Hope - Day 31

Monday 31st December - New Year's Eve

31 is the most common number of days in the Western Calendar's months. The rhyme that many
people use as a reminder ("Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest
have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear; And twenty-nine
in each leap year.") was first published in 1555, when it was copied into a manuscript. It is probably
the only 16th century poem that many ordinary people know by heart.
I hope the months ahead are happy and healthy ones for you and yours.

The end is nigh, in more ways than one. Today is the last day of 2018 and it is also the final guest post that I will curate and host as part of the Advent Blog series, well at least for the foreseeable future. There have been some brilliant pieces this year - huge thanks to all the contributors. It is New Year's Eve and for the first time for ages we are not going to a party, instead we are cooking a family meal at home. I am looking forward to spending some time with my sons. We have a big party on Saturday to celebrate Hamish's 21st. He has asked me to say a few words, so I need to give that some thought. It is a funny feeling seeing your children become adults. I'm sure I should feel older than I do.

The final guest post in this year's Advent Blog series is by start-up and individual and organisational growth specialist Christine Locher. With an academic grounding in Communication, Psychology and Intercultural studies in her native Germany (during which time she also worked as a journalist), Christine is a high achiever. Post university she commenced her career in consulting, working first for McKinsey and then Boston Consulting Group, undertaking a variety of client and internal development roles before focussing on the growth of consultants at all levels. She ran global leadership and learning for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu before a brief stint at Oliver Wyman and BTS. Christine has a passion for seeing others thrive and grow. In 2017 she decided to branch out on her own, founding her own leadership development business. She is an excellent coach (ICF standard with high level academic qualifications in thinking and change as well as communication and psychology) and tends to work with entrepreneurs and growing businesses, especially within the tech space. Although a global nomad, Christine is currently based in London, where she takes advantage of the breadth of experiences that the City offers. She is a voracious reader with an almost insatiable curiosity - quite capable of ensuring that the details are not missed when effecting the big picture plan. Christine is a keen and natural networker - I recommend your connecting with her on Twitter, her handle is @ChristineLocher. I like her post as it is full of hope and we all need a but of that.

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“Help me, Obiwan Kenobi, you are my only hope.” (Princess Leia, Star Wars. Sending this into a galactic void, hoping to get heard. She did, eventually.)

Hope is one of our most beautiful qualities as humans. No matter how deep the colossal mess is that we might find ourselves in, we manage to, at least in a good moment, lift our eyes off the chin-deep muck we are in and towards the horizon. We imagine a future that is better. Hope is what keeps a sacred space for that imagination, not as an escapist delusion, but as a vision that just hasn’t been implemented yet. Hope gives us energy when the struggle has taken it all. Hope is what keeps us alive. This time. Next time. All the time.

Hope doesn’t need to wear rainbow unicorns or come with an ethereal violin soundtrack to work. Hope can be an empty parking lot at 3am shouting obscenities at the big man in the sky in existential disagreement to then sleep off the hangover, make your first cup of coffee, take a good hard look at your life, to keep going for another day, this time better. It doesn’t need to be pretty. It doesn’t need to be instagrammed. It just needs to be there, however it looks and feels at the moment. Hope, at all times, is as real as you allow it to be. I’ll just say that again. Hope is as real as you allow it to be. 

We have of course no proof or confirmation any of our hopes will ever come true. But hope doesn’t need that (and neither do you, you hope-endowed human, and deep-down you know it). Hope knows that tomorrow is another day, that one decision or one conversation or one encounter can reset the path to a better future that you can’t even imagine yet. And that you just don’t know beforehand which one it is going to be this time. So you keep going.

You might have a vision, or you might have had one but lost touch with it, as your daily mess is too far away right now so you have a hard time seeing how you get from over here to over there. Hope hears you. Hope reminds you that you don’t need to see the whole path to be able to take a step. And then another one. Hope focuses you on the things that work, so you can start doing more of them. Making small changes, which then add up to the big change. It’s how most big changes or successes work anyway, despite what it looks like on social media. And hope knew that all along. You might be deep down the problem hole right now, but there is no point in wasting more of the energy you don’t have focusing on how deep and messy it is. 

