Does our fear of vulnerability fuel our shame and disconnects us from people around us

In my day job I speak to health professionals about their experiences at work and what they find the most difficult. It nearly always boils down to communication, people being rude and dismissive, being shouted at, and communication being incomplete. This is not just from one direction, this is generally from every and any direction, which makes me think that there is not just one group of people that are the problem, but that we all play a part in this volatile environment. That made me think about something I wrote a few years ago about vulnerability and shame. Hopefully this resonates and helps you think about how you view shame and how this contributes to how you behave and communicate when things are challenging.

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 our 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 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.

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 your 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, can 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 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 youhave 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. 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 examine 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 this 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, ut once you start practicing 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 a few 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 on 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. 

Lets start creating more autopilots and embracing our vulnerability, rather than being driven by shame and the desire to be invulnerable.

Don’t chase a career path, go where your values take you

You might be at the beginning of your working life, or already on a career path and wondering what is next for you, there are always points in our life when we start to consider our choices on where we want to be in the next few years.

There seems to be a popular view that to be successful we decide on a career or vocation and follow a clearly laid out path. This starts at secondary school in the UK when we decide which subjects we are going want to or considered capable enough to study. This can start us on a path we feel we have little control over. First off we are either academic or vocational, arts oriented or science oriented. These early choices can start us on a path that can feel pre-ordained, by our social standing, family culture and perception of our intelligence to name but a few. This all before we are 16! For some people this works out well, they are able to make choices that suite who they are and they thrive. You might be that person, for the first 20 years of my career I would have agreed with you.

Academically I was average, I was not considered very artistic or any good with my hands. I was kind and enjoyed helping people. When I was 16 I decided I wanted to be a Nurse. Most of my friends were set on an academic path of going to University, I felt I wanted to be part of that crowd, I did not come from an academic family so I was never socialised to studying for academic success. My mum was really encouraging but she had never had experience of studying so I was never challenged to work harder. I realised quite early on that I did not have the personal discipline to study to the level needed to pass my A levels, I just did not have the motivation. I liked the idea of going to University but I was not prepared to do the work to get there. I knew I could be a Nurse without going to University. To register as a Nurse then you did not have to study for a degree, you could do a 3 year course that qualified you to be registered with UKCC as a Registered General Nurse, or do a 2 year course and become an Enrolled Nurse. The entry requirement for Registered General Nurse training was 5 ‘O’ Levels including Maths, English and a Science. I had that so I decided to not to try that hard and have a good time in 6th Form instead. I was accepted on to 3 courses one at Liverpool Royal Infirmary, one at the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham and one at Hull Royal Infirmary. The course in Hull started first so I started in Hull in October 1989.

I loved being a Nurse, I didn’t really enjoy the academic work (thankfully there was not a great deal of that). I loved caring for people, I loved the excitement of caring for really sick people and I loved building relationships with people. In my 3rd year of training I did my Paediatric placement on Ward 130 West at Hull Royal Infirmary. I loved Nursing children, it was full of challenges, it was fun at times and heart breaking at other times. When I qualified I got a job on the Children’s unit and worked on Ward 12 which was the Children’s ENT and Ophthalmic ward. The condition of working on the Children’s Unit was getting accepted on and completing the Children’s Nurse qualification. So initially I was given a 12 month contract as a D Grade Staff Nurse. I was then accepted onto the RSCN (Registered Sick Children’s Nurse) course in Hull. This was a 14 month course so I was given a 14 month contract which would become permanent on successful completion of the course. I hated the RSCN course. I loved Nursing the children and working on different wards and settings where children were cared for, but I hated all the academic work. With the help of my tutor Jeremy I managed to qualify (by the skin of my teeth). I qualified as a Children’s Nurse in March 1995 and started work as a Staff Nurse on Ward 130 East the Surgical, and essentially trauma ward as we admitted, orthopaedics and neurosurgery patients. We would often look after children following road traffic accidents. During this time we looked after a lot of children with multiple fractures and major injuries as well as children with brain tumours requiring neurosurgery. As well as this we would look after children having general surgery (appendicectomies etc.), Plastic Surgery, Maxiofacial, ENT, and Ophthalmic surgery. To say the least it was an incredibly challenging and interesting place to work. There was a huge amount to learn. In 1997 I decided to leave Paediatrics and go and work in ICU. At times I felt out of my depth looking after really sick Children, so I decided to get more experience in Critical Care so I dropped down a grade and went to work on ICU. I spent a year working there. I looked after Children and Adults whilst I was there, but I found I missed caring Children so went back to the Children’s wards, and got a post as an E Grade Staff Nurse on 130 West (Paediatric Medicine). I loved working on West, this was the ward where it all started as a 3rd Year Student Nurse. In 1999 I got a Senior Staff Nurse post on West, everything was going really well. In 2001 the Children’s unit opened a High Dependency Unit and I got one of the Senior Staff roles. It was a fantastic year working there, I learned a lot and had such a great time. Then in 2002 the ward Sister on 130 West retired and I applied for and was successful in getting the Charge Nurse job on 130 West. At that time I thought I had secured my dream job. I was the manager of the ward that I loved. It turned out to be far from that.

