Distract yourself or develop yourself?

Painful things are hard to think about.  I notice myself pushing them to one side in my mind, and focussing on something more pleasurable instead.   Quite a natural way to prevent anxiety, but at what stage does this become ‘problem, what problem?  Let’s party!’  i.e.  the stage at which pleasure is used to avoid engagement with stressful circumstances.  Virginia Satir identified this type of reaction to stress as the ‘distractor’ response.

I have found successful projects much easier to engage with than less successful ones.  My way of dealing with this has been to notice it and ensure that I give the things I enjoy less, but which nevertheless deserve attention, the time they need.  Tackling them first in the day when I am fresh works well.

When do we give ourselves permission to engage with pleasures that distract us?  This is easier to answer when our days are well structured and there are clear times for ‘work’ and ‘play’.  Working for myself,  I have to self-motivate and organise my own time.  I find that I have to set myself rules, targets and manage myself so that I tackle the things that are necessary but less fun.

This makes me think about personal development.  Many people say that it is our failures we learn from, but thinking about them in order to learn is painful, so we will often slip into defensive ways of thinking – projecting blame onto others, distracting ourselves with pleasures, ascribing a failure to the context.  The other thing we do is distract ourselves, which also means we fail to learn.

For me a great way of spotting where I should be learning/changing is when I give myself permission for a ‘treat’ – am I trying to distract myself from something I need to engage with?  I’m not talking about some hair shirt approach to life, but about noticing when I think ‘let’s have an hour off now and go for a walk in the sun’ at a time I would normally be working.  Is this because everything is under control and I can enjoy this, or is it to avoid tackling something unpleasant?

Procrastination is another good indicator of what we are avoiding.  Last week I found myself grateful for a day of DIY as a way of avoiding dealing with other tasks.  In themselves those tasks were not unpleasant, but they had a negative emotional charge for me.

Noticing what is going on can help us make conscious choices, learn from errors and engage with areas of our work and lives which need to change.

Coaching; professional vs personal

One theme that I have noticed while coaching senior managers is the thin boundary between professional and personal at work.  I don’t mean that these managers are blurring the boundary, but that the coaching relationship has uncovered the impact of the personal on performance at work.

What surprised me was the depth of this connection and how useful it was to be able to compare patterns of behaviour in work, with patterns outside of work.  Influences included parents, siblings, partners, religion and loss.  The way these patterns and the emotions they engendered influenced work should not have been a surprise to me – a fundamental of my coaching is that it deals with the whole person, because it is the whole person who goes to work.  It was the strength with which these influenced affected daily behaviour that was surprising, and the need to recognise those influences and take action to move beyond them.

I can only liken this to seeing an osteopath (something I did recently).  Working with the underlying structure, the osteopath clicks something back into place, freeing the whole body to move and feel better.  In the same way, freeing up the personal helps the professional perform smoothly.

Coming Unstuck

After two years working as a consultant, I reached a restless period.  Work wound down for the summer, nothing much was happening, a sense of dissatisfaction grew.

Somehow Wile.E.Coyote  had spread glue on my road.  Fortunately I had registered for a Diploma course with the Academy of Executive Coaching, and this involved being coached myself.

On the first session of the course I was disconnected and my mind was spinning.  I splurged everything I was feeling to my coach for the day and a weight lifted.  I began to travel forwards again.  Drive returned and I got back to marketing and getting coaching work, to clearing out the shed at the bottom or our garden and making other changes.  I just took 20 minutes clearing the debris to begin this process.

I’ve noticed similar things for friends and colleagues – it often takes an event to begin to unstick things.  This might be a coaching session, it might be taking practical steps to clear out a room, or it might be just getting some distance on a weekend break trip.  Physical clearing, emotional clearing or distance.

I attended a conference yesterday that had a model that made some sense of this for “serial achievers” – a person’s drive to learn and move forwards falls off into a period of stability until  there is restlessness.  A period of incubation follows, during which they may be searching or reflecting, which ends with an epiphany as the person realises where they want to go next.  Drive returns and the person sets off in a new direction.  This happens in cycles and different cycles may be going on in different spheres of the person’s life.

Being restless or stuck is ok, if uncomfortable.  That’s the time to look for a catalyst that might release that stuckness.

Dissatisfied of (insert organisation)

Work in supported housing in the not for profit sector brings me in contact with a lot of dissatisfied people.  Mostly they don’t know why, and think things should be other than they are.  There’s a lot of emotion and stress involved.

While this might often be projection (projecting dissatisfaction with self/lifestyle/partner/income/whatever onto an organisation), there can be a more positive personal reason.

Discussing this with my critical friend by the banks of the Thames, we came onto the subjects of self development, creativity, learning and change.  Government regulation may lead to a culture in supported housing organisations that is, if I can use a technical term, “stodgy”.  Management becomes hierarchy, empowerment becomes targets and statistics.  Playing this game well leads to advancement, a self reinforcing situation.

