Here is my third and last instalment this week from my Connected Living project. This chapter encourages you to consider your persona and where you preferences lay. This chapter helps us appreciate that we are never binary (one thing or another) but a complicated and often situational. There is not a better way of being, we are all a complex wonderful mixture, and the key to success to knowing and understanding where our strengths lay in that mix.
I have added a little exercise to help you identify your core values.
Chapter 3: The story of your persona
Are you an introvert or extrovert?
Are you most comfortable as an extrovert or as an introvert, or does it depend on what you are doing and who you are with?
Are you chatty or more the quiet type?
Do you prefer to watch from the side-lines or are you more comfortable in the thick of it getting stuck in?
Do you look within yourself for inspiration or do you prefer to surround yourself with friends or colleagues to find your creativity?
Do you relish those intimate one to one moments with friends or do you love those occasions with all your friends and family present?
Do you like to blend in to the background or do you love to stand out in the crowd?
Do you think to speak or do you speak to think?
Do you like to reflect before you act or are you more prone to rushing in to action?
Now if you are anything like me you will relate to some of the introvert traits and some of the extrovert traits. For some of the statements you might not have an opinion either way. We are after all complex and interesting human beings, none of us can be put in a box.
You may have noticed however that you answered more one way than the other.
In all parts of my life I have a tendency towards introversion. I prefer to email someone rather than speak to them on the phone, especially when I do not know them very well. If I am in a shop and I cannot find what I have gone in for I would rather walk out of the shop empty handed rather than ask a shop assistant. When I have a difficult problem I need to solve, I will prefer to do this alone and work through my problem carefully, I will then share my plan once I am happy with it. On the flip side I love teaching groups of people and I love talking in large groups, I often relish being the centre of attention on some occasions and hate the thought of it on others. When I worked on the wards I had no problem talking to complete strangers and striking up a rapport with them. When I am teaching and talking to large groups of people I am Matt Smith the Educator or Matt Smith the Coach. When I am blending into the background I am being Matt Smith, just plain old Matt Smith, the father, husband, son, blogger and coach. Saying that my extroverted traits do show up in my latter persona as well as my professional persona, and the same is true for my introversion. Jung described humans as having different personas for different occasions. So crudely speaking I have my Professional persona and a persona as a Father, a persona as a Husband, Son, Coach, Blogger and Friend. Most of these persona’s no doubt are very similar, as yours will be, otherwise it would could get very confusing trying to work out what version of a person we are speaking to, let alone how exhausting it would be to keep up all these multiple characters all of the time.
As well describing your attitude (introversion and extroversion) Carl Jung, suggests there are 2 aspects of our decision making. He proposed that we either make decisions based on our thinking or our feelings. As with our attitude they are not mutually exclusive, therefore we can and do use both traits, but not at the same time. We do however prefer to make decisions either one way or another. Again to help you understand you preferred behaviour I have put together a series of questions below:
Do you consider yourself to be formal in your interactions with people or are you much more informal when greeting people?
Do you remember facts and figures more easily than names and faces or do facts and figures leave you cold?
Do you like to analyse a problem before you plan to correct it, or do you get stuck in and use a kind of trial and error approach?
When faced with an issue do you look at it with a subjective or objective eye?
Once you have decided on a direction of travel do you stick to that route or do you see where road takes you?
Do you relish competition and strive to come out on top, or are you more interesting in taking part and helping others to succeed?
Is it important to you to have a tidy desk, is it important that everything has its place and is in it, or do you not really care whether you desk is tidy or not, or where things are kept?
Do you choose your work or task above spending time with friends or family, or do you insist on finishing work on time to ensure you spend quality time with your friends and family?
Again if you are anything like me you will be able to relate to some traits for both thinking and feeling decision making. I must admit my preferred route to making decisions is based on what I feel rather than thinking things through. When faced with important decisions however, I will rely more on than feelings. When I am writing or reviewing guidelines I will spend time collecting data and make sure I have all the information I need before I start writing, sometimes to the point where it takes me such a long time to get things done. However in every other aspect of my life I make decisions based on how they make me feel and how they may make others feel. I will often base my decision making on my values, if they are congruent with my values, for me it is the right decision. You may think that you base decisions on either analysis of data or on what you feel, but they may have their basis in the opposite. To examine where your decision making is routed it is worth exploring your values. What you value will unearth your preference.
Discovering our core values
In her book Dare to Lead, Brene Brown offers an exercise to help you explore what your core values are; in fact that is why I discovered my 2 core values (courage and usefulness). It is an exercise worth doing even if you think you know what you core values are, as you might be surprised that another value lies behind the values you hold as important. Brene offers a long list of values and invites you to find 2 core values, this is quite a daunting task, therefore she suggests you come up with 10 initially and then try to group them together, in themes and ask yourself what value do they collectively represent until you get down to one or 2 core values. To help you try this out I have provided a list below, I do however implore you to read Dare to Lead if you are a leader it will change the way you view your leadership, and if you are not it will change the way you interact with your leader. Any way below is a list of values to help get you started with discovering what your core values are. Once you have 10 values that relate to you (please try not to choose values that you would like to have or what you think are admirable, choose those that really mean something to you). Then can you group any of them together, do they represent an overarching value. Take your time, really think about what you value; if you cannot find your value add it. Have some fun with it, be creative and thoughtful and you will be able to come up with 2 core values. You can find a list of all the values that you can print out via Brene Brown’s website; https://daretolead.brenebrown.com/workbook-art-pics-glossary/
Brene then invites you to operationalise your core values and the values of the organisation you work in. Read Dare to Lead and visit her website https://daretolead.brenebrown.com/ to discover more.
For me this is a useful exercise to discover why you prefer to behave and make decisions. It also helps to explain why we are so complicated and not easy to put in a box.
As I promised yesterday here is the second instalment of the latest iteration of my Connected Living Project. I touched on shame and vulnerability last week in relation to me writing this blog. We see shame everyday at work, showing up in defensive and divisive behaviours, every time we look at the media we see shame being role modelled. To navigate the challenging world we live it is important to understand what our story of shame and vulnerability is and give more space to vulnerability and self-compassion.
Chapter 2: Our stories of shame and vulnerability
Our shame diminishes us; it stops us being vulnerable and therefore connected with those around us. Shame can quickly turn into blame, and jealousy, it encourages us to search for what disconnects us rather than what connects us.
When I think about what I am ashamed of, I realise that I have heard a lot of the descriptions I use from other people. We share a lot of our shame with the people around us. How ridiculous is that? So we all share common themes in the very thing that causes us not to share and drives disconnection!
Now not all of our shame is shared by everyone, however the broad themes of our shame are. To illustrate this I will list a few things that create feelings of shame in me;
Not being handy, I am completely inept at all things DIY, every time a craftsman, my brother in law, or my brother does some work around my house I feel that I am somehow less of a man. (I know it makes no sense and what I can and cannot do does not define me, but that is my initial feeling).
Having poor mental health, when my mental health is poor and my mood is low, I instantly go to a place of shame. I want to hide it away, I am afraid that I appear weak and flawed. Now this is an initial response, and I am able to overcome this shame, however every time I feel low I go straight to feeling ashamed and wanting to hide away.
Being overweight, I am not comfortable with how I look, it makes me feel like I am somehow a failure. I can hear you all shouting “go on a diet then!” You are right, I could do something about it. I have made attempts in the past with varying degrees of success. This then drives that shame of being weak willed and a complete failure. Oh god I can feel my jaw getting tight with shame just writing about it.
Some of you will recognise those feelings of shame that I have described. There are a lot more where they came from, but let’s not over share. You will notice that our society and culture drive the three triggers of shame I have described. If you are going to be a successful man in our society you have to be able to build and maintain your home, keep your shit together and be pleasant on the eye, amongst many other things, which I probably do not possess.
Our shame and vulnerability is shaped by our map of the world (our paradigm). It is probably best to describe paradigms before we start to talk about how to tackle our shame and embrace our vulnerability.
Stephen Covey describes paradigms as our maps of the world. What is important to remember though is that a map is an interpretation of the territory before us and not the actual territory. It is important to make this distinction, as we will all have different interpretations of our territory even though we may share that territory with others. Our experiences and how we interact with our territory will determine how we draw/paint our map. The stories we are told will all add to the detail of our maps. The stories we hear come from a variety of sources, not just our families, but from our local community, news media, social media, and fictional media. This therefore creates a rich and detailed map that does share some similarities with those people we share a culture with. Below is a picture that is used frequently to describe paradigms and perception. Some of you will recognise it, and be able to see both the old lady and the young lady. Some of you will only be able to see one or the other.
