We have a quick chat with Carl Honoré about slowing down!

Carl is the voice of the Slow Movement. "In a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower!"

ABOUT CARL HONORÉ

Carl Honoré is a bestselling author, broadcaster and the global voice of the Slow Movement. His two main-stage TED Talks have racked up millions of views.

His first book, In Praise of Slow, chronicles the global trend toward putting on the brakes in everything from work to food to parenting. The Financial Times said it is “to the Slow Movement what Das Kapital is to communism.”

Carl’s second book, Under Pressure explores how to raise and educate children in a fast world and was hailed by Time as a “gospel of the Slow Parenting movement.”

Carl’s third book, The Slow Fix, explores how to tackle complex problems in every walk of life, from health and relationships to business and politics, without falling for superficial, short-term quick fixes.

Carl’s latest book, Bolder: Making The Most Of Our Longer Lives, explores ageing – how we can do it better and feel better about doing it. It’s also a spirited manifesto against ageism.

Published in 35 languages, his books have landed on bestseller lists in many countries. In Praise of Slow was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and the inaugural choice for the Huffington Post Book Club. It also featured in a British TV sitcom, Argentina’s version of Big Brother and a TV commercial for the Motorola tablet. Under Pressure was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Award, the top prize for non-fiction in Canada. Bolder was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Reader’s Digest (UK) Book of the Month.

Carl featured in a series for BBC Radio 4 called The Slow Coach in which he helped frazzled, over-scheduled people slow down. He also presented a television show called Frantic Family Rescue on Australia’s ABC 1.

Carl is an advisor to Jack Media, which makes messaging apps, and sits on the Board of Trustees of Hewitt School in New York City.  

Carl lives in London. While researching his first book on slowness he was slapped with a speeding ticket.

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- Hello, I'm Carl Honoré.

I'm a journalist, author and a speaker, broadcaster.

And for the last sort of 15 years,

I've been the voice of what's called a Slow Movement.

So I've been traveling around the world

sometimes quite quickly, making the case for slowing down

arguing that in a world addicted to speed,

slowness is a superpower.

- [Karim] Carl, thank you so much for joining me today,

I really appreciate it.

- Thanks, great to be with you.

- [Karim] Carl, talk to me more about Slow Movement.

What does that actually mean?

- Well, I think what it doesn't mean, to start off with it,

it doesn't mean doing everything very slowly.

I mean, that would be absurd, it'd be preposterous,

I'm not an extremist or a fundamentalist of slowness.

I love speed, faster is often better we all know that,

this Slow revolution, Slow with a capital S

this is about doing things at the right speed.

So it's about knowing that sometimes fast is the way to go

but other times you want to slow things down, right?

So there's turbo mode but there's also tortoise mode.

Musicians talk about the tempo giusto,

the correct tempo for each moment.

That's a way of thinking about slow.

It's a mindset really, it's quality over quantity,

it's being present in the moment, doing one thing at a time.

Ultimately slow is about doing everything

not as fast as possible, but as well as possible.

- [Karim] Interesting, if we just think back a year

if not just a little bit more, we'd wake up early,

quickly get dressed, quickly leave the house

drive through traffic as quickly as possible

quickly get to work, to finish things at work

as quickly as possible, to quickly get home.

And if we had kids or have kids,

how quickly we can get them to soccer or piano or hockey

to then quickly get home

and things are always quick, quick, quick.

- No, I was going to say, I mean this is the state

of the modern world is that we're all racing

through our lives instead of living them.

The virus of hurry has infected

every corner of our existence so that everything feels

like a dash to the finish line

and it's reached ludicrous levels.

I mean, you can attend speed yoga classes

or drive through funerals,

I mean, there's nothing we won't accelerate now.

And people always say, well, I can't slow down

because life will pass me by,

that's completely the wrong way to think about it

because life is happening right here right now.

And the only way to get the most out of it

is to slow down and be in the moment with that slow spirit.

- [Karim] And do you think that the pandemic

has helped people realize the benefit of slowing down?

Because we're not rushing,

like I don't need to rush from my bedroom to my desk.

- Hallelujah.

Yeah, I think the pandemic is a great moment

of global reset.

It's forced the world to go

through a mandatory workshop in slowness, right?

And I'm not a fan of the pandemic

it has been a total nightmare, right?

- [Karim] Of course, yes.

- But I think the silver lining,

the silver lining, I think is that people have experienced

the good side of slow, right?

So if you look at the whole boom

and home cooking and home baking,

all the walking people are doing.

People talking about having time to listen

and spend time with their loved ones

and families that are the ones that live with anyway,

and also feeling more productive, getting more done at work

'cause they're not distracted,

they're not fast all the time.

And they're able to control their speed,

their rhythms work-wise.

