Excited to be telling you that today (Friday 15th January 2021) the new book is out! Strictly speaking it’s a reworking of the other book – a remix if you like for the music people among you!
We wrote a book (myself, Lisa and Steph) and we aimed that book at Social Workers because we are all social workers and wanted to provide some sort of ‘toolbox’ to social workers to help them with their self-care, wellbeing, and productivity, because we knew for ourselves and from our social work friends that social work takes its toll.
But, what we and the publisher noted, as we were finishing the book and it was set for publication, was that the advice in it was relevant to so many more people than just social workers because many people in many workplaces experience work based stress and indeed many people experience the stresses of life overall. The book would work for everyone.
So, the publisher, Critical Publishing, had me re-write the book for the general market as the launch of their Business in Mind series – and there are more books to come in that series! Exciting!
So there are two ‘How to Thrive….’ books. How to Thrive in Professional Practice is the one aimed at Social Workers and How to Thrive at Work is the one aimed at everyone (and social workers would find it useful too). So buy one or the other – whichever suits who you are – but don’t buy both as they are very very similar.
I would say though there’s a very nice chapter in the How to Thrive at Work one on Rest which isn’t in the first one…. and even though I say it myself it’s a very nice addition!
Whichever you were to buy – I hope you get something from it!
This is huge isn’t it? This thing that we’re going through at the moment. This huge transformation of how things work and how we go about our business. As someone who loves to write about how we can look after ourselves, how we can self-care, I have found myself at a loss to write anything. “What do I know?” is how I have felt.
Starting to read a new book this morning (Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) I was struck by some things he said which resonated for me (and I’ve only read the prologue!!). Here they are:
“…ones personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion” (p. 15). This is indeed true. If you haven’t lived it how can you write about it.
“I write with my scars, hence my thought is inseparable from autobiography” (p.18). So true. In explaining how things are, and how they might be, you have to weave them into your story. We have gone to great pains in our book to tell a story and offer advice that only includes things we have tried for ourselves when it comes to self-care, well-being, and emotional regulation. That’s why I’ve not written anything yet about ‘lockdown’ and how to thrive in it.
Also, there are too many variables. I am in very fortunate position of not being on the ‘frontline’ like lots of social workers and social work students I know, and have not lost my livelihood as a consequence of the current circumstances. I can largely do my job from home and my family are safe and well. I feel very lucky and humbled by the stories of those who must, and do, continue to go about their roles to maintain some semblance of order for the rest of us.
What do you write in such dire circumstances when you haven’t experienced the circumstances for yourself? I did what I usually do when there’s something I don’t know about; I turned to the books and read, while I experienced personally and vicariously what was going on to try and make sense of our predicament.
I was delighted in Camus’ fictional narrative to see him write, “…one easily passes the time away when one has routine”. And there was my first indication of what I came to conclude about where we are now, namely, my insistence that routine is everything. What you do in the morning sets you up for the day, how productive you are during your day depends on how you have planned, and planning thrives on routine, and your evening should have routine, a rhythm if you prefer, that prepares you for sleep through activities of recuperation that in turn prepares you for the next day. Everything may well have changed in your environment but you still need to give yourself the security of a routine. That’s important.
The story in The Plague followed a familiar narrative as what unfolds followed what I had seen unfolding, to one degree or another, across the first month or so of the Covid19 experience. “Pestilence”, he says, “is very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us” (p.30), was reminiscent of those who said early on that this would all just ‘blow over’. The story unfolds of more deaths, of temporary morgues, and a long term ‘lockdown’. Startlingly similar to the true events of now.
I was also struck by the line, “It is at the moment of misfortune that one becomes accustomed to truth” (p.89). We find ourselves in an age of lies I feel. We lie to ourselves about where the true nature of humanity lies and are lied to, to fuel that, by capitalist advertising and a political ideology that thrives on capitalist and consumerist ideas. ‘You can buy yourself the dream!’ Except, as it turns out, you can’t. Because, as it turns out, there is something bigger than capitalism…. the unexpected. How quickly the pillars of the world we live in have fallen.
Alvin Tofler, in his book Futureshock, predicted that the change of pace he saw in 1970 would continue into the future (our present) and people wouldn’t be unable to keep pace with change. The future, he says, for many ,will have arrived to soon. The world we live in works well for those who have enough but lets down badly those who don’t. Unfortunately we get to personally define, based on what we see and on what we are ‘fed’, what enough is and the trend is that for lots of people they always want more. Enough is never enough. Because once you have what you thought was ‘enough’ it is not enough any more. You want the next enough to satisfy yourself. So those that don’t have and those that think they don’t have need (in the case of the former) and want (in the case of the later) more. And we get sold the dream of having more and when we don’t get it we can feel we’ve failed in some way. ‘Ordinary’ and ‘normal’ aren’t good enough in this world. Except they are. And there’s nothing wrong with either. In stopping trying to strive for more than we need we may find we have everything we need. That would be great and very privileged place to inhabit.
