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Category: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, WELLBEING & POETRY

I was right! I feel so much better now

Published December 15, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Surprised by your dislike

Have you ever had a situation where someone heard the exact opposite of what you said?  And accused you of lack of faith?

It’s wildly disconcerting.  Your mind races as you try to understand what is happening and your heart sinks when you release how much the other person dislikes you.

Sometimes the situation is less clear cut.  You are distressed by a situation and think someone should be making an effort.  They think you should have acted in some way to sidestep the distress and that your lack of action has brought threat to them.  What a slap in the face with a wet fish!

Do we ever see the facts in the same way?

Where am I going on this?  Simply, it is astounding how different two people’s views can be of the same situation.

And it follows to me that there is not much point in worrying about other people think. They will think what they will and sometimes what they think seems to be a fabrication, utterly devoid of any factual accuracy.

What other people think is so distracting

The trouble is that most of us do worry what other people think.  And quite often we aren’t released from the hurt of someone expressing their dislike and their distrust until our side of the story is confirmed.

It is a dreadful waste of time and effort, but ‘there we go’.  We hate being excluded.  We hate being rejected.  That is why so many people put a  lot of effort into being rich and powerful.  To have “f+++ off” houses and cars as one of my former students put it rather pithily. They don’t want ever to be bothered by other people’s power to put them down.

We feel awful until our status is restored

The emotional release comes when our status is restored, at least in our eyes.  And of course, it is in our eyes.  The other party probably does care . . . or is plotting revenge!

But release there is. Silly isn’t it?  It is like going up a ladder in ‘snakes n ladders’ and feeling important because the roll of the dice was in your favor.

But ‘there we are’.  It is the human condition to be silly. It comes with the ‘box’ in which we were delivered.

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Take the first step, don’t look back, and the universe will conspire to help you

Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

On Commitment

Goethe

Until one is committed there is always hesitancy,

the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness,

there is one elementary truth,

the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision,

Raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings

And material assistance which no man could have dreamed

Would come his way.

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Multiplicator effects – key to the economy, key to our business success

Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Multiplicator effect

I sat down this morning to ponder the multiplicater effect and what it tells us about management in the new age of knowledge and information.

This is how I look at it.

In the 1900’s

In the olden days, business was like a household budget. Money came in and money went out.

The way to get a bit richer was to take the job you did and get someone to do parts of it more cheaply than you could do yourself.

Let’s imagine I was a cobbler. If I could get you to stand in a line and one of you put on the soles, one thread the laces, and so on.  I could pay you each less than I could pay myself. And I could keep the profit that each would make if he worked for himself.

We used simple arithmetic and success was mainly about keeping the change.

Confusing housekeeping with economics

This business model leads to weird behaviour. Everyone believes that a one pound coin is indivisible. Either I have it, or you have it. And we fight to the death over it.

National wealth does not work like that. Indeed, company wealth doesn’t work like that.

Stock turn is important in shops. I don’t want to buy stock and having it sit on the shelves. I want it in and I want it out and the money banked. Circulation is the key. Not hoarding.

In a town, the same applies. When we fight over the one pound coin, we are wasting time and energy. Let me buy something from you with the coin. Then let you buy something from the next person and they from the next and ultimately someone buys from me. That one pound serves many of us. The more people served by the same one pound coin, the healthier the economy.

Installation art

I keep threatening to put an GPS device in a pound coin to follow it as it moves in the wild. If you would like to collaborate in that project, do get in touch.

In the 2000’s

In the modern business world, few of us are like the cobbler with a skill which can be broken into parts, each of which can be done by someone less skilled than us for less money than we would do it ourselves.

Adam Smith and the division of labor

In this day and age, that model of division of labour is a nonsense. Yes, it made perfect sense in the 1800 hundreds in Scotland when Adam Smith said that we can make more pins when we each made part of the pin. And maybe this rule-of-thumb is still true when we are making pins.