In hindsight I was not ready to be a Charge Nurse. Clinically I was very capable and was comfortable managing the care of most patients that we would see right across the Children’s unit, including patients that we didn’t come across such as Children requiring critical care. What I was not prepared for was being a manager of a fast moving ward with competing demands. I spent most of the 11 years I managed the ward under a lot of scrutiny and pressure to perform. When I first wrote about mu experience as a ward manager my emotions were still quite raw and I was quite negative about the whole experience, however if it was not for those 11 years I would not be doing what I am doing now. That time was difficult personally and that had an effect on how I performed as a leader. It is important to recognise that life events will always have an impact on all parts of your life, and it is impossible to shield one part of your life from the other. During my time as a Charge Nurse I completed a post graduate diploma in Leadership and Management (not too bad for someone who was never a graduate) and discovered Clinical Supervision and my skill in communicating with people and building relationships.

After my decade or so as a Charge Nurse I moved to a development role and became the Teacher Practitioner (Clinical Nurse Educator)for the Children’s Unit. To be honest this was right up my street. I supported the Safeguarding Children Team in developing their supervision training. I found that I loved writing guidelines and putting together training packages. I developed an induction programme for new registrants and started to align guidelines and development with the rest of the hospital. For a year I worked one day a week at the University supporting undergraduate education (so I eventually got to University). Being a Nurse educator allowed me to build supportive relationships with Nurses. I wasn’t caring for patients but I was caring for Nurses instead. This job also gave me freedom to explore how I could be useful and support the development of Nurses across the Trust. I started to get involved with Human Factors training and worked with our simulation team and the Paediatricians on Human Factors training for Paediatric Doctors and Nurses across the region. I introduced Human Factors training into Nursing Induction across the trust and started spending more and more time collaborating with Nurse Educators across the Trust. It was around this time that I heard about coaching and met Lucy (my now boss) and I completed a coaching qualification. For me this was the final piece that I needed. It increased my self awareness and enhanced my skills in communicating with people. Just supporting Nurses was not enough for me know. If I was going to use my core values of Courage and Usefulness I needed to shift my career.

Lucy offered me 2days a week on a 12 month secondment, helping to develop a Coaching and Mentoring Network. That turned into a permanent part-time job that I juggled with my Nurse Educator role and eventually in 2019 (30 years to the day after I started my Nurse training) I took the plunge and left Nursing for good and became a Senior Organisational Development Practitioner fulltime. I came off the register completely. This was a really big moment for me, being a Nurse had become an integral part of how saw myself. In reality I was never a Nurse, I was Matt whose job was a Children’s Nurse. I am not Matt whose job is Head of Organisational Development. As Brene Brown says and I repeat on a regular basis. You are not what you do. Allowing myself to follow my values and do a job that allows me to consistently work with those values was a game changer. Being a Staff Nurse allowed me to be Useful and Courageous whilst being caring, compassionate and empathetic, I was not always able to work consistently in that space as a Charge Nurse and I felt compromised on a regular basis, as a Nurse Educator I could live with values, but when I discovered I could increase my scope and have an impact on a larger scale it was a no brainer. This job I have now allows me to live with my values every moment of everyday, I can support and care for the team I manage and directly support and care for all the teams and individuals I work with across our whole Group. It is important to recognise that working in the NHS at the moment is the most challenging it is has ever been during my career, however I am still in my job able to consistently work in values.

It is so important to identify your core values and use them as a guide for all you do. There are a lot of values exercises available online. If you want to understand your values more please feel free to contact me to discuss how we can work together.

