Category: Personal

Blessings #194 – Chronos

In English we use the word time to mean a number of different things. We use it to mean the passage of seconds and minutes – “what time are we having coffee”. We also use it to describe those moments of significance – “the time has come to get a new job”.

the storm and the shells

In Greek they have two different words for time – Chronos and Kairos these are the words used in the New Testament of the Bible, both translated as time.

Chronos is the word that reflects the passage of time. In my culture we are generally taught that this type of time is an enemy to be overcome. We are given the image of Father Time who walks around with a scythe in one hand and an hourglass in the other. The scythe represent the cruel passage of time, cutting us all off at the end, some earlier than others.

I heard a phrase recently, but I can’t remember where (it was probably from Gretchen Rubin):

The days are long but the years are short

It rings true in my experience, we perceive time with a kind of reverse Doppler effect. When we look at time in the now we convince ourselves that we have all the time in the world then we look back at the years and see how short it’s been.

C.S. Lewis said:

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

We know this is true, but it’s not the way we behave, or the way we experience it.

I’ve had some time off sick this year because of stress related issues. One of the reasons for this is that I got all mixed up in my head about the difference between urgent, immediate, time-scales, scheduled, action lists, priorities and the like, this lead to all sorts of worries. On top of that I became anxious about the inevitable family changes that come from children growing up and the effects of ageing process on the rest of us.

To put it another way, I stopped (as the famous Serenity Prayer tells us): “Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time”.

Through the later half of this year I’ve been trying to reverse my image of time and embrace a new gratitude in the day-to-day and the minute-to-minute. Rather than seeing time as an enemy stealing time from us, and looking to cut us off, I’ve tried to see it as a set of moments to be enjoyed. Each moments contains its own value and blessing.

For years I’ve known that the bible tells me not to be anxious, but I missed the antidote to that anxiety that followed straight afterwards:

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.

Philippians 4:6

Concept of the Day: Learned Helplessness

While discussing some work related issues the other day a colleague used the phrase:
Castle Stalker

Cultural change isn’t easy – especially when we’re operating in an environment where learned helplessness appears to be prevalent

He pointed to this link on Wikipedia.

That got me thinking: What is learned helplessness? Is it really prevalent in the context that we were talking about?

The first question took me on a journey of discovery, this is what I found:

First, a definition from the Wikipedia article:

Learned helplessness is the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly, failing to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help itself by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards

To bring it closer to our normal experience, it’s the choice not to respond when we see the opportunity to do something for a third, or forth time having failed on all previous attempts. Or the choice to avoid something because of a previous traumatic experience even though that thing might be very good for us.

Thinking about my life, I know that there are certain things that I don’t do because of previous poor experiences. Some of these experiences happened a long time ago and I’m a different person now, but I still haven’t returned to give it another go.

So from purely personal experience it would appear that learned helplessness is a real phenomenon, and there also appear to be quite a lot of evidential support for it too. The Wikipedia article is quite well referenced including 42 different items and there are numerous articles on reputable sites across the Internet.

Like all concepts and many theories though it isn’t a 100% cause-and-effect explanation, the initial experiment that was undertaken by Martin E.P. Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania on a number of dogs only resulted in learned helplessness in two-thirds of the animals involved. Some animals and some people respond in a different way. He also went on to link learned helplessness with clinical depression and other related mental illnesses.

The opposite of helplessness is, apparently, optimism, which Seligman later researched and wrote about, coining the phrase learned optimism. This involved the challenging of negative self-talk and numerous other positive psychology techniques. Seligman is still around and talking about a new era of positive psychology, but that’s a set of thoughts for another day.

Here’s my conclusion. Some people, in some situations, will behave with learned helplessness and that has serious consequences. We need to think very seriously about the situations that we create that induce helpless feelings. We also need to think seriously about the tools that we give people to help them respond to these helplessness situations as they inevitably occur.

I’m not going to answer the second question because that would need me to talk too much about the context. It is suffice to say that my colleague’s insight was quite revealing.