And also just on a structural collective level

you're seeing cities around the world,

closing down roads to traffic

and making them now pedestrianized

or setting the side for cycling.

So we're slowing down the rhythm of transport

through our urban landscapes.

There are many things now,

that people are coming out thinking,

well, I've had a bunch of months now where I

as you say, haven't been rushing, right?

I've rushed less, I've done less, I've spent less

and they're thinking, you know what?

I wouldn't mind hanging on

to a little bit of that when this pandemic passes.

- [Karim] That is so true.

I want to focus a little bit on work.

And what that means for people that want to embrace,

the Slow Movement or slowness

and what that means for work as a whole.

Do you have thoughts on that?

- Definitely, people think that slowing down means

you're a loser or you're a slacker, you're unproductive,

it's synonymous.

This is part of the taboo against slow.

It goes so deep in our culture that slow is a dirty word,

it's a byword for lazy, unproductive,

everything nobody wants to be especially at work, right?

But actually slow is crucial in the modern workplace

even more than it was in the industrial era, right?

Because we're knowledge workers

and human brains need those slow moments.

The Economist Magazine did a big survey looking

at the pace of business and the working world

before the pandemic and came to a conclusion

that's a perfect summation of the slow creed.

The final paragraph of that Economist survey was

something like it said, "Forget frantic acceleration

"mastering the clock of business means choosing

"when to be fast," right?

We all know that bit.

"But also when to be slow," right?

When to be fast and when to be slow.

So the future of work lies in that on off switch, right?

So when to be on, when to be off when to lean in

but also when to lean back, right?

It's about mastering all those different rhythms

and paces, knowing when to switch off

and when to switch on, relearning the lost art

of shifting gears and that, those are the people.

The people who master that art,

which I just described as the art of slow in a sense,

those are the people who will inherit the earth,

starting in the workplace.

- [Karim] I'm thinking it's more of a mindset, right?

Rather than the speed of how things get done?

- Exactly, because you could be moving very fast

but on the inside, you're calm, you're focused,

you're still, you're in control.

It's like athletes talk about being in the zone, right?

They're moving through a hockey game, a football game,

a soccer game, a tennis match at superhuman speeds.

But on the inside, they are super calm, right?

They are still, there almost serene.

And that's that mindset,

when you regain that ability to shift gears

to have slow moments, to move into faster moments,

to move fluidly between the two.

Then when you're in the fast moment

and everything is spinning around you at 100 miles an hour,

you're like an Oasis of Zen, right?

You can control it much better.

And that's why they've shown that people who meditate

over a period of time develop more density

in this cerebral cortex which allows them

to process information faster,

which brings me to what I always think

of as the delicious paradox of slow.

That those who slow down with meditation,

which is one of the slowest things you can do

short of sleeping, are better able to cope in the fast world

all that data and distraction coming at us

than those who never slowed down at all, right?

So I come back to what I said at the beginning,

in a world addicted to speed,

slowness really as a superpower.

- [Karim] That's really fascinating.

There's a lot of...

It's interesting that you talk about meditation.

I've seen, on Twitter, especially a lot of senior executives

or people that you would sort of look up to as successful

have embraced meditation recently.

- Exactly, you can't swing a cat

without hitting a mindfulness program, right?

In the corporate world at all levels from the C-suite

right down to the factory floor because it works, right?

The science is crystal clear

that meditation sharpens concentration,

reduces feelings of stress, enhances feelings of calm,

produce wellbeing.

And does that other thing I said a moment ago,

that allows you to handle and cope with the barrage

of speed that's going around you.

So it's an ace-in-the-hole, it's a no brainer,

which is why people including

and maybe even especially the fastest sectors

of the global economy, like Silicon Valley, tech,

Wall Street are all over meditation, right?

Because they're not doing it

'cause it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling,

well they probably get that too

but they're certainly not doing it

because it gives them a halo of new ageism, right?

They're doing it 'cause it works.

These are people who measure things

by the bottom line, output and metrics.

And they know that meditation,

the ultimate act of slow, delivers.

- [Karim] There's, I can't remember the name of the app

but I've seen commercials and I don't know whether it says

as I was watching the US presidential election

and everything happening there, or as I'm watching sports

but there would be like a 15 second commercial

or a 30 second commercial

that a meditation app would be advertising.

And it would say, "We're giving you

"back 30 seconds of your life just breathe."

And that's all it does for the 30 second commercial.

And there's sort of like a timer there

where all you're doing is just breathing

or that's what it empowers the viewer to do.

So it's really interesting.

- I love that.

- [Karim] Yeah.

- It's sort of gloriously counter-cultural, isn't it?

Because so much of especially TV advertising

is breathless, right?

It's this bombardment of sensory distraction and information

and then to take an ad and flip it around

and say, actually we're going to give you 30 seconds

just to breathe.

Don't be breathless, breath, be breath full.