Once you see either the old lady or the young lady for the first time, your paradigm has shifted and more detail is added to the map of your world. You will forever be able to see both. As we interact more with our surroundings the more detail we add to our map. These interactions create more data, which is then incorporated into our ever expanding map, however how we view this data is dependent on our previous experience with similar data. The problem is those previous experiences may not be our own, and may come from stories, many of which might not be completely factual. Can you see why parts of our map of the world might not be completely useful to us, and in fact can be destructive? It is important to challenge ours and others paradigms if we want to start to step out of this shame that our paradigms can generate.
So how do our paradigms shape our shame? It is probably best if we dissect some of the shame I experience and discover where it comes from. Let’s look at the shame driven by my body image. This is based on a few different paradigms. Firstly I see that our culture values men that are slim, muscular and athletic, and I am none of them, however if I ate correctly and exercised regularly I would have a body like this. Our society values people that eat healthily and exercise well, therefore I see people that live up to this ideal as successful. I do not live up to this ideal therefore I am not successful. Occasionally I will make half-hearted attempts to live up to this ideal and then give up, therefore I am a failure and therefore I am less valuable as a person, and that is where my shame comes from. If we don’t live up to our paradigms we can feel less valuable as a member of our community and this makes us feel ashamed. There is no reason why I don’t live a healthy lifestyle other than I choose not to, and if I don’t challenge my paradigm I feel really ashamed of this.
Up until a few years ago I was a smoker, this was a source of great shame. Everyone knows smoking is unacceptable (another paradigm), therefore every time I lit up a cigarette I would feel ashamed, every time I tried and failed to give up I would feel more ashamed. To all of you out there that smoke, you know it is bad for you, you know all of the reasons why you should give up, however the reasons you continue to smoke are just as valid. By all means feel guilty for smelling like an ashtray, and making others cough. But you smoking does not diminish you as a person, I would still like you if you are funny and caring, you being a smoker does not change that, so don’t be ashamed, feel guilty but not ashamed. Guilt does not diminish you as a person, it accepts that you are as complex and flawed as the next person, and that we make mistakes and make poor decisions.
So how do we keep our shame in check? I don’t believe we can ever defeat our shame but we can keep it in check. The first thing to do is to think more critically about why we feel ashamed. What is our view of the world based on? Is it based on fact, or from stories we have been told. If it is based on stories, how accurate are those stories? Our paradigms come from our memory banks, and the problem with our memory banks is that they are generally a mix of fact and fiction. Therefore how reliable are our paradigms. If our paradigms struggle to stand up to critical review, why do we put so much store in them, and why should they drive so much shame? Just asking yourself why you think that way, and can you start to diminish your shame.
Let’s put this to the test with my body image shame. My shame is partly driven by my inability to stick to a diet and healthy lifestyle. When I think about it, the paradigm I am stuck in, is that I should find living a healthy lifestyle easy and therefore my inability to do this means I am somehow less of a person.
Now how does this stand up to scrutiny?
What evidence do I have that supports this paradigm?
Pictures of smiling toned healthy people on social media telling me how much they enjoy drinking kale and beetroot smoothies, and doing the plank.
How reliable is this source? Have I ever seen someone drinking a kale and beetroot smoothie or doing the plank in the flesh?
No I haven’t.
Have I ever drunk a kale and beetroot smoothie, if so what did it taste like?
Yes I have and it was the most disgusting thing ever.
Have you ever done the plank, and if so did you feel like smiling when you were doing it?
Yes I have, and no, I tried not to be sick if I am honest.
Just writing this has reduced my shame.
When you start picking apart your shame and what drives it, you start to treat yourself with empathy, you start to understand your own emotional response to your shame, this allows you to show yourself some compassion. Brene Brown in her books Daring Greatly, and Dare to Lead suggests that empathy is the antidote to shame. Empathy and compassion shine a light on that shame.
We are more accustomed to hearing about empathy and compassion in the context of showing them to others. This comes next as being empathic with others really does put that shame in a box. Brene also points out that, to truly be able to show empathy to others you have to be comfortable showing yourself empathy. Once you have started to diminish your shame you are able to successfully articulate your emotions when feeling that shame. When a friend is experiencing shame you are then able to draw on your own experience of shame, and can share those emotions with them. When we start sharing what shames us we start to recognise that many of the paradigms that drive our shame are shared by the people around us. When we notice that we share those emotions, and that diminishes the shame further.
By being present and responding to what is really happening, rather than anticipating what might happen based on what we believe has happened in the past, or what we believe people will think of us, and sharing those feelings, we can keep our shame in check. I don’t think it is possible to banish our shame completely but we can prevent it from ruling our lives.
We can often confuse guilt with shame. Now guilt is an emotion we feel after we have behaved badly or done something wrong. Guilt is nothing like shame. When you behave badly and subsequently feel guilty you are acknowledging that you have behaved in a way that you do not find acceptable, and that you are sorry that you behaved that way. Guilt provides the opportunity to make amends, to show accountability. By expressing guilt you are saying that you are not less of a person because of your behaviour, and you want to make it better. Shame says that as a result of your behaviour you see yourself as a bad person. For example if I feel guilty that I have not been able to stick to a diet, I am saying that I am not happy that I have not been able to stick to it, but I am not a failure, I do however need to find a diet and adjust my attitude to having a healthy lifestyle. My shame however says that I am a failure and I deserve to be fat and unhealthy, and I will always be fat and unhealthy, because I am useless. I much prefer to feel guilt. Guilt demonstrates dissatisfaction with the current status quo without diminishing my sense of self-worth.
If we want to tackle our shame, and start making meaningful changes to our lives we have to challenge our paradigms, start practicing empathy and sharing what drives our shame with the people we care about. It is possible to manage our shame, we just have to start being kinder to ourselves and each other.
The other day I was facilitating a team building session, and I had asked the participants to pick out at least 5 values that they felt were important to them. Not what they thought they should value but what they really valued. This is more challenging than you think it might be. As it is difficult to find the words that describe your values I provided them with 3 pages of words that describe their values. I then invited them to use the lists of values to start them off, but reminded them that they were not wedded to that list. Nobody used any values that were not on the list. Now this could have been that they were happy with the wide selection, or that they did not feel comfortable enough to tap into their individuality for fear of getting it wrong. This fear is driven by our shame. We all know how shame attempts to diminish us to make us less of a person. We all know now how to combat this shame. We do that by confronting it and talking about it with our fellow ashamed friends and colleagues. The problem is, that you have only just read the chapter on how to combat that shame. Fair enough you may have read Brene Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability, but shifting your shameful paradigm takes a lot of practice flexing your empathy muscle. So what else is there to do but avoid shame at all costs by not putting yourself at risk of mucking things up. “Probably best if you play it safe….remember the last time you tried to express your opinion at a meeting….you made yourself look a right tit”. I have said that to myself so many times. It has always led to me keeping my mouth shut in a meeting instead of letting people know, what I have observed or experienced as I was fearful that I would not be taken seriously and be dismissed, therefore diminishing my self-worth. The problem is with this approach is that it can end up having the same effect as the one you were trying to avoid. People could start to think that Matthew never contributes to meetings, he somehow appears disinterested, and is not engaged. Don’t get me wrong embracing your vulnerability is not about running off at the mouth at every opportunity. But perhaps I could have just been vulnerable and spoken up, and trusted my judgement that what I had to say had value. If it didn’t then the conversation would move on, I may feel a little silly, but I it has not harmed me.
The difficulty with avoiding vulnerability is that it is driven by our limbic system or mammalian brain, as is shame. It is evolutionary necessary for us to live in groups (something we will look at in depth later in this book). So it is important to us not to look foolish, as foolish means weak and less useful to the group, which may lead to us being cast out and left to starve to death lonely and unloved. Yeah I know a little extreme. The thing is the limbic system is primitive and it’s primary function is to keep us and our species alive. It does not care which century we are in or how dangerous our outside world is. If it is left unchecked it will assume any threat is a threat to life unless advised otherwise. Therefore when you notice that another member of your team is ridiculed behind their back for making a suggestion at a meeting, your limbic system makes a note to put in your memory bank, so the next time you are in a meeting and consider making a suggestion your limbic system, goes and gets that note and waves it in your face, saying don’t do it, you then get that funny feeling in your stomach and your mouth goes dry and you say nothing. The urge to say nothing is as strong as it would be if you were alive a thousand years ago about to question the leadership qualities of your village chieftain. Only you are not likely to be cast out or get your head chopped off. The limbic system has no understanding the current political climate it is just interested in you staying alive, it leaves all that stuff up to your frontal lobe.
