Seven Deadly sins - they originated with the "Desert Fathers" (a collection of Christian hermits , aesthetics and monks who lived in Egypt in the 3rd century AD). The sins as we know them were described as evil thoughts by Evagrius Ponticus. Originally there were eight - the extra one being "dejection"
It is a pleasure at times to look back as well as forwards. My most recent past has been pretty grim, so it was reassuring and uplifting for me to revisit this post, which was crafted in December 2014. I am very grateful to its author. What a lot has happened in the past four years. It has been a timely reminder of the fact that things change, dark times do not last forever and that there are always good experiences and learning to look forward to.
Today's post was written by my dear friend Michael Carty. Michael is often described, especially by those who know him, as the glue that binds the HR community on Twitter together. He is alert, interested and very well connected. However, he is much more than just glue - Michael is a cherished contact for many and always there to provide support and advice. His Twitter handle is @MJCarty. He writes a delightful blog, http://mjcarty.com, that illustrates how well read and far reaching his thoughts are. I love the powerful message of hope and anticipation behind his apparently simple words...
You were there then. You are here now. You will be there then.
The path you perceive isn’t the only one that exists.
Path beside a lake, Croatia
The path you are on isn’t the only one available to you. No matter how long you have been on that path, or how far it’s taken you.
There are other paths... Ewoks fleeing an All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) walker on a forest path Original story board visual by Ralph Mac Querrie for Return of the Jedi, Star Wars film
You always have a choice. You are always free to decide if you can live with the consequences of making that choice.
You can’t be anybody else but yourself. You can’t have any other values than your own. Trust in them.
I think it’s time, as it always is, to let your values guide you through. Being you has got you this far. Being you has got you much further than you would ever have thought.
You can travel further than you think possible Dr Who's Tardis
Being you will take you to places of which you have just plain no inkling right now. That is nothing of which to be frightened. That is the most exciting adventure of all.
There will always be setbacks. There will always be reasons for tears. There will always be joy.
23 December is the busiest day for travel over the festive period and is often the busiest day
for the whole year, with queues at airports and ports, overcrowded trains and heavy congestion
on roads. In the UK alone there will be over 12 million drivers travelling at least 20 miles (source the AA)
We had a wonderful family meal last night, but today I need to brave the seasonal traffic and get back to London to sort out Christmas for my immediate family at home. I have a lot of things to prepare and wrap. Today's post is by my good friend Michael Carty. Michael is a popular voice in HR circles and on social media. He has acted as a focal point for a wide global community for many years (his handle is@MJCarty, and you can read his excellent blog onTumblr). He is a delightful man, consistently respectful and polite - mindful of the views and feelings of others. Michael works as an editor for XpertHR and is a benchmarking specialist. When not analysing data and making complex matters simple for us lesser mortals, Michael shares his impressions of the world and is a gifted artist who appreciates what he finds around him. He is very well read (from comics to biographies), loves film (especially Star Wars) and is a music aficionado. He is also a loving husband and a loyal, entertaining and much-valued friend.
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Black and white, yin and yang, dark and dawn. An intertwining as old as time, as old as life, as old as human lives and hearts.
The miracle of written communication would not exist without this beautiful contrast of dark and light. Pen glides across paper, typewriter hammer leaves its impression, keystroke begets pixel, each enabling the words in our mind to be seen, understood and felt by others.
I believe I have seen every dawn this year. My body clock hates me. The older I get, the worse my ability to remain asleep past the laughably early hours becomes. These are the times of day most people only imagine. My brain has decided, with age, to be wide awake in these unimaginable times. John Updike wrote in his autobiography Self-Consciousness that he loved to sleep late, to let the world get started without him. You have no idea how much I envy him this.
I have had to learn to love both the darkness of the end of the night and the light of dawn. I have had to make the most of this enforced wakefulness. I truly love these times now. I would not trade them for anything.
Weekend early mornings are perhaps my favourite times. The dark and light of strong coffee in a white cup. Immersive, hypnotic music playing (perhaps aptly for the theme our endlessly generous hostess Kate has chosen, the Dawn of Midi’s album Dysnomia is on this minute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH4lkK-vSco).
The unfolding black and white of letters as I stumble to form words for my blog (or, in this case, for Kate’s). My mind feels peace and wakefulness, the week’s pent-up conscious and unconscious musings allowed free as night’s darkness slowly gives way to dawn.
