesting of the rice. There's a lot that goes into the water or gets thrown away, and then after four days, if even if there's more rice, they leave. They leave after four days, and that's that. And this young man with his western eyes and his big heart, he wants to make it better for them. He says, I've got an idea for you that if we just created this productivity tool where we could put it on the front of the canoe, we could increase the yield by 85%. So he's very excited and he wants to show them his productivity tool can really give them more in less time. And the elders sit back and they go, Yes, thank you, um young man. That is true, but we don't want to do that. Because our law is never take more than half, only take what you need, and reciprocity, which is we're not the only ones eating the wild rice. When we go harvest, so do the ducks, and so do the wild rice then allow themselves to seed for next harvest. And so we're in perfect harmony. We take what we need, we harvest the rice at the right time, but we don't need more, and we don't need productivity tools, and it is our communion time with the wild rice, and I think that speaks beautifully to another way of being around productivity, more, and what is progress really?

Liz Scott 20:14

I remember that story, and it's perfect in this conversation, absolutely perfect. And maybe another conversation for us, Elizabeth, because it really feels quite strong for me as you're you're speaking, is this it's like who or what are we in service of in what in our engagement? The uh I was reading a book where a voice coach was talking about her work with actors, and she says, in the theatre and on the stage, the actors, the ensemble aren't in service of the lead actor. All the actors are in service of the play. And and it's almost like shifting. If if you're in service of productivity and more and better, and well, well, you will come up with ideas. If you're in service of something else, well, I'm kind of curious what what turns up then. And I mean that might be a conversation for us in the future. I love it.

Elizabeth Lovius 21:16

What are we in service of really? And I think the domain of the wild the wise wild elder woman is to really ask that question and know the answer. Because I think that's really important. So for another time, Liz. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Liz Scott 21:37

You've been listening to the Wild Wise Feminine Podcast with Liz Scott and Elizabeth Lovius.

Elizabeth Lovius 21:45

And if you want to get in touch, take a look at the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.