So there you are embracing your vulnerability and confronting your shame is not going to be easy. Your limbic system is always going to scupper things and avoid vulnerability at all costs. Don’t worry though there is a way to manage how your limbic system responds.
Before we explore how to create the right conditions for you to be able to be vulnerable it is important to explain why avoiding vulnerability and being a slave to your shame is not just toxic, it can be downright dangerous. Vulnerability avoidance can stop us from speaking up or acting when we see things are going wrong, things have been missed or when someone is acting with malicious intent. History is littered with testimony from bystanders that either did not think it was there place to say anything, they didn’t like to say anything or they were too afraid to say or do anything. I am not saying that to be able to embrace vulnerability you should put yourself in harm’s way. There have been occasions in history and to this day where people may be in mortal danger if they spoke up or acted on what they saw. Some of those people put themselves at risk and others didn’t, now that is a whole other debate that I have no wish to get into. If your life is in danger you are going to make decisions based on your values and what you are faced with. I am more concerned with situations much more commonplace, situations that happen on a daily basis.
When I was a Clinical Nurse Educator I taught Human Factors (risk management) to Health Professionals. The basic premise of this is that we are all at risk of making errors or contributing to errors as part of the error chain. One of those human factors that creates an environment for error is a steep authority gradient, where someone is clearly in charge. This leader however is not interested in discussion, and likes to let everyone know that they are in charge. Everyone is expected to do as they are told and there are consequences for disobedience. No doubt you can all think of examples of leaders like this either first hand or through stories. So imagine you are working in an environment like this, say for instance that you are a junior nurse on your first ward and you are involved in the resuscitation of a patient. The resuscitation is being performed by a domineering Consultant who is barking orders at everybody. All involved are clearly nervous, and no one is acting until they are told to do so by the Consultant. You notice that the green oxygen tubing that is attached to the bag and mask that the consultant is using to provide respirations to the patient is not attached to anything. It is you first ward but you are pretty sure that your tutor told you that the oxygen should be attached when using the bag and mask, but the Consultant is really shouting at everyone and you are too afraid to speak up just in case you have got it wrong. That patient subsequently dies, now how would you feel? Like you I would like to think that I would have spoken up, and faced the wrath of the consultant, and some of you would, but there are some of you who wouldn’t. Now imagine you are 18 and that Consultant is in his 50s with 30 years’ experience as a Doctor, how easy do you think it would be. This is not a real example, however I have witnessed situations where an authority gradient has put patients at risk, and I have read incident reports from all over the world describing this behaviour. There lies another problem, we have all heard examples of this behaviour and have a perception of the type of people and the situations where this authority gradient might be present. When you hear these stories your limbic system becomes very interested and lays down memories in your memory bank, just in case you encounter such people or those situations. So when you come across something that remotely looks familiar your limbic system leaps into action to ensure your safety. So regardless of whether or not this person and the culture they work within operate a steep authority gradient, you will behave as if there is one. So you start to perceive that if you speak up or act on your initiative that you will face sanctions regardless of the lack of concrete evidence. This perception of a steep authority gradient is just as dangerous as a real authority gradient. Our limbic system is on the whole very useful but it can be a right pain in the arse if you don’t manage it.
How do we embrace our vulnerability. What makes us do the things that make us vulnerable, like telling someone we love them, or walking in to that interview for a job? Well in those two circumstances it is the limbic system that can drive you taking the risk. After all the limbic system is interested in keeping you alive and keeping the species going. So it stands to reason that your mammalian brain would not have too much trouble doing either. After all having a good job and a partner are indications of being successful in our society (pack if you like). However speaking out when you think something is wrong can be very different, as I discussed earlier. So how can some people stand and say something when they notice someone senior doing something wrong and how can I get up and speak to large groups of people when it makes me so nervous.
The stories we tell ourselves have a big influence on whether or not we are willing to embrace our vulnerability. The stories we tell ourselves are influenced by the stories we hear from our friends and family, and then the myths and folklore we hear, as we grow up and what we hear at work. All of this fact and fiction from a such a wide variety of sources is all jumbled up filed in our memory bank, to be used at a later date either by our human brain or our chimp brain. In his book The Chimp Paradox Professor Steve Peters describes these memories as either autopilots (positive) or gremlins (negative). So when the mammalian brain goes running off to the memory bank to look for precedent to justify its continued involvement in the situation and its subsequent actions to keep you safe, it comes across either gremlins that justify its involvement or autopilots where it can handover control of the situation to the human brain. The trick is then to create autopilots or positive/benign memories for certain situations that we have come across where our mammalian brain has stepped in and prevented us from embracing our vulnerability. The thing is our memory bank is not that great at distinguishing between fact and fiction. When we start talking about and sharing our memories, especially those that drive our shame, then we can run them past our human brain and the human brains of our companions. With everyone in the room using their human brains we can fact check the information we hold about certain people, places and situations. It is then possible to rearrange previously held inaccurate memories that were gremlins, so they become autopilots. As mentioned in previous chapters talking and sharing shines a light on shame and changes it from a monster to in the corner of the room to your dressing gown hanging on the door. When collecting new information be sure to check the facts. Practice thinking critically, don’t just take things at face value, check what assumptions you are making about the information you are being presented with, how much of it is true and how much is just made up, and how can you check how accurate it is. Most things are never as bad as they seem. Notice I wrote the word practice, thinking critically is not an easy thing for most of us to do. So if you really are serious about embracing your vulnerability you really will have to practice examining some of the stories we hear that become part of our memory bank. Now the questions you ask yourself are very similar to those you ask when examining your shame. After All these stories and memories form the basis of that shame that stops you from being vulnerable. Below is a quick checklist to use when confronted with new stories or when you are examining old memories.
Did I witness it first hand?
If not
How reliable is the source of information?
What assumptions am I making about this information?
How can I check its validity?
Do I believe it?
If I do believe it what are the implications?
I know it can be a little bit laborious to start with, but once you start practicing it, it does get easier and easier.
I mentioned it earlier that I get nervous every time I teach or speak publicly as most people do. When I was younger it did it so much so that I just would not do it. Even up to 12 years ago when I became a clinical nurse educator I really struggled to stand up in front of people. The story I told myself was that I was boring, I had nothing important to say and more importantly the audience thought I was stupid and useless. When I examined this story critically I established that yes I could be a little boring at times and there were sometimes gaps in my knowledge. I could however change those things by listening to what people needed, knowing the subject and adding a bit of myself to the teaching. When it came to the audience having a poor opinion of me as a person I exposed very quickly that this had no basis in fact and existed in my mind and nowhere else. Now no doubt there will be people who do not like me, but I cannot do anything about that. So I adjusted what I needed to do and regularly enter the arena of the classroom or lecture theatre. I am still scared and nervous but I am able embrace my vulnerability as my chimp mind only now sees autopilots in my memory bank instead of gremlins.
As always I hope you find this helpful. Take care and always happy to chat if you want to discuss this further. I will drop the third instalment of part 1 of Leading a Values Based Life tomorrow.
The past few weeks have tough. I cannot put my finger on one thing, there is just a lot of noise in the system at work and outside of work that is conspiring to narrow my bandwidth. Talking to people over the past few weeks it is not just me that is feeling this way at the moment. I was talking to someone yesterday about using mindfulness manage all those thoughts and feelings that can affect our mood. That got me thinking about a project I started about 6 years ago. It started as an idea for a coaching programme, then turned into a book (some of the chapters have appeared on here in various iterations), a webinar and a podcast. The project is called connected living. I wondered if I read through the latest version I started working on a year ago whether that would help me with what I was experiencing. So this morning I started reading it, and I have not read it since I wrote it a few months ago. Firstly I think it reads quite well, I enjoyed reading it, secondly it has started to make me think and remind me of some useful techniques. I know I have shared quite a few chapters previously and some of it you will recognise, it is a bit of a long read so I am going to share part one over the next few days (3 short chapters in total). Part 1 is all about connecting with our story, before we can make sense of what we are experiencing it is important to understand why we see things the way we do. So here is Part 1 Chapter 1, please feel free to get in touch if you want to talk about it some more.
