On Emerging - Day 23

23rd December 2018

23 randomly-selected people is the smallest number where there will be a probability higher
than 50% that two people will share the same birthday. This is part of the Birthday Paradox;
99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people.

Today I am driving my mother and sister to Bath to meet up with my father and his wife. It will be a chance to have a fine lunch and to wish each other a happy Christmas and good start to 2019. The next time we will all eat together will be at my son's 21st party on the 5th January.

In a way today's post is a sort of celebration, in that, for me, the Advent Blog series is not complete without a post by Neil Usher. I first got to know Neil when he was the Workplace Director at Sky - he was one of the truly innovative property and facilities experts who understood the impact that the workplace has on work, the people within it and the wider environment. He has moved on from Sky to work as a property, workplace and change consultant under his own advisory business - workessence, this is also the best place to read his blogs (he has been writing them since 2011 and there are many gems in his archive). He has also written an excellent book, The Elemental Workplace. It is an interesting read and demonstrates his passion for ensuring that everyone can have and deserves a fantastic workplace. It is a pragmatic and entertaining read by a genuine expert who can demonstrate that he has practiced what he preaches. He will be writing a second book in 2019 to be published in 2020. If you want to know more about Neil, you can find him on Twitter (his handle is @workessence).

Neil is an exceptionally talented and creative writer. His pieces have a flow to them and need to be read without distractions for maximum impact. In consequence, there are no punctuation illustrations.

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On emerging

Something was wrong. Something had been wrong before, but never like this. The severance of Lou’s umbilical cord during a spacewalk was calming, a soft suffocation in isolation. She had realised she was the lone passenger on the bus home, just herself and the driver, focussed and disinterested.

The bus slowed at each stop and sped again when they revealed themselves to be empty. It didn’t stop from the pick-up through to the lone bell when Lou only alighted.

Christmas shrieked silently; garish, primary, immediate.

Lou lived across a field. Anywhere else she would have been nervous about walking alone along the main path lit by lanterns made to look old and hiding the scrub in darkness.

There was none of the sound of shuffling feet and snuffling dogs, the exhausted exasperated forced chatter of parents to babies in buggies, the duller half of a dull phone call. No-one whistled anymore, she thought. It was just Lou. The glow from a hundred lounges was at its warmest, the air she breathed in step with her pace at its coldest.

Why was this time so wrong? She ran through a list. She liked lists, when something made it onto a list it was half done, the easy half at least. The list was of stuff she was always told was important, that the vacuously-profiled always posted and shared with unwavering conviction. Solutions are easy on the internet; six things, eight things, ten things other people do that you can do and everything’s alright.

There was purpose. She knew why she was there, she understood what the big idea was and believed in it just like all those around her, she punched the air when the others punched the air when something went well and she frowned and searched her soul when the others frowned and searched their souls when it didn’t. Often, they searched each other’s souls. Usually without asking.

There was no doubt, not a flicker. She knew people who complained that they didn’t have a purpose they and their people shared, and she felt bad for them but comforted that she did.

There was meaningful work. She understood how what she did fitted in, why it was needed and how important it was. She knew that she could do things the others couldn’t, so she felt needed and valued. People would say ‘this is a job for Lou’ and this made her happy because it wasn’t ‘Lou or’ or ‘Lou and’ but just Lou.

She knew that what they were all working towards was better than anyone else had ever done anywhere and so it was special, and this had stopped her stepping off the conveyor belt so many times when she wanted to. Even if it wasn’t true.

She learned and grew, she was better at what she did and knew more stuff and was better able to handle tricky moments and worked things out better than when she joined. She didn’t need to sit in a classroom for this, every day was its own training course with no agenda or discussion of ‘what she hoped to get out of it’, just a randomly-assembled corporate assault course.

She felt resilient, even though at times she could have sworn she was broken yet always found something, enough, to get through it. Then it was forgotten all over again.