Gellhorn (p.95) says about the English, “when they are really up against it their negative qualities turn positive, in a glorious somersault. Slowness, understatement, complacency change into endurance, a refusal to panic, and pride, the begetter of self-discipline”. How much we need some of that war time transformation now! She is writing this during the Second World War and, for me, this transformation is so lacking in the panic buying of toilet rolls (of all things), in the ‘how am I going to survive not getting my nails done’, or, ‘how am I going to manage without getting to the pub’, mentality we have seen so early on.
The people Gellhorn is writing about have endured years of war, bombing, fear, and uncertainty. Yet, here we are, in the triumphant age of self, where what I want to do is more important than the need of the many, flailing about with a complete lack of fortitude only days and weeks into this set of circumstances. Where did it all go wrong? When did we become lacking in back bone and balanced thought?
When Camus says, and I repeat for you, “It is at the moment of misfortune that one becomes accustomed to truth”, it leads me to think, I hope that in these difficult times we have something of a reset where people reevaluate what is important to them, their truth. Because in doing so we can maybe reconnect with the reality of the human condition, begin to look after ourselves, our families, and our communities and off-set some of the damage done as a consequence of the 60’s ‘self revolution’ reinforced by the political ideology of the 80’s to the present day.
Taleb (p.20) defines 3 positions in which he suggest’s all things exist and into which I feel our emotional responses fit. He suggests things are either fragile, robust, or antifragile. ‘Fragile’ needs tranquility and certainty. The reality is there is little of that in the world at any time, and less now. The ‘robust’ position defines (in my interpretation) someone who is resilient. Someone who is able to cope with the ebb and flow of life, who is buffeted by the wind, and stays strong. The antifragile position that Taleb proposes moves beyond this and suggests that the antifragile actually grow in disorder and benefit from it and volatility. Resilience (again in my interpretation) is enhanced by being confronted by such uncertainty and the consequences of it.
This falls neatly in line, I feel, with Goleman’s triad of emotional styles (from Emotional Intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ). Taleb’s fragile correlates to Goleman’s ‘engulfed’. People who have an emotional style of ‘engulfed’ are easily swamped by their emotions and are helpless to escape them. They are emotionally fragile. Some people are ‘robust’ which aligns with Goleman’s style of ‘accepting’. Such people accept their emotions and are clear about what they are feeling but don’t try to change. They don’t try to move on and develop from their emotional reference points. Those who are ‘antifragile’ are those who align to ‘self-aware’ in Goleman’s model. They are aware of their emotions and have a sophisticated response to them. They understand their inner responses to the external vagaries of life and know how to manage them. Such people, Goleman says, are usually autonomous individuals who understand their boundaries, have a positive outlook on life and are in good psychological health.
I find that those people who are ‘self-aware’, competent pilots of their own lives, as Goleman puts it, tend to be those who take seriously self-care, reflection, and the development of their inner-selves through mindfulness and meditation.Self-care is about understanding the impact of sleep, what you eat, and exercise on your emotional, as well as your physical self. Reflection is about taking time out, journalling maybe, and considering what you have done, why you did it, and what you might want to do next. Not overthinking, not dwelling on things unnecessarily, but rather taking charge of your thinking about your actions and responses and dealing with how you feel about how you feel (or felt!)… and then moving on from it. Meditation can give you time out to aid recovery and there are many ways to meditate. I like to meditate ‘on’ something (more here). Put into my head an idea or a problem and spend some time with it, turning it over, examining it, trying to conclude something about it. This in many ways is mindfulness. Dedicating yourself to a task to the exclusion of everything else. Focussing on one thing at a time in an effort to get something done. People who do one thing at a time with focussed concentration tend to get things done.
Stay in control. Learn to take charge of your emotions.
Control them rather than have them control you.
That’s the starting point for navigating yourself through these current times whatever your personal position.
And as we seem to becoming fond of saying, and rightly so…. Stay safe.
Stephen’s book, written with Lisa Watson and Steph Hunter is due out in early May and is called “How to Thrive in Professional Practice”. The book is an engaging yet undemanding read, and pulls together the various individual strains of self-care, spirituality and common sense, housing them under one external literary jacket, in a ‘whole system’ approach. A one stop ‘bible’ to give social workers and other professionals an uncomplicated, easy to read, go to resource that empowers them to manage and maintain their wellbeing through personal responsibility and self-care.
Sometimes the penny drops and you think… I’ve been thinking that all along but had never really thought of it as clearly as that.
Meditation is not an easy thing to get ‘right’. Whatever ‘right’ is. We are generally told that it’s about clearing your mind of everything, focussing on your breath and nothing else. But, if you’re like me things just keeping pushing to get in. I applaud myself for 20 seconds of thinking of nothing because to be honest that is me doing well!
