Fake it til you make it (aka New Boots)

I had the good fortune of winning some (riding) boots in a magazine competition. When they arrived- I tried them on to check they fit and, as they did, I just kept them on. (They were new so clean and smart).

As it happened I was heading into town... via the petrol station as the warning light was on :o I was standing there filling the tank when I realised I was standing differently... stronger... It was because of the boots, and it felt good.

Which got me pondering...

At a couple of work events, the topic of body posture has come up, specifically the physical impact your posture can have (Power Poses, Amy Cuddy). The way you stand doesn't just affect the impression other people have of you, in affects your own body chemistry. Adopting a power pose changes the levels of key hormones in your body.

There is an interesting cycle between the physical and the emotional - where adopting a smile, even where "faked" by holding a pen in your teeth, affects your mood. And your mood affects your posture.

I think we all know this somewhere in the back of our heads. We know that first impressions count and we manage the image that we present, in every aspect - the clothes, body language, voice, language, hand shake - even down to the car we drive or the gadgets we use.

We choose the face(s) we present to the world.

What occurred to me while fuelling my car was how the clothes and shoes we choose don't just have a direct affect on the people around in terms of the impression we make. They also affect how we feel about ourselves, which will affect our body language (and body chemistry), and that will also influence the people we meet.

Once upon a time I used to wear heels and putting on heels, glad rags and make up was enough to change my body language. But then I damaged my knee and heels were banned for quite a while. Even when I was given the all clear, I was physically unbalanced and fairly unconfident in crowds of people. Feeling vulnerable affected my body language, and hence the impression I made. I've never really made it back into a "heels" state of mind. I have tried wearing low heels a few times and while it does change the way I walk, I don't feel confident. Plus my joints hate me by the end of the day. So I don't do it very often, which means I don't get into "heels" state of mind very often.

One of the other things that came up in the work course was the ability to choose your "state". We did a practical exercise choosing what "state" to greet people in, and it was interesting how the extremes of the state spectrum felt false and difficult. I felt I could probably choose state within a range, but would struggle to choose outside of that range.

[Quick side bar on "state": I realise I didn't really challenge what was meant by "state" when I was on the course. I just made an assumption that it was about "positive mental attitude", but somewhere in the mix you also get energy level, confidence, in fact probably the big five personality traits. The exercise was to greet people at a zero, five and ten level of "state". And they would be doing the same but you wouldn't necessarily get a zero:zero meeting. I think most people found the zero and ten states were not very comfortable and took some effort. What a "ten" was varied between people. And a big mismatch between states e.g. a zero:ten meeting also caused some frustration on both sides.]

I have been updating my wardrobe anyway as changing job always means some adjustment to the new dress code. But I think I need to spend a bit more time thinking about how that also affects me; how the clothes and shoes I choose affects my posture and also my mood.

However "state" isn't just about clothes and shoes. Horses don't judge me by what I wear, but they are very good at reading body language. How I am feeling, what I am thinking, these things affect me at the level of minute differences in my muscles that might not be visible to the eye (at least to a human) but can be felt by a horse, even with a saddle in the way.

Us humans probably used to be better at doing this than we are now, but we've got lazy because we can listen to what someone is saying (and the tone and so on). And our survival doesn't depend on it.

There seems to be a fine line where "faking" confidence or calmness works and the horse responds to a not-entirely-genuine state. But at the same time horses seem to have a pretty consistent ability to see the things you are not even aware of yourself - when you have doubts about a jump, or "don't really mean it" when you ask them to do something.

Somehow there is an aspect of "authenticity" to faking it - you need to mean it.

If I choose particular clothes or shoes in the short term, that will change my mood, and my body language in the short term. And that will affect my body chemistry in the short term. But if you choose to do this again and again, you start to embed that mood, that "state" in the long term.