Part 1: Connecting to our story
Chapter 1: Stories of our well-being
Since becoming an adult I have struggled with my mental health and well-being. Over the years this has manifested itself in a number of ways, ranging from general anxiety, self-hatred and physical symptoms. I was going to say I manage to avoid a dependency on this journey, but that would not be strictly correct. From the age of 16 until I was 44 I had an addiction to nicotine and I definitely used that as a crutch. Throughout my adult life my depression manifested itself as a physical ailment, generally I would present with joint and back pain. The pain I was experiencing was very real, however maybe not as severe as I felt it was. All the diagnostics came back negative each time. Eventually I was referred to the community pain team. This team was made up of a nurse, a physio a doctor and a psychologist. Each member of the team would take it in turns to triage new referrals. I was triaged (luckily for me) by the psychologist, who ended up continuing to see me. He started me on my journey of recovery from my back and joint pain and on my journey for managing my mental health and well-being. I recognised that my back pain was a useful framework for my poor mental health to take hold of my life, it also provided a shield for hiding my shame.
I had 4 sessions with the psychologists where we talked about how it all started and eventually how I found the pain useful, actively seeking it out to give me something to hide behind. When the negative thoughts were too much I would concentrate on pain in my back, telling myself and all those around me that is was the pain that was too much to cope with, allowing me to withdraw from the world. In my eyes it gave me a legitimate excuse not to be at work, to be grumpy and sit in front of the TV. Being away from the world does not help your depression however, the pain is still the same, the only relief is that you don’t have to interact with people.
As I said though these sessions changed my relationship with my back pain. For the first time I had permission to talk about the real reasons for my pain. It was just like shining a light on those childhood night-time demons that lurk in the corner of your bedroom. When you shine that light you realise it is just a dressing gown. I started talking about the triggers for my pain, that made them somehow smaller. This was not an overnight sensation, however it showed me what was triggering my feelings of anxiety and how that manifested itself in me becoming tense and therefore creating that pain. Some of the anxieties were connected to unhelpful habits, others were reactions to what Professor Steve Peters would call these my Gremlins. Gremlins are unhelpful negative memories associated with certain situations, places, sounds and smells. These gremlins would trigger those anxious feelings. By recognising these triggers I could start rewriting those memories with benign memories. Most of these gremlins were not based in fact but came from assumptions I was making about my relationship with the place I worked and the people I was working with. This was a long slow process but I did start to rewrite those memories. I now do not experience anxiety when I approach my work place. I still experienced pain for a good 3 months after being discharged from the pain team, but my relationship with the pain had changed and I no longer used it as a shield, I was beginning to manage my feelings by facing them. I stopped catastrophizing the pain and accepted that my back was hurting because of the tension I was creating and once I relaxed, the pain would subside. I was then able to carry on with whatever I was doing and eventually the pain would diminish.
With regards to my anxiety I still have episodes of anxiety and low mood, sometimes on a weekly or even daily basis. The difference now is I do not deny these feelings, I am now willing to accept that this pain is psychological. It is still pain and I feel it as I would any other physical pain. Painkillers are not going to work, I once tried antidepressants when I first acknowledged that my mental health required attention. I am no longer on antidepressants, I came off them under the supervision of my GP. So far in this chapter I have been reluctant to call what I was suffering from depression. Now in my blogs I have called it depression, but then when I hear about what people who suffer from depression go through I am more inclined to think I have low mood and anxiety as a result of not paying attention to my mental health, which is very different from having a diagnosed condition. My GP called it mild depression, and prescribed antidepressants for a few months in the first instance with regular check-ups . In the end I was on them for a year. In hindsight I was grateful for them, they gave me the time and space to get use to paying attention to my mental health. Once I had come off them I felt able to be open about my feelings, and start looking for ways to look after my well-being. As I said I do not believe I was depressed or mentally ill, I believe I was mentally unhealthy, just as I was physically unhealthy. Essentially I had been neglecting myself and was paying the price for that.
This chapter is not about mental health or ill-health it is essentially to help you pay attention to your well-being. If you believe that you may be depressed or suffering from anxiety, then speak to a health professional. If you think you are suffering from any illness that is having a debilitating effect on your life then you need to be assessed and diagnosed by a Doctor, whether that is appendicitis or depression they are both potentially life threatening illnesses that require assessment and treatment immediately, take it seriously and get yourself checked out.
If you are feeling essentially well or just a bit clunky and under the weather then this chapter may well help you stay mentally healthy and even make you feel significantly better. Martin Seligman one of the founders of Positive Psychology describes 5 conditions that he research suggested were essential to leading a fulfilling life. They are positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. I have described my story for each of these conditions, what they mean to me and how I know I am experiencing them. It is so important to think about your story for each, and start living your life in these terms.
My story of positive emotion
I have always had an abundance of positive emotion. I love a good laugh, I am always cracking jokes. That was true but when I looked deeper I asked myself how often I smiled, I mean really smiled. How often did I look at the world and see more than just my surroundings, how often did I see my beautiful surroundings. I remembered being on holiday in Thailand and having my breath taken away by the beauty of the country. I asked myself since then, how many times had I felt that. I struggled to be honest. I can tell you now every time I take my dog for a walk, go for a run, or just look up at the sky I feel joyful and grateful for living in a beautiful country. I listen to music and smile, I laugh out loud daily. I feel joy when I see family and friends. I smile when I see or hear that a friend is doing well.
My story of engagement
I suppose once I get out there, running is engaging, but I have to get out there and I have to get into the rhythm of the running before it becomes mentally effortless. Reading a good book I suppose creates the most engagement for me, and most of all researching for this book, reading about how the mind works, how we behave and what makes us successful and effective. I love reading about this, I love talking about it as well, I love giving masterclasses and lectures on this subject. That creates the most engagement for me. I can spend hours prattling on about how to empty your bucket, understand your stressors and connect with each other. I love it, it energises me and the better the response from my audience the more engaged I become. So there we are that is my engagement. This stuff, my passion provides me with engagement.
Do you look up and realise hours have gone? One common activity that creates engagement is catching up with a best friend over a coffee that leads to several coffees and then a race across town to pick the kids from school, because you completely lost track of time, catching up on old times. Some of you might get engrossed in a good book, sometimes that might be a new book or an old favourite. Whenever there is a new Jack Reacher story I will pre-order it and devour it as quickly as possible, I will binge read it in about 2 sittings. Other people love to curl up with a favourite book, something they have read it over and over again, it gives them comfort and transports them to another time, without any effort or too much thought.
Music is another way to create that engagement, either playing or listening. Music like many engaging activities also creates a positive emotion. It is obvious really that for you to be engaged in an activity that you enjoy it.
So do you take part in engaging activities regularly?
My story of relationships
Loneliness is a real problem in modern society. The latest ONS data for loneliness in the UK is quite stark. This study was conducted between December 2023 and January 2024. 27% of all adults had experienced loneliness. The data below is from 2018 however the ONS state there has been little change in this position.
You are more likely to experience loneliness if you, are single or bereaved. People with long-term illnesses are also more likely to experience loneliness. If you live in rented accommodation, and feel disconnected with your community you are more likely to be lonely. What was quite striking for me was that people aged between 16 to 24 are more likely to be lonely than any other group.
Being single or bereaved, having a long-term condition and even disconnection with the community are unsurprising causes of loneliness. At first glance though the fact that young people are more likely to be lonely than older age groups is surprising. I don’t know about you, but when I imagine lonely people I think of a little old lady or man sat in a flat, not a young adult. In fact over 75s are 63% less likely to report loneliness. That really surprised me. The ONS provides a couple of explanations; a) older people have developed a resilience to loneliness, as a result of adverse life events; or (and this will make you sit up and notice) b) most of the lonely people are already dead before they get to 75! According to the ONS loneliness increases mortality by 25%, so being lonely reduces your life expectancy. It is vital not only to your state of mind, but to your life that you seek out positive relationships. You won’t only be having an impact on your life, but the life of the person you are connecting with.
If you see the same person every day, on the train or the bus, or in the lift, start with a smile, then progress to a hello. Now not everyone will respond, but there will be people willing to connect that will say hello.I can think of a number of people who I have connected with, and have a positive, friendly relationship with, that started with a smile and a nod of the head. If you think about it all our relationships start with at least 2 people who have never met before (even your mum and dad). Be bold give them a smile, let them know that you believe there is more that connects you with them, than disconnects you.
My story of meaning
Does your life have meaning? Is there a purpose to what you do every day? Putting it another way, what gets you out of bed in the morning? I have asked myself this question many times, and I always come up with these three things:
A Dad to my boys
An Educator
A Coach
Essentially all of these roles (Parent, Educator and Coach) all provide the same meaning for me. That is caring for and supporting my fellow human beings. I hope I have a positive impact on the people I meet. Being an active positive member of the human race is my meaning. It is as simple as that. These roles live up to my core value of being useful (something we will come to later).
