Most organisational consultants like leadership development better than almost anything. This is partly because working with people on their personal development is utterly utterly fascinating, but (I think) it is even more because it feels like a useful thing to be doing. Surely helping someone to be a better leader will have a highly positive effect on the world around them?

I’ve done a fair bit of leadership development and it is indeed utterly utterly fascinating. But recently I found myself saying, “I don’t think leadership development is very useful, because in my experience leaders do not get very far in their development before they find themselves at odds with the system within which they work.”

When the leaders I’ve worked with have decided that fulfilling their potential is their highest priority, they have mostly ended up leaving the organisation quite quickly, because they’ve realised that they can’t be their best self there.

I think that most people are neither really good nor really evil. There’s a lot that we can do to make ourselves better. (Some thoughts on this here.) If you are really unhappy or messed up, this is probably a good focus for your attention. But most people are not really unhappy or messed up. So for most people, it might be that our environment is the single biggest determinant of how well we are doing.

In most organisations, leaders do not tend to have great influence over the systems, structure, processes and culture. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, most of these are often determined centrally and leaders don’t tend to have power beyond their role. (Put differently, the people right at the top can change these things, but the people lower down can’t, and most organisational leaders are not right at the top.) Secondly, they are intrinsically hard to change and there is usually a lot of resistance to change. Thirdly, it is very hard to build systems, structures, processes and culture that really do enable people to be at their best. Fourthly, I don’t think many people realise how important and critical they are to how well we do, both as individuals and as organisations.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about what characterises systems that set people up to do well, and systems that set people up to do less well. My current showcase system is single queuing. People behave better when there is a single queuing system in place, and they are much more relaxed. In parallel queues, they twitch in case the other queue is moving more quickly or someone jumps in or they are in the wrong place and will miss their turn. Their behaviour is more defensive and less kind.

Systems have properties. The other day I noticed a pregnant lady on the tube getting more and more upset because no-one would offer her a seat. I felt a great deal of sympathy, but I also really wanted to say to her, “I know that people are supposed to offer you a seat, but the London Underground system is set up for people to go into their own world and that’s what happens. We read the paper or a book or rest or daydream or listen to music. It’s a property of the system. If you need a seat, you are going to have to ask, and then lots of people will feel lousy about themselves and compete to be the person who gives you somewhere to sit. But left to themselves they will not notice. They are not ignoring you deliberately. The system is set up that way.”

It’s easier to fix post office queuing than the national health service. But in their fundamental nature, both problems are the same. They are systems that create experiences for people that lead to painful feelings and hence problematic behaviour.

Systems are made up of people. People are not susceptible to rational analysis, and when we get together into systems of people then the system develops new and unintended properties as a result of our strange and wonderful nature. This is very hard to plan for, and when you see it going wrong then it is hard to fix.

This is one of the most powerful and telling stories I have ever read. Please read it. I think this should be on every curriculum in the world.

Another great example is Philip Zimbardo’s work on Abu Ghraib. He is unusual among psychologists in his willingness to theorise beyond the individual and into the environment, and I admire him for it.

Most complex systems have properties that make life better and easier for people and also properties that make life worse and harder. A great example is the Internet. Because of the Internet, we help strangers with unbearable burdens – and we find new ways to harm people we know. Because of the Internet, the prevalence of sex addiction has soared – and, because of the Internet, people who don’t live in a major city can now find treatment for it. Et cetera. Similarly, my (debatable) thoughts on the Christian church are here.

How do you build a system that has more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff? Perhaps even more importantly, how do you change an existing system to get more of the good stuff and lose its bad stuff?

A generalisation from single queuing that might help: look for rule sets that (a) are clear, and (b) demonstrate fairness.

A generalisation from the London Underground that might help: look for ways to maximise person-to-person contact. (We seem to have gone the other way in a lot of our organisational systems, and I don’t think that’s helping us. They’re actually connected: one of the problems with electronic problem-solving is that people have no evidence that they are being heard, which is not a good way to bring out the best in people.)

That said, I think it’s very hard to design any system with an outcome in mind. My best example here is Jesus Christ, who said ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘blessed are the meek’ and ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’, and look at some of the unintended consequences of that one.

My best guess – and it is mostly a guess; I have rarely seen it done – is that the best way to build or change a system that brings out the best in people (employees, clients, users) is to use good system design. Appreciative Inquiry is still the most effective I’ve seen, but I’m sure there are other ways.

My current best guess for what’s most likely to help:

(a) involving a wide range of people in the design (and above all those who are closest to the client / user) and putting collaboration at the heart of every process.

(b) real democracy, in which everyone is heard, and all voices count. (This should really have its own post, but for me the ur-management textbook is the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the best guide to human relations I have ever seen.)

(c) feedback loops that work.

(d) principles rather than outcomes, and the ability to flex outcomes to these principles. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

(e) fair and transparent allocation of resources. (I am still thinking about the Big Society. In this post, I said that I didn’t think the Big Society could work whilst so many people are feeling squeezed, but I also think that this is wildly exacerbated by the sense of unfairness that so many feel. I think our human need for justice is very deep and compelling. I wonder if we would find it easier to seek new ways to collaborate if we really did believe that we are ‘all in it together’? (It is worth noting that fairness is socially constructed and two people can feel just as hard-done-by – or just as fortunate – from the same allocation of resources between them. So this is hard.)

(f) as much devolved decision-making as it’s possible to have, within the above-mentioned principles.

I will end this post with a quote from David Cooperrider, the founder of Appreciative Inquiry:

The best path to the good society, we believe, is the construction of great organisations.