A couple of really interesting videos about Learned Helplessness to finish with:

Can We Induce Learned Helplessness?

Description of Learned Helplessness

A Field Guide to Procrastinators

A lovely piece of work by twentypixels which apparently took quite a while to be drawn due to procrastination 🙂

I think I’ve been every one of these people:

Blessings #193 – The Smell of Summer Rain

We’ve had wonderful summer weather this year in the UK.

Borrowdale Sun RaysIn some parts of the world you can  guarantee what the weather is going to be like from week to week, year to year. In the UK there is nothing predictable about the weather. Some years it’s not even clear whether we’ve had a summer.

This year’s weather has been an ideal summer. We’ve had lots of sunshine and also a nice amount of rain. We don’t really like to go for too long without a bit of a downpour, we’re just not used to it. As an example, I was talking to our window-cleaner this evening and he said that he’d gone to the Lake District camping for a few days, but come back after only two nights because it was just too hot. A few days of sunshine followed by a cloudburst or two is what we regard as perfect.

This flow of warm and rain gives us lush countryside which we find delightful.

It also gives us lots of opportunities to experience that wonderful scent as the first rain descends from the skies after a period of drying sunshine.

It’s an aroma of refreshment. It’s a fragrance of cooling. It’s a perfume of clear air.

The sunshine is a blessing, but so is the deluge that follows it.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

John Ruskin

Axiom: People join companies, but leave managers

I’ve had reason to use this phrase a few times recently, but it occurred to me that I didn’t really know where it had come from.

Waiting for the Olympic Torch

Like many axioms it feels correct, but does it really work out in practice? More specifically; does it work out in practice today?

In 2013 and the age of the Free Agent Nation what does it mean to leave a manager, or perhaps more interesting, what does it mean to join a company?

Doing a bit of research in this area it looks like the phrase became popular from 1998/99 on the basis of an article published by Gallup and the popular management book First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman.

The Gallup article is titled: How Managers Trump Companies – People join companies, but leave managers

It concludes like this:

An employee may join Disney or GE or Timer Warner because she is lured by their generous benefits package and their reputation for valuing employees. But it is her relationship with her immediate manager that will determine how long she stays and how productive she is while she is there. Michael Eisner, Jack Welch, Gerald Levin, and all the goodwill in the world can only do so much. In the end, these questions tell us that, from the employee’s perspective, managers trump companies.

The book – First, Break All the Rules – is still a very popular management book and has been used as a source of training in all sorts of organisation.

The basis of the book is a lot of research undertaken by Gallup through their world-renowned ability to find information through surveys. It’s this book that is the basis for the Gallup Q12 approach which utilises 12 questions to ascertain the level of employee engagement and from that the organisation’s performance.

In the book it states “the manager – not pay, benefits, perks or a charismatic corporate leader – was the critical player in building a strong workplace.” Which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like people join companies, but leave managers but it makes the same point.

The fundamental point is that managers can make or break your organisation.

Has the world moved on since 1998/9 when the book and article were written?

On one side of the equation it looks like things haven’t changed much at all. According to Gallup, the findings still hold true for the organisation that they work with. The last set of research published in 2012 states that the correlation between engaged employees and productive workplaces continues. If that correlation is true then people will choose to stay at organisations where they are engaged in meaningful work by good managers.

There’s another side to the equation, though, are people still joining companies? Do people still want to be employees?

In the UK, at least, there’s been quite a shift in employment. The following chart comes from a Department for Business Innovation and Skills report Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions 2012:

Business Growth by Size

This chart, and the report, show that the number of sole-traders and self-employed businesses (shown as businesses without employees) has massively grown over the last 10 years while larger businesses (business with 250 or more employees) are down significantly. These businesses with no employees now account for nearly 75% of all businesses and provide employment for nearly four million people. While 9.8 million people work in companies of larger than 250 employees, over 14 million work in no employee, small and medium-sized businesses (there’s also millions more people employed in the public sector).

