The Urgency Trap

 Why Moving Faster Isn't Always the Answer

What if the thing making you feel like you need to speed up is actually the thing asking you to slow down?

In this episode of The Brave & Balanced Fundraiser, Erin McQuade-Wright explores the hidden cost of living in a constant state of urgency. From fundraising campaigns and Giving Tuesday deadlines to overflowing inboxes and endless to-do lists, many nonprofit professionals have learned to operate as though every day is an emergency. But what happens when urgency becomes our default way of being?

Drawing on her own experience in fundraising leadership, Erin shares how chronic urgency can narrow our perspective, strain our relationships, disconnect us from our bodies, and ultimately make us less effective—not more.

You'll learn:

•  Why urgency is a normal human response—but a dangerous long-term strategy 
•  How constant activation affects your nervous system, creativity, and decision-making 
•  The surprising reason reflection can feel uncomfortable when you're stuck in "go mode" 
•  Why many fundraisers feel guilty slowing down, even when they desperately need it 
•  Practical ways to pause, regulate, and respond more intentionally when everything feels urgent 

Erin also shares insights from Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening and reflects on the fundraising culture that often rewards exhaustion while overlooking sustainability.

If you've ever felt like you can't stop, can't rest, or can't slow down because there's simply too much to do, this episode is for you.

In This Episode:

•  The difference between true urgency and chronic urgency 
•  How fundraising culture can normalize burnout 
•  Why post-campaign reflection is often the first thing to disappear—and the thing we need most 
•  The hidden belief that slowing down is irresponsible 
•  What it means to "slow down to go fast" 

Journal Prompt:

Where in your life are you telling yourself, "I don't have time for that"?

Could that be the very thing your nervous system needs most?

Subscribe to The Brave & Balanced Note for weekly reflections and practical tools to help you fundraise, lead, and live with more steadiness and less stress:

The Brave & Balanced Note

Book your 1:1 Brave and Balanced Breakthrough Coaching Session here: https://calendly.com/vitalistcoaching/brave-balanced-breakthrough

✨ Stay Connected & Continue Your Fundraising Growth

Listen to all episodes + subscribe:
https://thebraveandbalancedfundraiser.buzzsprout.com

Join the community:
The Brave & Balanced Fundraiser Facebook Group
👉 https://www.facebook.com/groups/braveandbalancedfundraiser

Book a Brave & Balanced Breakthrough Call:
A personalized 1:1 session to support your inner clarity and fundraising wellbeing.
👉 https://calendly.com/vitalistcoaching/brave-balanced-breakthrough

Learn more about Erin’s coaching & nervous-system based support:
VitalistCoaching.com

