Nothing of the sort

A mistake your inner critic most probably makes is projecting your own inner self-criticism onto what others say to you. Or, in other words, adding criticism to what's being said.Under these circumstances even genuine, heartfelt expressions of interest and curiosity from another can feel like attack.So can love.Could it be that you've misunderstood?The first and necessary step in finding out is distinguishing your own inner dialogue from what others are saying to you, so that you can find out what's yours and what's theirs.It's not easy, as the critic is often committed to hiding its involvement in things.But pay this enough attention, over sufficient time, and you might well find out that what you've understood as their attack, or their criticism,

perhaps for years,

is indeed nothing of the sort.

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Not your circumstance

You're not the failure of your most recent project. You're not the loss of your job. You're not the disappointment at not having come first. You're not that mistake you made, or your company results.You're not your success, your fame, your glowing reputation, either. You're not the letters after your name, your job title, your exam results, your place in the hierarchy.You're not your bank balance, your debt, your smart suit, your car, your house, your muscles, your illness. You're not even your happiness, your sadness, your rage, your shame, your hope.How could you be any of these, given that any of them - any of them - are liable to change at any time?It's a huge misunderstanding of what humans being are, and one that your inner critic can go wild upon, demanding that you fix, or change, or that you hold on ever so tight to what you've got for fear of losing it.You are not your circumstance.Perhaps there is a new kind of freedom you can find from knowing this. A new kind of acceptance of the transience of the world, and of your own strength and constancy.And a new kind of hope.

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Book Week Day 7 - On The Internet

How do we learn, really? And what kinds of skilfulness it possible to acquire by learning online? What do we lose in a world in which there is increasing pressure for learning to go quickly, to be bite-sized, and to be done without a teacher (by streaming video, online lectures, online self-study)? These are the most urgent questions posed in this slim volume by Hubert Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley.Using many examples, Dreyfus shows convincingly why the acquisition and mastery of complex human skills always involves significant time in the bodily presence of others who have already achieved some level of mastery themselves. Distance learning can't easily replace this not only because so much in the moment feedback is missing, but also because by leaving out bodily participation we rarely experience the emotional and bodily sensation of being fully engaged. Learning to do something well, argues Dreyfus, requires exactly this. We have to risk, to fully feel our successes and our failures, and most of all to jump in even when we don't know at all yet what we're doing.All of these, Dreyfus says, are denied us when our primary form of interaction is at a distance, is disembodied, and is mostly anonymous. Just compare the experience of asking a question that matters to you when you're in the same room as the teacher and other students, with the safety and relative hiddenness of a question by email. It's in the felt experience of risk and its consequence, of being in the mess alongside others, and of caring deeply about what happens that much learning of value takes place. It may not be needed for learning facts alone, but if you want to learn do something well it's vital, and hardly available to us online.On the Internet also takes up bigger questions about how technology shapes us as we use it. Alongside Dreyfus' account of what it takes to master anything, including a clearly described series of stages through which all learners must pass, the book includes chapters on the changes in human knowledge brought about through search technology, and a sharp critique of the net's capacity - by disembodying us - to rob us of our own ability to discern what really matters. For this reason it is a wonderful read for anyone who cares about learning and change - in individuals, in systems and organisations, and in wider society.