When I had poor mental health and spent time away from work, I was disconnected from my meaning. I didn’t feel I made a positive contribution to the people around me. At the time I was a Ward Manager and was deeply unhappy with what I perceived my role to be and started to disengage with the job. There was a clear gap in my view between my values and what was expected of me. My job no longer had meaning as far as I could see. When I was a Staff Nurse I was caring for my patients, using empathy and compassion, something I felt comfortable doing. I assumed that being a Charge Nurse meant that I would extend this care to my staff as well as my patients. However at the time these attributes were not valued for managers. Coming to work and not being valued had a terrible effect on me and I could not see any meaning to what I was doing and who I was. My mental health suffered and eventually I became so unwell I went off sick. I was not ready to be open about my mental health at the time. My poor mental health manifested itself as back pain. Nurses notoriously have bad backs, so the normal aches and pains became unbearable pain. I would find myself in unguarded moments holding myself with so much tension to create more pain in my back. I couldn’t stop it; I needed the pain so I did not have to engage with the world. Being off sick removed nearly all meaning to my life. I only had being a parent to hang on to, but I didn’t always recognise it. It was a vicious circle, the more time I spent off work the less meaning my life had. The less meaning my life had the worse my mental health became. At the time I was not aware that any of this was going on in my head, I had convinced myself that my back was the problem.
As you know there was a happy ending for me. The psychologist who saw me and helped me realise that my poor mental health was driving my back pain, gave me a way back into the world and reconnecting with my meaning. This didn’t happen overnight as you know the struggles with my poor mental health continued for a while longer. My journey to good mental health is relatively recent. Since becoming Head of Organisational Development I have developed a clear sense of meaning in my life. Becoming an internal coach has given me the confidence to start a blog and do some life coaching, which have all added to this sense that my life has meaning because I contribute positively to the human race.
My story of accomplishment
What have you achieved? It doesn’t have to be a dramatic achievement, like a first class honours degree or running the London Marathon (although there are plenty people I know who have done this). Accomplishment means you have achieved what you set out to do. It does need to have been challenging though. It needs to have required effort on your part. We have all achieved something in our lifetime. Can you remember that feeling you got from that sense of accomplishment, being able to complete something you have never done before?
On many occasions this accomplishment comes alongside the other PERMA components. For instance learning to play a musical instrument or singing in a choir creates positive emotion, engagement, possible positive relationships if you are in a choir or a band, even meaning as music entertains others. Then when you can either play a piece of music that is recognisable or you sing with your choir at a concert, you have accomplished something.
The question is do you challenge yourself to accomplish something most days? It does not have to be really hard, but should challenge you. I go for a run at least once a week I don’t run far or very fast but I do it, and every week I accomplish running at least 1 or 2 miles and even 3 miles. I always aim to exercise for 30 minutes and push myself each time to be out for a little longer. Every week I write at least one blog, to me I have accomplished getting my message across, hopefully bringing some light to someone’s darkness. When it is published on my website I look at it and think, I made that. What have you made this week?
I hope have found this helpful, I will publish chapter 2 tomorrow.
For me writing a blog was always a way to work through my thoughts and feelings. It has always been a way to manage my well-being. It has however always been a two edged sword. One side is helpful, and helps me make sense of my thoughts and feelings. The other less helpful edge creates a vulnerability that is quite unsettling and exposing. I doubt very much that I am exceptional when it comes to feeling vulnerable when I publish anything, in fact I am pretty certain the majority of people that create anything and put it in the public domain all have a degree of anxiety before they put it out there. This feeling of vulnerability however, has prevented me from writing anything for quite a few months now. Let me get this write, it has not been the vulnerability that has stopped me, it has been my aversion to the feeling that, that vulnerability creates that has stopped me. For the past 6 months I think I have been shying away from discomfort. I think this might be because my work is more challenging than it has been for a while, so I have been leaning into this discomfort that is creating, so I just have not had the energy to make myself feel vulnerable outside of work. Work life has been my priority, i have wanted to get it right, so I have been prepared to be vulnerable at work and take on new challenges. When I get home that has meant that I have just not wanted to expose myself and share my thoughts.
Let me explain what vulnerability is to me in relation to writing a blog and my new role. Let me start with my role (which in fact I have been doing for a year now). Whenever we all start a new role, there is always, a feeling of being an imposter. For some people this feeling is quite large and overwhelming, often preventing people from taking action for fear of being exposed, and for others like me, it is just a feeling of discomfort that sits in the back of your mind and makes you pay attention and learn, as you only want to make mistakes once. A moderate amount of feeling like an imposter is helpful and is a great driver, but it is exhausting as I am constantly considering the impact I am having on the work I do and the people around me. I will most weeks have a low level of anxiety, which occasionally spills over to full on anxiety. None of this is a problem, and I am assuming is perfectly normal. Vulnerability at work is feeling like an imposter, but acting anyway and being open to learning and improving. Vulnerability when writing my blog is very similar to work. Whenever I write I feel like an imposter, probably more so than at work. At work I have extensive knowledge, experience and formal qualifications to back me up. When it comes to writing a blog apart from having an ‘O’ Level in English Language I have no qualifications in writing. When it comes to the content I write about, it is a mixture of my personal experience and my professional experience and knowledge, mixed in with what I am interested in. Most of that is subjective, and I very well aware that there are a lot of people far more qualified than me writing about this subject matter. Every time I write a blog I feel like an imposter, I however my mouse over the publish tab, worrying about what people will think of me, worrying about what people will say behind my back and to my face. Then I normally embrace my vulnerability and publish anyway. The pay off for me was always that my blogs help me sort out my thoughts and have helped others. That would always give me the motivation to publish and allow myself to be vulnerable. Recently I have just not had the bandwidth to embrace feeling vulnerable all the time.
What has changed? I realised that I have used my blog to restore myself , and I have missed the process of writing and expressing my thoughts and feelings. Avoiding being vulnerable was not helping me at all, therefore I thought I would get back to it, and use it as part of my self-care alongside regular gentle exercise, so here is my first blog after a long break.
As you have probably guessed, I am a bit of a leadership and coaching nerd. I am a sucker for a good book on leadership, coaching or well-being. So I thought
The other week we were talking about books we have and I suggested we all list what books we have so we can share the books we love. This morning I have just been through the books I have at home and on my Kindle (I have quite a few books in the office that I need to add) . I have shared the list on our Teams channel then I thought some of you might want to know as well. So I thought I would share here too. Now I am not a librarian so books from the same authors are scattered in the list. I have ordered them according to how I see the subject matter and as they come of my bookshelf. So if you like things in order I apologise, my brain would hurt too much if I tried to do that.
