So much to do

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from June 2013.
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When you're overwhelmed it's easy to blame how much you have to do on others. Yes, your boss, your colleagues, your customers and the state of the world all probably have something to do with it.But maybe it's time you started to look at your own part in your situation.The first question to ask is whether you're paying attention to what's important or are trying to do everything. Developing your capacity to discriminate, to determine what actually makes a difference and what's peripheral is foundational here. And it's often not so easy to tell. So you may have to observe the effect of your actions over time and talk to people who are affected by the fruits of your work as you learn the discernment you need.But, please, don't stop there. Because the way you take on every possibility that comes your way is born of the story you have of what it is to be a person, and what it is to work. You might be working at being:

a noble hero: able to take on all difficulties, courageously keeping everything under control, ensuring everybody sees your unassailable strength, never letting on the difficulty you're experiencing

the saviour: the only one who can do this. "I couldn't possibly put anything down... they need me"

a martyr: trying to hold the burdens of the world, keeping everyone from harm, sacrificing yourself by scooping up all that needs to be done

Each of these identities will be doing something for you that you value. They can play a powerful role in generating self-esteem, giving you a place in an uncertain world, and defending you from shame and embarrassment. It may well be the case that your colleagues are playing similar roles too, or playing their part by working to have you to stay in yours.But each of them makes the space for discrimination very small indeed, and the possibility of putting anything down smaller still, because they call on you to push harder, go faster, and for longer in the face of difficulty.Each adds to your suffering by promising that resolution will come soon: that if you're strong enough, persistent enough, fast enough, sacrifice enough then eventually the world will stop making demands of you.Usually, it's the opposite that's the case. The world will not stop with its demands, and pushing on relentlessly until it does leads eventually to exhaustion and resentment.It's time you started catching on to the way the identity you have taken up is part of the very difficulty that's breaking you. If you weren't a hero or martyr or saviour, who else could you be? 

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Not really my life

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from May 2013.–

"This is not really my life," you say. "I'm just getting ready."You'll be ready to live properly, you tell me, in earnest, only when

You get promotedYou find the perfect partnerYou make some moneyPeople appreciate youYou have it all worked outThe children leave homeYou get discoveredYou find happinessYou sell the companyYou're not so confusedYou live in your dream houseYou feel peacefulYou become famousYou find out what you're meant to do

You've been taught to live this way by happy-ever-after fairy tales, celebrity fantasies and by believing that there's some step which will take away your suffering, clear up your uncertainty, allow you to settle at last. So you've continually postponed fully inhabiting your life, because every goal reached reveals to you how lost you still are and how much further there is to go.Living in a suspended state saves you from coming into contact with the fierceness and love and immediacy of living. You learn to settle with life lived at a distance, a perpetual watching and waiting for the answer that will free you.What if you gave up the idea that anything or anyone can relieve you from your longing and from your confusion? What then? You'd have no choice but to throw yourself headlong, passionately into your life. Or maybe to allow life to sweep you off your feet. And who knows what might come from that?

Photograph by Justin Wise

Holding on for dear life

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from April 2013.

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Anxiety and fear are not the same.If you're walking along a cliff-top path, fear is to do with what might happen if you slip and fall. It has to do with consequence.Anxiety is what arises from our freedom. It comes from knowing that at any time we could choose to step over the edge. Sometimes knowing this feels too much to bear. Step far enough away from the edge, hug the cliff face, and the anxiety subsides. We've removed a possibility for ourselves that could lead us into danger and difficulty.Turning away from anxiety radically reduces the degree of freedom available to us. From our place of safety, face pressed against the smooth rock, there's no chance we'll find ourselves leaping from the edge. But there's also no possibility we'll see the huge vista laid out below, the distant horizon with its forests and rivers and towering mountains. No possibility we'll begin a journey towards them. The cliff-hugger has a vanishingly small world available to them.Whole organisations, careers and lives have been dedicated to holding on to the cliff face. Any hint of anxiety and we hold tighter, inventing the rules, structures, measures, justifications and stories that will lash us into place, and everyone else with us.But the very anxiety we're trying so hard to avoid is what is calling us into an enormous world of freedom. Taking up its call is our particular human heritage, and our unique human responsibility.

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1st Anniversary

On Living and Working is one year old today.363 posts so far, one for almost every day of the year.Writing daily since April 11th 2013 has been an illuminating, searching, and often joyful process - a practice in discovery, persistence, discipline, curiosity and self-kindness. And also, sometimes, a way in which I am finding a voice on behalf of much that seems very important to me.That other people read, pass what I've written on, and often respond has been an additional gift.So today, simply gratitude -

that the world, and current technology, makes this possible

to each of you who subscribe, follow my facebook and twitter feeds, or receive this from friends and colleagues

to those of you who have passed posts on to others you think will benefit

to the many people who have inspired me to write, and who have given me ideas either in person or through their own writing

and to all of you who have joined in by commenting or emailing me directly

Thank you.There is much more to come.

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Making strange

Do you ever have an experience where a familiar word, like queue or other or word itself, suddenly loses its familiarity and becomes strange to you?The experience can come by chance, though sometimes it's possible to make it happen by staring for long enough.

QUEUE

OTHER

WORD

What about with people? Moments when you turn towards those you know best, and who you love the most, and - for a moment - they are completely unfamiliar to you, suddenly - and inexplicably - strangers? How, we wonder, did you end up in my life?

So much of the world is this way to us - familiar in an easy, transparent manner, in which everything performs its function and nothing in particular stands out. And we go on in our ordinary way, responding to the world without having to pay much attention, without much by way of thought or connection.

But it's when we're prepared to make strange what is most obvious to us that the world, and people, in all their rarity, start to be apparent - present - to us.