Positivity (Not what it is cracked up to be)

This week I delivered a short talk to a group of Doctors in training about how to manage stress at work and home. I deliver this talk to Foundation Year 2 Doctors on a fairly regular basis. It started life as a straight up signposting session, telling them where to get help if they needed at and a brief description of the signs that they might need help. From an Organisational Development perspective this felt a little reactionary rather than discussing and sharing how we can effectively manage our stress to reduce the risk of needing the offered support. Therefore I have changed the hour long session to a quick guide in recognising our own protective qualities and how we can be more intentional in deploying them during more heightened times of stress. The point of the talk now is, that we live and work in a stressful world. It always has been and it always will be. We can try to get rid of the stressful elements of our life, but the fact is leading a fulfilling, purposeful life involves a certain amount of stress. Our exposure to stress is inevitable, therefore attempts to avoid stress will compound the issue.

I don’t want to go into the detail of the hour long talk. To be honest you can find most of the content in previous blogs on identifying what brings you joy in a day (Hour of Happiness). I want to talk about another subject that I do bang on about a lot in my blogs which is the relentless pursuit of positivity. Yes I know I have mentioned the Hour of Happiness blog. Acknowledging what brings you happiness in any given day is not the same as relentlessly pursuing happiness and positivity and ignoring the difficult, stressful and upsetting aspects of our life. It is quite simple avoiding sadness and discomfort can be massively unhelpful. In the short term it can feel convenient. “I haven’t got time to face this at the moment.” I hear that every week in fact I have heard myself say it plenty of times. Sometimes the problems and issues we face are inconvenient and stop us from getting where we wanted to go, so we ignore them and plough on regardless. Putting your head down and carrying on might work for a short time, but it wont last for ever. It will always end in burn out, you might think this sacrifice and persistence is professional and honourable, but all you are doing is creating more problems further down the line. In fact it is an incredibly risky strategy not just for you, but for friends, family, colleagues and the organisation you work in.

If you are a regular reader of my blogs you will have read about the three elements of organisational resilience originally written about by Diane Coutu. She suggests that the first element of resilience is having a sense of realism. If you and the organisation you work in wants to remain resilient you will have to be realistic about what you are facing and will be facing in the future. That includes the challenges and problems you face as well as opportunities. That includes emotions, and you and others are emotionally is a vital part of the reality we face. Instead of framing everything either positive or negative constantly it can be more helpful thinking in terms of helpful and unhelpful. This can help us wean of the obsession with either being relentlessly optimistic of persistently pessimistic. Pointing out barriers can be helpful as can visualising success, but focussing on one to the detriment of the other results in us missing vital information that will help us. The same is true of our emotions, constantly focussing on either negative or positive emotions means ignore large parts of our lives and are not able to focus on what is important to us. I found Dr Susan David’s book “Emotional Agility” really helpful in understanding the importance of acknowledging all aspects of our thoughts and feelings. If you want to know more, it is well worth a read. She has also done a few talks on this subject the link to her TED talk is below.

Courage

I have written this opening sentence about 10 times and deleted it this morning. I just cannot decide what to write. I did contemplate not writing anything this week, as I didn’t think I had anything to say that was new. I am still not sure if I have anything to write. These blogs are rarely structured, I much prefer to use a free writing approach. The problem is with this approach is that it can take a little of bit of time getting going and my opening paragraphs can ramble a bit as I tried to find a thread to get hold of. I have an idea I want to discuss courage today. Courage as some of you will know is one of my core values. About a month ago I had a 1:1 with my manager and I decided it would be useful to revisit my values. As I have changed roles in recent months it is time to reflect on what my sense of purpose is and reconnect with it. It is very easy when you are busy getting to know a new way of working at the same time as maintaining business as usual it is easy to lose sight of what is important to you and why you do your job.

I have been using these blogs to help me with this process. Free writing gives me the time and space to reflect on work and the impact this is having on me. It will however only get me so far. It is important to have a reflective, restorative conversation with someone, it helps me discover parts of my experience I might not be paying attention to and tests my narrative of myself. I am very lucky that my manager has a very reflective approach to our 1:1s which is massively helpful. I also have a wonderful friend Janis, who has been my mentor and supervisor for a decade now. She has an unnerving ability to look into my soul, and she never lets me off the hook. This week we met up and discussed my new role, how it is making me feel and how my values play a part in my successes and how I can use them to my advantage when I face challenges.

During our discussion it became very clear to me that my 2 core values have not changed, they may however shifted in focus. These values are Usefulness and Courage. I remember when I first identified them and put a name to them Usefulness was the value I focussed on. It was the touchstone for me, I would always ask myself…”is what I am doing useful”. Over the past couple of years I had stopped paying as much attention to my values as I probably should have. They were still at play in my life and were still letting me know how I was doing by either making me feel good about what I was doing or uncomfortable, but I was not always paying attention to the message they were giving me. As I reflected during our catch up, I recognised that having courage has become the focus of my values, and whether I am being courageous or not has become my guide for how I work. When I have shied away from situations and not used the skills I have, or when I have just gone with the majority I have felt inauthentic and generally these situations have got worse, but when I have shown courage and done the right thing or backed my own skill and ability, it has gone well and I have felt good.

