As I very often say – I have an astounding ability to finally realize the extremely obvious. If I have an intellectual guardian angel she probably spends a lot of her time slapping her forehead and going “good grief”. My current brainstorm is on the subject of learning a new habit. I have finally realized one of the main reasons it is so hard.

It is hard because we do not train ourselves the right way. My dog sits when I say “Sit!”. This is not because I am wonderfully masterful or very skilled with dogs. It is because when my dog hears “Sit!” he knows that if he does indeed sit he will get a munchy. He has a great liking for dog-munchies and so he sits.

That’s it.

I did warn you that it was obvious, but what is astonishing is what we humans do when we are training ourselves to adopt a new behaviour. We do the equivalent of whacking the dog for standing or not sitting fast enough. We withhold the munchy. We sometimes (whether the dog sat or not) bury the dog in steaks. The message here is simple:  all you need to do to get yourself to behave differently is to consistently give yourself a small but noticeable reward when you do the new behaviour at least a bit. Do not give the reward when you do not do the behaviour. Always give it when you do. Despite our wonderful yearning spirits, the learning part of us is no smarter than a dog. So if you want to lose weight, jog regularly, study French etc. build in a human-munchy until whatever it is is second nature.

I got used last week.

But that’s ok. Here is how it happened.

At the moment I spend part of my time in an environment were there is fear and lack of candour. People feel threatened and powerless and unable to connect to each other. Such situations are anathema to me, they dampen down our fire and life and infect us with secrecy and doubt. Anger and complaints do not counter this. Bitching around the coffee machine does not help. The only cure for fear is truth: gentle, unremitting personal truth. So I told the truth about what was happening to me (I am going to leave) but that I was fine and would be happy to talk to anyone about my situation. This undoubtedly helped the manager concerned to avoid a confrontation with his staff. He used what I said to paper over growing concerns. So he will probably not properly resolve the situation. That is a shame, but I stand by my principle. I knew that I would be used and did it anyway because, as I tell my sons very often, I wish to behave according to my own best principles rather than responding to other’s worst actions. I hope that some of my co-workers will feel a little easier, a little stronger and less alone. It was for them. I was a small thing I could do.

So what am I telling you? For me, it does not matter if others would put your actions to bad use. Tell the truth. It really will set you free.

As Bruce Wayne’s father says “So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

It is a hard thing to do, perhaps the hardest thing. Coming back for something that really hurts you, really makes you doubt: very hard. But if you can do it, you will be stronger, simply because you know that you can. You will have done something that you will remember every time you get knocked down. I do not believe that suffering ennobles people. But surmounting it does. It opens up possibilities.

I recently read a blog post by a creative writer who fell on his face, was utterly incompetent in front of a group because he was not properly prepared. It almost crushed him, but he summoned up from somewhere the anger and spirit to “get back on the horse” and try again. As I wrote to him, I believe from the bottom of my heart that such moments are magnificent, they are triumphs of the human spirit and beautiful in the eyes of God. I do not wish you adversity, but I do wish you the strength to surmount it and a long and powerful memory of having done so.

Why do we fall? So that we learn how to pick ourselves up.

I got very interested recently in experiments being done in the field of “ego depletion“. The theory proposes that humans have a  limited quantity of “ego” or willpower. When you exercise self-control you use up this resource and will then be less able to persist with other tasks. In the classic experiment of this field hungry subjects were left with plates of radishes and chocolate-chip biscuits. Half of the subjects were allowed to eat the biscuist and the other half were asked to only eat radishes and ignore the biscuits. The subjects then had to try to complete a difficult puzzle that was, unbeknownst to them, impossible.

The “biscuit-resisters” gave up much earlier than the people who were allowed to eat biscuits and they were more tired at the end of the experiment. Later experiments with tasks that were not impossible showed that people who had not had to “burn willpower” resisting a normal impulse were much better at the task. They got better results. I looks as if “ego” is also needed for complicated thinking, like a sort of mental jet-fuel.

It is of course dangerous to glibly apply a limited experiment to the complexities of everyday life, but the image of will-power being drained away by resisting temptation is very appealing and aligns with many experiences we all share: the fatigue of resisting an impulse, a bad habit, the catastrophic results of trying to adopt several “good habits” at once.

If we do accept these results, what can be do to use them in ordinary life?