Connect on Instagram:
@erinmcquadewright

Transcript

Erin McQuade-Wright 1:33

Welcome to The Brave and Balanced Fundraiser, the podcast I wish I'd had during my 15 years as a professional fundraiser. I'm your host, Erin McQuade Wright. This is your space to breathe, realign, and reconnect with the part of you that chose this work for a reason. Together, we'll explore tools and practices that help you show up less stressed and spread thin and more grounded, brave, and on purpose. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Have you ever felt like if you stopped moving, even for five minutes, everything would fall apart? Maybe you're racing from one deadline to the next, checking your phone at stoplights, calendaring yourself back to back to back, eating lunch at your desk, or mentally working through tomorrow's to-do list while you're trying to fall asleep. Today, I wanna talk about urgency, not because urgency is bad, but because many of us actually have turned urgency into a lifestyle. And while urgency can help us survive a moment, it was never meant to become our permanent address. So let's talk about it! So if you feel urgency in your life, I just wanna normalize that. There's nothing wrong with you. Urgency is not the enemy. It's a state where we feel like we need to push, push through to get something done. It's a natural human response, and the body interprets urgency as information. It's time to move. It's time to respond. It's time to act. And there are genuine emergencies in life, and you wanna be able to switch into that urgency gear during those times. So the problem isn't urgency itself. The problem is when every day becomes urgency day. So your nervous system was designed for seasons of urgency, not a lifetime membership in the urgency club So what if the next level move isn't going faster all the time? I like to think of urgency as like version 1.0 and version 2.0. So if you think about version 1.0, it's like feel urgency. For me, it's usually in my belly. Then move faster, push harder, do more, accomplish, accomplish, accomplish. So it's a feeling and then a go And I think of 2.0 urgency as feeling urgency and then looking for what's the information inside that urgency and slowing down intentionally to regulate, and then choosing a response from there. It's like the difference between a gentle serve, uh, in badminton that would be kind of like-- or pickleball, that would be kind of like a gentle serve versus shooting a pinball out of a pinball machine, like pulling back the lever and then have it just like spring-loaded into bang into the ball, right? So 1.0 version of urgency is like the pinball version, and the 2.0 might be the gentle serve of badminton or pickleball. I've never played pickleball, but I've played badminton as a kid, and I think I remember something gentle about that serve. So I can feel some of you arguing with me right now. "Erin, you don't understand. My life really is urgent. Like, I need... I do need to keep moving. It's an emergency," "i need to raise this money or people will be laid off or fired. I need to be able to generate impact or else I lose my income." And, you know, sometimes you're right. Urgency is needed. But every day can't be urgency day. You are not built for that. And I'm encountering a lot of people, a lot specifically of women, but not just women, who are noticing that this push, I mean, there's no scheduled end date for this push I'm in. It's just become every day, and my body is talking back to me saying, "This ain't it. What got me here is not gonna get me the rest of the way that I need to go. I have to change something up." In the Book of Awakening, this, this day book of thoughts to set you up for the day by Mark Nepo that I just love and I've been reading for years now. He talks on February 24th about urgency, and he says, "Unless someone is bleeding or can't breathe, unless there is some true physical requirement to act swiftly, a sense of urgency is a terrible illusion, a trick that happens again and again, because life inside our skin and outside our skin are forever different." And I remember when I was working in philanthropy, there was a sentence that a colleague of mine would say that would just sort of like clear the whiteboard or, um, set the context of what was actually happening here, and the phrase was, "There really aren't any philanthropic emergencies." Now, that was a, that was a, a kind of a coy thing to say 'cause sometimes there were philanthropic emergencies, like a storm is coming and it threatens to flood our city, and we moved on that urgency and raised money, uh, to help people in that urgent time. But for the most part, it was true. There, there weren't philanthropic emergencies, but there felt like big urgency. And what I have come to learn about urgency is that it's not bad. It's just information. It's feedback. Oh, how am I being with myself in this moment? And for me, more often than not, I was really pushing myself harder than anybody was asking me to, and the result was that I showed up kind of overwhelmed and spread thin. And it didn't take a whole lot to knock me off my center because I was carrying this story of urgency with me, and it really tired me out. So what Mark Nepo is saying in this passage from the Book of Awakening is about urgency often feels like not a state of being in the body. Like hunger, that's a state within the body. But urgency feels like a command. It's like it's, like it's sounding the alarm, and we have to respond I remember my family would eat around the dinner table together, and we had a rule growing up that you couldn't answer the phone during dinner. We did not answer the phone during dinner, and this was pre-cell phone, and we just had a landline. But it was right there next to the dining room table, next to the kitchen table, and when the phone rang, we practiced something very uncomfortable, which was to let it ring. The urgency of that moment Was one thing, but our decision to pick up the phone and agree, yes, this is an urgent moment and we're gonna pick up the phone, was what we had control over, and we chose not to pick up the phone. Now, I was a young kid, a teenage girl. Of course I wanted to pick up that phone, but it was against the rules. We left the urgency of that moment, of somebody trying to call us, we left it right where it was. That was a ball we did not pick up. We finished our dinner, and then you know what? We didn't even have an a- answering machine, so if somebody wanted to convey something to us, they would call us back. And I don't remember any actual emergencies that came by that phone. But people knew to just call back later. So there's the, the signal of urgency coming at us, and then there's what we do in response to that. And the idea we're exploring here today is slowing down to go fast. And if you just got like a clench in your gut when I said slowing down to go fast, ooh, there's gold here for you When I feel like I can't sit still, I need more than ever to sit still. What if the thing making you wanna speed up is actually the thing that's asking you to slow down? You're just getting the wrong message from it. You're just taking away, "I need to speed up." What if it's actually challenging you to slow down? And this is, like, really prevalent in fundraising. I remember when I got into the field, there was one campaign a year. It happened in the fall, and actually, you know, right around Christmas time, and there was maybe one event, if that, and that might happen in the spring, and that was the entirety of the fundraising calendar. And by the time I exited 15 years