Leadership Books
Atlas of the Heart- Brene Brown
Dare to Lead- Brene Brown
Leaders Eat Last – Simon Sinek
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni
Critical Thinking An Introduction- Fischer
The Infinite Game- Simon Sinek
Rebel Ideas- Matthew Syed
Start With Why- Simon SInek
Outliers – Malcom Gladwell
Rising Strong – Brene Brown
Bounce – Matthew Syed
Turn The Ship Around- L David Marquet
The Chimp Paradox – Prof Steve Peter’s
Compassionate Leadership – Michael West
Understanding Organisations – Charles Handy
Humankind Rutger Bregman
Managing Transitions – William Bridges
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey
Life Entrepreneurs – Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek
Essentialism – Greg McKeown
Daring Greatly – Brene Brown
Restorative Just Culture in Practice – Sidney Dekker, Amanda Oates, Joseph Rafferty
Facing Our Futures – Nikolas Badminton
Stop Blaming, Create a Restorative Culture – Sidney Dekker
Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain
Atomic Habits – James Clear
Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
The Karpman Drama Triangle Explained – Chris West
How to Be An Antiracist – Ibram X Kendi
Factfulness – Hans Rosling
How to Develop Your Personal Mission Statement- Steven Covey
Black Box Thinking – Matthew Syed
Well-Being Books
Fear Less- Dr Pippa Grange
Emotional Agility- Dr Susan David
SUMO- Paul McGee
Emotional First Aid- Guy Winch
How to Be Human- Ruby Wax
Sane New World – Ruby Wax
Burnout – Emily and Amelia Nagoski
Flow, The Psychology of Happiness – Mihaly Csikszentmihayi
How Not to Worry – Paul McGee
What Can You Change and What You Can’t – Martin Seligman
Flourish – Martin Seligman
Mindfulness In Eight Weeks – Michael Chaskalson
Coaching Books
Time to Think- Nancy Kline
The Reflecting Glass- Lucy West and Mike Milan
The Power of Negative Ideas- Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener
The Coaching Manual – Julie Starr
Coaching Skills (A Handbook) – Jenny Rogers
The Neuroscience of Leadership Coaching – Patricia Bossons, Patricia Riddell, and Denis Sartain
Supervision in The Helping Professions – Peter Hawkins and Aisling McMahon
Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard – David Augsburger
Relational Team Coaching – Erik De Haan and Dorothee Stoffels
The Coaches Handbook – Jonathan Passmore
Acceptance Commitment Coaching – Jon Hill and Joe Oliver
The Heart of Laser Focused Coaching – Marion Franklin
Coaching The Team At Work – David Clutterbuck
Systemic Coaching – Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner
Positive Provocation – Robert Biwas-Diener
Full Spectrum Supervision – Edna Murdoch and Jackie Arnold
Challenging Coaching – John Blakey and Ian Day
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching – Michael Neenan and Windy Dryden
Coaching, Mentoring and Organisational Consultancy – Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith
I woke up this morning feeling run down and out of energy, it was the same yesterday. We were supposed to go see Space (a indie pop band from the 90s). Most of yesterday though I felt nauseas, had a headache and was so tired. We did not end up going, Lisa was not up for it, as she has work today, so we decided to do what we do most Saturdays and plonked ourselves in front of the TV. Lisa watched Bad Sisters on Apple TV and I started reading a book I read a couple of years ago called Noble Beginnings a trashy Bourne Identity shoot em up, which is thoroughly entertaining. I was in bed before 10pm feeling sorry for myself and wondering if I had picked up a virus from somewhere, it definitely felt like I had a temperature. I could’ve checked but I could not be bothered to go back downstairs and find the thermometer in our medicine box. I had just taken some paracetamol so it wasn’t going to influence my actions. Work has been whirring around my head all week, and it was still not giving up especially now I was in bed, so I immersed myself back in to the world of American Special OPs and read another chapter of my book until I could not keep my eyes open. I slept for what felt like hours, but in actual fact was about an hour, when I was woken up by my son who had just got in from work and was moving around downstairs. Work came creeping back in to my mind again. Everything I seem to be working on at the moment is based on relationships, and how we all manage them or not in times of uncertainty and stress. Tackling the behaviours that are impacting on the relationships seems so big and as a result of so much that is out of the control of the individuals. This week it has been consuming me, I have fallen into the trap of trying to solve it and as a result feeling helpless and frustrated. Hence why I am feeling so run down and lying awake on a Saturday night and early hours of a Sunday morning trying to find a solution, a solution that is not mine to find. I had a fitful sleep after that.
As I said I have woken up this morning feeling wrung out, but determined to shake it off. Firstly I need to pay attention to my emotional response to all the work I currently doing. I understand why my desire to fix has become so strong this week, and that is because I need to write and talk about what is happening. I have written in my journal what I have been doing this week, but I have not written about how I feel. I am not able to share what I am doing for confidentiality reasons, that is why I have a personal journal. However I do find it useful to share my emotional responses to some of the work I do, for some reason I find knowing someone else will read this, really helpful. I have written in the past that it makes me feel part of a community of like minded people. I do however need to talk to someone about what is in my head, just to sense check me and make sure I do not talk myself into or out of actions or a line of thinking.
As mentioned earlier nearly everything that I am working on at the moment is relationship based. The NHS as a whole is under a lot of strain at the moment, it feels more strained and pressurised than I have ever experienced it. Whether that is reality or just perception could be debated but at the end of the day if the people working in the NHS perceive this as the most difficult time then that is their reality. All of this pressure has an impact on all of us individuals that work there. There are currently a lot of people that are not feeling fulfilled in their work and are not getting their needs met, this in turn makes them feel insecure. When we feel insecure we start to concentrate on protecting ourselves and become more focused on self preservation than preserving the team. As result relationships with each other and our employer become strained if we do not perceive them as helping us.
I been seeing this play out in a lot of requests for support in the past few weeks, where individuals are falling out and not being able to see someone’s perspective even when they are both seeking the same outcome. Everyone is tired and in need of a moment to gather their thoughts only it feels like there is no time for this. They just want someone to sort it out for them, and that is where our team comes in, and that is why this week I feel so helpless, as it is just not possible to fix their problems for them. When I am tired and not all my needs are being met I find myself going into rescuer mode and try to tackle the problem head on and come up with solutions for people. That however is not my job. My job is to stand outside of the drama that a team or an individual is facing and help them see what they are not seeing, to introduce another perspective to help them identify what they can impact and what is out of their control, so they can start to take action on what is going to make a difference for them. I can only do this if I recognise when I am immersing myself in the drama. This is the difficulty that internal OD teams face, the drama the teams are in, is also our drama to some extent, and the drama of the NHS is definitely ours. So we have to check ourselves on a regular basis. That I suspect is where I have been in the past few weeks. Sat in my own personal drama triangle, that is connecting with all the drama going on around me. Now I have recognised that I have spent the last week at least sat in the drama with the teams I am working with, it is time to take a step out of the triangle and start listening and observing so I can be back in service of them and help them find the solutions, for the problems that are theirs to solve rather just tackling behaviours full on.
The actions I am taking are:
Spend today resting and recovering and showing myself some compassion
Allow the teams I am working with to own their own problems and solutions
Book some supervision time for myself so I can continue to be compassionate to myself.
For some reason today I have felt in a reflective mood. Previously I have been reflective on my shortcomings. Today I decided to reflect on my professional life in a positive sense to reflect on what I have achieved and have to offer. So here is a short history of my 39 year people career.
I started as a volunteer on a medical elderly ward in the City Hospital, Chester in 1987 as a 16 year old school boy, At the time I was undecided what I wanted to do as a career.After the first day on the ward, my mind was made up. I wanted to be a Nurse. My mum persuaded me to stay in 6th form rather than going to do my nurse training in Chester when I got to 17 and a half. I applied for 3 Universities to do a degree in Nursing but in my heart of hearts I knew I was not interested in University or had the academic discipline to get the grades I needed. So I applied for Schools of Nursing. Back in the 80s Nursing was not a traditional degree qualification, you could apply to Schools of Nursing to do either 2 years pupil nursing to qualify as an Enrolled Nurse or 3 years student nursing to qualify as a Registered Nurse. Degree Nursing was at that time a 4 year course and not many people went that route. I wanted to go the Student Nurse route. I agreed to stay in 6th form and apply for Nursing to start in the autumn after 6th form. I was offered places at Liverpool, Nottingham and Hull. Hull was the only offer that was to start in the autumn, for the others there was a delay before I could start. I wanted to leave home at the same time as all my friends were going to University so I chose Hull. Hull was smaller than Liverpool and Nottingham and felt friendlier, so that made the decision easier.
On 1st October 1989 I moved to Hull. I will never forget that first night in Nurses Residence at HRI. I met my fellow newbies and we eventually found the Centre Club (Hull Royal Infirmary’s social club) where we were signed in as guests. We could not join yet as we did not have our payroll numbers. Dan on the door was very kind and got us signed in as guests. In the Centre Club we met fellow students and started to settle in.
Monday was our first day and we were introduced to our tutors. Stan Smith, Steve Knight and Tony Catania. At the end of my second year I did my paediatric placement on Ward 130 West at HRI, and that is where I realised I wanted to be a Children’s Nurse. In my 3rd year I applied for a job on Paediatrics. Nursing jobs at that time were relatively scarce, there were however vacancies on the children’s wards because to get a permanent job at that time you had to train to be a Registered Children’s Nurse which meant a further 15 months study. I was given a 12 month contract and had to apply for the RSCN course. My first day was December 27th 1992, on Ward 12 (Children’s ENT). I got on the RSCN course at Humberside College of Health (the new name for Hull School of Nursing) and started in the January of 1994. I qualified as a Sick Children’s Nurse in March 1995 and worked on ward 12 and ward 130 East (Paediatric Surgical Ward). Ward 130 East took everything surgical when I worked on there as Ward 12 eventually closed. It was a place to learn and learn fast. We cared for a lot of children who had major head injuries and multiple fractures following road traffic accidents and children post major surgery. In the mid to late nineties 130 East was a very challenging place to work. In 1996 I got married. In 1997 I decided I wanted to get some experience on ICU as at that time had 2 Paeds beds. Before I moved I spent a few months on ward 130 West
I spent a year on ICU before coming back to Ward 130 West in a rotational role with ICU. Which meant I spent a fe months of the year working on ICU, this arrangement fell down after about a year.