Filtered by the smog
I have had two horrible, worrying bouts of illness this year. The second bout of illness knocked me out for most of last month. Shingles, I learned, is no joke, despite what its innocuous, almost friendly name might suggest. "It will make you feel pretty grotty," said the doctor who diagnosed my ailment. He was onto something. A lot of feeling rotten and a lot of rest was in order.
At times like these, the words you need to hear will find you. My recovery was aided by the most wonderful book, The Rise, The Fall and The Rise by Brix Smart Smith. The extraordinary story of an extraordinary life, told in the most extraordinarily vivid language. Good times, bad times, Brix has had her share. "Nothing is better than something that's bad," her biological father told her. We can and should learn the lessons of our darkest times, so that we can fully appreciate the light when it returns.
I blogged recently about this wonderful book (to read it follow this link), so I will not repeat myself here. I am stunned and humbled that Brix actually read my blog post, and tweeted some kind words about it.
I drew a picture of Brix to accompany the post.
Halfway through drawing this picture, I realised the subconsciously apt colour choices I had made, given that one of many highpoints of Brix’s time with The Fall was the collaboration with dancer Michael Clark (I imagine his name will be known to Kate) which resulted in the album I Am Kurious Oranj. I was subsequently amazed to read that Brix found the picture evocative of dawn and early morning in the California of her youth:
"Quite kurious..... it looks like the colour of the hazy early morning sunshine light of my 1960s L.A. upbringing. Dappled through the sycamore trees and filtered by the smog."
A different view of darkness
My first bout of illness this year, back in the Spring, gave me a different view of darkness. I had a very allergic reaction to an insect or spider bite (the precise cause remains undiagnosed) on my left hand. The toxin started to track rapidly up the veins of my left forearm, plotting a worrisome trajectory towards my heart. The poison’s progress was obvious, the vein and the area around it becoming inflamed. A visit to A&E resulted in a prescription of very strong antibiotics.
The effect of the first dose of antibiotics was overpowering. Back home from A&E, I lay in bed feeling a profound, all-encompassing darkness engulfing my vision and my mind from the edges. At first my mind tried to fight against it, to remain alert and awake. But I realised there was no messing with this medication. I had no choice but to surrender to the darkness, to trust that it wanted to heal me. The alert reader who spots that I am alive to write these words will perhaps already have twigged that, thankfully, the antibiotics did their trick. As much as I wanted to resist this enveloping darkness, it was not to be feared.
The best decision of my life
I got married in June this year. Just as my lovely friend Laurie Ruettimann said it would be, this was the best decision of my life. My happiest moment this year was during the ceremony, the ancient power of the words of the wedding vows producing a joy that overwhelmed me (yet somehow I didn’t blub - at least not there and then in the registry office). The wedding day fell during a heatwave. The whole week was sweltering, sultry, dreamlike.
The day after the wedding was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. I woke to see the first rays of sun of the longest day, the air around me scented by roses.
Softest night loosened its grip over the world.
Darkness is not to be feared.
As transporting as that dawn was, the most beautiful dawn is always tomorrow’s.
For those of you who are celebrating today, I wish you a very Happy Christmas. Regardless of your religious beliefs, I hope that the next few days are good and that they provide you with some time to recharge and connect with loved ones and friends. I am spending the day with my family in London. Our Christmas Day post comes from the wonderful Michael Carty. He is seen by many as the connective glue that holds many in the HR social media community together. Always interested, always mindful of others and respectful - a true gentleman. Michael is a thoughtful and talented blogger - you can read his words on Tumblr. Michael has for many years followed and commented on HR for XpertHR and is known as a benchmarking guru who can make sense of complex analytical data and communicate it in an easily understood manner to others less capable than himself. He is active and supportive on social media (often encouraging people to attend tweet-ups and events), indeed he and I first met at a tweet-up and over the years we have established a close friendship. You can follow him on Twitter (his handle is @MJCarty)
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Angels around you at all times
For much of 2016, the world has seemed an appallingly cruel place. There has been much to make a heart feel heavy and hollow. Comfort and joy - those traditional fixtures of the festive season - might seem in short supply. But even in these times they are still there, as abundant as they have ever been. Angels are not on high. They are around you at all times. You just have to ask for their help.
"I can't believe people care about me like that, and they don't even know me."
Hearing these words brought tears to my eyes in public at the start of this month.
These words come from a story that seems - the more I think about it - like a modern-day, real-life It's a Wonderful Life. Angels play a key role in this story. So does Twitter.