later It felt like there were multiple campaigns running, some overlapping. There was an annual campaign, there was a regional giving day campaign, there was Giving Tuesday, which had its own spot on the calendar Events, and then, you know, God bless you if you had a capital campaign happening, that's multiple years. If you were building a building or buying equipment or renovating a property. And it just felt like I was walking through sticky mud, and I couldn't get clear of all the campaigns. There was no end to it. And I felt like if I spoke up about that and said, "This is really not optimal," that I was the problem. "Oh, she's not grateful. She's complaining." Mm, better not do that I remember I had a colleague tell me once, "You don't want people to think you're not grateful for your job. Be careful raising issues about it. Be careful, 'cause you don't want people to think you're not grateful." And at the time I was offended. But that was the culture. That was the culture, and I know I'm not alone in that. So you take on more, it piles on. You've got your giving day, you've got your Giving Tuesday, you've got your campaign, you've got your multiple channels, your social media, your emails. You know, if you have If you are lucky enough to have a culture of philanthropy in your organization, you've got board members maybe writing thank you notes or calling people and thanking them for giving or going to in-person asks for major gifts. That all needs to be calendared and organized, and stewardship is a big part of that as well. So it can have this feeling of constant go, go, go, and there doesn't seem like room to speak up and say, "Hey, can we pause? Can we slow down for a moment?" And I remember I had a colleague at one point who was really interested in, like, debriefing after a campaign. What went well? What didn't go well? Or after an event, what were some of the great things? Let's write them down on some chart paper and let's get everybody's opinion on what went well and where we could have improved, and then we use that to build next time, to grow from so c- we can do it better in our next attempt. And I remember feeling like this seems like a luxury to stop the go, go, go and look back at what has happened already. Feels like, I mean, don't we have anything more important to do? That was a big piece of data for me. That, ugh, frustration and, "Don't we have anything more important to do?" is really important feedback 'cause it points to exactly where I was, which was stuck in go, go, go, in fight or flight, in a story that I was failing and so I needed to keep up. I needed to do more in order to get ahead 'cause I was so far, quote unquote, behind But I really see the value in being able to work smarter so that you can say, "Oh, actually the donors really didn't like this last time, so let's do it differently this time. Let's be thoughtful about it." People really appreciate it when you're thoughtful for the most part. And we could have given better campaigns and events if we felt more comfortable stopping and focusing on, on that debrief. But I was fighting it every step of the way And I was used to any amount of success immediately being followed by, "Yeah, but we didn't get this done. Let's focus on this." Right? So I want you to ask yourself, when was the last time your team finished a campaign and reflected before launching the next one? I mean, is that just a crazy idea? Are you doing this? Do you see value in doing this I really had a story when it was me that that reflection time would be irresponsible And the deeper wisdom that my body had for me was that actually what was happening is my nervous system could not tolerate stopping. It didn't feel safe. It did not feel safe to stop. And I remember h- you know, having a, having a debrief or a planning session with my team, and having people walk by and look in the window as they were g- going on their way to a meeting or to their own office, and feeling the feeling of, "Are they judging us right now?" Saying, "Look at the development team. None of them are at their desks. None of them are working. They're in some meeting together." You know, that projection I was putting on the people who were walking by, that they were gonna judge us for reflecting, it was real. When we're stuck in fight or flight, reflection feels threatening, not because it's wrong, but because it requires us to leave survival mode. You gotta go to use a different part of your brain to reflect than you use for running away. It's different mechanics And what you might feel when you're weighing this, this idea of stopping or slowing down to reflect, you might feel jangly nerves. You might notice yourself snapping at people or checking your phone compulsively, or difficulty being present with a partner when you are home. Trouble sleeping, or you may or may not notice that you're breathing only from your chest rather than from your belly. We call that shallow breathing. Or feeling behind, no matter how much gets done. So what urgency is doing there for you is it creates the illusion of being productive. But what it actually does is it narrows our field of vision because we're in survival mode, so all we can see is what's right in front of us. Gotta get there, gotta get there. We see fewer options, we're less creative, and we make reactive decisions. We're in that When we're in that mental state I remember when I came into the field early, when I was a baby fundraiser, the person I looked up to would... was just like this. She would eat lunch at her desk most often. She wouldn't even finish chewing before she opened her mouth to say something. So she was just fully talking with a mouthful of food and shoveling it in, and it was just like she was completely disconnected from her body and did not feel she had the luxury to eat her food calmly and enjoy it. She was just barreling on through her meal And conducting a meeting. It felt like everything was on fire And for years I thought that was dedication. And now I really think it was her nervous system carrying more than one person was meant to carry. And I'm grateful to our younger colleagues who have entered the field and who have said, "No, I, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna be that person who sits behind the desk and eats and, you know, doesn't get enough rest, and doesn't enjoy their food, and just sort of is barreling ahead." 'Cause we can see they're gonna crash. They're gonna crash into a wall with this kind of living, right? The, the body does not allow that forever that kind of pushing And so I've, I've heard from younger fundraisers who have said we need, we need to acknowledge the fact that our health matters, that our boundaries matter, and the ability to do this sustainably rather than just burning out and burning out and burning out matters. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. So what does slowing down actually look like? What are we talking about here? Let's get really practical about it I'm not talking about like quitting your job in a blaze of glory or just like calling in one day and saying, "I'm taking a month off," or escaping responsibilities and being the person that nobody can find when it's time for things to get done. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Building in taking three breaths before we respond to an urgent request from a colleague, or pausing before we send the email Reflecting before we launch the next campaign. Asking those questions I was resistant to my colleagues asking those years ago. What worked? What didn't, and why? How do we wanna do it better next time?