Her team were incredible, the most angled and impossible jigsaw fitted together beautifully, and everyone know that without the other pieces they were nothing. She knew she had found many of these shapes and would sometimes stand back and watch and see the completeness playing out before her eyes and wonder just how that could have been possible.

The jigsaw needed her too and she knew that. She had painted the picture on the box lid, at least with words. They had wanted to be part of it. Without her they would have been part of a lesser jigsaw, that you could do with your eyes closed.

She had a life, too. She saw her family, they valued the time spent but all wished it could have been more but knew plenty of stories of absent Mums and consoled themselves that what they had was better than what they could have had, that the grass was green enough right where they stood.

They coped with her morning distance, busied themselves with their own awakening, her flitting eyes elsewhere in a random landscape. Her children drew pictures of what she was like when she came home in the evening, her fuse cropped, her voice drawling, an unwillingness to arrange anything even stuff that was fun, pushing everything away, clawing at peace.

That was the list. Everything was okay, the pieces were in place, it should all be right. But instead she was lost.

The abandoned bus and field and path suggested she was still searching as she resolved that it could not go on. That was one conclusion, far too late, at least. She would resolve that when the string of tiny lights was back in its shabby box.

She flicked through the days past like vinyl records in their whitewashed wooden boxes, stacked, ordered, regular, inspecting some, passing over others.

Perhaps, she mused, if there weren’t other agendas playing out then the charcoal of her dolour might have made sense: the entirety of the diaphanous mesh of unarranged meetings hurriedly held, whispers loud but indiscernible, comments clumsily coded, laughter lurched and suppressed, ideas made flesh before disclosure, papers hurriedly scooped and folded, glances without words, and shallow reasons for having to go. She was there, but not always, included, but not always, visible but not always; a life, almost.

With that, it made sense. It was not what she had been looking for, but what she had been looking through.

The front door opened, the warmth prickled her face, and familiar voices scrambled to be heard. Her own voice was clear, her mind was clear. It had lifted.

Finding Balance During Emotional Times - Day 12

Wednesday 12th December 2018

Twelve Days of Christmas, also known as Twelvetide, are the twelve days commencing
with 25th December and ending on the 5th January ("Twelfth Night"). In the song
"The Twelve Days of Christmas" (first published in 1780 in a children's book Mirth
Without Mischief) my true love gives a total of 364 gifts over the period.

I am really getting into the festive swing - I am starting this morning with a Christmas Breakfast party in Soho, will be seeing my son's godfather at lunchtime and am ending the day with a carol concert in the Long Room at Lords. I will go to bed tired, but with a grin on my face.

To make me even happier, I a delighted to welcome back to the Advent Blogs series my former colleague and good friend Katharine Bourke. She is a co-founder and Director of South West Growth Service (@SWGrowthService), a consultancy that supports small businesses, enabling them to develop, adapt and grow. Katharine is a certified mBIT coach (for those who don't know, mBIT stands for multiple brain integration techniques). Outside work, she is keen on walking and exploring the beautiful countryside where she lives. When Katharine and I worked together we were based in London, but she was born and raised in a farm on Dartmoor and she has returned to her roots (but not farming, although she is helping things grow). Since moving West she has founded a successful IT business and spent four years helping to deliver the government's Growth Accelerator and Business Growth Service in Devon and Cornwall, before co-establishing the South West Growth Service.

Katharine has many varied interests and knowledge that she shares. I recommend that you follow her on twitter (her handle is @KatharineBDevon). I her post this year she shares how she has found a sense of balance and harmony through breathing and meditation, which has helped her through times of emotional heartache.

As in some previous years, Katharine has selected her own illustrations.

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Heartaches, Hopes and High Fives:

How balanced breathing helps me through

Whilst attending my husband’s employer’s Christmas party last week, I caught up with another of the many partners who were there and we got chatting about how our 2018 had been since we first met at last year’s ‘do’. She asked me a good question, along the lines of ‘sum up your 2018 in one word’. I found myself pausing to reflect on the year, noticing a range of words that popped into mind, and the one that arrived first and kept coming back was ‘emotional’.