In 1999 I was promoted to F Grade (senior staff Nurse). In 2000 we had our first child. Ward 130 West was a Paediatric Medical ward, it was extremely busy and we cared for a lot sick Children. There was at the time a clamber for a High Dependancy Unit and eventually funding was secured to open one on Ward 120 (Baby ward). I applied for the role of Charge Nurse on PHDU but was unsuccessful, I did however get one of the senior staff nurse roles, and was one of the original team members of PHDU in 2001. That first year on PHDU was fantastic we all learned so much and bonded as a team. Clinically it was the best time of my career. We looked after some really sick children that pushed us to the limit of our knowledge and skill.
In the spring of 2002 we had our second child. In the summer Sister Denehy from Ward 130 West retired. I applied for the vacant Charge Nurse role and was successful.
I had plenty of clinical leadership experience, but I had no experience or knowledge of how to deal with the challenges I faced in the first 6 months of the job, including staff being suspended and inheriting a staffing establishment that did not meet the needs of the ward. I learned very quickly. I completed a couple of leadership courses and eventually managed to get a leadership qualification on the way. In the past I have concentrated on the failures and challenges during this time and not acknowledging what I achieved, so I am going to focus on those successes here. Firstly I modernised the staff structure of the ward by increasing the number of senior staff to support the complexity of our patients and help the development of new staff. I encouraged personal development of staff which resulted in a number of nurses moving onto specialist roles. I encouraged innovation with a member of our team winning a regional award for the development of a patient passport for children with complex needs who were unable to articulate their needs, providing piece of mind for parents when children were in our care. We developed a sensory room for children with complex needs. We also started an assessment unit on the ward that later developed into the Paediatric Assessment Unit.
In 2012 I completed my Clinical Supervision training, and if I am honest those 3 days changed my professional career. Not long after that the Children’s Unit was reconfigured and I was put at risk and ended up working as the Clinical Nurse Educator. My first project was to support the Safeguarding Children team in developing safeguarding supervision for staff across the organisation. I worked with colleagues in the community and developed an internal training programme for safeguarding supervision, and trained nurses across the organisation to enable them to supervise their colleagues. In addition I co-wrote our local Safeguarding supervision guidance. As the CNE for the Children’s Service I was responsible for nursing procedures and policies ensuring they were up to date and aligned with the wider organisation. I developed an induction programme for the newly qualified nurses, and provided regular clinical supervision and educational updates for our registered nurses. I worked with our medical colleagues to develop simulation training and human factors training. I delveloped human factors training for newly qualified nurses across the organisation. I mentored students from the local 6th form college who expressed and interest in Children’s Nursing. I worked with my colleague Janis delivering Clinical Supervision training across the trust back with the people that changed my career. In 2015 I spent a year on secondment for 1 day a week at University of Hull as a guest lecturer on the Child Health faculty delivering training to undergraduate Nurses.
In 2016 I started training to be a coach, for me this was an extension of the knowledge I gained from Clinical Supervision. Coaching just clicked for me. I knew on day one of the course that coaching would form a huge part of my career and would take me in a new direction. The coaching course was commissioned for the trust by my now boss Lucy, and during the course I showed so much enthusiasm that she offered me a secondment in the Organisational Development Team for 2 days a week to start a coaching network. I have not looked back. In 2018 I joined OD permanently all be it part-time. Along with Antony who delivered the coaching training I completed we ran 2 more cohorts of coaching trainees to increase our coaching network. The network during this time went from strength to strength. Then in 2019 there was an opportunity to make the role full-time, I went for the interview and got offered the job as a Senior OD Practitioner. When I took the job full-time I decided to give up my nurse registration. My first job as Senior Practitioner was to programme manage our in house leadership programme. As a CNE I had run programmes but on a much smaller scale and less stakeholders. It was definitely a steep learning curve.
In March 2020 our leadership programmes ground to a halt as the pandemic hit, I went over to HR and worked on the employee service centre helpline supporting staff who were worried they had covid. It was a very worrying, stressful and frustrating time. After a couple of weeks the plan was to pull me out as we had plans for supporting staff by distributing donated goods and having well-being conversations. Unfortunately I ended up getting covid myself and was laid low for about a month. When I came back staff support was in full swing, with staff support clinics online and face to face. I started visiting places under the most pressure, holding drop in clinics on the Covid wards. This continued right through to 2021. During this time I managed to complete a level 7 course in leadership coaching online.
I started delivering bite size leadership workshops online and learned very quickly how to deliver webinars. I also ran staff support 1:1s online and leadership support drop in sessions for managers across the trust.
When we were able we restarted our leadership programmes, online in the first instance. Working with Trans 2 Performance we managed to deliver meaningful leadership training for our teams online.
As teams were recovering after the pandemic a lot of teams needed support to comeback together and reconnect with a shared sense of purpose. I developed a Mission Statement creation workshop where teams could share their values and co-create their Mission Statements, for the teams that did it, it made a big difference for them bringing them closer together and reigniting their passion for caring for their patients. It is incredible to watch clinical staff talk with passion about the care they deliver to patients. Post Covid our team expanded, myself and Nami got promoted to OD Managers and Ruth joined us. Ruth took over leadership and I concentrated on team development and well-being. Amy joined me to support with clinical supervision training and well-being, Elaine joined the team and worked with Nami with EDI development work and team development, and Louise came across from Education to support with leadership training. Carly one of the originals returned maternity leave working across leadership and team development. The team had never been so big.
Myself and Amy continued to keep our hand in with Clinical Supervision providing training and delivering group supervision for clinical teams across the trust. As my work evolved I handed over the coaching network to Carly so I could concentrate on coaching and coaching supervision as well as line manage members of the team.
In 2024 Hull University Teaching Hospitals went into partnership with Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Foundation NHS Trust to form the group Humber Health Partnership. This provided me with a further career opportunity and I was able to take on the role of Head of OD North. I became the line manager of the OD team on the North bank of the Humber and have a portfolio responsible for Leadership, team development, coaching and mentoring and talent development across the group. It has been another steep learning curve working in partnership with teams right across the group and working very closely with the OD team on the South bank. I still manage to coach a variety of staff. As a group with have started using restorative practice as way of supporting teams and individuals working in volatile uncertain times. It helps staff individually and collectively identify what they need to improve on and take the right action. It is early days but I have been working with Restorative Labs on training that will support clinical and non-clinical staff use as an approach to look at the problems they face and manage the solutions that will really make a difference. I am also noticing this has changed the way I approach my coaching practice.
My career has changed dramatically over the past 36 years in one way and yet it has not changed at all. When I have got the most out of my career people have always been at the centre.
In fact what ever I do people need to be at the centre for me to feel fulfilled.
I cannot believe the first month of 2025 is nearly over, then again I can never believe how time fast is going. My youngest pointed out to me that time inevitably feels like it is going faster when you get older. The longer time you spend alive the shorter the perception of what time is. When you are 20 years old a decade is half of your life. When you are in your 50s like me it is only a fifth of my life. Which is cruel when you think about it. I spent my youth wishing time would go faster, so I could get school over with then my Nurse training over with. Before you know it you are at the back end of your career wishing time would slow down so you can enjoy what is around you and take stock of the world around you. Sometimes I wish I was younger again, so I could pay more attention. When my kids were little I was busy chasing a career and rushing around, for stuff that didn’t really matter. I wish I had savoured the moment when my children were little more than I did chasing something that wasn’t for me.
Wishing isn’t going to make it happen, and in fact it does a disservice to my life and experience. In some ways I did chase a career, but a career that probably was not the right one for me and I did not throw myself completely into, because I relished spending time with my children. The relationship I have with Ben and Jack now is because I valued the time I spent with them. The challenges I faced at work and the impact that and the death of my father had on my mental health has had a direct impact on how I am now, and what my subsequent career choices have been. I love the job I do now, and because I love it I am quite good at it. Sometimes I think that I probably did not fully live up to my potential, that is probably right. I imagine most people would say that about themselves. I am however confident that I have always done my best, I have always tried to be better today than I was yesterday.