So while it can be said, with a reasonable level of confidence, that people leave companies because of poor management, it’s no longer clear that people choose to join companies in anything like the volume that they used to.

So I think I’ll keep using this axiom, but it looks like it’s going to get less relevant as the make-up of the workforce changes.

Blessings #192 – Sand Martins and Swallows

Yesterday morning I set out on a bike ride. There’s a lovely route which starts near my house and after a short while drops down through some woods into a nature reserve and then along the banks of the River Ribble.

Brockholes SunsetThis stretch of the river is still in the countryside, winding its way through farmland. The river is wide, meandering through a broad valley with woods on either side.

In the nature reserve they’ve recently erected a Sand Martin nesting wall hoping for some seasonal visitors. I stopped off to see if anyone had taken up residence, but there was no-one home. I left wondering whether it was still too early in the year for them to be nesting.

A little way along the river I had the answer to my pondering. I’d noticed a set of holes in a sandy mud bank on a bend in the river on a previous trip. Today it was a mass of teaming activity, the travellers had arrived from there southern wanderings.

Sand Martin’s were swooping along inches above the river.

Some were chasing each other from bank to bank before one of them would climb steeply up into the sky eventually plunging down again to join the chase.

Others were congregated around the nest holes sojourning from one to another as if it was an open day at university halls of residence.

Wings of dark brown feathers danced through the air using each flap to propel the Sand Martin with absolute precision.

Each bird danced with the others in close acrobatics without collision or clash.

The air was their play area and their play was an integrate dance.

After standing and taking in the gymnastics for a while I pressed my feet back onto the peddles and continued on my way.

A little further along the cycle track cuts the corner off one of the Ribble’s meanders and makes its way through fields of grazing cattle. Above the cattle another dance was under-way, this time it was the turn of the Swallows to show their talents.

The Swallows’ dance is different to the Sand Martins’.

Where the Sand Martins dance in close intricate acrobatics, the Swallows prefer a more swooping arching movement.

The Swallows can fill a sky chasing insect delights.

I watched as one Swallow travelled from one end of the field to another no more than a wingspan away from the ground, swooping left and back right along the way. Another Swallow criss-crossed in the opposite rhythm not far behind.

As they reached the end of the field they both flicked a wing and shot high into the sky to join the dance higher up.

They were followed by others creating reversing patterns in the air as they went.

There was no set design to their dance and yet there was a form, there was an artistry to their movement.

I’ve spent most of my life in a Christina tradition that has, for the most part, regarded dancing with something of a suspicious eye.

In recent months I have become convinced that God wants to be so intimate with us that he wants to dance with us. He doesn’t want to be distant or stand-offish, he wants to hold our hands and swing us around. He wants to look us in the eye and smile at us as He leads us in the next movement.

I was recently at a meeting where I saw a picture in my mind’s eye of a spotlight shining down into the middle of the assembled crowd. In the middle of the crown was someone dressed in traditional Jewish clothing that I took to be Jesus. He reached his hand out to someone and gently swung them around, he then reached his hand out to another and drew them into the dance. A full on ceilidh was taking place with Jesus right at the centre of the action orchestrating the steps.

I’m not sure what it means to dance with Jesus, but it sounds like a fun thing to do. More than that though, it sounds like an intimate thing to do. You can’t ceilidh with someone at a distance.

I missed my blog birthday

It was my blog birthday back on 04/04. I have an excuse though, I was on holiday.
Jimmy lays claim to the sofa
Amazingly it’s been 8 years.

Like all polite people I started with a welcome a welcome that I still extend to all of you.

At 1,200 posts I’m never going to be the most prolific writer, but that’s not why I do it. I write because I enjoy it, I just hope that the experience isn’t too painful for these of you who get to read it.

(That’s Jimmy back in 2005, he doesn’t seem to have aged anything like as much as I have)

Is the news making you sad?

An interesting article in The Guardian today – News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. It’s based on a book by Rolf Dobelli called the Art of Thinking Clearly.