I really do believe this, and it’s where I want to keep working. My PhD is on the individual work (alignment to purpose, self, care, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-transcendence), and this is important too. I’m glad I’m doing it. But the system-level work is even more important.

Maybe it’s not possible to have one without the other. Perhaps the most useful line of enquiry is understanding how they fit together – and when I know that, I will understand what I do in life.

Actually most of the time I do not think I am a smug hypocrite, although by definition I’m not the best judge of deluded. This is because everything I write is actually based on stuff I have learned, and almost everything I have learned comes from screwing up. (For example, I am in the middle of drafting a post on how to apologise, which I now more or less know how to do, but I only know how to do it now through making some appalling and actively harmful apologies in the past.) That’s true of pretty much everything on this blog, and also pretty much everything in my consulting and coaching practices. (Research is a bit different in the way it works, but I still screw everything up first before I get it right.)

The thing is, I tend not to write about the screw-ups. I just write the lessons.

The ostensible reason is that I mostly have no idea who the readers of this blog are, but at least some of them are past or future co-researchers or colleagues or employers or clients, and I want them to think I’m competent.

The reason underneath that is that I am still afraid of showing my imperfection to other people, because I feel shame. That link is Brene Brown’s TED talk on shame resilience and vulnerability, which I link to often. I think it’s one of the best personal development resources I’ve ever seen.

I’m doing a lot of coaching right now where I’m hearing myself saying ‘the important thing is not your relationship with [insert other person]. It’s your relationship with yourself.’ Again and again, I see them doing the work and getting the results. As their relationship with themselves is changing, they are finding the peace of mind and fulfilment they seek, even when their relations with the world around them remain difficult.

I tend to think that if I find myself saying the same thing again and again, I am saying what I myself need to hear.

It turns out that my relationship with myself is quite messed up at the moment, and that is having consequences for my relationships with others.

I am not going to write about this in detail right now. There are some good reasons for this and some bad reasons. The good reasons are that this is meant to be a work blog and I really don’t want to turn it into self-indulgent maunderings about my personal journey through life. If I want to write about how difficult to find it to live with my imperfections, there are other media for that.

The bad reasons are that I still want other people to think I’m perfect, and I still appear to subscribe to the delusion that if I only present information that reflects the good bits of me, other people will fall for it.

The thing is, my work is about helping people – and organisational systems – to find well-being, and that involves working with the fabric of who they really are. There is no project plan that gets change from a starting point of ‘who you’d like to be’ or ‘who you are pretending to be’ or ‘who you hope other people think you are’. There is only the truth.

I wouldn’t hire anyone to coach me if I thought they were perfect. I wouldn’t hire a consultant who was perfect. I wouldn’t even hire a researcher who was perfect. Because how would they understand me? How could they empathise with me? How would we connect? How could they interpret the environment around me in a way that took account of the way in which we trip up on our humanity all the time, if they themselves did not trip up on their own? I admire strength, but I connect to imperfection…

… and there I go trying to make myself look right again. I’m not a better consultant because I’m imperfect. Well, I might be. But I’m imperfect whether or not I’m a better consultant. I’m imperfect because I just get things wrong, all the time.

The truth is that in some ways I am an adult and highly functional person and in some ways I am very messed up and I do not function so well. Just like everyone else.

I am thinking about sharing more of my own journey on this blog. I’m very unsure about it. I fear others’ judgment. I fear being found out. I fear criticism and attack. Perhaps most of all, I fear what comes from admitting to myself how much work I still have to do in some areas. Right now I am feeling paralysed and overwhelmed by it, and I am therefore not doing anything at all.

On the other hand, I know that I do my best coaching when I become willing to tell the story of what I have learned, mostly through doing appalling and harmful things. I know that when Lloyd stops pretending that everything is okay, his writing starts to break through the page and comes alive with the magic of the real out-there in-your-face difficult uncomfortable non-standard painful truth that he is telling. And I know that for him, that’s when the magic starts to happen in his life and around him, as well. I’ve seen it again and again.

(In looking for those posts, I also found this one, which seems to make my point better than I’m doing.)

I know I can’t short-cut the process. There are some aspects of my research that I do very well now, having screwed it up first and then learned. Other aspects I do less well and am currently screwing up. After a while I will learn how to do it well. I look back on the last year and a half and think, ‘I should have done it so differently.’ But the truth is that I couldn’t have. I have to make the mistakes to learn how to get it right. The same is true for my coaching practice and my consulting practice and my personal relationships and my spiritual life.

I still feel lousy about all the mistakes I make and the harm I cause.

I still feel convinced that if I let any evidence of my imperfections escape, the people that I’ve somehow conned into giving me a studentship or working with me or letting me support them – or being in a close intimate loving relationship with me – will realise what a terrible mistake they are making, and the whole edifice will crumble.

I talk with people who share this experience with me – literally almost every day – and I always find myself saying the same thing. You will only be free of this by showing up and being truly yourself, no matter how scary it feels.”

Physician, heal thyself.

My friend R and I have been doing ‘three things’ every day. She is also a PhD student and we face many similar challenges, both internal and external.

It’s very simple. I email or text her with ‘these are the three things I am going to do today’, and she does the same’. Then we do them. Or we don’t.

Then the next day we draw a line under yesterday and start again with a clean slate.

Three things can be very large or very small. Mine are often ‘send an email’ or ‘download a paper’ or even ‘say a prayer’.