I ran a circle meeting with a clinical team yesterday. A circle meeting is where (yes you guessed it) everyone sits in a circle, for the purpose of the meeting there is no hierarchy and the purpose of the meeting is to unearth the challenges faced by the team from the perspective of those in the meeting. Everyone has an equal opportunity to speak, I encourage everyone to own what they have to say and resist the urge to defend their position. To make sure everyone has a fair hearing and everyone listens to what everyone has to say, I use a talking device, which in my case is a small toy basketball. You can only speak when you are holding the talking device. I ask 3-4 questions in turn. Each time I ask a question I ask who wants to speak first. Once we have a volunteer I hand them the talking device, they provide their answer then pass the ball to their left. This continues until the ball has gone round the circle. I then ask the next question and so on. So the first question I asked yesterday, was…”What is the most prominent challenge you face at work right now?” As you can expect it started off with people talking about workload and resources, but vey quickly people started talking about their personal stress level and mental health and how that is damaging their relationship with their work. I then asked them what were the thoughts and feeling about what they heard. This was very emotionally charged and covered all ranges of emotion from anger, distress to comfort, pride and optimism. I then asked them what they needed to overcome the challenges they face. This brought up discussions on what they can control and cannot. The overwhelming need was to show love and be loved by each other so they can care for their patients. There was also a clear request to be acknowledged by the organisation and love to be shown towards them. There was an evident willingness to improve processes in collaboration with other professions and departments.
It was an incredibly humbling moment for me. It reinforced for me the notion that we are all doing our best and want to do a good job, but sometimes the work and working environment can conspire with our personal circumstances to cause us harm and cause our best not to be good enough. That team yesterday decided to take some tangible actions in their team to show and be loved on a regular basis with a daily check in and check out on how everybody is arriving to leaving from work. To have regular circle meetings to tackle practical challenges they face and to embark on an improvement project to change a process that is harming everyone in the team as well as potentially harming patients.
It is so important to remember that we are all doing our best, sometimes our best is not good enough, so instead of condemning ourselves or others for not being good enough work out how you can help change things to make everyone best better.
I am not quite sure how I got to this but I have found it helpful to remind myself that the time I have spent at work and home has got me to where I am now, so it was not wasted. If it wasn’t for those times I would not have spent a wonderful afternoon yesterday working with an inspirational clinical team and helping them working through their relationship with work.
There is a lot of focus on poor behaviours from all angles (colleagues, customers, patients, general public). It feels especially a problem since the pandemic. Wherever you look there is divisiveness…”you are either on our side or against us” attitude appears to prevail.
We all blame different groups for these behaviours, the right wing, the left wing, baby boomers, gen x, millennials, gen z, immigrants, the list is endless. We focus on the behaviours, and the people we witness perpetuating those behaviours and label them as the problem.
Behaviour seems to be worsening, or that is the prevailing opinion. People nowadays are less respectful than they used to be. I am not so certain that people are any more rude than they were previous generations. I am not so certain that any group of people are more rude than others. I have been guilty of blaming others and damning individuals and groups for a witnessed behaviour. I am not sure it stands up to scrutiny. For instance when I was a Staff Nurse on a Children’s ward we all labelled A&E Nurses were rude and entitled, and ICU Nurses were elitist and entitled. I had friends who worked in A&E and they were not rude or entitled. I ended up working in ICU and the Nurses who work there are generally not elitist and lazy.
Behaviours do not define who people are. We are all capable of being dickheads and we are all capable of being kind and loving. Behaviours are a visible representation of what people are thinking and feeling, as a result of their needs either being met or not. It is not always easy for us to express what we need, or sometimes are requests are not answered and that causes frustration which can spill over into poor behaviours.
Just tackling the behaviour and not addressing the context within which the behaviours sits will not create a change, it will just make the situation worse.
I was giving a new member of our team a tour of one of our Hospitals this week. She is completely new to the NHS so as well as giving her a physical tour it was important to provide context to the work we are tasked to do in Organisational Development in relation to work culture, civility and leadership. The hospital is really busy, with every department under extreme pressure. So when we are developing work with teams it is essential that we just don’t focus on highlighting poor behaviours and help teams manage their environments to ensure the needs of the team, and their patients are in the first instance acknowledged and then addressed. This will help manage behaviours, give people autonomy over their workspace and allow true accountability.
If you work in healthcare and you want to address behaviours in your team, I can recommend this book. Restorative Practice at Work by Lesley Parkinson. The link is below. It has straightforward steps to follow.
I was up ridiculously early this morning. At 5:30am I was laying in bed wide awake, with the all the activity of the past week playing out in my head. Everything I managed to achieve, all what I didn’t get done, and most importantly all the things I could have done better. The usual when I have a busy week.
This week has been very delivery heavy for me. Which has meant that I have been away from the office either providing training or facilitating team sessions. I really enjoy delivering training and facilitating team development days. They are activities that I have been doing for years, so I am very comfortable talking in front of people and getting them thinking differently. When I say I enjoy it, I mean that I am confident that I can do it, as I am well practiced and I have a routine that puts me in the right headspace, and ensures I am prepared and know what I am delivering. It requires a lot of effort mentally to get myself into the right headspace and keep me there for the whole session. I am naturally introverted so summoning up the courage to put myself into an extravert mindset takes a lot of emotional labour. Then there is the time post session when I second guess and critique my performance afterwards. In the moment I really enjoy facilitating and delivering training, before and afterwards not so much. For 4 out of five days I have been training or facilitating team development. I have not done that much delivery for months, and I am definitely out of shape.
My role now means that I just don’t have the time to do this amount of delivery. Most of what I was doing this week were commitments I had made sometime ago and needed to be honoured, and one was to cover a member of the team. This has however meant that I am taking time away from other pieces of work that need doing. So when I would normally have a bit of down time to reset after sessions, I have not been able to fully do this, as I have needed to attend to urgent requests or tasks that I normally would have done throughout the day, as well as prepare for the next session. When I look at next week, it is just as busy with activities taking me away from my desk, for large parts of each day. This it appears is how it is going to be for the next 6 months as our planned work is starting to ramp up and compete with our business as usual work and the reactive work that inevitably happens.
This is why I recognised this week that I need to spend time each week reflecting on how my week has gone in a constructive way, where I can review the work I have done, how I have organised myself and attended to my thoughts and feelings about my work. For me writing what I have done down helps me look at what I have done more objectively and test what unchecked assumptions I might have been making about my approaches. It starts with writing down what I have done, just what I have done. Then as I write it I pay attention to my thoughts and feelings about what I am writing. It is important to spend some time writing down the thoughts and feelings, as this starts to describe the context in which the activity has taken place, and how I make it match the narrative I have about myself, for instance I describe myself has being naturally introverted and it takes a lot of emotional labour to get myself into an extraverted space. This is how I view and describe myself. This can often lead to assumptions that make about the way I prepare for the work and reset after the work. I can say to myself (and often do) that I have to do it the way I do it, without questioning where this story comes from. I might be spending a lot of time and effort on activities that make no difference to what happens.
Once I have examined my thoughts and feelings and understand the origins of those initial thoughts and feelings about my week, I can decide what I could change in my approach for the coming week. It might be that the routines I have adopted are really useful, and continue, or I can adjust them to allow myself do other things that would be more useful to me and reduce the amount of pressure I feel to get what I need to do done.
My early morning ramblings probably have not described this reflective process very well. My apologies. I think I needed to get some thoughts and feelings out of my head to help me reflect on my week and make changes for next. Therefore below is a simple step by step approach to the reflective process I have tried to describe whilst reflecting (lol).
Describe the activity. Write down what you did, when you did it and where. Write down as much detail as you can remember.
Write down the unfiltered thoughts and feelings that you experience as you describe you activity. Include your justifications for doing what you did, what you think and feel about the activity now you write it down.
Read back all that you have written. What have you not said? What have you glossed over? What assumptions have you made about the activities you have done? What is behind the justifications you make? Are there external influences that play a part in what you do and how you think? Can you describe you emotions differently? Is there another perspective that you could have?
Are there any changes to make? These could be changing how you do certain activities, it might be how you view yourself in certain circumstances. Create a mini action plan with start date and time, and a time to review the changes you have made.
This approach today has been really helpful for me to reflect on the week I have had, and allow me to put all of that down, to allow me to relax and recharge before the week ahead. I also recognise that I am due my 1:1 with Janis to talk though what I have been doing and have the opportunity to have some helpful challenge and support. It is vital to have a regular 1:1 coaching/mentoring conversation to talk through your reflections and invite challenge, to ensure you are not creating a mini echo chamber with your reflections.
Connected Coaching 