The tears came as I was walking to the train station through the bustle and tacky Christmas lights of a noisy and busy part of South London on my commute home. I was listening to an episode of RuPaul's consistently delightful What's The Tee podcast. He was talking to his podcast co-host - and fellow RuPaul's Drag Race judge - Michelle Visage about Jake.
The media recently picked up on Michelle Visage using Twitter to crowdsource help for Jake, a gay and trans teen from Elizabethtown, Kentucky (you can read one brief account here). Jake's mother had banished him from the family home on grounds of his sexuality, telling him by text message (as Visage recounts it):
"We didn’t raise you to be like this. That’s not the way God wanted it. No, you can’t come home."
Jake set up a Twitter account to reach out to Michelle Visage, who shared a screengrab of the text message, and asking for reassurance that life might get better for Jake from the wider community.
She responded to Jake with words of support and reassurance, and shared Jake's situation with her own Twitter followers. "Floods of tweets" came through, with people offering moral support, help, jobs, food and shelter for Jake.
Both Jake and Visage were overwhelmed and humbled by the love and kindness out there. Through the advice and support offered by Visage and legions of perfect strangers, Jake has made tentative progress with his mother and been able to move back into the family home. He is by no means out of the woods ("I fear for him" when Jake raises the trans issue with his mother, says Visage). But Visage is there for him. As is a new support network of thousands of friends.
Michelle Visage is humble about her role in Jake's story:
"I knew that I don't have that many followers - 290,000 or whatever. All I did was tweet it and it got picked up. But it wasn't meant to be about that. It was meant to be about - anybody would do this. And thank you so much for this help. And because of this help, this kid saw that he was loved. It just goes to show you how strong and how resilient and how amazing our community is when we pull together."
RuPaul takes up this theme:
"I wonder how many people have this story to tell? So many people go through this. And so many people survive.I've said this before. There are angels around you at all times. But because you have free will, they will not intervene unless you say: 'I. Need. Help.' Boom. It's done. And that's what happened with this kid."
Angels. Friends rallying to offer support. This could be a modern It’s a Wonderful Life. No man is a failure who has friends.
Back in 2014, I wrote the following about our hostess in this advent blogs series, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth:
There are angels around you at all times. Kate is one. I want to thank Kate for all she has done and does for me, for our community, for perfect strangers about whom none of us but Kate will ever know.
Kate when a little girl
Please join me in raising a toast to our wonderful advent blogs hostess, Mrs Kate Griffiths-Lambeth. And if you are on Twitter, please, please tweet her a Christmas message of gratitude and love.
I’ve been fighting off a foul lurgi (as The Goons would have called it) for the past four weeks. Currently I can hardly speak and I make a sound like a mouse when I try to cough. Not an ideal week in which to speak at a conference. However, the occasion itself was a great success (thank goodness for microphones). For the first and probably only time in my life I was able to open with “The voice of women has often not been heard and tonight will be no exception...” not an observation on the quality of my fellow speakers, who were excellent, but a reflection on my predicament. I’m grateful to Michael Carty of Xpert HR for the inspiration (http://www.xperthr.co.uk/blogs/employment-intelligence/michael_carty.htm). The event, put on by the Strategic HR Network and hosted by Penna, was about “Unlocking Female Talent”.I was one of five who spoke about our personal experiences, the out-dated, current and emerging approaches to support women, (and our opinions as to what seems to work and what detracts from) creating an environment in which to encourage high performing women at all levels in organisations.
We covered everything from psychology and unconscious bias, to ways of fostering women's careers, (including: training, the need for good managers, appreciating what women require from work and what motivates them, what puts them - and people from certain other sectors of society - off from wanting to be a member of the C-Suite and/or senior management, the value of networks (especially the advantages of establishing them in conjunction with other organisations, thereby enabling unfettered discussions), mentoring, the significance of role models, the importance of sharing success stories, demographics, flexible and agile working approaches and the necessity for listening). What we said seemed well received and the public questions, with the Chair and audience’s agreement, ran on long after the end of the session.
