Urgency Undermines Your Values

With a neverending news cycle churning out information, it can be easy to feel like you have to react immediately. We feel the urgency of needing to say something, do something, to fix the problem we’re now aware of.

Whether it’s posting your reaction to the news of the day on social media or rushing to put programs in place in your business, so often, the issues you’re reacting to existed long before you acknowledged them. And the fix can’t be immediate.
Erica discusses reacting with urgency to the events of the day, how it leads to burnout, and how it can pull you away from your values.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• How discomfort and urgency are related

• How urgency undermines addressing root causes with long-term solutions

• Why being consistent in your values and your actions in support of them mean doing less damage control when things do go wrong

Choosing to Leave Urgency Behind

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica says that when it comes to instances where it can feel like there’s an urgent need to react or respond or to jump in and fix things, she is stepping back from urgency.

Most recently, this came up with Spotify and Joe Rogan, but she felt it acutely in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the influx of people urgently asking for help with DEI initiatives. 

“I broke systems for myself, and I experienced burnout because urgency was being dumped on me in droves.”

The problems they wanted to address weren’t new, just as Spotify’s issues weren’t new when that situation came to a head.

“It was just a really challenging thing to watch something become urgent because of the discomfort that came with it. Not because there was all of a sudden a recognition that it needed to be changed…It was more like, oh my God, this is uncomfortable, I need to fix it.”

Post-2020, she says she had to make a decision that she wasn’t going to be involved in that kind of urgency in the same way, for her own sake and for the sake of her team.

So when the Spotify situation happened in early 2022, “it was really clear for me that I was not going to put urgency on me or my podcast production company to break our system in order to create and push this out to be with everybody else that was talking about this.”

It’s both a recognition that she isn’t a source for breaking news and also that the space she cultivates is more about discussing the issues and topics that are consistent, like company culture, give back components, business structures, hiring practices, and how DEI shows up in how you do all things. 

She also wants to ask about the causes and not just the symptoms behind news like the Spotify controversy.

Fix It Before You’re Forced To

“Most of the things that I choose to bring here to the show are topics that are true at that moment. But the reality is that six, twelve, and eighteen months later; it’s still relevant.”

The topics remain relevant because the values behind them are consistent. The values are consistent.

“And that’s really where everything comes back to the need for clear values that are aligned with their actions.”

She says that if you’re consistently taking steps to act in alignment with your values, “you don’t have to do so much after the fact to fix what got broken because you didn’t wait until it broke to figure it out.”

She says that, of course, Spotify was aware of what they were doing with Joe Rogan’s podcast. And businesses with inequitable or unethical practices knew they needed to fix things before 2020, but they chose not to deal with those problems until they had no choice.

“And so we keep having the same lesson coming up…which is why I’m here to remind you, fix it before it needs to be fixed. Put things in place before you’re forced to.”

If you are in a position of being forced to fix something that’s gone wrong, she says, “I understand that it feels urgent, but I also understand that to those that it was a problem for before it became a problem for you, that can feel very dismissive.”

Urgency also keeps people stuck in addressing the symptoms of issues rather than getting to the root causes. 

“To bring urgency to this as if it just popped up is doing a disservice…Something got us here. We have to pay attention to that. And we have to look at solutions that are addressing the root causes and that are setting us up for success going forward.”

Being consistent in your values and in taking action in support of those values will lead you to better outcomes.

Ready to Dive Deeper?

How are your values playing out through your actions? Where do you want more clarity, alignment, and understanding as you navigate choices, from who you hire to where you shop? Being clear on this means you can chart a course that prioritizes your values and the impact they can create.

Leading through your values means being explicit about what you support and how your actions are aligned with that. If you want support as you consider and clarify what matters to you and why, join the Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/explicit.