It's a nice spin on it there.

I think, just if I could just make a little addition here

to the work discussion and slow, and so on of the pandemic,

I think one of the benefits of the pandemic,

or one of the lessons that we're going to take away

is that what the pandemic has done for many people

has given them control over their own working rhythms,

their own times.

And that's something you were already beginning to see

as part of the Slow Movement of the workplace

before the pandemic.

Was that forward-looking companies were saying to staff,

okay, we understand that everybody

has different metronomes, internal metronomes.

So some people are going to thrive getting up at six

in the morning, (indistinct) report out by eight.

Others will be better off sleeping till nine

and getting up and doing their creative work between nine...

And this is what I think companies will be doing

more and more in the future is saying,

okay, here's the big deadline at the end,

we've got six weeks to get there.

You work out how you're going to use your time

between now and then, either individually or in your team.

So if you want to come in at three in the morning

on a Saturday to knock out some code, go for it.

But if you want to leave the office or leave the desk

at noon on Thursday to go watch your daughter do ballet

or your son play basketball, or whatever,

you do that too, right?

Because we trust you.

And that's why I think a lot of companies

that have found themselves just forced by the pandemic

to give more autonomy, more temporal autonomy control

over their time to their staff

are seeing this big productivity payoff.

So I think we're going to see a lot more of that in future

and that's completely in harmony with the Slow revolution.

That's a big part of what it's all about.

It's giving people control over their own time

and their own rhythms.

- [Karim] That's also like a mind shift,

for management to be able to,

I'm not saying that there's no trust there

but it's almost like,

we've got these regular check-ins, right?

So whether it's a weekly check-in

or it's people know if you're online

or not at nine o'clock or 8:30,

especially we're all connected with all these,

whether it's devices or whether it's software,

where you know whether your coworkers

are quote unquote online.

And I'm wondering, sort of that challenge

of working from home, if there's this understanding

that you've got a home life, you've got a family life,

you've got a work life

and there's this need for balance,

versus this idea of

my boss knows when I'm working

and that challenge, push and pull challenge.

- There's a big challenge there.

And I am not at all a fan of the software programs

that measure everybody's movements

and presence of the computer took down to the last second.

I think that that's actually going

in the wrong direction.

I mean, the traditional workplace has been one

of command and control, right?

It's you rule from the top by fear.

And that probably made a lot of sense

in the Victorian factory,

it doesn't make sense in the knowledge economy, right?

When people need to be relaxing, they need to tap

into what psychologists called slow thinking, right?

The kind of creative blue sky innovative thinking

that comes when we are in a relaxed state,

networking, team building,

All that stuff you can't download that from an app

or mandate it with a tight schedule, right?

These things only flourish

and blossom when the powers that be back off

and give everyone else in the trenches,

the space, the time and the freedom just to breathe, right?

Coming back to breathing,

just to let things happen at their pace.

I'm not saying you don't have any control

but I think again, before the pandemic

what we were starting to see again,

among smart thinking, forward looking companies

was a move away from the top down control,

fingers around the neck of your subordinates approach

and giving devolving power out, devolving freedom,

handing out autonomy and seeing a payoff, right?

And you put your finger on a very important word there,

which is trust.

Yeah, there's got to be trust.

I think for companies to take that first step

there's going to be a bit of a jump in the dark

but you'll see the benefits.

If you don't see the benefits

then maybe that's the wrong staffer, employee for you

and you move them on.

Or maybe you need a conversation to work out

how that person can use the new freedom more wisely.

So it pays off for them and for you as the company.

But this has to be the way forward.

It seems to be a retrograde step to move into a world

where people's bathroom breaks are being timed.

I mean, toxic is the word that comes to mind.

- [Karim] I totally understand.

Carl, this has been a fascinating discussion

and yeah, I'm sure people are going to want to take

some time and really dive in.

If you could Carl, I know you've got a website

and various Ted Talks and books.

What would you recommend people do to find out more

about the Slow Movement and how to embrace it

at their work and in their lives?

- Sure that's easy.

I have a kind of one-stop shop site for that

It's just www.carlhonore.info, no punctuation,

carlhonore.info

And they're all there.

You'll find the links to everything

from talks to digital courses.

So I've just published my first workbook, "30 Days to Slow,"

helping people slow down, books are there.

There's lots of video, audio, just loads of resources

for people to take their first step,

because everybody's going to find their own way

towards the Slow Revolution.

Some people are going to come at it through work,

others through food, others through sex,

others through their family life, with children.

So there's no right recipe to finding your inner tortoise

but we all have one and we all aspire I think,

to reconnect with it.

So I would just say, go out there and find your own way.

And start on our website, it's a good place to start.

- [Karim] Carl, thank you so much for your time,

I really appreciate it.

- Thank you very much, good chatting with you.

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