There is a lot of research about how often you need to do something for it to become a habit - and it is only a matter of days. So if I have been moping around for 20 or 30 days, that is effectively a habit I have created for myself. I have been inadvertently choosing a whole load of habits for myself.

It isn't just a question of accepting that I can choose my state. it is a question of what state do I want to choose ? What 'me' do I want to be (a 'me' that I can be with enough authenticity) ?

Which is a fair amount of pondering given I only have a small petrol tank !

Speed, direction and destination

I'm not sure whether Mark Rashid does this deliberately, or whether he just has a knack of pointing those universal truths that have an unexpected depth and meaning.

I was out for a nice quiet peaceful toddle with my mother's pony today. Weather was neither here nor there, but at least it wasn't raining. The bluebells were still out and looking lush. 

I deliberately set out not to have a fast hack, but to include some "hillwork". Well it would count as hills in Norfolk... really just undulations in Scotland ;)

Anyway, I was reflecting that a year ago my "goal" was for us (Rosie and I) to be able to comfortably manage an hour's hack. And last year we did a few taster rides, managing the last one at the right speed and time. (If you are riding 9-12km at the required speed, it takes around an hour to do).

So this year the aim was to step up a bit and aim towards doing a short pleasure ride. Rosie was already starting the year fitter than this time last year - but still wasn't going to be "fit enough". We have already done our first taster this year - the same ride we finished last year with. The ride is in a forest so is level and soft going, and we just snuck in at the maximum time.

Which means the training needs to work towards more than an hour, needs to be not just on flat soft going, and needs to be building more speed.

As we pootled along today (aiming for the longer time but not at any speed), I realised I could express my/our goals in terms of "speed, direction and destination" (something Mark talks about in his clinics).

On any ride I want to achieve a certain speed, on a specified route (direction), with a known destination in mind (most of our rides are loops, but they go "via" different places).

And then for some reason my mind made a link with work. If you used the same three aspects - speed, direction, destination - couldn't you pretty much define your work goals as well ?

The destination is where you want to be, whether on a personal, team or corporate/organisation level. 

To get there you need to know where you are starting from, and what route you plan to use - a roadmap. The direction might be overall (I want to go north) or for the next part of the journey (I need to travel along this road for a mile and then turn left).

And then you decide how fast you are going to get there.

You get what you settle for

as part of my translation from myspace:   I was venting about behaviour.

To quote from Thelma and Louise "You get what you settle for"

Or to put it another way, borrowing from NLP every behavior has a benefit for a person.

Now normally I had come across this in terms of encouraging good behaviour. But in this case I was venting about what, in my view, was sub-optimal behaviour.

I had a bit of a vent about what I thought was going on. When I had been talking about my own stress levels I had commented a number of times that it wasn't about work load, it was about behaviour. But when you start to think about why the behaviour is persisting, despite there being a definite will to "do the right thing", you end up coming full circle to workload (the number of things we were doing).

And this is compounded by working inefficiently. To quote Einstein

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." 

If we grasped the nettle and said "no" to a few things, we could turn some work around, clear the decks and be ready for the next thing on the list. Shorter, sharper, more focused.

As long we are doing the same things, the same way, no one person can make up the difference. Trying is simply a road to bad physical and mental health. The only sensible and logical thing is to stop trying.

The only real question is why it took me so long for me to come to this conclusion.

"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

OK so I finally clocked that myspace had reinvented itself and stopped hosting blogs. Shows how often I used it. While there is probably a lot of content that can just shuffle quietly off the internet coil.... there are a few posts that I shall "reuse and recycle" - so there may be a few posts while I translate the content.

This time last year I was reading a book called "Control Stress" by Paul McKenna. He quotes Dr Hans Selye as saying

"It is not the event, but rather our interpretation of it that causes our emotional reaction."

I figured I would double check that quote, and the closest I could find was the one I have used as the post title.

"It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you take it."