Sometimes the three things are very small and they still don’t get done, because I’m too tired or ill or avoidant or something else (which may or may not be work-related) happens instead.

It doesn’t seem like very much when you look at it written on a page.

And yet, it is working for both of us.

I have been thinking about why it works. I don’t really know why it works. I know a lot of successful people who do it, which is why I started doing it – I am a great believer in ‘if you want what somebody’s got then do what they do’. It’s quite tempting to file it under ‘magic’, which is where I file a lot of the strange things that nonetheless work. But there may be more to it than that.

Setting up a track record of success. I don’t get my three things done every day. But most days I do. Some days – quite a few days – I get more done as well. By focusing on my three things alone, rather than the hundred and fifty things I think I ought to be doing, I’m starting to see my college work as something that I’m succeeding at, rather than always feeling like a failure. So I feel more enthusiastic about it, and I do more. I’m starting to develop a virtuous circle rather than a vicious circle.

Taking the pressure off. Some days I’ve done my three things by 9.45am. Then, guess what? I’m done. College work complete for the day, and I can take the rest off if I want. In general I don’t – I do more college stuff, or something like tidying and organising that will help me with college stuff tomorrow. But sometimes I take the day off, and I see friends or rest or go to the gym. And then, guess what? I’m in great shape for tomorrow’s three things, because I didn’t spend the day either tiring myself out or stressing about what I haven’t done. Virtuous circle ahoy.

I can do this because I’ve seen other people use this process and I know it works in the long term. Everything that needs to get done gets done, and it is good enough. I get that it’s a bigger leap of faith for R, or someone else who is taking it on trust from me. But it is working for both of us.

Mixing and matching To finish this PhD, I’ve got a lot of different things that need to get done. Some are administrative (find and download papers, investigate college regulations, identify participants, schedule interviews). Some are relational (talk with supervisor, interview participants, chat and tweet with interested parties about my research). And some are creative (read and interpret papers, write content, reflect on interviews, write memos, build theory, challenge theory).

It’s easy to think that only the creative stuff – coincidentally the most difficult – is important. But three creative tasks in a day is hard. One creative task in a day is hard. I don’t want to overwhelm myself and lose my hard-earned track record of getting my tasks done. So I mix and match. A good day’s list contains one admin, one interactive and one creative task. Then my energy will take me in one of these directions and I’m likely to get more done.

Working smarter, not harder I was ill on Friday and then I took the weekend off, so today is my first day’s work since Thursday, and I was really really avoidant this morning. Did not want to start. So two of today’s three things are administrative – upload some papers to the Kindle and get some comments on a document – and one is a very small creative action designed to get me back into the flow. That’s manageable. So I have done the first and am all set up for the other two and have time to take a break and write a blog post.

Tomorrow I’ll be more back into the swing of it and I can go for bigger and more directly relevant tasks. Or maybe I’m not as recovered as I thought and I’ll still be on tiny tasks and I’ll be on tiny tasks all week. That’s not up to me. There’s not a lot I can do about my energy levels except take the self-care actions and remember that the cycle always swings back up in the end. That’s okay. I trust the process and I know it’s all going to get done, because I’ve seen it happen. And I’m far, far further on than I could ever have been at any other time in my life.

Engaging with work every day I do take weekends off for the most part, although not invariably. But during the week I will have three tasks every day, unless there’s a very good reason. So I’m working every day.

It’s not my fantasy. In my fantasy I start working at 9am and finish at 5pm every day and work consistently throughout, with a break for lunch. But I am not that person. I have never been that person and I probably never will be that person and I can’t make myself that person. (And so far, everything that’s needed to get done has got done anyway, so maybe I don’t need to be that person.) But I am working every day. I am making some progress every day. That is a very good feeling, and I’m sure it’s part of the virtuous circle.

And, of course, my work is near the surface of my mind. So when I do have a creative day, I don’t have to worry too much about getting back into it, because I’m already in it.

I’m not in this alone I cannot begin to describe how much difference working with R is making to my PhD. Her discipline is about as different from mine as you can imagine. She lives in a different city using different methods and different working styles and different times a day. We rarely talk. (Well, we rarely talk about work. We talk about Strictly Come Dancing incessantly.)

But I know she is there for me.

I know she will not judge me if I sign up for three tiny tasks and do none, and I know she will cheer me on when I’ve completed my day’s assignments, even if it took a total of seven minutes. I know that I can email her and say ‘not happening today, sorry’ and she will get it because she has been there and will be again. When I see her having a low day, I know that she’s going to hang in there and the flow will come back. And knowing that’s true for her helps me to remember that it’s true for me.

I think that a lot of my writing, whether it be about working life or personal life or spiritual life or even political life, probably comes down to ‘try not to be in it alone’. It is hard for us to ask for help and hard to accept it and hard to share our real selves. But it is not only one of the most useful and productive things we can do, but also one of the most worthwhile.

Multitasking versus shifting I have been thinking about multitasking for quite a while now. I am a very good multitasker, and much of the time it seems to work for me. I have a good time doing it and I have periods that seem very productive.

On the other hand, I’m well aware that (a) I also have periods that are not very productive, and (b) multitasking is not considered best practice by the people who are most expert in this kind of work. They tend to be advocates of ‘do one thing at a time and focus on it deeply’. That seems boring to me and I don’t enjoy it or get much done when I try to practise it, but on the other hand my experience in life has almost always been that when I disagree with the specialists, they turn out to be right and I turn out to be wrong.

So I’ve been sitting with this one for a while.