Reflecting on my choice of word the following day, I decided to look up the word emotional, to find that it derives from the mid-1500s when it was derived from the French word émouvoir which means ‘to stir up or to excite’ which in turn was based on the Latin emovere meaning to ‘move away, remove, dislodge’. Looking more into this, I found references to Paul Ekman’s classification of six emotions being those of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, and then of Robert Plutchnik’s eight primary emotions of joy versus sadness, anger versus fear, trust versus disgust and surprise versus anticipation.

As a woman in her early fifties, who appears to be going through the ‘change’, I suppose it is not entirely unexpected that I recalled the feeling of being emotional. I have noticed this last year that I have developed an uncanny knack of being overwhelmed by tears, often seemingly without reason, although rarely when in public or at work. This could probably be diagnosed as a mental health issue, but I’m not sure how that would help. My emotions are my emotions, and I feel like the right way for me to approach things is to stay curious, to allow them to emerge and in turn to move on their way, in their own time which so far, they have done.

One of my previous #AdventBlogofferings shared my experience of being overwhelmed by a flood of tears when I joined a Zen Leadership course at Sharpham House in Devon and found myself sitting in complete silence, eyes open, with tears streaming down my face, trying so hard to keep silent and stationary while the tears kept flowing…

When I said the word emotional, I didn’t mean that I spent the year weeping, although tears have been very prevalent, and sometimes overwhelming, especially when they seemed to come from nowhere. As a student of the multiple brain integration techniques or mbraining which enables people to achieve greater coherence through engaging more with balanced breathing and considering the wisdom each of our multiple brains can offer, I was able to reach for their collective support time and again during this year.

I’ve become more aware that tears for me can be the physical manifestation of many different emotions. Sadness of course, but tears emerge from me when I’m feeling frustrated, under pressure, angry, touched and on occasion when I’m feeling real joy – such as when I see or think about someone I care very deeply about.

Most of all though this last year, as I reflect on that word ‘emotional’, I am realising that I have begun a journey to understand emotions better by understanding a little more about their purpose. And by allowing them to teach me what I need to learn. Mid-way through January I decided to recommit to my meditation. I returned to my favoured Insight Timer (which I use a little like some use Runkeeper or Strava or other exercise apps to keep track of their workouts) and aimed to sit once every day. More importantly perhaps I also committed to notice the impact it was having. There is no doubt that when I sit each morning and sit well, I make more of my day. Put simply, more stuff gets done!

That said, I’ve also realised how important a key component of my meditation time is, namely the quality of my breathing.

I stumbled across the power of the breath over 21 years ago now when I was pregnant with our first child. Living in Oxford at the time I was lucky enough to be recommended to a pregnancy yoga class where it was all about using one’s breath to better manage the experience of giving birth. Having worked in the Far East, where women got on with giving birth without much by way of medical support, I was keen to explore as natural a birth as was possible. All the more so as I’d realised that my amazing grandmother (mentioned in another previous blog) had sought out a natural birth in Blackheath in the early 1930s!

Understanding more about the physiology of birth, I was able to combine this with the confidence gained from hearing from other women who had used their breathing to manage their experience of giving birth left me well equipped for that long night when I rang my husband to let him know I thought I was in labour. He was working late, finishing off month end accounts so I took a deep breath (yes really!) and said he’d better get them finished before he came home… and with the help of two paracetamol, I managed to breath my way through labour to deliver our boy a little over twelve hours later.

Since then, I think I’d rarely considered how often I use the power of my own breath until earlier this year when I was on an NLP (neuro linguistic processing) course and we were asked to think about superpowers. Without hesitation, the thought that came to mind was that my superpower came from knowing that as long as I was breathing, I could cope!