Hmmmm. Now this was at a time when I have been signalling pretty strongly that things are not good at work - to both my line manager and HR. And spent time looking at stress triggers and so on and so forth. Not much happened as a result. From where I stood it felt that it wasn't a question of sheer workload, it was much more about behaviour. 

 (I did a mind map where the centre said "everything is grim" - I found it the other day.... not much has changed :( )

Then a colleague went off with stress, and another left for a new job. So then we had all the previous complexity and chaos, but exacerbated by 40% less resource in the management team.

So there I was.... stressed. According to Dr Selye I should have been able reframe that... reinterpret it... so that my emotional reaction is different.

What happened next ? Well they appointed a new director, who restructured us and then left. Joy. My job disappeared and my team were split up. Three guesses how I felt.

There still seemed to be a prevalent view that any negative view of what had happened was purely about "point of view". As I said to one of my HR colleagues: if something is a muck heap, I can look at it from any side, from any point of view, it is still a muck heap.

Goal setting

A few weeks back I was at interview. I can say that now as it's no secret any more. There was one question that completely stumped me .... and got me thinking, on all sorts of levels. The question was

Tell us about a personal goal that you have failed to achieve and how you dealt with that

Hmmmmm. Now I've been on the other side of the table doing competency based interviewing so I have an idea what they are looking for. They are not trying to get me to confess to something "bad".... they are trying to find out more about how I deal with things going wrong.

My brain starts mentally thumbing through the past to try and come up with an example that fit the question. And I'm struggling.... the examples that I can think of have really related to things outside of my control. Like my horse having arthritis.

Whoa....

Do I only remember success and I have blanked out all the bad stuff ? Is this selective memory ?

Or....

Does this mean that I don't set myself goals that I can't achieve ? I know I have a "talent" for pacing myself - I know my own limits and I work within and up to them. But have I got too good at that and don't actually challenge myself ?

Oooo.....

Does that mean I don't actually set myself goals at all ?? If they are always within my limits, always "do"able, are they really goals ?

Needless to say I only went through parts of this at the time, and some of it later when I was pondering my reaction. Though I suspect I did briefly have that "deer in the headlights" look as I tried to work out something....anything.... to say. Inventing things in an interview is never a good idea and not an option. But I was coming up empty. I explained the only example I could come up with (wanting to do things with my horse but being limited by her physical issues) but that I wasn't sure that was the kind of thing they were after. We moved on.  I got the job so it can't have been too much of a disaster.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I have never experienced failure. I have. We all do. And I have learnt from it. In fact if they had asked me to talk about what I had learnt from failure, that would have been easier to answer. For example, my degree result was pretty useless. But I was lucky in that my future employer wasn't bothered about that and so the related "goal" still went ahead. I didn't fail to achieve the goal, but I did learn from the experience.

Do I remember the good stuff more than the bad ? I'm not sure (is that because I'm blanking out the bad stuff ? I could paint myself into a corner with this one !). But that isn't the question they asked. Would I have had equal difficulty answering a "tell us about a goal you succeeded at and how" ? I suspect so. I think I tend to assume failures are *mine* whereas successes are about the whole team.

They did ask me what I would see as my greatest achievement.... and the next question was whether my boss would agree with my answer. There is a saying that

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime

My answer was that my achievement was building the team,. as it wasn't just about the projects *I* had delivered, but about the ongoing value the whole team were adding. And no, I didn't think my boss would have the same  answer (after all, they had just restructured my team out of existence !).

Do I set myself goals ? Yes, though not all the time. I don't think we tend to think of everything in our life in terms of goals and objectives. Sometimes we are just doing stuff ;) And when I deliberately set myself a goal, yes it probably is carefully thought through, planned, considered in a way that makes it a stretch but achievable.

If  reality intervenes, then I have options - in the way we do with managing risk. Say something changes to make the goal unrealistic. When my horse was simply lame, I managed that lameness but I confess I had not really given up on ever riding her again. Maybe this was just denial. (as part of the change/transformation cycle) But it did mean I had to consider a longer timescale for what I had hoped to do.