Speaker 3 23:48

before solving someone else's problem, having an internal beat where we check in, "Is this mine?" Thinking back to my family sitting around the kitchen table and eating and the phone is ringing. Is this mine to pick up? Right? That's a, that's a question that you are within your rights to ask And I wonder what becomes possible if I slow down for 60 seconds? Bathroom is a great place for this. Nobody's looking at you. Just breathe Take one minute The goal isn't to eliminate urgency. Urgency exists. It's part of the human experience. We sometimes need it. The goal is to stop living in urgency. Urgency is a tool, and it was never meant to become your identity. And here's the thing, you can care deeply without carrying everything. And I say that this podcast is a love letter to the fundraiser I used to be. This piece is everything for me. You can care deeply without carrying everything, and that's something I literally did not know when I was in fundraising You can move quickly when needed without living in a permanent sprint And sometimes the fastest way forward is the pause you've been resisting taking So here are your takeaways from this episode. Number one, urgency is information, not a lifestyle. Your nervous system was designed for temporary periods of activation, not permanent acceleration. Number two, the next level move is often counterintuitive. When urgency appears, slowing down first can help you respond more effectively. Number three, reflection is not wasted time. It is often the very thing that prevents repeated mistakes and unnecessary effort. Number four, constant urgency affects more than productivity. It impacts our health, our relationships, our creativity, and our ability to be present. And number five, you can respond without rushing. A regulated nervous system makes better decisions than a frantic one, even when the stakes are high If you haven't read The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo, N-E-P-O, uh, which if you didn't know is Open backwards, Mark Open is Mark Nepo. I highly recommend it. It's a great small, short reading every day to help you start out your day remembering who you are, and that you are not your work. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. I wanna thank you for being here. We'll see you next time