Today’s products are more complicated than pins

But in today’s world, we are often making something a lot more complicated than a pin. We’ve moved on. There isn’t any one person who has made the whole of what we are making. There isn’t any person who knows how to do everything. In truth, if we put a 1000 elves in with Santa we wouldn’t be able to draw or visualize exactly what we are making

We are like the blind men describing the elephant. I think the elephant is his trunk. You think it is his tail.

The elephant knows he is an elephant, of course. But he has no way of communicating with the blind men We have to wait until the blind men get the concept of a possible elephant and start communicating with each other. Then they can work out there is an elephant and what it looks like.

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time but there is no end to the people who will try

Now there are plenty of people out there trying to pretend that they know how to make a pin and hoping to delegate part of it to you. Notice well though, that they will be reluctant to give you a good contract that goes beyond chance.   They have no market for that pin. (Sorry people who make real pins ~ I know you are real.)

Before you part with an hour of your time, ask them for their sales report

The point is not that the heaven has finally fallen on Chicken Licken. The point is that the world is making bigger things than pins. When you hear someone claim that they understand the whole elephant and you should play a small part at the trunk for a pittance, ask sweetly to see the sales reports. They won’t show the report to you because it doesn’t exist.

Listen to those who want genuinely to collaborate

But when someone says, hey, I feel something interesting in front of me. What do you feel? Do you think there is any connection between what you feel and I feel? THEN, we have a show.

When we network our skills together, then we can make something that we cannot see alone.

This is not the age of division of labor

Division of labour aimed to do things faster and cheaper. Today’s world is about networking specialist labour to do something no one person or company can do alone.

This is the age of connecting with other skilled people

This is not the age of division of labour and making smaller and smaller things. This is the age of networking skill and making bigger and bigger things.

To be practical

As a career coach and work psychologist, I put my practical cap on and ask: what does this mean in practice?

  • The essential career tool of today is a set of modular pieces of work which have the potential to link up with others. I say potential because other people may not have work ready to link up.  We do our work anyway but rather than just do it, we do it in a way that has potential to link up with others so they can see where they could join in.
  • The essential career management tool of today is to be adaptable and do whatever work is available without losing sight of our skill base. The test of any task is not whether we are paid for it but whether we are willing to put it on our website for others to link up to.
  • The essential selection criteria for inclusion in a permanent team will be
    • number of modules we have available for others to use
    • the diversity of modules (are we able to clean the floor and do the accounts as readily as paint a Picasso)
    • the readiness at which we create modules in new situations (rate and diversity)
    • the connections we make with the team and importantly are now possible between other team members without our presence!
  • The ethics of selection come down to whether a person’s connections will be richer by working with us (do they become more creative and are they involved in richer sets of connections?)
  • Pay is likely to be more equal with money paid into development funds to pay for capital when it is needed and the opening up new opportunities. Where there are differentials they are likely to come from being central to a network because the pound moves through us more often (we buy and we sell). People who only sell should receive less.
  • Ranks of professions might change. Lets imagine we paid a toll to a receptionist each time we walked through the door. We might be come reluctant to have a receptionist. Indeed, this is a test of a division of labour philosophy operating. We may not need the service if we had to pay more for it. Let’s imagine the hospital workers mentioned in a paper today who create a lot more value than they take home. What if they decided to run a hospital and just hire the doctors and nurses around them. That makes sort of sense to me!
  • In the olden days, training meant starting with a small task and growing into the ‘owner’. Obviously the tasks in our early career will be small.  But what if the goal was to move increasingly into the centre of a network where we are able to work with a wider number of people?  Have the pound coin pass through us more often? What if the goal was to increase whom we are able to work with on a project of value?  What if I took a person into a room and said: take two people, figure out what they can do and figure out, not what you can sell to each of them, but what you can take/buy from one, transform and pass on to the next. It’s what entrepreneurs do, of course. But what if the entire training process was geared to the capacity to detect and executive collaboration?
  • Jane McGonigle lists the qualities of projects that have this magical capacity which I restated here I would look for these multiplicator competencies in someone’s portfolio and help them find opportunities to broaden their experience in new ways of working.