The value of courage for me is having confidence in what I can do, showing up and doing it even though I am fearful of what people will think or whether it will work or not. In other words courage is doing something that holds a personal risk and doing it anyway. When I say personal risk, I am not sure I would do this if it was a physical risk, the value I place on courage is doing something in the face of psychological risk.

That whole reflective process has been incredibly helpful, reconnecting with Courage and Usefulness has been really helpful, to do an inventory of events and progress since starting my new role and notice when I have been consistent with my values and when I have not. I feel so much better, there is something reassuring about having that touchstone to help me notice when I am straying away from my values and when I am staying on my path.

Have a good week everyone.

We all need to be heard, really heard!

I don’t often do 2 blogs, 2 days in a row, but today’s blog is less personal, what I want to talk about today is how we communicate more effectively, by talking less and listening more.

Most of us think that we listen well but I would suggest most of do not. I have written about the importance of listening many times before and always say that we must listen to understand rather than listening to respond. It sounds really easy and we all intend to listen to understand and then almost immediately we get fully involved in the subject and start listening to respond, which essentially means we have stopped listening. It is so important to listen to the person rather than the subject you think they are talking about, and we can only do this if we listen to understand. It is difficult because we spend most of time in content, in other words we spend most of our days assessing, evaluating against past, and planning for the future. So when someone wants to talk to us about something important, that they need to do some thinking about, we continue to operate in content and start to assess and problem solve what they are saying. I know a lot of you will be reading this and saying…”well yes of course we would they have asked for our help to solve the problem they face”. It does feel natural to get stuck in with them and solve their problem. The issue with this approach is that we hear the headline of the issue and immediately go to work solving the problem. If that was the problem though, they probably would have solved it already. They have decided to ask for your input because the problem is not easily solved. The root of any issue or problem rarely sits on the surface and easily accessible. What the other person needs is a different perspective, by listening to understand we keep our distance and get a view of the overall problem where it sits in their world. When we listen to respond we get stuck into the surface story and get right next to them narrowing our perspective.

To listen effectively it is important to spend our time out of content mode and in observing mode/receiving mode, where we just take in the sights and sounds. Listen to the story they are telling you, and when you get to a bit of the story that you don’t fully understand ask questions that gives you more understanding. If you are curious about the characters or the places you hear about ask about them. Help them paint the picture of the problem they are facing. Notice the emotions the person is experiencing and acknowledge them. This approach always takes a little longer than just plain advice but it works so much better. Let them take you on a tour of the issue/issues they are facing, get curious about the bits they gloss over, and avoid relating it to your world and solving their problem in your world.

You will notice that you will drift back into content mode and either relate it to a part of your world or want to ask them questions to steer them in a direction that takes them to a solution you think would be satisfactory. Once you notice that you are stopping listening and starting to solve, let that thought go and re-focus on what they are telling you. When I am having a conversation at work with anyone, I have started to intentionally employ this approach and it works incredibly well, I have noticed that I enjoy even challenging/important conversations much more than I have in the past, as I don’t feel the pressure to solve the problem. I am there to help them examine the problem and for them to find the answer that is most helpful for them, and sometimes that is not finding a solution right now.

The difficulty with listening to understand is that it requires bandwidth, the narrower our bandwidth the harder it is to stay out of content. There are just too many intrusive thoughts passing through our mind, so we stop listening and move into solution mode or become dismissive of the problem the pales in comparison to the issues we perceive we are facing. As with anything in life it is vital to make sure you are heard and have someone that will listen to understand when you speak. In my previous blogs I have written about how easy it is for our bandwidth to narrow and as a consequence become less responsive and supportive of those around us. It is important that we all play our part in maintaining our own and others bandwidth by being open to receiving support and being a good and I am mean a really good listener for those around us.

Take care everyone.