Focus on how you get out. Hope here serves as the magical, ever-elusive “air hook”. You can tie a rope to it and start pulling, and, with hope, it actually works.

Hope also lets you build trust. Take that first step first, without having to wait for the other one to begin. Raise that topic. Have that conversation. Mention the thing you are afraid to mention. Take small risks, be mostly rewarded, and start being less alone in this. It is easier to be hopeful when you have a tribe of supporters. Hope invites participation and support from other humans (and some friendly ‘droids…). Hope is stronger when shared. This, in turn, paves the way for others so they can dare to keep going as well. Hope lifts everyone.

You'll Never Walk Alone

Gerry and the Pacemakers

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark

At the end of a storm
There's a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll…

Scarcity and Abundance - Day 28

Day 28

The Twenty-eight Parrot - colloquial name of the 'Barnardius Zonarius Semitorquatus',
a green-headed subspecies of the Australian Ringneck.
It gets its name from its call, "Wenneeeyate",
which sounds like the number being shouted.

I first met Inji Duducu when I rudely dashed in and out of a watering hole, to say "Hi", when she was catching up with David D'Souza - so I was delighted, but amazed, to be invited as her guest to the People Management Awards dinner this September at the swanky Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair, London. Her employers, benenden health, were one of the sponsors of the event. Inji is their Group HR Director (she started there in May). It was a wonderful evening made all the more so by the fact that I was sat beside her - what an interesting lady (and lucky me). Inji is a Turkish American and she lives with her family in Leeds, in the north of England. She is active on Twitter (her handle is @injiduducu) and within the wider HR community.

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I am a fan of The Apprentice, even though each year's candidates are more ridiculous than the last, for me there is something compelling about watching people make terrible decisions week after week.  I am usually watching while wincing and peeking through my fingers - a bit like Fawlty Towers.

What is  particularly interesting is the follow up programme "You're Fired".  Even the candidates who came across as so idiotic and irritating you want to chew your own arm off just to have something to throw at the screen, seem disappointingly considered in the follow up.  No doubt some of it is down to entertaining editing, but one of the contestants recently commented that it was very stressful being project manager, and that's why he had behaved so disastrously.  It got me thinking, "why was it so stressful?"  I suspect it was because he knew that if he did not win the task, he would be ‘fired’.  In addition, because there is only one "job" (or investment opportunity), there's not much of an incentive to work effectively as a team because they are all competing to show Alan Sugar how great they are, and make the others look bad by comparison. 

Cuckoo chick pushing host birds' eggs out of the nest
Photo by Mike Richards

What if instead of competing, the premise of the series was "we've got 10 potentially great people here.  Let's test them out and if they're all good enough then we will invest in them all".  What if they believed there was enough – how would that impact collaboration and ultimately, performance? (though as Mitchell and Webb say in their sketch about  the show, "it’s not very entertaining to watch talented people perform brilliantly."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ss-59fi4nM)

In seemingly unrelated news, a friend of mine works in a company that has acquired a lot of other organisations, resulting in lots of different terms and conditions, especially holiday allowances.  The majority of people get 25 days, quite a few are on 30 but some are on 22.  She suggested bringing everyone up to 25 days as a minimum.  One of the fortunate 30 day-ers objected - those on 22 days would be getting 3 more days and he wouldn't be getting anything more, how unfair!

For me these things are linked by what Steven Covey described as a "scarcity mindset" - a sense that there is not enough, and if some people get a big share, there will be less for me. 

“Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everybody else."

The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit – even with those who help in the production. They also have  a very hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people.”

Picture courtesy of Ronald Grant
Screen shot from Outrage, directed by Ida Lupino, 1950

Many people apply this to work - if someone else gets a promotion then I won't, a pay rise for them means less for me, there's not enough, not enough, not enough.