The beginning is the ability to do modular work that has capacity for collaboration. To be potentiated, so to speak, to collaborate. A change of focus but an important one. Learn to be a multiplier rather than a taker.

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Are we done ‘bargaining’ about the financial crisis? I wish, but I don’t think so.

Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, action & the financial crisis

This time last year we were definitely in the first of the five stages of grief.  Denial: we couldn’t quite believe that the bankers had blown a hole below our a waterline.

A year later, economists at least, have moved on.

The Governor of the Bank of England said

The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short of a trillion (that is, one thousand billion) pounds, close to two-thirds of the annual output of the entire economy.

To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.” (Governor of the Bank of England, in a speech, 20 October, 2009. )

Yes.  One trillion pounds sterling, 66% of the UK’s annual GDP of 1,4 trillion pounds has been put aside to mend the hole, lest it sinks the entire ship of state.

I don’t think the man and woman in the street quite grasps the size of the hole.  If they did, they would have stormed thelife-boats.

Professional economist are beginning to look at alternatives

The economists are beginning to debate seriously though.

Do we cut back hard to pay down our national debt – for which you and I must read – government debt?  Should the government stop spending like we might when we’ve just had an overseas holiday and put too much on the credit card?  Cut out all the luxuries till we have paid off our excesses?

Or do we need Keynesian economics to get out of this?  That is, should we spend money from the center to create a ripple effect?  For example, should the government spends 100 pounds on a new school, who pays the builder who pays the suppliers and who pays their suppliers who pay the supermarkets and who ultimately pays me.  All of us take part and we all pay tax and don’t claim benefits?

Ann Pettifor’s talk on Keynesian economics is 20 pages long.  If you are not an economist, put aside a couple of hours to get through it. It is worth the time.  First, it is clearly written.  You will understand the issues. Second, it is well written. It is nice to know that someone in England can still write a great speech (though she appears to live and work out of the States now).

Where are economists on the grief cycle?

So the economists are beginning to look at the facts.  What stage of grief are they in?  We need to know this so that we have a sense of how long the dilly-dallying will go on.

  • None are really proposing action.  The actions of others, yes, but not their own.  But they are along the track.  I would say the independent economists are around the bargaining stage – if we do this, it will be alright!
  • The Governor of the Bank of England, though admirably witty, seems to be further along around the depression stage. I do hate writing that.  It feels like tempting fate.  It’s relevance is this. It’s important to have a sense of when we will move collectively out of the state of shock and deliberation.  And it is important for younger psychologists reading this to store away a sense of how long community’s take to recover psychologically from extreme shocks so they are better able to lead when shocks happen in the future as they surely will.

We are gathering ourselves for action

We are still waiting for the leaders whose plans are not contingent.  We are still waiting for the leaders who say this is what I am going to do. This is what I am wholly committed to doing ~ so much so that I don’t have to say I am committed.  You see it in my eyes. You see it in my focused attention.  You see it in my invitation to join me.

We have a way to go.

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Now that I am 45

Published December 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

When I was 25

When I was a young and brash 25 year old, I often dismissed people as ’45 and going nowhere”.

I expect the young of today to be equally as intolerant. And I forgive them. Our twenties are heady time.  We achieve autonomy and we reassure ourselves that we are able to take our place in the adult world.

Now I am 45

I want to honor the promise of my 25 year old self.  I think

  • We have a responsibility to the young to make opportunities for them and to allow them to make their mistakes but in non-career threatening ways.
  • We have a responsibility to create institutions where they can progressively take on larger and larger projects.
  • We have a responsibility to ensure that the young have access to information about what is worth doing and what is not. We should not allow them to spend time on speculative work that will be career-breaker and undermine their confidence for ever after.
  • We have a responsibility to espouse a vision and work towards it systematically.
  • We have a responsibility not to sulk. We are not 25 any more. We can not longer start projects with only the thought “I can, I can.”