I have found something I didn’t realise I had lost

I normally write my blogs when I get up on a Saturday morning. When I was in the groove a few years ago, it was my Saturday morning routine. During the pandemic at one point it was a daily routine. I found it incredibly helpful in managing my well-being. More recently I lost that routine until 4 weeks ago when I started again. 4 weeks ago I felt lost, I was worried that I was becoming depressed again. My bandwidth was narrow and there was just too much happening. I decided to try writing again, to see if would start to improve my well-being. In the short term after my first blog, it did I got some lovely feedback and my ego was certainly massaged, it felt good to be appreciated. That feeling didn’t last, I didn’t really expect to either, one blog is not going to have that kind of affect. I got a similar response after my second blog, but after the third I felt a dramatic shift in my mood and capacity to manage what is going on around me. I am not saying it was just writing the blogs that has made the difference but what it has done is start a shift in my mindset and got me reconnecting with what is important to me. After last weekend I have started to feel more balanced and able to quieten my mind long enough to see what is going on around me and see my thoughts and feelings for what they are, which is that they are just thoughts and feelings and not my reality. They are there for data to guide my actions, not to dictate them.

So, why do I write my blogs on a Saturday morning? When I start writing I am generally the only person up, so I can start to think about what I am going to write which is helpful. Lisa normally gets up whilst I am writing (she has just walked into the room now), which is fine as my thought process has already started. The other reason for writing on a Saturday is that it helps me reflect and make sense of the week I have just lived through. As I have said before to help me sort my shit out. It has certainly started doing that over the past few weeks. I never really know what I am going to write about until I start writing, sometimes it comes quickly sometimes it takes a little longer to work through what is going on in my head. Last week I had several stops and starts and deleted the first paragraph several times until I had my thoughts in order. This week I wanted to write about the change I have noticed in my mental health since restarting these blogs. It is probably time to actually tell you about my week and how I feel different and why writing a blog helps.

Last Monday was the first time in months that I have not felt anxious on my way into work. I was very clear what my sense of purpose was and how I could achieve it. My purpose is to be useful, be courageous and enable others to improve. When I think about how to support others to improve I am energised, however I would often feel anxious when I felt I was not being useful enough and showing courage to get stuff done they it needs to be done. When I lean into my courage and trust that what I do is useful I can realise my desire to enable people and teams to improve and that makes me feel energetic and fulfilled. As each day has gone by this week I have felt more energised. This week has been challenging, with a lot going on, in particular yesterday had the potential to be overwhelming, but it didn’t feel like that, it felt exciting, there were times when I did feel that I could be overwhelmed by it all, and I definitely had to draw on my courage to dive in. Previously I might have worried that I was not being useful enough and would have tried to rescue everybody and take too much on. But having the balance of courage and usefulness allowed me to support people to do what they needed to do to improve the situation for themselves. All week there have been I series of separate problems in front of me, some big like one that came to the fore yesterday and another that is long standing and I started work with this week, and others being smaller and more contained. All of them needed attention and all of them needed not to be overengineered, which I might have done when my bandwidth was much narrower.

This week on a personal level has been a fulfilling week, it did feel like I had turned a corner and my thoughts and feelings were lined up with my values. The lesson I have learned, which is a lesson I probably have to learn periodically is to keep your purpose in your eyeline, if you lose sight of your sense of purpose and do not align your values with what you do it is so easy to lose your way. There is something else that I have just reflected on as I am writing this and it is something I have heard before, but this experience has made it real for me, is that life is not static, we do not walk along a straight clear path, we walk along an ever changing route that is often uncertain and dynamic. Our purpose and values may shift because of the part of the route we are on, so be open to changing your approach and re-evaluating your values and purpose, but never lose sight of them.

Have a fabulous weekend everyone.

The Power and Curse of Emotional Intelligence

Last week I wrote a little bit about how I make decisions and interpret the world, I am much more comfortable picking up feelings, both internally and what is happening around me. I struggle to with creating and interrogating logical structures. I am fine if someone provides me with a structure that is not overly complicated, in fact I rely on structures and processes provided by others. What I am able to do with ease is read the emotional temperature of a team or room. Relationships and the developing and maintaining of them as you may have guessed is always my focus. This is why I love coaching people so much I love to listen to people and understand their world. What I do suffer from is an urge to help and get overly involved in the solutions of the problems people face. This is the other side of emotional intelligence for me, I am motivated by the need to be useful and to maintain harmony, and when it is unchecked can cause my problems. Unregulated I have an overwhelming urge to help, which turns into problem solving and advising which is never helpful. Let me explain where that comes from for me.