1. Allow for reduced performance
   If you are resisting a bad habit you are depleting your willpower and will be less able to keep going in other areas needing persistance or higher level performance. If you are having to keep yourself to a strict diet you will not be as sharp as you might otherwise be…
2. Don’t try to do everything at once
   If willpower is being use for five different things there will be less of it available for each of them, so you risk failing to complete anything. This is very like the classic advice on goals: one or two give you focus, twelve is a recipe for failure.
3. Limit the time you spend exerting willpower
   If you stay in the room with the chocolate-chip cookies too long you are burning will-power all the time. Stay there too long and you may “snap” and grab a handful! The whole point of exerting willpower is to create a success, to visibly, tangibly and emotionally succeed in controlling your own behaviour. Mark that moment very conciously, reward yourself and then back off to give your will-power a chance to recharge!

Let me tell you a story.

I once ran a team into which was dropped a grumpy and rigid old-school programmer. He was unhappy to be landed with me and I was similarly unhappy that this ugly duckling had been dumped into my budget.  Fortunately I had through personal experience one insight that served me very well: if you cannot get efffective work out of someone it is probably because you did not find the right framework, the right goals and match with their skills. You, as a manager, did not do the due dilligence to locate that thing which needs to be done which the person you are confronted with will do well and (hopefully) enjoy. I finally found a task within my purview which needed doing and which this person did well. He never quite got over the grumpyness, but he became more positive and gained respect from other team members for a job well done.

It  can be a tall order.  It may be that the right frame for your ugly duckling,is not in your team, or even your company. But do not make that judgement too soon. I work as a project manager and I and my colleagues are therefore often dropped into a new context. I have very often seen and personally experienced that the same person working in two different contexts within the same organisation went from excellent to not merely less capable but incapable. Subtle differences in management styles and culture can make a huge difference.

This, of course, also applies to you.

Look carefully at the social, functional and managerial context in which you are working.  Have you suddenly found yourself struggling upstream rather than going with the flow? Are you suddenly the black sheep? If nothing has significantly changed in your life and attitude, it could be that you are in the wrong framework. You may need to look carefully at the situations, groups and tasks where you excelled and enjoyed your work. That is your frame and you will be happier fitting in to it.

I read a  lot of webcomics. I have always loved comics, having been brought up with the Sparky and the Beano. Unlike their squashed-tree cousins, webcomics have almost no threshold. You could turn away from reading this, draw something, scan it and have a webcomic up in ten minutes. This means there are hundreds of dud, repetitive, game-themed, puerile comics out there and there are wonderful ones and foolish ones etc etc.

Getting started is simple. Continuing, updating regularly with new episodes, is a tremendous challenge. It requires an investment of time, creative energy and technical skill that commands respect. If you follow a webcomic for any period of time you will see the creator’s ups and downs, family crises, bursts of inspiration and periods of despairing blankness. Of course, given that all the sustained webcomics have huge archives, you can follow someone’s entire artistic history from beginning to end in the course of a couple of hours of clicking your mouse.

There is no other medium I can think of where you can so easily and precisely trace the growth of someone’s skills and creativity.  It is an arc that is otherwise only visible to the expert who can gather an artists timeline in his mind’s eye or by visiting a skillfully-crafted exhibition. I get a kick out of seeing skills build. It is a validation of my cherished belief in growth through enduring effort.

There is something that I want to say, somewhat out of the ordinary for this blog, please be patient while I find a way to say it.

I am a scarily cheerful person almost all of the time, particularly on diamond-bright blue-skied winter days like today. Things are actually pretty grim in the Netherlands, where I live, right now. The economy has taken a hit under the waterline and people are losing jobs, businesses and houses. Such times are of course sent to try us and they have one gift to give: perspective, they force you to focus on what is truly important.

I may lose my job.

But, I have a close and loving relationship with my wife and children. I am healthy (though a little overweight right now) and live in comfort and safety. I consider myself fortunate beyond all reckoning.  If was going to have a problem with something I would definately have chosen the economy and work. I am therefore filthy rich in any coin worth counting.

In these times it is tempting to “turtle”, pull the covers over your head and wait for it all to blow over, but that is not what we are for. If you do have perspective and strength this is the time to reach out to others. I spent various moments this week with people who are overstretched by their work, put at financial risk, or worse dunked in confusion and sadness by turmoil and tough decisions in their personal lives. There is little you can do but listen attentively and perhaps offer a little practical help and perspective. You can be gentle. So that is what the title is about. Even now, even when money markets lurch around like drunken giants there is no force, no dictum greater than love and the ability to care for your fellow-person.

Gentleness is your super-power. Use it for good.

Use it.

One of the things David Allen says about thinking and focus, is that “it’s not about whether the information is available, it’s about whether you are available to the information”.  Forget the nutty, mystical stuff where people think that imagining their dream life will cause it to appear. This is all about what you notice, what opportunities you take and what you filter out.