This week’s breakthrough came courtesy of a US Army presentation on attention and leadership. (I can’t reference it here, sorry.) They hold a very useful distinction: “multitasking versus shifting”. Multitasking is doing more than one thing at once. Shifting is doing one thing at a time and focusing on it alone, but it’s okay to move between activities rapidly. The thing to avoid is diluted focus.

So I’ve been practising shifting. Work for five minutes, paying conscious attention, then piss around on the Internet, paying conscious attention. It works. It’s more productive than multitasking, because there’s more consciousness involved. It’s not as boring as focus, because I know that I can stop working and piss around on the Internet any time I like.

I suspect it’s a pretty good first step on the journey from multitasking to actual focus. And it’s one that I’m willing to take.

Self-care and balance October was quite a difficult month for me, so I stepped up all the healthy activities. Lots of meditation. Lots of writing. Lots of asking for help – and lots of giving attention to helping others, so that I’m not trapped inside my own head. Et cetera. And of course I couldn’t keep that up for any length of time, so for about the last ten days of October I did pretty much none of this stuff.

And I wasn’t really worse off.

This is counter-intuitive, especially for someone who is evangelical about self-care. So I’ve been thinking a bit about what’s going on there.

I think the thing is that self-care should be caring. What I was doing isn’t caring. An hour of meditation sounds great on paper, but if one is relatively inexperienced at it (as I am) then it is a chore. An hour of meditation every day for three weeks is a lot of chore, and a lot of chore uses a lot of energy.

What I was doing, essentially, was using self-care to try and manage my state. It stopped being care and became homework. Also, that doesn’t work. Using meditation (or, indeed, anything) to try and avoid painful feelings is actually not very different from using alcohol or sugar (or television or shopping or anything) to avoid painful feelings. Meditation works when I become willing to accept and surrender the painful feelings and just be with them as they are. Which I can do, but not yet for an hour. So the meditation became a struggle, which is the opposite of what it is meant to be.

I think a good model for self-care is the inner child. It’s a bit naff – I cringe a bit when it comes up – but I think it’s a very good way to work with this kind of stuff. If I were to say to myself ‘what does the child inside you need, in the way of self-care’, it would not be ‘two and a half hours of difficult work a day’. It might be ‘ten minutes of meditation’. That would probably, ironically, have done a lot more for my well-being than the full hour.

The answer to the child question is never self-indulgence. Children don’t need chocolate and they don’t need to be stuck in front of the telly all evening and they don’t need new dresses and they surely do not need alcohol. But it isn’t self-improvement, either, because children are best off when they learn that they’re okay the way they are. Not perfect, but okay. Which is bringing me – as I write – to a new distinction: between self-improvement (not IMHO a great way to engage with the world) and learning (brilliant and necessary). Ten minutes of meditation could be learning. An hour, at this stage in my practice, is definitely self-improvement.

So right now I’m trying for balance. A bit of the healthy stuff every day, and a bit of the fun stuff every day. Something of everything and not too much of anything. We’ll see how it goes.

Meaning and purpose This is a bit of a cheat third thing, but I am really very keen to be in the habit of writing regularly again and this is what’s in my head right now. I’ve been doing college reading about meaning (in life) and purpose, and I’m thinking about the difference between the two. So far the most interesting suggestion has come from Alison, who suggested that purpose has direction – that it’s going somewhere – whereas meaning doesn’t have to. But I am still playing around with it, and I would really love to hear any thoughts about how they are different (or indeed similar) to you.

Start with physical self-care

I know it’s boring. I know it sounds banal. But everything I’ve seen and experienced and learned has reinforced my conviction that this is the single biggest factor that contributes to well-being, by miles and miles and miles. Really it is. And not just well-being, but (perhaps more importantly for some) resources. If you want to do a lot of stuff and it feels too much, then it makes sense to start with the activities that are going to generate resources. In my experience (this is not science), nothing generates resources as quickly as physical self-care, and conversely nothing drains them as quickly as lack of self-care.

Physical self-care is easy to talk about and hard to do. My basic list is as follows: decent night’s sleep, minimal or no alcohol, reasonably healthy food, some exercise, something enjoyable most days and some time outside most days. That’s fine unless you’re an insomniac or the parent of a young child or you have an addictive personality or no money or you live in an inner city or work a very demanding job (or two jobs) or are disabled or a full-time carer or lots of other scenarios that I have not thought of.

So do what you can. Go to bed a bit earlier. Drink a bit less, or eat a bit less sugar or processed food. (If you have repeatedly tried and tried to do this and you can’t, you can get help here or here.) Go for a walk at lunchtime if you can. Five minutes will make a difference.

Ask yourself ‘what would I do if self-care were my absolute highest priority, because I absolutely knew that it was the cornerstone of getting everything else done and being okay?’ Then do about a hundredth of that. I do this for a living, darn it, and I still only do about a hundredth of the self-care that I’d like to do and think I ought to do. Self-care is hard and in general we’ve been doing the other thing for a very long time, and habits take a while to change, and we have lots of resistance, and we’re socialised to think self-care is self-indulgence, and we have lots of important things to do.

The important things in self-care are (a) being willing to make it a priority, and (b) letting a very small amount be enough. Both are hard, but very worthwhile. I’m putting it up here as number one because it truly will make the most difference.

Get some help

Help can come from anywhere. It doesn’t have to be professional help, although it can be. It doesn’t have to be new or external help – it can be a colleague or a friend or a family member. It doesn’t have to be a named person – it can be a blog post or Facebook status update. It doesn’t have to be someone you know. It doesn’t have to be only one person.