Then there are others who say just let the thought come, acknowledge it, and then let it go. Ah right! Ok! Except in acknowledging it I have a 10 minute internal dialogue where I over think and debate it with myself. Is that what you mean when you say acknowledge it? I suspect not.
And then we drift into mindfulness. Put simply immersing yourself in a single thing, an activity, or a thought, at the expense of everything else. This is a great thing to do. It lends itself to single-tasking which we know works better than multi-tasking and it creates flow that we know improves our productivity (more on single tasking and flow soon). Sometimes it’s not about thinking about something though but rather it is about experiencing something. For example the physical experience of being in shower, the smell of the soap, the feeling of the water, the warmth. So mindfulness can operate in many modes.
Harari, in his great book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, was telling me about Siddhartha Gautama, the central figure and originator of Buddhism. Harari tells his story and while doing so says “He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish”. And there it was. Just a small word. But a small word that in reading it made me think about meditation in a different way. He meditated ‘on’. It doesn’t say – he cleared his mind and waited for magical things to appear to him. It doesn’t say he settled in quietly to think of nothing. It say’s he meditated ‘on’.
Now, turns out, I meditate ‘on’ all of the time. When I’m walking the dog I’m thinking through a knotty issue I’m trying to resolve. When I’m lying on my shakti mat I mull over a lecture I’m about to deliver and think about the best way to explain something. When I’m out for a run I think about running and how it makes me feel. I’m not thinking of nothing but I am thinking of something deeply, reflectively, mostly to the exclusion of other things. So, something like meditation but equally akin to mindfulness.
This feels like Reflection. Reflection is a key component of being a competent pilot of your life as Daniel Goleman puts it in ‘Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ’. He says that those who acknowledge, learn about, and control their emotions have a sophisticated response to them. Meditation (and mindfulness) help us manage our responses to things. Thinking things through in a meditative way can help us consider our responses to life’s events and challenges meaning we respond from our thinking selves rather than our emotional selves. When we respond to things from our emotional self we can sometimes find we have made poor decisions. Knee jerk reactions.
If meditating is about anything it is about creating ourselves space and time to meditate ‘on’ the challenges of what life presents to us. To do so will mean we formulate a meaningful and elegant response rather than a rash one.
The establishing of a morning routine is vital to starting the day on the right foot (that’s the ‘correct’ foot not necessarily the ‘right’ one – you could start on the left one if you want!). Your first ‘steps’ into the day are crucial to how your day goes. Some advocates of this suggest creating a 30-60 minute routine to benefit yourself and start you off on the day right. (Although 30 to 60 minutes feel like a bit of an ask for most of us). This comes as no great surprise to me, but it is nice to have what you know affirmed. You want something that will physically and mentally prepare you for the day. Ideally it should involve a period of mindfulness or reflection. Visualising the day ahead had been shown to help.
It’s the start that stops most people
Thinking about our day, visualising what you want it to look like and what your objective is, has been shown to have a significant impact in how it actually turns out. Neuroscience has plenty of research to tell us it is so.
My morning routine has changed since we got a dog because she won’t wait for her walk until I’ve sorted myself out!! So my mindfulness and visualisation takes place while I’m in motion!
Morning Meditation
But it used to look something like this….. On waking I’d start with some deep breathing – this is before I’ve even got out of bed. Next, I’d press play on the music that is the backdrop to my yoga stretching the Om Mani Padme Hum (Ven. Dharma Nauka). I do sun salutation, downward and upward dog, pigeon pose (which I completely struggle with!), cat and cow pose and some additional stretches for good measure ….and it usually takes me the time of the full mantra to do this. I then sit on the floor for more deep breathing and some meditation – just for a few minutes. I still do this as often as I can… but now after the dog walk! She sometimes joins in and shows me how to do both downward and upward dog… and she’s much better at it than I am.
Hydrate!
Next – water. Then – coffee and settle down to read for quarter of an hour or so – something that’s currently intriguing me about the human condition ….and then I’m done ….and all ready for breakfast!
The reality is, for me anyway, is that I still fit all of these things in at various points but it has to be flexible. With a little planning I generally don’t have to miss too much.
And what are the benefits? For me (at my age!) I feel physically ready for the day. I feel aches and stiffness when I wake up – but if I get my stretching in early I feel none of it for the rest of the day. But more than this I feel energised and ready to face the day in a state of calm. It certainly benefits me as if I miss too much of this out I’m convinced I don’t have as good a day. If I do these things, including the dog walk, I feel I’ve activated my body, activated my mind, and started my day by achieving a great deal. And that’s before I start on the other things that are waiting for me.
Start your day well and your day will go well – I’m convinced of it!