And then all kinds of magic can happen.

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Not best practice

I wrote yesterday about the pitfalls of using process when what you're really hoping for is relationship. It's an example of a category error - trying to fix one kind of problem when what you're dealing with is a problem in a whole different domain.One reason why performance management processes can't work on their own to support engagement and people's own capacity to self-correct is that it's in the conversation between people that everything important happens. And skill in conversation is not at all the same as skill in following process.I find it interesting that in many organisations in which I've worked people say 'we have a successful performance management system' when they really mean 'we're successful in following the process'. Rarely does it mean that employees have a greater sense of enrolment, that there is deep systemic understanding of what's making performance possible and what's hindering it, or that anyone is able to self-observe and self-correct well enough to actually make a difference to anything. But at least everyone's filling in their forms, scheduling performance meetings, and assigning ratings...All of this is an example of why the idea of best practice can't easily be applied to human organisation.In a mechanical environment best practice makes sense: if we find that a certain cooling unit produces good results in my factory it's very likely to do the same in your factory, assuming we have similar conditions and similar equipment. But in addressing a human system itself it's often impossible to make such an assumption. The 5-point rating performance system I described yesterday, that might have worked so well somewhere else once before, may have very different effects here. Because here it's us, not them. And here we have our own particular relationships, commitments, language, understanding, priorities, values, habits, discourse, concerns, interests, conversations, bodies, culture... which means that a process on its own could well, might well, produce a whole different constellation of meaning and effect when applied here - including having the very opposite effect from what's intended.How many performance management processes which are apparently 'best practice' produce nothing but busyness, hiding, disillusionment, manipulation, game-playing and secrecy simply because we took the idea of best practice far more seriously than we ought to have done? And because as a result, we failed to take seriously what was really needed to address our concerns?

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Let's have a process for that...

What you really wantedHonest, enrolling conversations with colleagues and staff about progress, about what's important, about how they're doing, about what could change, and about what might be needed next.What you didForesaw all of the problems in doing this; felt your anxiety and the anxiety others would experience about being open in this way; and so invented a process instead:

"We'll set specific, measurable goals at the start of the year" - which avoids the difficulty of talking about all that people do that's uncertain, shifting, cannot be predicted, that which changes, that which is affected by the efforts of many and by the changing circumstances of the world.

"We'll have meetings with each member of our team twice a year to review progress" - which frees you, for most of the year, from the difficulty of turning towards one another and talking about things as they happen.

"We'll assign each person a performance rating from 1 to 5 so they know where they stand" - adding a measure makes it look like you've reached the truth of the situation. It gets you out of the difficulty of talking with nuance, of discovering together what's really happening, of learning from your employees, of discovering how much you don't know, and of finding out your own part in how things are going.

"We're finding that people have difficulty giving low ratings to their teams when required, so we'll have a forced distribution - a fixed quantity of 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s" - which saves you from any genuine conversation at all. By forcing the ratings you can simply say "I'm sorry, we really wanted to give you a 2 but there weren't any left, so we're giving you a 3".

"We'll pay people, or promote them, based on their rating" - which saves you from the trouble of genuine conversation about people's future and the future of your organisation - you can blame the rating on people's ability to move on.

Process can support you, yes. It may often be necessary.But every step here, if implemented without also cultivating the ability to speak and listen, takes you further from your original intention of enrolling, engaging, and supporting people's contribution. Every step makes all of you more machine like. Every step treats people more like a commodity and less like participants in a shared endeavour. And all because every step is being used to cover up anxiety - turning people away from the risky endeavour of skilful, genuine, nuanced, open conversation with each other.In the end, when what's required is talking with one another there's no substitute, no substitute at all, for the difficult work of learning to talk well with one another.And if you're looking for process to do the heavy lifting, you're looking in the wrong place.

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The secret mission

Many things become possible when you discover

perhaps for the first time

that the secret mission of your resentment

your anger, your frustration

and your judgements about your colleagues' many misdeeds and failings

is to save you the difficult, liberating

and essential work

of looking at your own contribution -

your own part

in the troubles you're experiencing.

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Not holding back

To those of us known for quietness, consideration, measured responses; and to those who speak up only when everyone else has said their piece:What if, friends, we give up having it all together before we speak?If we allow ourselves to say things when they're half-formed, incomplete?When we're not sure?If we let others in on our thinking?What might we bring to those around us?And how might we surprise ourselves, discovering the incomplete ideas we're so used to holding back until they're just-so are themselves seeds just waiting to grow in the imagination of others?

Keeping it going

When you're in trouble do you have familiar, fixed, repetitive ways of responding?

Perhaps you depend on your thoughts - thinking it through until you have a solution. Or do you look for a system or process that will help - a tip, technique, tool, app or book that will address your concerns?

Maybe you rarely ask for help, depending upon yourself alone to sort things out.

Or perhaps you systematically discount your own strength and resourceful-ness, asking others in the hope that someone else will have the answer.

Is what you're doing most often actually helping you?Perhaps it's time to turn towards other possibilities - starting with different choices from the list above.Or take up an option that's less familiar:

Shifting your body - running, walking, sitting quietly, meditating, dancing, writing, painting - to see what fresh perspectives arise

Paying attention to place - going somewhere that inspires you and which gives you new ways of seeing - a wood, a cathedral, a lake, a quiet place in your home, a museum, a gallery

Workplaces and organisations have preferences for all of this too. When there's a problem we arrange a meeting, or have an away-day, or leave people to think it through by themselves. Sometimes resolving a difficulty successfully in a system with preferences requires stepping well outside of what's considered 'normal' or 'appropriate' where you are.Can you see how always trying to do more of what you're already doing (more thinking, more asking people, more searching for a fix) might be exactly how you keep your problems going?

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