The important things about getting help are (a) being willing to ask for it, and (b) being willing to accept it. Both are hard.

I just wrote a long paragraph about the importance and the liberating value of truth-telling, and then I deleted it because, y’know, it’s obvious. This is not a step where instructions are useful. The problem is not figuring out what to do. The problem is actually doing it.

So just do what you can to move yourself as gently as possible to a place where asking for help would be easier. If you’re bad at showing vulnerability to people you know, seek help from people you don’t, and vice versa. Try practice runs. Watch Brene Brown’s inspirational TED talk on shame and how to become free of it.

And keep reminding yourself that we are not meant to do all this stuff alone. We are community animals. We tend to like helping people, so asking someone for help is likely to be rewarding for them. Asking for and accepting help is natural, not broken. It’s a sign of strength, not failure.

Practise patience

Change does not usually happen fast. This is a shame.

I am very good at making project plans that involve my becoming a perfectly competent, wise and serene human being within about ten days. These plans tend not to work, at which point I get very pissed off and demoralised and start thinking about hitting the chocolate again, because I feel overwhelmed and the mission seems impossible. This is rubbish and unhelpful thinking.

In my experience, the overwhelm comes not from the amount I think I have to do, but from the time in which I think I have to do it. Right now, I’m paying attention to doing good creative work on my thesis, and managing my time better, and getting more exercise, and rehabilitating persistent bad health, and connecting to a sense of purpose in my wider professional life, and dealing with uncertainty in my personal life, and getting over my fear of failure, and developing a better relationship with my body, and probably other stuff too.

If I try and do all this by Christmas, I’m stuffed.

If I take a bit of action every day and let it be enough, I’ll get there eventually on all of them, and I don’t have to postpone being happy until I’ve finished.

Letting go of my timescales for change is one of the single most useful things I have ever done. In fact, thinking about it, that was the point at which I actually started to change, because I was letting go of what was paralysing me.

Patience is not easy. It takes work and (ironically) it takes a while. But as timescales stretch out, possibilities become tremendous.

Surf your energy

Here are some of the things that I could be doing that would be better uses of my time than pissing around on the Internet:

* Meditation
* Gentle physiotherapy exercises
* Swimming
* Writing
* Working on my thesis
* Working on wider professional stuff (e.g. reading that isn’t directly related to my thesis but is connected to personal growth or wellbeing or system dynamics)
* Playing the ukulele
* Making collages
* Playing with the cats
* Clearing out the attic
* Going to bed early
* Interviewing
* Spending time with family and friends
* Watching back episodes of Strictly Come Dancing It Takes Two
* Organising my archived emails (and, in particular, amalgamating my lists of PhD-related memos and actions)
* Ordering papers and books from the library
* Food shopping and menu planning

Note that not all these activities are productive. So what is the difference between pissing around on the Internet and watching Strictly? Simply that the former drains my energy, whilst the latter builds it.

I tend to spend a lot of time pissing around on the Internet because it gets to 8.30pm and I can only remember the items on the list that feel like work and I’m out of energy for work. If I kept the list with me, I’d probably be able to find something on it that felt attractive at the time, and do a bit of that. And then I’d have more energy to do something else.

Paying attention to energy has really made a difference to what I do, and to how I coach. Asking the question ‘what do I have the energy for?’ or ‘what will build my energy now?’ seems to be much more productive than ‘what ought I to be doing?’ I get more done, and I see people getting more done, and we feel better because we have more energy and we’re not putting ourselves under pressure when we’re out of resources. Sometimes all I can do is play with a cat or two, but even this does more for me than checking and rechecking my Twitter feed.

If this feels overwhelming, then I have massively screwed up this post. What I am trying to say is that you can start more or less anywhere if you do it with care for yourself. The idea is to take the actions that will make it easier for you to take more actions, rather than the ones that are too hard or too painful and lead to stasis. It’s like going to the gym for five minutes rather than an hour and a half. It doesn’t feel like much, but you’re far more likely to go back than if you try and run a marathon the first day. Be slow, be kind and be gentle. It will happen. It won’t happen as quickly as you would like, but it will happen.

My blog posts tend to turn into War and Peace. This is not a bad thing in itself but it does have the consequence that I often go three months without writing one, which is not what I’m playing for. So the point of this is to try and lower the stakes by writing about minor thoughts and encounters, to see if I can make posting more of a habit.

So, some recent thoughts, in no particular order:

Making unfair dismissal easier. My take on this: actually it is not difficult to get rid of people who are underperforming at work. You just have to be willing to use the underperformance process. A lot of managers aren’t willing to do this, because it’s too scary and they don’t want the conflict or they don’t want to feel like the bad guy or they don’t feel competent to do it. This is a big corporate problem with wide-ranging implications.

Therefore I am against this idea, not just because of the obvious possibilities for abuse (which is a whole ‘nother post), but because I think it would have the opposite effect to the desired one. Enabling managers to continue to avoid doing their jobs would reduce organisational competence rather than increasing it, and that would do nothing for our productivity and prosperity.

Stories and strategies. I had a conversation with a couple of wise friends on Thursday evening. I said to them, “I want to know what I’m doing with my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’ve finished studying and I don’t know how my PhD is going to be useful, and I want to be able to tell people what it is that I do, and I want to feel that I have a purpose in life.” Their annoying but probably accurate response was “stop worrying about what to call your purpose in life and get on with doing things that are purposeful, and the purpose will become clear”.