It is our job now to bring together all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. The people. The money. The processes. The customers. The parties. The comfort when things don’t go our way.

We are 45 now. The 25 year olds are right. We aren’t going anywhere. We are gathering together all the resources we need for larger works.

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The welcome illusion of Monday morning

Published December 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Too Much Weekend

I’ll like my week better for a tidy room

A golden rose cheerfully in a crystal tube

But with a day spent alone

Working on streams distant from the streams of others

I yearn for the strains of the world outside

If I had a TV, I would switch it on

I’m glad I don’t

It would not give me what I want

The compulsive tug of collective movement

People going somewhere, maybe nowhere

Do I mind our destination when we move together?

I’m ready to join the surging throngs of people in the morning

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It’s hard, just to listen

Published December 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Please Listen

When I ask you to listen to me

and you start giving me advice,

you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me

and you begin to tell me why

I shouldn’t feel that way,

you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me

and you feel you have to do something

to solve my problem,

you have failed me,

strange as that may seem.

Listen! All I ask is that you listen.

Don’t talk or do—just hear me.

Advice is cheap; 20 cents will get

you both Dear Abby and Billy Graham

in the same newspaper.

And I can do for myself; I am not helpless.

Maybe discouraged and faltering,

but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can

and need to do for myself,

you contribute to my fear and

inadequacy.

But when you accept as a simple fact

that I feel what I feel,

no matter how irrational,

then I can stop trying to convince

you and get about this business

of understanding what’s behind

this irrational feeling.

And when that’s clear, the answers are

obvious and I don’t need advice.

Irrational feelings make sense when

we understand what’s behind them.

Perhaps that’s why prayer works, sometimes,

for some people—because God is mute,

and he doesn’t give advice or try

to fix things.

God just listens and lets you work

it out for yourself.

So please listen, and just hear me.

And if you want to talk, wait a minute

for your turn—and I will listen to you.

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Beautiful New Year Resolutions: Follow the beauty you discovered in 2009?

Published December 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

New goals to focus the new year

2010 is upon us.  2009 has gone fast.  I began the year overloaded.  I was stressed out in January and was working hard to limit my goals.  That’s the purpose of goal setting, right?  To reduce the number of things claiming our attention.

Do you achieve your goals?  I sincerely hope not!

In the end, I over-achieved some of my goals and under-achieved others.  Why?  Why can’t we arrive spot-on?

Because that is not our job.  Really it is not.

Events, dear boy, events!

Our job is to respond to events.  Events, dear boy, events, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said.  Or as the military say, no plan survives meeting the enemy.

Our job is not to press on regardless.  Or job is to be aware of what is happening around us, to understand what is valuable, and look after that.  We’ve had a good year when we’ve attended to who and what is important.

To be ready for unfolding events, it is a good idea to plan.  Plans mean we have information at our finger-tips and we find it easier to read evolving situations and understand what we need and want to do.

A good year is when our goals unpack themselves and we discover what is ‘good and true, better and possible”

But our job is to learn.  A good year is a year in which our goals unfold.   A good year is when our goals unpack themselves.  We come to understand the richness of the world and gaze upon it with respect and more curiosity bordering on reverence, not to forgive its wrongdoings but alive to what is ‘good and true, better and possible.”

So as we open our diaries for 2010, what has changed for us during 2009?  Putting aside the farce of bailing out banks to the tune of more than half out annual GDP and politicians who rifle the petty cash, for farce is what that is, what changed for us during 2009?

Looking around the world, what do we see that we never used to see?  What poetry & song did we hear this year, yet never heard before?   Whom do we know whose style and approach to life we truly admire?

What brings us alive and takes us bubbling with enthusiasm towards 2010?

Take your first small step that may be the giant step needed by mankind

Often what brings the light to our eyes is deeply personal. We don’t want to expose what we love to the harsh glare of spotlights and public scrutiny.  What we share is not for the sake of sharing.  It is for the sake of nurturing what we feel is beautiful and it is for the sake of encouraging what we would like to see more of.