Putting aside the irony of a newspaper producing an article that is saying that news is bad for you, it raises some interesting points.

Some of what it is saying is drawing on the same sources and thinking that have driven many of my Information Addiction posts, but it goes further to focus in on news itself:

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

The article goes on to describe that:

  • News misleads – making us irrational.
  • News is irrelevant – of all of that news out there a tiny amount has any direct impact on us individually.
  • News has no explanatory power – “News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.”
  • News is toxic to your body – by constantly triggering the limbic system and releasing cortisol.
  • News increases cognitive errors – giving us confirmation bias. “In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.””
  • News inhibits thinking – because it impacts our ability to concentrate.
  • News works like a drug – something we’ve seen a number of times on this site.
  • News wastes time – back to the point about relevance, if it’s not relevant why spend time on it.
  • News kills creativity – “I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.”

This is where I need to admit to being a bit of a news junkie, but also knowing that it’s not doing me any good.

You might have noticed that the amount I’ve been writing has dropped off in recent months, that’s partly because I’ve spent too much time focussing on the news interrupts and not enough time on thinking and reflecting. That’s partly down to a modern workplace challenge where immediacy is king, but it’s also down to my working habits.

How about you?

Waking up with you Facebook

One of the regular themes on this blog is Information Addiction and our ever present need to be connected.
Loch Creran
There’s more evidence this week about just how connected we are, this time focussed on Facebook mobile usage and a report from IDC:

Depending on your perspective, many of the results are either depressing or confirm what you knew all along. For example, it seems that 79% of smartphone users reach for their devices within 15 minutes of waking up. A clear majority — 62% — don’t even wait 15 minutes, and grab their phones immediately. (Among 18-24 year olds, the numbers rise to 89% and 74%.)

via Mashable.

That’s right, people can’t even wait to go through their morning routine before diving in – wake-up and connect. But it’s not just about the speed of connection, it’s also about the frequency of connection, the average is 14 times a day rising to nearly 18 times a day at the weekend just for Facebook.

According to the report, the average daily time on Facebook on a smartphone is 32 min 51 sec, the total daily time communicating on a smartphone is 131 min 43 sec. That’s right, over 2 hours every day on a smartphone.

Smartphones are powerful tools that are changing the way that we interact. What concerns me is that I don’t think most people recognise it. The smartphone is only just the start of it, watch the Google Glass backlash build even before the product has been released.

Back Online

I was offline for a while yesterday, but all should be good now.

Loch CreranOf course you wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t, so it’s a pretty pointless post.

What I am writing is clearly self-evident, but all the same I thought I would let you know

“Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.”

Mahatma Gandhi

Blessings #191 – The Seagull Call

The other morning while I was out on my regular morning walk, in the relative quiet as the sun started to rise, a screeching noise broke through the peace.

Fish and Chips on the Beach in Oban

Where I live is only a few miles from the coast but we don’t see many gulls nearby. They prefer to stay around the local marina (or docks as they used to be) preying on the remains of takeaways from MacDonald’s.

There was a group of four of them rising up into the sky probably retreating from some mischievous exploits.

Before I had even seen them the noise took me to another place and another time. It wasn’t anywhere specific; it was the combination of a number of different memories.

There were days walking amongst the chalk caves and pools of Flamborough Head. It’s a place of cliffs, clear seas and stories of pirates.

There were days walking along the tops of the cliffs a bit further up the coast at Bempton where the Gannets and Fulmars add to the song.

It was the noise of family holidays relaxing between bouts of body-boarding on Whitecross Bay on Cornwall.

There were memories of long beach walks on the nearby Lytham coastline.

Then there the recollections of fish and chips on the beach just outside Oban watching the CalMac make its evening rounds.

To many the seagull is a bit of a pest and I must admit that I can understand that point of view. The other morning though they brought a pleasurable cascade of memories, memories that are treasured blessings.

Do you need a contract with your smartphone?