And then last year she lost the sight in one eye. And that meant having to accept that I really wasn't going to achieve certain goals with her. It didn't necessarily mean I was never going to achieve those goals - but certainly not in the near future and with my current horse.

So what I did was redirect. In this case I was lucky that my mother has a little pony, not suitable for my original goals but in need of a jockey to "do fun stuff" with. In an ideal world would I be riding a small native pony ? No. But can we have fun together - yes. (And am I learning from it..... absolutely !)

I don't think I would have considered my original goal as being "have fun". It was more about the what and how I wanted to have fun. But when the chips are down, you often have the chance to realise what is at the core of your aims. Maybe it's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this case the original goal (with my horse) was further up the needs pyramid. But with her issues, I wasn't then fulfilling needs at a lower level. She simply needs to be a horse - and by effectively retiring her, I can let her get on with doing that. And in the meantime, there is a win-win by working with another pony.

And maybe one day I will get back to those unmet equestrian goals ;)

Are there other areas of my life in which I am not setting goals (and should be) ? Well there are certainly areas where the report card might read "could do better". I guess I need to think some more about whether that is something within my circle of control (something I have the power to control myself)... and if so maybe set some appropriate goals and actions.

I've been reading a book called "Grow Your Own Carrots". It has a structure for goal setting. What I like about it is that rather than setting the big, long term goals, they encourage you to set shorter term goals that you can achieve in, say, 8 weeks. I need to finish it soon as it belongs to my current employer - so that gives me a nice short term goal... to finish the book this week ;)

Reduce, Recycle, Reuse

Waste. In a previous incarnation, the company I worked for saw (and measured) inefficiency as "waste" and aimed to reduce it. Instead of just measuring pages of paper printed, or miles travelled, they looked at things like the time lost in meeting through them starting or running late.

I guess that was the start of my "recycling" habit. Only it isn't just about recycling.....

Reduction

is about making sure you don't acquire or create things you don't need in the first place.  And that when you do need something, what sort of packaging does it come with ? What sort of waste does it create ? (My coffee machine uses discs that can be recycled - but there aren't any recycling points near me and you need to store a massive volume to justify getting them picked up).

From a work point of view the "thing" might not be tangible. It might be about not having meetings without a purpose and agenda, not starting projects that don't have a clear strategic alignment and owner.

Or it might be more obvious and be about printing less, writing efficient code, not getting the latest gadget because it is a status symbol or is the latest craze.

I remember any number of people saying "storage costs nothing". Yet every server we add to the estate takes time to maintain, update, manage, keep secure. Every server requires power and, at some point, become obsolete and needs replacing. Is that really "free" ?

Reuse

Many things can be "repurposed". Clothes can be reused either by someone else, or as part of the textiles that are used in the paper trade. Plastic bottles can be used to water gardens, or make windmills to scare birds away. The only limit is our imagination !

Recycle

If you can't do either of above, then clean up after yourself responsibly.

Cardboard, many plastics, tetrapacks, glass - they can all be recycled. It really becomes more a question of whether there is enough of something to make it worth collecting up and selling to someone to use as an ingredient for something new.

Check whether systems and applications are being used - and get rid of the ones that are no longer needed.
Retire old kit when it gets to its end of life

And you know I think there may be an extra category in terms of workplace waste - and it relates to the "inefficiency" comment that I started with.

If you go to a meeting unprepared, if you don't follow the purpose, agenda and so on of the meeting, then that is wasting all the attendees' time. Even more so if the meeting runs over or runs out of time to complete all the necessary items. So many times I hear people saying "we have too many meetings" - but those very same people are the ones who turn up unprepared and sidetrack the meeting.

My message to them would be "clean up your act !". If they don't want long meetings that over run, then do the prep, stick to the agenda, get in and get out. (Of course it's not easy to say that to your boss, or your boss's boss :( )