As mentioned above harmony is a strong motivator for me. This comes from my childhood. My Mum always wanted us all to be happy and for everyone to get on. Any disagreements no matter how small were to be stopped and avoided at all costs. I learned to read emotions and please people to maintain harmony. Which in our society is a very agreeable way to be. A lot of people like me because of this. On the whole caring for people and helping them paid off, and feeling of being useful was so powerful that it became an important part of my personality from childhood onwards. In fact I have based my career on this, it is the secret of my success. It does however come with a price. It takes an emotional toll, tuning into people’s emotions requires you to be empathetic. To be able to understand and articulate the emotions of others you have to connect with the emotion you are witnessing to emotions that you have experience of, which can result in you feeling that emotion. For instance if when listening to someone they sound as if they are feeling anxious about something, I will connect with a time when I felt anxious to understand what that feels like to me to be able to use that experience to be able to articulate what I am witnessing back to them. This means for a moment I feel that emotion. When I am feeling balanced and my bandwidth is wide enough that is fine, the emotion will pass quickly. If I am unbalanced, and my bandwidth is reduced it can be quite difficult to shift that feeling. When I am at my lowest this can be quite extreme, and my empathy can go wild. There have been times when I have heard a child crying and felt myself being so profoundly bereft that I have nearly cried. I once saw a lady sat on the bus that looked really tired and fed up, she looked beaten, as if the world that day had chewed her up and spat her out. I didn’t speak to her I just noticed her but for the whole journey and for the rest of the evening I felt despair. That was an extreme but it is something I have to notice and keep in check. Sometimes this unbalance comes from what is happening in my life, other times it comes from coaching and supporting people without having an outlet. The busyness of supporting people, and not seeking my own support is something that happens in cycles. For instance it is busy at the moment, there is a lot of upheaval and change in the world around, no matter who you are or what you do, and this results in people reaching out. I live in the same world so experience what they are experiencing, I get caught up in the work and do not find the time seek support. As a result my empathic response starts to become unregulated, this increases the urge to help by problem solving to reduce the emotional response for the person I am coaching and therefore reduce my emotional response. That rarely works, I would then start to feel unhappy with my approach as a coach and if I am not careful can spiral.

The reason why I decided to write about this today is after a conversation I was having on Friday with a group of Health Professionals who were on the Clinical Supervision training I was delivering. As we were practicing having restorative and developmental conversations with people, we explored how easy it is to fall into the trap of problem solving and helping, and how important it is to understand where this comes from and how to regulate ourselves.

When it comes to regulation and maintaining a balance, I don’t think there is one single approach. The most important is to have an outlet to talk with someone else. Which I must admit, I could be better at, and have more regular system. I have plenty of people to do this with, but it is something I need to sort out. Another approach is to write stuff down, which is what I am doing now. I also use mindfulness before and after coaching sessions, and at the end of every day. Mindful meditation just allows me to hold my thoughts and feelings more loosely and not hold onto to them to tightly, it stops me moving into problem solving mode and allows me to see unhelpful thoughts without judging them, so when I connect with emotions in the coaching sessions I can let them go quite quickly without hanging onto the feeling.

The shame of the imposter

There are a few things I want to talk about this week. I am really good at listening to people and getting into the thoughts alongside them, helping them poke around what is bothering them and get a bit more understanding about what is going on. I am rubbish at doing it myself, and I am often reluctant to let someone else help me rummage through my jumble of thoughts in my head. I much prefer to work with other people’s thoughts and feelings. I imagine most of us do, its much easier helping someone with their life laundry than dealing with the ever growing washing basket in your mind.

Last weeks long awaited blog started to put me in a reflective mood, and I started to think about how I would go about finding a willing participant to work through this massive pile of discarded thoughts and feelings that are starting to get in my way. If I am completely honest I am still not quite sure how I go about this. I am kind of hoping that by the time I have finished writing today’s blog I will have made a firm conclusion. I can but hope. To help me though I want to mention a few things that have been happening this week.

I might have mentioned last week, that I have been feeling really anxious for a few weeks now. Every time I started thinking about work that knot in my stomach would arrive. The thing is I love my job, when I am talking with different staff whether that is coaching them, delivering to teams or discussing future work I am in my element. This feeling of anxiety I know is in part a result of my bandwidth being narrowed as I mentioned last week. I have realised this week that my relationship with my new role is playing a big part in this anxiety.

