Procrastination as a source of learning
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Is procrastination always a bad thing? What if it’s a place of learning rather than self-criticism?
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Personal reflections on work, life, coaching and anything else that gets me thinking
You don't need to know all the answers
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Leaders, especially new leaders, tend to assume that knowing the answers is what good leadership is all about. What if it's not?
Read MoreIf a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it exist?
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If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it exist? Sometimes, even if no one else notices, you are the best person to judge the quality of your existence and the contribution you are making to the world.
Read MoreThings I learnt on a writing retreat that are not about writing
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I went on a writing retreat a couple of weeks ago. Here are some of the things I learnt that are nothing to do with writing. You can learn things wherever you are if you are open, curious and thoughtful. Life is full of opportunities if you take the time to see them. Grab it with both hands.
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Mind over matter
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In the 21st century, we tend to assume that if we know it or think it, we can make it happen. But if that’s true, why do all those self-help books and business case studies and leadership training not translate into action on a daily basis? Especially when we need them most?
Read MoreWhy not now?
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Why get to breaking point before taking action? Why waste precious days, months, years of your life waiting for divine intervention? It might feel luxurious, investing time and, perhaps, money in yourself when things are sort of not that bad. But making it a priority now, before it gets to crisis point, significantly increases your chances of a better outcome and is likely to produce a positive conclusion much earlier than if you try to pretend it’s not happening.
Read MoreToo busy to think
/Because of Covid, train strikes and protracted engineering works, last week was the first time for a long time I’ve been on what you might call a commuter train. I had just been given a stark warning about not burning out, so I decided to use the 75 minutes as downtime. I sat and read the Harvard Business Review. (I know.)
For the first time in ages, I read four long articles back-to-back, each of them fascinating and thought-provoking.
What struck me was how unfamiliar it felt to be intellectually provoked into thinking differently. Some of the articles talked about ideas I had been vaguely thinking about for a while (how do we use the pandemic to re-think the way we work? When we worry about how to transmit culture in remote-working organisations, what do we really mean and why does it matter? When we complain that remote working doesn’t work, is that because it doesn’t, or because we haven’t done enough radical thinking about how to make it work?). But I realised that in my cult of busyness I had lost the time and mental space to do any big picture thinking, to notice trends or themes coming up in my work, or to give sufficient thought to the underlying meaning in the challenges faced by my clients and how I might better support them.
I found myself thinking about one of my clients who laments her inability to talk “corporate speak”, believing it to be a disadvantage in her career. Reading these articles, particularly about remote working, the very nature of work itself, and the cult of busyness, it seemed to me that unless we have people who think outside the constraints of our current mental models, we will never crack some of these really important problems. HBR articles are often written by academics, people whose entire rationale is to broaden minds, think new thoughts and do research. We need people like my client who can take those ideas and put them into practice in organisations and communities, and to make them useful in the real world.
Like me, I have many clients who struggle to find the time to do any strategic work. But how will we learn and develop if we don’t? How will we uncover the answers if we don’t spend quality time examining the questions?
So maybe this train journey wasn’t exactly downtime. But it certainly energised me and gave me a reason to want to do something about the incipient burnout that is constraining my ability not only to do my job well but to live a satisfying, healthy and useful life.
Time for a change.