What if we led our people with an abundance mindset? A sense that there's enough business, enough customers, enough opportunities and if we all perform at our best there will be enough recognition, training, promotions and bonuses for everyone?

I have written before about what perceived threats do to our cognitive abilities.  Our brains have evolved to be attuned to threat and additionally the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle probably evolved preferences and mechanisms that were effective in that time of scarcity, leading us to have a preference for a scarcity mindset.  Perhaps now that most people live in fixed communities (a relatively recently development in human evolution) and human relationships are increasingly inter dependent, being attuned to scarcity is no longer helpful?

FOMO (fear of missing out)
Source: Garfield comic strip by Jim Davis

When a threat (and perceived scarcity is a threat) is recognised our bodies are flooded with fight or flight chemicals that reduce our cognitive processing in the region of 40% (particularly higher order functions like emotion and impulse control). 

Fight or flight?
photo, A Dangerous Leap, by Juan Luis Duran 

This is useful in short bursts, but many of us live our lives chronically stressed and exposed to these chemicals, which increase our risk of disease.  Conversely chemicals like dopamine, endorphins and oxytocin, released when we receive ‘reward’, feel loved etc seem to be protective against disease.

Source Compound Interest

For those with a scarcity mindset, many things will be a potential stressor, reducing their thinking ability.  In addition, the perception of competition reduces teamwork and collaboration.  Who can afford that in their organisations?  People taking their thinking offline,  being chronically stressed and spending energy on defending, attacking and panicking?  Looking at it through this lens, it makes sense then that encouraging an abundance mindset in our workplaces will lead to better outcomes for all.

Here’s what Covey says about abundance

“The Abundance Mentality… flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.”

Importantly, an abundance mindset thinks long term – a person with this outlook understands that short term pain now will reap long term benefit, and someone else getting a pay rise now doesn’t mean that they never will. 

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin, 1879-1889. Bronze, life-size

Not surprisingly the advice for cultivating an abundance mindset is similar to the advice about cultivating positive thinking.  Here are some things you can try in your private and work life:

Appreciation – take time to deeply appreciate people, not just for what they do, but for who they are.  As part of this, keep a gratitude journal (or a modern version -  I’m part of a What’s App group where we log things we’re grateful for, and it’s wonderful to share in other people’s abundance).  Living pampered lives in the West we think we know what we’re grateful for, “yes, clean water, vaccines blah blah blah.  I know I’m very lucky blah blah”, but actually forcing yourself to stop, think and commit it to paper (or screen) acts on your brain in a very different way to theoretically knowing that you’re lucky, but still being really really annoyed about the traffic, or the printers not working, or whatever today’s irritation is.

Appreciation
Oil on board, Kay Crain 2012

Give – people with an abundance mindset give freely.  And since you cannot control what you get, but have 100% control over what you give, it makes sense that if you want abundance in your life you give the things you want most to receive.

The Three Wise Men bringing gifts
The Magi, Balthasar, Melchior and Gaspar, from late 6th century mosaic
Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nouvo, Ravena Italy

Trust – if you want people in the organisation to trust each other and trust you, trust them and be trustworthy – straightforward and authentic.  It’s just a version of the “give” stuff above.

Demonstration of mutual trust
Acrobats Jarley Smith (top), Jewell Waddek (left) and Jimmy Kerrigan (right) on
Empire State Building, Manhattan. August 1934 Photo credit Bettmann/CORBIS

Don’t create false competition – get rid of the forced distributions etc. Everyone can be recognised and appreciated for themselves.

Illustration by Liu Rui

Thinking Environments – if we want people around us to have a strong sense of self worth, then thinking our best about them, and helping them to think at their best makes sense.  If you’re not already familiar with Nancy Kline’s work on this (set out in “Time to Think”) it may well be the best 2 hours and £9.99 you ever spend.

Effective listening

Especially at this time of year, an abundance mindset seems like something worth trying.  

Happy holiday everyone!

Bing Crosby singing "Happy Holiday"

Holiday Inn promotion 1942