Yesterday myself and my colleagues supported a timeout for a team, we were asked to help a new team come together and prioritise some of their workstreams. Standard stuff for an OD team, nothing out of the ordinary. But for the past 2 weeks every time I thought about this event I felt really anxious, even when I wasn’t thinking about it, I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about how it was going to go. I was working with my fellow Head of OD and an OD Manager in the team. Between us we have years of experience of working with lots of different teams in different situations. This isn’t even my first session as Head of OD. I think the combination of the new role and other events had conspired to create a heightened anxiety. For the past few months since starting the role I have been able to manage the difficult feelings of anxiety about having a new job, but recently that has been more challenging, and it has highlighted that I was only partially addressing those feelings. I was clearly pushing them to the back of my mind so I could crack on with the work and not fully addressing the lingering feeling of being an imposter. There it is I have said it! Lets be clear though, it is not a syndrome, it is a feeling, that I have that is routed in my past experiences as a leader and the narrative I decided to attach to my life when I was a young man.

So lets talk about this feeling of being an imposter. This week I have been helping a few people with interview prep, and the subject of imposter syndrome came up. When coachees bring up the subject I am always interested to hear what they experience, and how they describe it. Most of us have feelings of being an imposter from time to time that can be used as a motivator, a few people will experience something far more intense and debilitating, that can seriously get in the way of their work and life. With the people I spoke to this week it was clearly the former, and what they experienced was self doubt and a lack of self-compassion. Reframing those feelings of not being deserving of the role they were applying for into seeing themselves through a compassionate lens, and examining their career journey to this point and how that is going to help them grow in the future. As I was in a reflective mood after last week I recognised that I could probably do with some self compassion, and that my feelings of being an imposter were starting to get in the way again.

Thankfully I have a truly compassionate boss. Recognising that I was struggling with my thoughts we had a life laundry 1:1, where she gave me the space to examine what is going on in my head. During our conversation (bear with me this is related to feeling like an imposter) I examined how I learn. Being in a new role requires us all to unlearn old ways of doing things and learning new approaches. My learning style is quite slow at first, I struggle with logic, it takes me a long time be able to accomplish tasks that require logic, however once I understand it I fly. However I am an instinctive learner, so when it comes to emotional intelligence and understanding culture and context I learn really quickly. This is where the feelings of being an imposter comes in. This role requires high levels of competence in logic and instinct. It is taking me a while to pick up the logic, where as I have not noticed a deficit in instinct, therefore I am feeling like I am not up to the job. It is knocking my confidence causing the feelings of anxiety. This is where I need to do my work, reconciling my potential areas of weakness and reframing them to areas for development. Definitely not doing what I have been doing which is feeling shame and embarrassment, and trying to ignore it hoping it will go away. It never goes away, it lingers and sits in the pit of your stomach.

I have decided on the routes I am taking to work through the feelings of being an imposter and the resulting shame, by engaging a coach. I will let you know how I get on.

Riding the Waves

I was just looking back and I last wrote a back in March, and to be honest in the past 2 years since Mum passed away my blog writing at best has been sporadic. There were loads of reasons I suppose but the underlying most important reason was being comfortable sharing my thoughts with the world. A confidence that anyone would find it remotely interesting and helpful. I know there are a lot of you who have told me how helpful my blogs have been over the years. I found them helpful too, that often helped me sort my shit out. For the past 2 years though I have needed to be more introverted outside of work than I had previously. I did not have the energy to use me extraversion outside of my day to day work. I reflected on this over the summer with Lisa and she agreed that I have become more unsociable and at times across as a bit rude. This feedback really shook me, as it really did not fit with my narrative of who I am. The story I tell myself is that I am a kind and sociable person that will always give people the time of day. Deep down I knew this was not the case, but I just did not want to acknowledge how much of a miserable git I can be, and more recently the miserable git has been making an appearance more than maybe he should. It made me realise that I can be quite dismissive of people and situations and that I do not always choose to listen to understand people and will either stop listening or listen to judge them. I had got my self caught in my own personal drama triangle constantly reacting to the content of my life from a standpoint of either the rescuer, the victim, or the persecutor. I know I talk about her a lot, but losing my Mum has been the most important life event since losing my Dad and both my boys were born, which all happened within 3 years and had a seismic effect on me. I am much more self aware now than I was in my earlier 30s, but it is still having an impact on me, far more profound than I thought it would. A lot has happened in the 2 years without Mum, both my boys have graduated from University, Jack has moved back home, and I have been promoted at work.

I know these are just normal life events, that many of us experience. I suppose that is why I am writing about it. It is a struggle that a lot of us will have in our life times, we will all experience them in our own way. It can feel overwhelming and take up a lot of our bandwidth, it certainly has mine. I have noticed over the past couple of weeks in the build up and aftermath of Mums anniversary has been particularly challenging and my bandwidth has significantly narrowed, this has combined with work being really busy with lots priorities requiring my attention. At one point on Friday this week I wanted to walk away from everything. Obviously this was just a momentary blip, and for a few days in the build up I was seeking ways to resolve this by talking to people about how I was feeling. Working in the public sector is always really challenging, right now is especially challenging as the country changes government, on top of the Organisation I work is going through a major transition, then there has been the riots and civil unrest in Hull, which has unearthed intolerance and anger that has had a huge affect on the morale of many people who work in the NHS. Last week all of this reached a crescendo in my head, last week was my week to reach saturation.