I found myself in the role of the elder spokeswoman, who had lived through many approaches and had been a victim of uninspiring career advice at school. I stressed that society has a huge impact on the women within it (when 17, I was told I should be a nurse, teacher, secretary or shepherdess – I suppose in a way that I am all four now, but not in the way that my school intended). When I was leaving school, women were not expected or encouraged to go into senior levels of business, even those of us with strong academic results, who had secured places at university. It was in contrast to the observations from one contributor, who had grown up outside the UK - she had two highly skilled grandmothers (both engineers, working in challenging industrial environments), they were not considered exceptional, despite being female, as many other women followed similar career paths. It was not until the speaker came to the UK that she realised that in some countries doors are closed to some because of the culture in which they reside.
It is easy to forget the impact that society can have. I suspect that one of the main reasons why so few women spoke out over the six decade period, during which Jimmy Savile was allegedly taking advantage of them, was because of the way in which UK culture functioned at the time. I was one of a few women working in a dealing room in The City in the mid eighties and regularly was told to wear a short skirt when we had clients coming to visit. My father was a lawyer and I used to meet him in the renowned bar, El Vino’s, in Fleet Street – women not wearing skirts were often turned away and they were not able to buy drinks at the bar (a man had to do that for them). At the end of the 1980s, when in recruitment, I was regularly propositioned by male clients, who seemed to think that a no-strings physical relationship should be provided as part of the service. I didn’t complain – I probably should have done so - I felt that to speak out would only make my life more difficult, as to others it was “only a bit of fun”.
These days a surprisingly high proportion of workers will “throw a sickie” (i.e. take a day or longer of unauthorised absence, claiming illness) in order to have a bit of fun. Despite the impact that this type of behaviour can have on the business, in many Western nations it is accepted (indeed it is almost expected) that employees will be absent at times, without authorisation. Employment experts in the UK refer to what call thay call “national sickie day” – analysis of attendance patterns over a number of years has singled out the first Monday in February as the worst day of the year for absenteeism in Britain, due to post-Christmas gloom, little sunlight/short days and low morale, partially attributable to the length of time until the next official public holiday. Having “a duvet day” (taking unauthorised time off whilst claiming illness) is not just a British malaise.
European and Asian based employees might be interested to know that it is common for US employment contracts to include a certain number of approved “personal absence” days. In the USA there are two traditional absence policy approaches; the most traditional distinguishes between excused and unexcused absences. Under such policies, employees are provided with a set number of sick days (frequently three days in every ninety day period) and a set number of vacation days (usually around ten days per annum). Workers who are absent from work after exhausting their sick days are required to use vacation days. Absences that take place after both sick and vacation days have been exhausted are subject to disciplinary action. The second policy (sometimes called a “no-fault” approach), permits each employee a specified number of absences annually (either days or occurrences – when multiple days of continuous absence are counted as a single occurrence – this policy does not consider the reason for the employee’s absence), but, as with the traditional approach, once the permitted days or occurrences have been used the employee is potentially subject to disciplinary action.
In Europe, the number of days of permitted absence and paid vacation is seldom linked to a specified number of occurrences of personal or unauthorised absences; hence the American approach is often seen as strange. However, once employees outside the USA become aware of the policy of “personal absence days”, the apparently small number of days’ vacation in most American employment contracts doesn’t seem so ungenerous. It is common in Europe for an employee to have at least twenty days permitted vacation per annum, but lengthy medical or dental visits are often expected to be taken from these days.
Although the occasional unauthorised day off costs businesses, in many ways long-term sickness is more expensive both for companies and the state. The publication earlier this year by the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), looking into long-term sickness absence (i.e. sick leave for periods lasting more than six months), is the first of its kind to assess the cost of long-term sickness – in the Public Sector the bill apparently hits £3.4 billion per annum. It is claimed that the problem costs the average company with more than 500 employees £620,000 a year (mainly due to the length of time that most organizations provide full pay to an absent employee followed by a further period on half pay with no contribution from the individual, as well as additional costs incurred through the provision and training of replacement staff). http://www.hi-mag.com/health-insurance/product-area/income-protection/article400093.ece
Perhaps we should be focusing more on prevention.
Trying to reduce illness, that can have an adverse impact on production, is not a novel concept. My mother used to lecture me and my siblings to cover our mouths when coughing or sneezing. Being a “War Baby”, I suspect that she was inspired by this 1943 British Ministry of Information newsreel trailer intended to persuade people to use a handkerchief.
So I have a dilemma, given how grotty I am, will I be leading by example by going to work and “soldiering on” or is it more responsible to stay away until I am less likely to infect others? How much will my decision be made as a result of the society and culture in which I live? All in all, it’s not an issue to be sniffed at...