Book Week Day 6 - True To Our Feelings

It's easy to think of emotions as the opposite of reason - unintelligent intrusions into an otherwise measured life. Or to think of them as if they're a form of hydraulic pressure - to be contained unless (or until) they explode. Or to treat them as mere physiological events, nothing more than a surge of hormones, a quickening of breathing, a pattern of brain activity.In True to Our Feelings, Robert Solomon mounts a convincing argument that emotions have a rich intelligence all of their own. He invites us to look at them through new eyes, and to see what it is that each of them has to show us about ourselves, our cares, what matters to us. By understanding our emotions more accurately, he argues, and by avoiding the simple reductionism that's so easy to fall into, we can enrich our lives and develop more sophisticated responses to the world.Each chapter in this book takes up the story of a different emotion or mood, and Solomon does much to rehabilitate the so-called 'negative emotions' to their proper place in the family of moods each of us experience. Written in an accessible style but with the depth and intelligence to bear fruit on repeated reading, this is a fabulous book for anyone who'd like to address their own emotions - and those of others - with more skill. It's also a resource for helpfully attuning each of us to what moods might be trying to show us, but which we're denying or ignoring.The book is based upon a publicly available lecture series, The Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions.For a companion piece you could have a look at Solomon's much earlier book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. It's denser, more philosophical, and has an comprehensive dictionary of moods at the back - some 60 of them analysed in detail, showing how each mood orients us to the world, brings us in close or distances us from others, has us feel superior or inferior, as well as what keeps each mood going and how it works to maintain self-esteem in the face of the circumstances of life. The dictionary itself is a valuable resource for understanding yourself and others, and in particular the unique worlds of possibility (some tight and closed, some wide open) that each mood brings about.

Book Week Day 5 - Tiny Beautiful Things

"There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding... Understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of these things will have to do with forgiveness. "

Cheryl Strayed's advice to her twenty-two year-old self from a viewpoint two decades further on, from her searingly honest, compassionate book Tiny Beautiful Things.As well as writing novels, Cheryl Strayed was the for-a-while-anonymous advice columnist for The Rumpus. This book brings letters written to her about life, love, loss, work, identity - and her beautiful replies - together in one place. Many of those who write to her are in the midst of life's great transitions and paradoxes and she responds with humour, kindness, depth and an unwavering belief in the dignity, strength and courage of her correspondents. All of this allows her to say what's true, and what's sometimes difficult to hear, in a way that invites the possibility of living with a whole heart.

"You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else."

Tiny Beautiful Things is a wonderful read from start to finish, and a necessary reminder that kindness is not the same as niceness, love need not be the opposite of truthfulness, and that it's possible to talk about the deep concerns of human life in a way that's at once humane and liberating. An amazing resource for any of us who want to muster the courage to face life's difficulties, or to support others in doing the same.

Book Week Day 4 - Aping Mankind

This fierce, thorough, and immensely readable book is Raymond Tallis' challenge to the contemporary trend of explaining everything about human beings either in terms of neuroscience or evolutionary psychology.Explanations based on neuroscience in particular have become the accepted mark of serious grounding in many fields, even where the science is tenuous or is being used sloppily or inappropriately. These days it's possible to give a veneer of scientific respectability to just about any subject by prefixing it with neuro-. And so we have neuro-leadership and neuro-coaching and neuro-justice and neuro-aesthetics. And in many cases huge claims are made about the nature of human beings and, from there, rules inferred about how to treat others and ourselves, from momentary glimpses of brain activity in an fMRI scanner.Tallis, a scientist and physician himself, has much to say about the careless ways in which neuroscience - a field that has so much to offer in understanding the brain - is misused to justify claims in fields as diverse as law, social policy, management and education. But he has more to say about a bigger and more important topic - how peering into the brain can tell us little about what it is to be the uniquely social kind of beings that we are. We form worlds, layered with meaning and practice, which we inhabit together. And the understanding which gives rise to our actions, he argues, arises between us and can't be found in the firing of neurons in the intracranial darkness. Another way of saying this: brains are clearly necessary to be human but are insufficient to account for the whole story of human life.This book is important because of the way it challenges the cultural trend of misusing science in order to give a diminished, reductionist account of human beings. Hence the subtitle: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.This is a book determined to preserve the dignity and possibility of the human world by showing how we are much more than glorified apes and much more than clever computers made of neurons. It's a fabulous read for anyone interested in the question 'what is a human being?' and for anyone concerned about how neuroscience is being misused to sell to us, manipulate, or to produce public and private policy that fails to take the dignity and humanity of human beings into account.