Which makes sense, because that’s what happened in my personal life. I never got a strategy, much as I’d have liked one, and if I had had one then it would not have been “go and live in my friends’ attic”, but actually living in my friends’ attic has made me much happier than any of the plans I made. I didn’t get that from a strategy. It came from taking the best action that I could at the time.

So I am now trying to let go of my desire for a coherent narrative to describe what I do, and getting on with making the best job of it that I can (which is much better on some days than it is on others) and trusting that the story will follow.

Using social media I have been at a rather good UEL workshop on how to use social media, run by a communications company called Pickle Jar whom I found rather impressive.

The workshop leaders asked the participants: “who is your audience, and what do you want to do for them?” These are good questions for me because I’m not really a fan of Twitter and I tend to tweet because I think I ought to, rather than because I find any magic in the medium. That inevitably means that my tweeting is a bit of a mixed bag, and I don’t think it makes the world a better place. Maybe musing on this question will improve it.

Some other useful thoughts & questions:

* Use Twitter to listen to people who are important to you (customers, students), not just to talk to them – this can be the most valuable use.
* Make content “useful, relevant and interesting”.
* Is the objective of tweeting to transmit (one-way traffic) or to engage (two-way conversation)? Either is fine, but they will be supported by different strategies.

I don’t know whether I will be any better at Twitter as a result of this, but I will certainly think about the questions and see what emerges.

I am not going to write about him in detail here because it is a personal loss rather than related to what I do. But for his funeral, he chose the song ‘The Impossible Dream’ by Andy Williams, and that struck a chord, no pun intended. It’s not everyone’s path – and it is a hard path, and I’m not even sure that I think it leads to well-being – but many of us have a little bit of this in us, and sometimes it’s what keeps us going, and sometimes we do better when we nurture that spark.

Thank you, Allan.

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.

To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star.

This is my quest,
To follow that star –
No matter how hopeless,
No matter how far.

To fight for the right
Without question or pause,
To be willing to march
Into hell for a heavenly cause.

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
when I’m laid to my rest.

And the world will be better for this,
that one man scorned and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage.
To fight the unbeatable foe.
To reach the unreachable star.

The concept of self-care comes from a resource model of well-being.

Here’s the way I see it. I have finite resources. There are activities that grow my resources (e.g., food, sleep) and activities that use my resources (e.g., cleaning, difficult conversations). I can only use resources I have. Therefore, I have to make sure that I have enough resources.

My definition of self-care is ‘activity that replenishes my resources’.

My well-being is broadly proportional to my willingness to make self-care a high priority

There is a lot of discourse around self-care. I get sucked into it easily, thinking that self-care activities are selfish or a waste of time that I could use more productively. My experiences as a coach and in my own life, however, tell me the opposite. If I want to be useful, then I am required to care for myself. What I have to offer others is a function of how well I am resourced. Rather than being a luxury or a waste of time, self-care is a necessity if I want to do good in the world, and the more time I give to self-care, the more good I will find myself doing. Self-care is not self-indulgence, which often drains resources. (Similarly, self-care is not self-improvement. Self-improvement generally uses up resources, although not invariably. That’s a different post.)

The other important thing is that my experience of life is almost entirely a function of how much self-care I am practising. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve had people on the phone lamenting some minor circumstance, and the answers to the questions ‘when did you last eat?’, or ‘how much sleep did you get last night?’ or ‘how’s your health?’ have been ‘well, actually…’ The solution is almost never to fix the minor circumstance. The solution is to eat or rest or recuperate and then the minor circumstance no longer seems like a problem. So lack of resource is a vicious circle, because we end up using the meagre resource we have in stressing about things that would not occupy our attention if we had more resources.

There are no rules for self-care

Self-care is hard to generalise about. I can make a list of the activities that drain me and the activities that re-energise me, and my list will be different from anyone else’s. So, for example, work, socialising and gardening all fall into the category of activities that will be energising for some and draining for others. Self-care for introverts often involves solitary activity, whereas self-care for extraverts often involves communal activity. It is contextual.

Also, ‘one day at a time’ is a classic for a reason. I am very good at making elaborate plans for self-care, and they always fail, because I am a bit different every day and because I am not always good at working out what I need. Put differently, the question ‘how should I care for myself today?’ is much, much easier to answer than ‘how should I care for myself in life?’ It may be that every day’s answer is a bit different.

Here are some things that constitute self-care for me (in no particular order): Singing. Listening to music. Dancing. Meditation. Swimming. Sitting in the spa pool at the gym. Cooking. Doing spiritual work. Mentoring. Pilates. Collaging. Being with people I love. Shopping. Playing with my wardrobe. Playing with the cats.

For a lot of people, that list would be Very Hard Work Indeed. Everyone needs to make their own. Pro tip: try and put easy ten-minute activities on there as well as the ones that take an hour and require travel. That’s harder than it looks.

Start with the basics

When I am coaching someone whose self-care is all over the shop – which happens much more often than you would think – my starting point is this: (1) try to eat healthy food and not to drink too much. (2) try to go to bed on time. (3) try to get a few minutes of exercise a day, and (4) try to get outside for a few minutes a day.

I am not suggesting that these things are easy. I struggle with them. But they do not require dramatic life change and they tend to deliver about 80% of the self-care requirement. Most specifically, they tend to deliver enough of the self-care requirement to get into a stable place from which one can then say ‘okay, what is the more difficult stuff that I now need to do?’

I am quite good at trying to start with the more difficult stuff (e.g., going to yoga classes, doing creative work) and then finding that I don’t have the stamina to keep going because I am not doing the basics.