A number of sources have covered this story over the last few days:

My initial response on seeing the headlines was that this was some over-protective American parent who had no clue about how the real world worked (in the UK we always assume that stories like this are American). An 18-point contract? Are you mad?

Having read through the contract my opinion has completely reversed (apart from it being American, of course). This is a Mom who has thought a lot about the way that we interact with technology, the Internet, the dangers of being a teenager and the impact of all of those upon us.

If more of us followed more of these rules then many of us would be in a much better place.

Here’s the full list:

1. It is my phone. I bought it. I pay for it. I am loaning it to you. Aren’t I the greatest?

2. I will always know the password.

3. If it rings, answer it. It is a phone. Say hello, use your manners. Do not ever ignore a phone call if the screen reads “Mom” or “Dad”. Not ever.

4. Hand the phone to one of your parents promptly at 7:30pm every school night & every weekend night at 9:00pm. It will be shut off for the night and turned on again at 7:30am. If you would not make a call to someone’s land line, wherein their parents may answer first, then do not call or text. Listen to those instincts and respect other families like we would like to be respected.

5. It does not go to school with you. Have a conversation with the people you text in person. It’s a life skill. *Half days, field trips and after school activities will require special consideration.

6. If it falls into the toilet, smashes on the ground, or vanishes into thin air, you are responsible for the replacement costs or repairs. Mow a lawn, babysit, stash some birthday money. It will happen, you should be prepared.

7. Do not use this technology to lie, fool, or deceive another human being. Do not involve yourself in conversations that are hurtful to others. Be a good friend first or stay the hell out of the crossfire.

8. Do not text, email, or say anything through this device you would not say in person.

9. Do not text, email, or say anything to someone that you would not say out loud with their parents in the room. Censor yourself.

10. No porn. Search the web for information you would openly share with me. If you have a question about anything, ask a person ? preferably me or your father.

11. Turn it off, silence it, put it away in public. Especially in a restaurant, at the movies, or while speaking with another human being. You are not a rude person; do not allow the iPhone to change that.

12. Do not send or receive pictures of your private parts or anyone else’s private parts. Don’t laugh. Someday you will be tempted to do this despite your high intelligence. It is risky and could ruin your teenage/college/adult life. It is always a bad idea. Cyberspace is vast and more powerful than you. And it is hard to make anything of this magnitude disappear — including a bad reputation.

13. Don’t take a zillion pictures and videos. There is no need to document everything. Live your experiences. They will be stored in your memory for eternity.

14. Leave your phone home sometimes and feel safe and secure in that decision. It is not alive or an extension of you. Learn to live without it. Be bigger and more powerful than FOMO — fear of missing out.

15. Download music that is new or classic or different than the millions of your peers that listen to the same exact stuff. Your generation has access to music like never before in history. Take advantage of that gift. Expand your horizons.

16. Play a game with words or puzzles or brain teasers every now and then.

17. Keep your eyes up. See the world happening around you. Stare out a window. Listen to the birds. Take a walk. Talk to a stranger. Wonder without googling.

18. You will mess up. I will take away your phone. We will sit down and talk about it. We will start over again. You & I, we are always learning. I am on your team. We are in this together.

It is my hope that you can agree to these terms. Most of the lessons listed here do not just apply to the iPhone, but to life. You are growing up in a fast and ever changing world. It is exciting and enticing. Keep it simple every chance you get. Trust your powerful mind and giant heart above any machine. I love you. I hope you enjoy your awesome new iPhone. Merry Christmas!

xoxoxo

Mom

How many of these would make it into the contract you would write for yourself?

I particularly liked this one:

14. Leave your phone home sometimes and feel safe and secure in that decision. It is not alive or an extension of you. Learn to live without it. Be bigger and more powerful than FOMO — fear of missing out.

For me the the Christmas and New Year break was an opportunity for another Internet and always-on detox. It felt great to be walking around the Lake District without anything to distract me from taking in the world around me (I didn’t even have a camera as it’s at the repairers).

You might think that a contract is a bit over-the-top but I like the idea, it’s all too easy to let our standards slip over time.