Book Week Day 3 - Conversations for Action

Fernando Flores was a minister in Salvador Allende's government in Chile at the time of the Pinochet coup. In the introduction to Conversations for Action he writes movingly about the difficulties of this time, and the brutalities that followed, and wonders if the course of events in Chile might have been different had he and others in government found a different way of talking with one another that in turn could have produced more effective and coordinated action.After a period in political imprisonment and his subsequent release, Flores moved to the US and took up the topic of conversations in earnest. This book, a collection of papers written for clients of his consulting firm, is a clearly articulated exploration of topics relevant to the bringing about of powerful coordinated action. It will be of interest to the many of us who have experienced the frustrations and difficulties involved.Flores' central argument is that it is through conversation that all human action comes about, and that our common sense about such conversations does not make much sense at all. We need to think again, and more clearly, about the kinds of conversation we have, about our tendency to leave out crucial steps or avoid important topics (often the ones that cause us anxiety), about the role of mood in shaping what's possible, about the centrality of promises in coordinating action. And we need a new and more accurate understanding of the activity we call listening. If any of this sounds vague, remember that the purpose of this book is resolutely practical - bringing about conversations that can change things for the better.A book with the potential to shift how you think about the background to all human relationships, and in particular how you think about - and take action in - the conversations that make up the vital human activity we call work.

Book Week Day 2 - Soul Without Shame

Soul Without Shame is Byron Brown's deep, broad and practical guide to first knowing and ultimately freeing ourselves from the grip of the inner critic.It's the critic that has us hold back our contribution, doubt ourselves when there is no cause to do so, and also has us holding back others. Perhaps most importantly it's the critic that keeps us tightly bound by the norms which surround us, necessary to begin with but ultimately a huge restraint on our capacity to bring what's most needed. If we are ever to develop the capacity to speak up, to create, to make art, to lead compassionately and wisely, working with the inner critic is a vital step.This is a book to be savoured, taken slowly. I suggest spreading your reading out over a year or so, studying each chapter and taking up the various exercises and practices as you go. It's from these - coupled with what you'll learn from Brown's clear explanations - that the most powerful possibilities for your own learning will come.As you read, you'll see how the critic is a necessary part of our early development, how we keep it going in adulthood long after it's served its purpose, how to recognise it in action, and how sneaky it can be, disguising itself as conscience or simply hiding itself away while it's at work. You'll also see how you can create some space and start to step out of its shadow.A wonderful companion piece to Stephen Pressfield's Do the Workwhich takes on the same topic from the point of view of creativity and art - surely the activities at the heart of all leadership and principled human action.

Book Week Day 1 - How the Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work

This week, seven books in seven days.

Books that can change the way we think about work, or about life. And some books that have the possibility of changing the way we think about both.

--

Today, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey's How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, which lays out with clarity and precision the inner and outer 'immune system' that both protects us and makes personal and organisational change so difficult.

What we can't usually see, the authors argue, is that as well as our enormous capacity to develop and change, each of us has within us a powerful set of hidden assumptions about the world that keep us within tight bounds. They keep us safe from the unknown, or from shame and embarrassment. But when our efforts to change bring us up against these assumptions we're quickly stirred into fear or anxiety - as if we're about to step off the edge of the known world. And until we can see that we're experiencing this, and begin to test the edge for its accuracy and reality, change remains extraordinarily difficult - even change that's sincerely desired.

The book describes practical and razor-sharp ways of working with our hidden immune system, both for ourselves and for the organisations in which we work. And it offers a powerful corrective to our attempts to push or force ourselves and others to change, and to the unhelpful language of 'resistance' that brings it about.

Passionate, wise, humane and clear - I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to bring about meaningful change in themselves or in their organisation.

Silent

We keep on talking, talking.When we can't face silence in the midst of conversations with our colleagues, with our teams, with our clients we've equated words with work. Or perhaps we're afraid that silence might expose that we really have nothing to say.And so we keep on speaking, filling the air with word after word, long after our words have become shallow, jargon, nothing-speak, space-killer, idle-talk.In the endless talking, we've forgotten how to listen to ourselves, and to others.And we've forgotten that in the quiet spaces, where there is room to breathe, that most of the important, difficult work is often, silently, being done.

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