Stop doing the things that drain resource.

That’s often not all that dissimilar to the above, because for many of us eating unhealthy food, drinking and staying up late are the main ways in which we dissipate our resources. Pissing around on the Internet is another. For me, there are sites that I need to stay away from, and I am less well resourced today than I was yesterday because I managed to stay away from them yesterday and I haven’t today. (This makes me sound like an Internet porn addict. I’m not one, honestly, although I don’t condemn them.) Mostly it comes back to remembering in the moment that actions have consequences and being willing to take responsibility.

The other big anti-self-care activity for me is brooding. Getting lost in the thickets of my mind is easy, and it is a bad place to get lost. It drains resources more quickly than everything else put together.

For me, antidotes to the above are: meditation (even 5m will do), or making a call to someone who can help me remember not to believe the inside of my head, or actively choosing an activity that I will really find rewarding instead. If the only alternative to pissing around on the Internet is work then I will probably choose PAOTI. If I allow myself to go to the gym and sit in the spa pool instead, I’ll end up with more resources and I’ll end up getting more work done. (H/t Lloyd for yesterday’s timely reminder of this.)

As per title of this post, do not assume that I get this right all the time, or even much of the time. But I do my best, and when I take the action, it works.

I’m also reading a lot of political posts about this, trying to make sense of it. There are many different angles, all of which are important and valuable. Here are two to be going on with. (I’m not going to link to any of the string-em-up posts, but if anyone could put me onto a genuinely thoughtful right-wing post, I would be grateful.)

I am not writing about politics. I don’t know a lot about politics. I don’t know a lot about education. It doesn’t seem to me particularly surprising that people who haven’t experienced support from the system should fail to trust the system now. But why this has happened now? Or how to deal with it? I don’t know what action people should take, and I certainly don’t know what action the government should take (although I can think of a couple to avoid).

Instead, I’m writing about self-management. My rather-too-long post is mostly about what people should do inside their heads. Often I think that this is a very self-indulgent thing to write about. Why are we paying attention to what’s inside our heads, rather than just getting out there and being useful?

I’d rather be someone who knows about politics. It’s hard not to think that I’d be much more useful to the world. But I’m not. What I know about is how to work with the blocks in people’s heads that make them unhappy and stop them doing things. And there is a lot of that out there. For all the people who are cleaning up the streets today, there are many more who would like to and don’t dare, or who are paralysed and made miserable by their anger and despair at what’s happened in the last few days. This is not only a difficult place to be in but it makes positive action nigh-on impossible.

I’m starting to get very interested in first actions, the kick-off point for a change. Baumeister’s research suggests that if we improve our self-regulation in one area of our lives, we will be able to transfer this to other areas also. (So, for example, people who get better at making healthy food choices may also become better at switching the light off on time, or vice versa.) But where to start if self-regulation is new to you and it is challenging?

Newcomers to twelve-step meetings are told ‘keep coming back’. Not ‘stop drinking tomorrow or you’re not welcome’. Indeed, it is explicitly written into the traditions that ‘the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking’ (or insert the relevant substance or behaviour). I’ve always thought that this was about finding an easy place to start. We can’t always stop drinking right away. But maybe we can keep coming back to a meeting and, from there we can find the strength to go on.

I’ve been thinking that one of the saddest things about the riots is the fact that the experience of destructive rioting, after a brief high, is so appallingly unfulfilling, isolating and painful. By contrast, the experience of cleaning up after the riots, being part of a community and knowing that you are taking action with others to support it, is almost the definition of a eudaimonic well-being experience.

So how can we help people to turn it around? What could a manageable first step be?

And what do I, who have never wanted for anything, have to offer the people who have been so repeatedly failed by the system? Why would they take it from me that there is a better way, a way that hurts less inside your head, whether or not circumstances change?

I have no idea what the answer to these questions is. I’ve spent a lot of this week wishing I could be useful politically instead of psychologically, wishing that my area of experience was something concrete and practical. But I also think the truth is that it’s psychology that stops us behaving in the way that makes most sense to us. There are a lot of unhealthy eaters out there (often including me) and the problem isn’t that we don’t know about healthy food. The problem is that we’re using food in unhealthy ways. What’s the first step in changing that? It is not knowledge, and it is not reason.

For me, the first step is often in accepting where I am. No, I have not forgiven this person. I still want terrible things to happen to them. I wish I were not in that place, but that is the reality of where I am. Or maybe Today was another day when I tried to eat healthily and it didn’t work. This strategy is not working for me, and I need more support. Acknowledging this to myself, and letting it be okay, is the catalyst for the letting-go to begin.

Asking for help is another big one. That probably needs its own post.

The important thing, I think, is letting the first steps be small, whilst trusting that bigger steps are out there in the future. It can be very difficult. I tend to set ridiculous targets for myself and then be even more paralysed when I inevitably don’t make them. Reminding myself that I am not superhuman is vital.

I really don’t know how to translate what I’ve learned into something that’s more generally useful. But I do passionately believe that there is something important and valuable in this space. It’s a both-and. Yes, we have failed people in many ways and that is difficult to fix in an environment where there is little money around. Yes, the role of government and society in mending and healing is critical and we must pay as much attention as we can to getting it right. But there is an individual role in here too, and it’s hard. If it’s hard for me, how much harder must it be for someone who has not had the advantages that I have had? Looking for a good place to start would be a valuable exercise.

