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 :( )