We all do a lot of filtering. If you want to prove this to yourself just take a moment to think about books and then look around you for a few minutes. Anything remotely book-related will jump out at you. It you do this on your way to work you will see book shops and people reading, things you never noticed on any other day. This is also why you notice anybody driving the same make of car as you, things related to a sport or hobby you are keen on, anything about food when you are hungry!You can tune your perception to anything This is why you should be very careful about what you focus on: your perception will highlight it for you, even if it is unpleasant…  If you go into a meeting expecting everyone to be obstructive you will perceive all comments in that light and, by reacting to your negative image of the other participants, generate resistance you would otherwise not have met. In conversation and negotiation your preconception of how well things will go is crucial. It will communicate itself to others through your body language and in every word you use. See youself as a beggar at the table and you will get treated like one!

It goes further. I have a wicked, bad habit of riding my bicycle without hands. If I focus on how difficult balancing is, I end up doing a lot of balancing and start to wobble. If I focus on how smoothly I am going round the corners, I go, wait for it, smoothly round the corners. The less attention I pay to the fact that I am not using my hands, the better the ride. Holding an image of catching the ball, making the jump, balancing flawlessly are all crucial in sports. Top athletes of all kinds spend significant amounts of training time visualising the kind of race they will run, the line they will take down the course.

Of course, when I put like that it is hard to say when someone is “planning their approach” and when they are using imagery to guide their actions. But that is a false distinction. When I am planning a project, the most important part of planning is getting a clear image of what the sucessful outcome of the project will be.

Do a little exercise with this. Choose a guiding image, or if you prefer goal. Visualize a concrete success for tomorrow. Write it down and run it around your mind first thing in the morning and at regular intervals during the day and see what you notice and what difference that makes.

I am doing this exercise with you. I had a conversation recently in which one of my clients said, kindly and with concern, that he had found me rather too careful and reticent in a meeting. “I am used to you being a terrier”, he said. “You chase after people and get things done”. He was right. I had had a bad conflict with a colleague shortly before and it had closed me down a bit. But I was grateful for the positive image of me that he held and I shall spend tomorrow imagining that I am indeed a fierce, but gentle, terrier: determined to get to the bottom of things and chasing down every result we need… Let me know how your images serve you!

I have not posted in my blog for quite a while, which is strange because I enjoy writing.  I did some thinking and realized that though I still use GTD and coach others about it, I have little need to blog about it: any more than I would blog about cleaning my teeth. I still have insights and make mistakes of course and I shall bring those here, but I shall be moving this blog gently in a more personal direction. I feel the need for a journal…

Given that I live and breathe personal development there will be plenty of that in my journal. But I may also just talk about my kids and my job.

I may also post a few cartoons and illustrations: I have a creative side that needs to get out and play occasionally. I hope that there will be things for you to use and relish.

One of the things that has got my attention now is happiness. How can it be achieved and why are people not often focussed on achieving it!? I get a lot of insights into this from The Happiness Project.

Now if you are going to disagree with someone to make a point, you need to pick someone who’s opinion is worth considering. So I am going to pick on the thoughtful and helpful Merlin Mann.

Now I have been gettingt lots of useful information about how to get yourself moving on things, how to handle forgetfulness and distraction, from 43 folders, but an alarm bell went off when Merlin started saying that we all “suck at something“. I just hate the focus on weaknesses. Well of course he is right. I am pretty solid at GTD these days, I love and work hard at facilitation, coaching and clarifying communications but…. I am kind of terrible at short-term, common-sense logistics. The kind of stuff my way smarter wife effortlessly juggles when we need to shop, drop the car off at the garage, get someone a haircut, take a kid to a play-date and truck another one to a swimming lesson in one afternoon.

But it is certainly not just Merlin.

Lots of the personal effectiveness stuff I read is focussed on dealing with common human weaknesses like that. The only trouble is that spending all your time working on your weaknesses is rather depressing. I have been reading about focussing on strengths recently and the basic wisdom there is that you should spend most of your time investing in the things you do well and just do minimal “damage control” on the weaknesses that really hamper you.

For every hour of effort and attention put into handling something you are not good at you can get ten times the results by extending and deepening an existing strength. The time you focus on weaknesses is when they fundamentally prevent you from deploying a strength, given the context you are in, the work you are doing.

They way Getting Things Done fits into this for me is that it is an “enabler”. It allows me to get clear of the anxiety that I am not sufficiently in control, missing something important and leaves me room for creativity, for fun. It clears my head, so I do feel more able to use my skills. It is a catalyst. My personal strengths lie in first contact with new people, communication, finetuning, and connectedness. Feeling in control helps me have the confidence to lean into these strengths and apply them.

So I am still still dedicated to self-improvement and any and all methods that let me achieve that. The kicker is that you need to make sure that your self-improvement effort is focussed on your strengths, no your weaknesses