Of the many beautiful things we have discovered, which are we able to move towards?  Which are we able to do more?  Where and how can we take part and in the process make them more beautiful?

We may have the smallest role to play in their beauty.  But it may be our role in creating a beautiful world.  That small step on the edges of our existence may be a large step for mankind ~ if only we would take it.

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Not a sudden revolution in human nature but a gradual evolution in human institutions

Published December 12, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Tony de Mello

My internet rambles threw up a contemporary philosopher that I hadn’t encountered before: Tony de Mello.  Catholic priest from Indian, Tony de Mello challenges our yo-yo swings between the idea that we can and should control the world and our irritation when we find out that we cannot.

With western thinking, frustration often drives us to despair

Tony de Mello uses a good example.  Someone jumps the queue and it irritates us.   Would we, he asks, take a sledge hammer to ourselves?   Why do we punish ourselves with a bout of ill temper?

Does putting aside our ill-temper mean we should accept unfairness passively?

Should we do nothing about the queue-jumper?  Quite possibly. Particularly if we are feeling ill-tempered.  We are unlikely to be effective.

But we shouldn’t be passive.   Our first task is to attend to our ill temper.  Then when we are in a clear and positive state of mind, we can see what if anything can be done.

Choices in tough conditions

In a separate post I found a longer description of psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl’s explanation of the choices that we face under the direst of circumstances.

These are the three rules of thumb which I’ve tried to make concrete because I am still more comfortable with explanations of what “I do” rather than explanations of what “I be.”

#1 The world is not ours to control

I do feel better when I let go.  I can understand the world as scientist.  I can represent imaginative changes to the world as an artist.  But as a celebration of what is miraculous rather than as a need to control it.

#2 Other people are not here to do my bidding

It matters not whether I use force or charm.  People are not here for my purposes.

Rather I am able to build good relationships between myself and others.

#3 Accept that other people express fear, anger, pain, misery and spite

Of course, people will not be nice just because I am willing to be nice.  How nice are people when they crowd onto a commuter train or worry about their job security?  They will do what they will do.

What I am able to do is to be realistic about what they are feeling and doing and concern myself with how I react.  How does my interior world echo back events in the world to me?   What am I making of these events and am I absorbing their unpleasantness into my life?  It can be hard to remember that they are not here to do my bidding.  Nor I theirs.

To become discomposed by their actions is like remonstrating with boiling water for being hot.  I need to get a grip on irrelevant emotion, step back and consider the circumstances and my goals.

A gradual evolution in human institutions

When Barack Obama accepted his Peace Prize in Oslo this week, he quoted J F Kennedy.

“Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace–based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions–on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace–no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process–a way of solving problems.”

People won’t change.  But I can contribute by the slow improvement in the ways that we settle our differences.  And I can be realistic and expect to renegotiate our differences continually.  Daily. Calmly.

JFK went on.

“With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interest, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that

————–

We all inhabit this small planet.

We all breathe the same air.

We all cherish our children’s

future. And we are all mortal.

————–

“Enemies between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever.  However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

So let us persevere. Peace need not be the impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.”

So I can persevere.  I need not be at odds with the world.  I will get further by not expecting perfection.  I will get further “By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.”

For that, I need to be in good shape.  To be in a good temper with the world.  It seems selfish to be happy.  It also seems tautological.  But it seems true that to be happy we must be happy.   Yes, here is the “be”.  As I am not that good at “to be”, I will just do happy!  I will not ignore the world. But first I will do happy.  Then I can attend to our relationships and institutions.  And then maybe the world won’t feel as it it needs to be controlled!

Maybe that is the goal?  To live in a way that we don’t feel as it the world is dangerously out of control.  First, attend to ourselves.  Then to our relationships.  And then we can celebrate the world as scientists and artists.

So an Indian Catholic priest, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the holocaust, a Roman Catholic President and Kenyan Ecumenical President ~ why do we find it so difficult to grasp what they are saying.  Well, begin by being happy.

Three video clips of Tony de Mello talking are here.

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