21st Century Schizoid Man
I’ve been ‘in therapy’ for nearly a year now.
It’s been a great help. The reason for starting it was that my anxiety, which I thought I had dealt with and got under control, spiked again and to an alarming level. I had to do something about it and I’d pretty much tried everything else.
Well, that was the immediate reason. The real reason was what I had experienced at work, what had happened to me in my corporate career.
Of course, it wasn’t just that. There were some events in personal life that I had found difficult but I would probably have worked my way through those if work had been OK. If work had been a neutral presence in my life.
But it wasn’t. It was a negative force, draining me of energy, reducing my resilience, depleting my resources. Like it is for rather too many people.
So when life came along and threw a few obstacles in my way, as it inevitably does from time to time, I had very little to draw upon and deal with them. They made me stumble and they blocked my path.
A large part of the problem was that, at that time, I was in denial about the damage that work was doing to me. I thought that work being stressful was normal. That the constant pressure to do more with less was just how business was. That the bullying was just a fact of business life. That was just part of the deal.
Work’s supposed to be hard, isn’t it? That’s was the story I told myself. I just had to toughen up, pull up my big boy pants, stop whinging and get on with. Behind this were some confused ideas about being ‘tough’ and ‘resilient’, about not wanting to be seen as weak or to look like I thought myself ‘special’ in some way.
Well, that was a BIG mistake. Instead of acknowledging and accepting what had happened to me and dealing with it by getting the support I needed, I ignored it. Then I pretended it wasn’t that bad. Then I told myself that it actually was quite bad but I could get it fixed. So I did a bit of CBT, some mindfulness, I had some coaching and then I ploughed on (a strategy that had got me through some challenges in the past but was well past it’s sell-by date).
This desire to play it down, to try and skate over it, is, I think, all too common. Especially amongst men of my generation. I mean, we didn’t have to fight in a war or deal with rationing or work down a pit, what were we complaining about?
Even now, I feel the need to qualify my story, to stress how it’s not an unusual tale, that others have a worse time, that I’m not after pity. All that gets in way of facing up to what’s happened and dealing with it. Even now, some part of me feels that this talk about therapy is a bit wanky and makes me sound precious and a bit up myself. Even as I acknowledge the benefits, I resist.
So what changed? A conversation with someone who had been through real trauma who said they thought I might be suffering with Post Traumatic Stress.
My immediate reaction was “No, what? Me? Don’t be silly! PTS? No! It was just a bit of a bumpy ride, a bit of buffeting from life. I’m not one of those people who can’t cope, I’m not one of those people who need help.” (It sounds even more ridiculous now I’ve got it down in print!).
But that was fleeting, because I knew I wasn’t coping and I knew that I did need help. Deep down, I knew I there were wounds from my experience that needed treating. That’s why I was having the conversation. PTS sounds pretty dramatic but she wasn’t the first person to tell me I had been through a traumatic period in my life and I knew I was still struggling to get past it. I might rail against the label but it I had to admit that it did kind of sound like I had chronic stress that had started when I had some traumatic episodes.
Even then, I didn’t go and get help - but I did consider it. To be honest, it had already been on my mind, I thought I probably should have had therapy ages and go and that some of the coaches I worked with should have suggested it to me. But I rationalised that I was past that stage and I didn’t need it now.
Fortunately, not all of our intelligence is in our intellectual mind. I had persuaded myself out of it but my body knew differently. If I still wasn’t listening, then it would have to send a stronger signal. ‘Here, let’s see if some off the scale anxiety attacks get his attention’
Yep, that did it.
So here we are. Finally.
It didn’t need to take this long to get around to addressing the damage that was done to me at work.
But then, it didn’t need to happen in the first place.
So why am I telling you about this?
We need to recognise that the modern workplace can be a hazardous environment. Just because we wear normal clothes, sit in comfortable surroundings and look at screens most of the time, we assume we are not at risk. We think we can’t get harmed. It’s a false sense of security.