Self development can upset this situation, especially if it stimulates creativity.

Creativity, often released by being inappropriate, striving to be different or just a little crazy, does not sit well with such a culture.  Perhaps this is a reason the sector uses external consultants to import new ideas.

Self development stimulates asking questions and the realisation that actually, the person in charge may not know what they are talking about.  Suddenly you notice that the emotions and bias that drive you, drive them too.  No longer can you be satisfied with this, you ask questions, you become the one who always comments on ideas (often adversely).  You have changed and you no longer fit.

I framed this as a positive thing.  If you are dissatisfied with your organisation, and the reason is that you have changed, its time to go and find something that will help you keep growing.

Keeping busy and the Drama Triangle

You may recognise the problem:  too much work, leading to tiredness, stress mistakes and demotivation.  Then your manager offers you help.  What do you do?

A – accept gratefully, hand some of your tasks to someone else, and concentrate on other work

B – accept but try to stay in control, either monitor or check their work, or perhaps get upset when they do it differently or take a decision without asking you first

I have seen both reactions from colleagues and as the sample grows I begin to think that which reaction occurs may be partly explicable by the extent to which they are participating in Karpman’s Drama Triangle.

The drama triangle is an unhelpful situation where we act as either a victim, a persecuter or a rescuer.  Each dramatic role influences others to assume the other roles – so if you act like a victim it creates a persecuter, and probably a rescuer.  Combine this with a Transactional Analysis game: the payoff in this drama triangle role for the overworked person is that they feel like a victim, are acting heroically in a situation where nobody could possible help them successfully, and so their stress or lack of success are justified. We then have a situation where the help is actually a threat to the status quo, which if successful may break the comfortable patterns of behaviour of the overworked person.  Change is often challenging or painful, so they may resist.  Certainly something I have been guilty of in the past.

Back to my sample.  Those most resistant to receiving help appear to be those who already cope worst with stress, display more negative emotion than is normal, and want to stay in control the most.  Those whom it is easier to help (and to work with) tend to be more relaxed and apparently secure in themselves.

This is not to suggest that the person who sees themselves in a dramatic or heroic role is not a high performer – just that they are harder to help if they are overwhelmed with work.

A lot of management literature suggests that everyone needs to feel heroic in their work.  Based on the above thoughts, I would question that.  We need to feel what we do is worthwhile and appreciated, but do we need to get dragged into a potential drama to overcome impossible odds?

My prescription in this situation would be reflective practice.  Stop and think.  Do you stop people from helping you when you have too much to do?

Giving up Lent

A friend of mine asked what I was giving up for Lent.  My flippant reply at the time was “Lent itself”, although I felt guilty having just eaten her pancakes.  I further explained that I didn’t feel there was anything I particularly needed to give up.  She replied that this was not the point.

I got to thinking about this, and realised that it was rather like my feelings about New Year resolutions.  This was about the negativity of giving things up and the need to perhaps have a vision, a dream, something positive that will gradually force out more negative behaviour and the poor self image that creates it.

Lent is about more than self denial, but do many of us treat it that way?  One of the things I remember about fasting, rather like crash diets, is that you normally end up eating more and putting on weight as a result.  All that denial springs back on you like a snapped rubber band.  It also makes me think of the film “Chocolat“.

So I’m not going to give up Lent, which would be negative.  Instead I’m going to do something positive for Lent, which will be to practice gratitude each day for what I have.

Anxiety as a trigger for learning

The evidence is mounting that real change does not begin until the organization experiences some real threat of pain that in some way dashes its expectations or hope to make it open to the possibility of learning. — Edgar Schein

I was reading an interview where Edgar Schein asserted his belief that all learning is coercive, and that organisations learn because they are forced to.  He maintains that anxiety is neccessary as a trigger for learning, and talks about two types of anxiety.  “Learning anxiety” inhibits learning or trying something new due to fear of failure, while “Survival anxiety” promotes learning when the survival or the individual or the organisation depends on change.

Pessimistic although this seems, it immediately rang a chord with me.  Thinking on my own experience, on several occassions recently I have suggested innovations or changes that might help an organisation learn.  Here I am thinking of systems that deliver management information that were dismissed, only to be requested a short time afterwards.  In the specific cases I am thinking of, change/learning was embraced due to external pressure from funders and from poor performance.

I’m with Schein on the idea that learning anxiety – fear of getting it wrong – prevents learning and therefore change in organisations.  Perhaps not just fear of getting it wrong, but the fear that we will expose our own inadequacies, especially to ourselves.  Learning and change is painful – my own has certainly been at times.  I see this everywhere – especially amongst executives who perhaps have more invested in “being right” first time.

What can we do about this?  We can “feel the fear and do it anyway“, we can acknowledge anxiety and allow for it in how we propose change, and we can raise “Survival anxiety” when proposing change.  The latter puts me in mind of the “disconfirmation” stage of Lewin’s change model, the need to discomfort people and show that the old paradigm is spent, before asking them to change.