I needed to find a way that will help me keep riding these waves, as life is always going to throw waves at me, rather than fighting against them I need to start learning to ride them again. Life gets busy and we sometimes don’t notice that we are fighting against the tide, which is just exhausting and fruitless. Once we notice we are fighting, it is important to relax and ride the wave, accept what you cannot control, learn how to live with those certainties and make changes to what can control. It is simple but not always obvious. When I felt at my best I was regularly writing about my thoughts and taking exercise. When I go for walks 3-4 times a week (I struggle to run that much now, my knees just cannot cope) and write about life I know I feel more balanced, and maybe stop being as much of a knob as I know I can be. Here is a picture from my walk yesterday.

With that in mind I am going to make this more regular, I am also planning a podcast that will basically be the content of my blog in podcast form. I will let you know more about the podcast in due course.

If you are going through challenges no matter what they are, notice when you are stuck in your own personal drama triangle, relax, stop fighting what you cannot control and start taking control of what is in your power.

Speak soon and take care.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter, I hope everyone is having a restful weekend, even if it is just for some of it. So far I have a had a lovely weekend. Our weekend started on Thursday evening, myself and Lisa went to Hull City Hall to see Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast on tour. He interviewed Bob Mortimer (yeah I know, absolutely fantastic) and Tommy Cannon. Bob was his usual hilarious self, sharing jokes from his joke book in the style of Peter Beardsley, telling stories about appearing on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and explaining the drawbacks of having electronic gates that rely on having an app. Absolutely sublime! Tommy was not as abstract as Bob, but fascinating and somewhat emotional all the same. He talked about how he met Bobby Ball and spent most of the hour regaling us with stories of his best friend and comedy other half. It was a wonderful evening.

On Friday we went out for breakfast at the pub where Jack works, the breakfast was reasonable and the company was exceptional. It is always a pleasure spending time with Jack and of course Lisa. For the rest of the day me and Lisa just slobbed out on the sofa watching Homicide New York on Netflix, and trying to remember what day of the week it was (Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it felt like a Sunday but then it could be Saturday as we were at work yesterday, then remembered it was Good Friday). At teatime we wrestled with 2 traditions, do we have fish and chips as it is Good Friday, or do we stick with our Friday after pay day Chinese Takeaway. We went with the Chinese takeaway. It was a no brainer really, the queues for the chippy are always mental on Good Friday and we just couldn’t face the stress of waiting ages in a queue, getting more and more stressed and hungry with other people experiencing the same negative emotional response. Lets be honest most of us get hangry waiting in line for fish and chips and I just didn’t need that amount of negativity in my life. We ordered our usual once a month takeaway from our usual Chinese Takeaway (Hing Wins on Springbank West). We get the same thing every time. We have prawn toast to share, Lisa has Chicken Satay and fried rice and I have Singapore Chow Mein. We like what we like, sometimes if I fancy a change I will have King Prawn Curry and fired rice. But this Good Friday I wasn’t feeling that adventurous. Poor Jack was at work, he is always at work when we have our pay day treat. I felt bad that he missed out, then my food arrived and I didn’t care anymore.

After our takeaway which was delicious as always (Lisa left some of hers for Jack to have when he got in, I didn’t leave any of mine, I love him, but not enough to share my noodles with him), we watched Barbie on Sky Movies. I enjoyed it, quite funny in parts, in some ways quite simplistic, but I did like the use of Brene Brown’s web of shame to describe the female experience, and the box of shame from a male perspective. Very thought provoking, the songs were fun and I had a couple of moments where I laughed out loud. If you have not seen it (I don’t imagine there are many that haven’t) then it is worth a look.

Saturday saw us going into town to see some live music in the shape of the Trinity festival ( an acoustic music festival in various pubs across the City centre). We wanted to see one particular act (Louie and Zac from The Froot). They played 2 sets in Humber Dock Bar. As usual they were fantastic.

Today and tomorrow are a chill out days. Lamb is in the oven, football on the telly and I am contemplating getting a beer out of the fridge.

Have a lovely Easter, be gentle to yourself and those around you, take the time you can to rest and recover.