I’m a grandiose creature, and I want to fix the whole problem myself. I’m an impatient creature and I want it all sorted by the day after tomorrow. I’m a mathematician by training, and that means I want to reduce it to small manageable units of analysis that can then be manipulated with relative ease. Unfortunately the human condition is such that these kinds of interventions do not work. So this is my starter for ten list of what I think I’ve learned about what to do instead.

(1) Don’t give up.

This is the hardest, I think. At times like this it can be very difficult to maintain hope that (a) there can be a positive outcome, and (b) that it’s possible to make a valuable contribution. But working on maintaining hope is very important.

My ex used to say to me ‘the gates of Hell shall not prevail’ and I know that’s probably not useful for non-Christians but I’m putting it in here anyway because it has been so very, very helpful to me. I go through times when I recite it like a mantra. (I have no idea what it’s a quote from. The Internet will know.)

If you can’t find hope, put your head down and grittily keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hope will return in time.

(2) Keep practising compassion.

The police may be routinely abusing their power, may be derelict in their duty of care and may have committed crimes against vulnerable people. The police are suffering from a crisis of leadership and loss of confidence, are having their budgets slashed and are part of what appears to be a fairly toxic system in lots of ways. The second may go some way towards explaining the first but does not excuse it or remove responsibility. The first does not remove the obligation to exercise compassion and understanding of the second.

The people of Tottenham have a difficult and painful history with the police, and good reasons not to trust them. Many people in Tottenham (and other areas where rioting and looting have occurred) are currently experiencing a great deal of difficulty, poverty and despair because of economic conditions. The rioters and looters are committing serious crimes, harming innocent people and harming their communities’ prospects for regeneration. All of this can be true simultaneously.

It’s always more complicated.

People are complicated. Systems of people are even more complicated. (See many posts q.v. on the idiocy of a method of government that requires its leaders to pretend – or, worse, believe – that the system they govern is simple.)

It’s really, really easy for me to get angry. When I think about a teenage girl being battered by police (warning: violent link), I become vengeful and vindictive towards the police. When I think about local businesses that may be broken forever, I become vengeful and vindictive towards the looters. This is not going to help anyone, starting but not ending with me. If I make a conscious choice to practise compassion instead, I’m going to be a lot more useful. (See also point (5)).

(3) Keep self-care on the agenda.

Self-care is not a luxury of the bored middle-classes. It is not massage (although it may be, if you crave touch and shrivel from its lack). It is not ‘pampering’. It is doing what you need to be able to stay on our feet day after day, so that you can build your resources rather than depleting them, and so that you are in the best possible state to make smart decisions about how best to deploy those resources to get useful stuff done.

I do not wish to ignore my privilege here. Some people have more resources than others with which to care for themselves. If you have very little in the way of resource and, say, children to look after, it is vanishingly hard to care for yourself. Lack of self-care should not be another stick with which people beat themselves or others. But there is a reality that people, like plants and animals, do better when they are well maintained, and we can be more useful when we do the best we can to maintain ourselves.

(4) Look for opportunities to collaborate.

This one really deserves its own post and I’m not going to write much about it here because long post is long, and it’s also another complicated topic with many facets. (For example, I’ve written extensively here about the reasons that I’m currently not willing to be involved in organised political activity.)

But for me there is a fairly obvious principle that people can do things together that they cannot do alone, on all kinds of levels. There is a Margaret Mead quote that I’ve always loved: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I have no idea whether or not this is actually true, but it’s inspiring and I think we need all the inspiration we can get right now.

(ETA: great example here from David Yelland. Also, on Wednesday morning we are taking things (clothes, blankets, products, books etc.) to the Haringey Council for the people made homeless, so we are happy to take anything that you can get to us by then.)

(5) Pray. Yes, really.

I always feel a bit nervous about this because prayer is so linked with organised religion and I know organised religion is a really triggering topic and it’s not what this post is about. But I think praying helps even if you don’t believe in God. Obviously as per posts passim I do believe in God so I can’t make this claim from personal knowledge. But I have seen it work for enough people that I feel justified in saying that in my experience it is true. (I think a good comparison is the Buddhist practice of metta bhavana. That’s harder work, though. A prayer can be done within half a minute.)

I don’t believe that if I pray for peace there is more likely to be peace. (Well, I suppose I believe that on some weird mystical karmic level there is a connection, but I don’t think for one second there is a direct causal relationship.) But when I pray, I open myself to change. Most specifically, I let go of my anger and I’m more able to get in touch with the compassion I seek. If I pray for people – most especially the people or groups that I most despise and to whom I react with the deepest anger – then my response shifts and the anger starts giving way to understanding. This is valuable because I can then make better judgments about how to be of use. Also I have a great deal more energy when I am not spending it being cross.

(I hope it’s apparent that praying doesn’t need to be to God, or indeed to anything. Sometimes it’s useful to have a concept of a power greater than oneself, however one understands that power, but this is really not for everyone.)

(6) Keep your sights low.

I can’t fix this. I’m a private citizen. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a lot of influence. This blog is read by a hundred people max.

But I can do something. Some days, that’s nothing more than the prayer. Some days it’s showing up for a local meeting or writing a blog post or just having the guts to say ‘it’s always more complicated’ to someone who may or may not want to hear it. Et cetera.

The important thing is that I’m doing something. If I let it be enough, I can do more. If I decide that it’s inadequate, I paralyse myself and end up making no difference at all.

I will finish with the quote I cite most often in this blog, from Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not given to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” My intention in writing this is to help myself (and anyone who finds this post useful) to do the best possible imperfect job of continuing to engage with this work at a difficult time.