And in that moment, I returned to being introduced to Viktor E Frankl and his wonderful little book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, to the part where he talks about human freedom as being that one always has the ability ‘to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances’.

I guess this year, more than any other that I can recall, I have made more space in my day for moments of balanced breathing. I will make time to pause in my car or as I get off a train, in a client’s reception area or even to make an unnecessary trip to the bathroom simply to allow myself a few minutes of deeper breathing. As an executive coach I find this helps to make sure that any challenges that one client may be facing do not contaminate the next coaching space I hold for someone.

After a four-year gap, this year also saw me back on the Zen Leader mat as I attended IZL2, my second course with the Institute for Zen Leadership, this time in Somerset. It felt good to be back sitting for about two hours a day (45 minutes to start the day, a few stretches, then another 30 minutes before breakfast, with a further 45 minutes or more to finish each learning day), even though it was possibly even tougher physically than I’d remembered!

Powerful things happened to me during the four days of the course, the most memorable probably being in a field as a group chanting as we stood together after practising some tai chi exercises, and being aware that a fly had landed on my arm. Through all the various om chanting exercises, this fly stayed with me, it didn’t fly off, it seemed to be enjoying the tranquillity in my body and possibly the resonance in the chanting.

Curiously, once the group chanting was complete, we all were invited to make our own ways back to the meeting space and I found that my legs had a rhythm all of their own. I felt a bit like a cyberman, taking very regular steps as I headed through the long grass back to the path and then along the path. I was in my own world, I kept the pace that my body seemed to want, feeling strangely out of body as well as completely in my body, noticing a feeling of real peace combined with an awareness of the little things that I am finding hard to put into words. It was several hundred metres before I realised that I was the only one left on that path, heading back on my own, as everyone else was already back in the room!

My thoughts on breathing and meditation are simple. They are offered here only as a sharing of what works for me and what has helped me to work my way through a wide range of emotions this year without falling apart. There are many good quality meditation guides out there, so please know that this is offered from someone with no formal training in meditation simply an ambition to encourage others to breathe better.

Find a space where you are comfortable, not too hot, not too cold. Make sure you are sitting on your sitting bones (whether cross-legged on the floor or sitting on a chair) and relax your arms into your lap. If you are cross legged on the floor, make sure you have three points of contact with the floor using firm cushions to make yourself comfortable yet active. Your sitting bones should be able to support you to feel as if you grow up out of the ground as your breathing deepens – at least that’s what happens for me.  If you’re sitting in a chair, make sure your feet are flat on the floor and they support you as much as your sitting bones do.

Then breathe, allow your breath to flow in and out naturally, and allow that breath to ease any areas of tension. I often find my neck is stiff, as are my shoulders. Breathe into any areas that feel tight, encouraging tightness to release and let go. I find that counting my breath helps me into that beautiful quiet space within, allowing thoughts and emotions to come into consciousness before I release them as I stay present, focused on my breath. I often count to ten, one on the in breath, two on the out and so on. And when a thought comes to mind, I’ll acknowledge it, let it go and resume counting from one again.

I invite you to join me in the Insight Timer community, where you will find many far more experienced guides than me, along with all manner of music and sounds of nature to sit with including om chanting as options to accompany your breathing. I hope you will also find your own way into the truly remarkable and powerful space that I believe is within us all. For me, when I’m there, my emotions seem to find their own way so that when I emerge, I feel reinvigorated simply by being present with my breath.

It Only Takes a Spark - Day 41

Day 41 (Wednesday 10th January 2018)

41 miles - the length of the Metropolitan Line on London's Underground railway
- the system's 11 lines total 250 miles in length, which makes it the longest metro system
in the world. It commenced on 10th January 1863 when the Metropolitan Railway opened
a line between Paddington (then called Bishop's Road) and Farringdon Street. It is the
oldest and first underground railway for general public use in the world.

