Back with a Bang?

New Year

Are you doing ‘Dry January’, trying to eat healthily (but those chocs you got for Christmas are calling you from the drawer you tried to hide them in. Can you hear them? They’re saying “I am so tasty and delightful, eat me, eat me now!”), going to the gym (and queuing up to use each machines), meditating every morning (even though you hate sitting still), writing your journal (which is like drawing teeth), planning your day (although it always ends in chaos) and being a better partner/friend/child/parent/member of society?

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? I give you until about next Tuesday, when you will collapse into a heap and then try to revive yourself by bingeing on Netflix whilst eating your body weight in sugary confections and drinking yourself into a stupor. The next day you will wake at 11, spend all day in your pyjamas snarking at people on Twitter and eating beans from a tin. New Year, New Me, right?

This is a terrible time of year to make these sorts of changes. We’re supposed to be slowing down and building up our reserves of fat to get through the depth of winter ahead of us. We’re not supposed to be dieting and exercising our arses off, we’re supposed to be resting and reserving our energy.

What’s more, one of these changes is hard, several at the same time is just setting yourself up for failure. We only have a limited amount of willpower and it really doesn’t go very far. Creating a new habit takes time and effort (anything from 11 to 90 days, depending on who you listen to) and we have limited reserves of those too, especially at the time of year when our energy is low.

And the motivation for this is wrong too. Let’s face it, we’re just trying to assuage the guilt that we feel for letting go and over-indulging over the festive period. Self-loathing is not a good place to come from when you are trying to make changes.

Let’s start instead with self-compassion. We are all flawed and imperfect individuals, we all succumb to temptation from time to time and that doesn’t make us bad people. We should want to make these changes for ourselves, because we want the best for ourselves, not because of some random date on the calendar (which is widely disputed anyway. Did you know that the birth of Christ has always been disputed and our calendar could be out by 3 months? Even then, there are several different New Years around the world, are we going to set resolutions for each of those?).

It won’t surprise you that I don’t have New Year Resolutions. I think we have the whole idea of transformational change wrong. It is the rare exception, not the norm we think it is. Very few people have a Damascene conversion to anything. It’s supposed to be remarkable and exceptional, that’s the point of the story. We mistake the over-topping of the dam as the moment of change, forgetting the millions of individual raindrops that fell into the reservoir that brought it about.

Change happens gradually, as the result of small steps taken consistently over time. It’s like climbing up a hill, you keep putting one foot in front of the other and after a while you look up to find you are at the top and a wonderful vista is before you. Unless you have a helicopter, that’s the only way to get up there and enjoy the view.

So spend your time deciding on the next small step you are going to take today. Be kind to yourself, make it something you can achieve and then congratulate yourself. That will make taking tomorrow’s step easier, and the day after that, until it’s just become a habit. And one day, you’ll look up and find you’re at the top of the hill enjoying a view you’ve never seen before.

Don’t Look Back In Anger

I do, however, do a review of the year and look forward to the coming one.

I’m not very good at the whole self-compassion bit (it’s something I’m working on) and I tend to be quite harsh on myself. I don’t give myself enough credit for my achievements and I focus on my failings too much, so it’s a good exercise to review what I HAVE achieved over the past year. Like regularly posting blogs on LinkedIN and sending this out pretty much every week.

I’m not really a fan of goals, they literally set you up for failure because you either achieve them or fail and the outcome is often determined by factors beyond your control. I’m mean enough to myself already, I don’t need that as well! I prefer to look at intentions and directions of travel. If I consistently pursue those then the outcomes will be generally positive. It allows me to take advantage of serendipity, opportunism and luck that may arise.

I’ve tried various plans, methods, processes to do this and none have really stuck but I’ve picked up useful bits along the way. I have found I need to figure out my own way, to do my own thing rather than copy someone else’s method. I suspect that’s actually true for all of us but it’s very important for me. If I try to follow a method I feel constrained but if I deviate from it that’s another reason to beat myself up (at least, it used to be. I AM working on that!).

Whatever you do, however imperfectly, if you take some time out to reflect on the past year and think about what you’d like to see happen in the year ahead, you’ll be an exception to the rule. Most people don’t do that, they just careen forward through life. So, be exceptional. And do it as a kindness to yourself.

Another Cup Of Coffee

One thing that hasn’t changed since last year is ‘leaders’ saying stupid things about work. Our old favourite Goldman Sachs is back in the spotlight as it withdraws the free coffee it provided in the lobby of it’s Wall Street headquarters when it called workers back to the office after COVID. What has prompted such an unbelievable mean-spirited start to the year (they make about $50bn a year profit after substantial growth during the pandemic)?

Well, last month the Dinosaur-in-Chief David Solomon announced there would be layoffs in the first half of January, so it seems the top brass feel the fear of losing their job is all the incentive workers need to come to the office now. (They are going to sack 4,000 ‘low performers’ - about 8% of the workforce - no doubt selected through some ludicrous stack-ranking process).

This is very much a power move, now GS bossed feel the balance has moved back in their favour. They also say they are ‘pretty much’ back to pre-pandemic working, which seems a rather odd boast for a company to make. I wonder if their failure to embrace the new ways of working is in any way related to their stuttering performance now they have coerced everyone back to the office full time?

Revolution

As I said above, I’ve tried various methods for thinking of the future and where I want to be. It’s something I return to periodically, not just at this time of year, and I have various bits of paper stuck on my office wall to keep certain thoughts and ideas in front of mind.

There’s a couple of A4 sheets that I suppose I produced after some long-forgotten exercise that have been there a while. They say the following;

“I want to inspire people to stand up for themselves, create a world that meets their needs, to make their own rules and follow their own path.

The impact I want to have is to shift people’s perceptions of what is possible, for themselves and the organisations they work for and with.

I want to foment a bit of a revolution.”

They are still there because every time they catch my eye, I read them through and think “Yep, that still holds.” I tried rephrasing them but haven’t been able to improve on what I wrote in the moment, which tends to suggest it came from within.

Although, given where we are today, the last line seems a little lacking in ambition. Maybe I should take ‘a bit of’ out of it. What do you think?

Listen

Well, I was going to talk about why managers are struggling with adopting new work practices but that’ll have to wait until next week.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about your experiences at work, your horror stories, your challenges and anything else you feel like sharing. DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com . I’d love to have a chat!

Happy New Year !!!