Today I am catching up on some of what we have achieved with money clawed back from the UK Apprenticeship Levy and cementing plans for the year to come. So far we have individuals undertaking MBAs, others benefitting from management training and a group who are joining us as conventional apprentices, commencing their careers. It is always good to know that you are helping people to develop and grow for both their advantage and for the business. 

Today's post is by a chap who is superb at encouraging others - Steve Browne, an internationally known and highly respected HR star. In addition, Steve acts as a unique unifying gel for many of us in the global HR community, cheerfully making contact and encouraging others to do so.  For the past 11 years Steve has worked for LaRosa's Inc - Ohio's leading pizzeria business and a regional restaurant chain that has grown significantly over the past 60 years. Steve is the Executive Director of HR. He has worked as an HR professional for over 25 years and has gained experience in Professional Services, Manufacturing and Consumer Products in addition to Hospitality and Leisure.

Steve possesses amazing levels of energy and passion for people and all that he does. He is married to Debbie and they have two grown-up children (of whom they both are justifiably proud). Steve is an active leader in the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) in the USA - and was elected to serve as a Director on the Board just over two years ago. He blogs both for the Society (SHRM Blog) and also on his own site Everyday People, as well as tirelessly communicating with HR professionals and interested parties around the world. His enthusiasm is infectious. I strongly recommend that you follow him on Twitter (his handle is @SBrowneHR) if you have not already done so.

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I am a hopelessly optimistic human !! It’s odd to see how others respond to my personality, demeanor and approach. It’s amazing how much skepticism and doubt I encounter because we think that if people are positive it’s either some act or a sham. People automatically think that if you’re positive, then you must want something from them. There has to be some hidden agenda because NO ONE is truly optimistic these days.

Sorry to disappoint.

I’m astonished to see how jaded and hardened people have become about all facets of life. It makes me ache. Literally. I am not so naïve as to not see the incredible challenges and dysfunction that exists all around the globe. I also know that this same level of instability exists in my family, friends and co-workers. I choose, however, not to succumb to the darkness.

I empathize with others who are facing challenges without judgement. Something may seem an easy fix for some and be a mountain for others. We need to remember that people don’t want to be “fixed” – they want to be seen and acknowledged. There is an easy way to do this. You need to be the spark that rekindles the life and passion that exists in every human being !!

In my recent past, I was the Scoutmaster of Troop 941. I spent twelve years in Scouting with my amazing son along with many fantastic young men.

They came from all types of family situations ranging from affluent to poverty. Homes that were healthy and others that were not. Positive relationships with parents and siblings as well as those who couldn’t be in the same room as other family members. I never stepped in to try and “fix” any of their conditions. I had no right to do so, and that wasn’t my role.

I was there to be a spark in their lives. I’d be so geeked to see them attend a Troop meeting !! I’d see how they were doing as humans and check on how they were doing in school and at home. I’d listen to every single story and make sure to give them my full attention. When we went on campouts, I’d stay up to play card games with them and make sure they had everything they needed to learn, lead and succeed.

One of the first skills that a scout learns is how to make a fire. Now Boy Scouts is led by the young men in the Troop and not adults. They learn from each other as peers. So, the older scouts teach the new scouts. When it comes to fire building, the older scouts let the new ones try to “figure it out” first with little direction. Inevitably, the boys pile enough wood to start a bonfire, and it fails. After several fruitless attempts, the older scout steps in and shows them that you only need a very small amount of kindling and – a spark.

Once the new scouts see how little material is needed to start a campfire, they get it. A spark is all that is needed !!

This same approach is what happens to us as adults. Instead of stripping back the trappings of life, we pile on more and more until we’re almost immobile. We want to move ahead, but we can’t. We’re stuck in our circumstances and it seems hopeless. It isn’t. We have the chance to strip back all of the excess junk and get down to the basics. Then add our spark.

This coming year look out amongst your friends and see how you can help them unburden themselves by being the light that gives them confidence and courage. Be intentional and be the spark that brings them back into life that has joy and purpose !!