So when we do get damaged (as, evidentially, many of us do), we don’t recognise the true extent of the damage, we don’t see the real depths of the wounds. We underplay it and so we don’t get the appropriate treatment. We stick a plaster on a gunshot wound and wonder why we don’t seem to get better.
The first step to solving any problem is to recognise you have a problem. The second is to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Because you can’t run away from reality forever.
If I had my time over again, I would have started therapy when I left corporate. Actually, I would have started it when I got made redundant for the second time because I knew then I was depressed.
You see, asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength and a healthy outlook. We are all on our own unique journey through life but none of us can travel alone, we need the support and compassion of our fellow travellers.
Danger Zone
I’m writing about this because I think it is important that we talk about trauma and how we deal with it, even more so after the collective trauma of the pandemic. We are encouraged to push past it, to ‘get back to normal’, to downplay its significance. This is actually counter-productive and can be very limiting, even dangerous.
We also associate the workplace as a place of relative safety because of the lack of physical risk. However, I think it’s time to reappraise it and recognise the psycho-social hazards that are very real and increasing. For all the talk about psychological safety, there’s not much of it about.
Work can be traumatising, in a number of different ways. Some are obvious, like being made redundant or having a ‘Psycho boss’. Others are more subtle, like the chronic stress of overwork, the threat of sudden reorganisation, a toxic culture.
It’s not always one event, either. Whilst I certainly had traumatic experiences at work, it was the cumulative effect that was really debilitating. As I’ve already said, when I experienced trauma in my personal life, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Put denial or, at best, fleeting acknowledgement before ploughing on as before, on top and it’s not surprising I got into trouble. Trauma doesn’t go away because you ignore it, it gets more intense.
Besides, trauma doesn’t have to be dramatic or obviously significant. We all respond differently to situations, what I am able to move past quickly might bring you to your knees. We’re not in a Misery Olympics here, the point is to find healing. It’s about what you feel inside, not how you are regarded outside.
I suggest we need to start thinking of the workplace as a potentially dangerous place, and that our careers are likely to expose us to trauma and prepare ourselves for that.
In some ways I think the fact that 6 out of 10 people (9 out of ten in the UK) are disengaged at work shows that employees are already going down this path. People know that the workplace is not a safe space, that there can be damaging effects and so they disassociate as a protection mechanism. That’s not an optimal response, in my view, but it is the one most easily at hand.
The system makes good people do bad things, and people get hurt as a result. Taking yourself out of harm’s way is a natural response but I think we can do better. That’s what the “Corporate Survival Guide” is going to be about.
Mistaken Identity
I started reading ‘The Regenerative Business’ by Carol Sanford and was impressed. “This is what I’ve been saying!”, I thought, “although properly structured and better written …”. Clearly, I was aligned with the content.
Imagine my surprise, then, when it began quoting Elon Musk. That was NOT a name I was expecting in this context. Bill Gates, who jointly delivered the presentation at DAVOS WEF 2107 that was referred, yes. But Musk?
Well, I suppose every ‘evolves’ right? Although we think of evolution as a linear progression, there are actually lots of branches that lead to nothing and end in failure, which maybe explains Musk … but I digress.
The reason for my surprise is that, and I doubt this comes as a shock to you, I do not consider Musk to be a good employer. Actually, I’d go further than that, I think he’s an exemplar of some of the worst aspects of the Silicon Valley Tech Bro type of leader. Anyway, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so let’s see what he said.
Musk (and Gates) are pointing to the need for all companies to develop ’workers with the critical-thinking skills, technical agility, motivation and independence needed by the emerging economy’. I mean, it’s hard to argue with that, isn’t it?
Sanford also opens Chapter 3 with the following quote from Musk:
“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. With analogy, we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. With first principles, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”
Again, it seems a pretty sound approach. You can see that at Tesla and SpaceX, where simply building incrementally on what had already been done couldn’t lead to the sort of breakthrough that they were aiming for. You can’t deal with the limitations of the existing paradigm from within the existing paradigm (which is why I get so heated when people talk about organisations ‘installing to a new Operating System’ because it is still the thinking of the ‘machine’ paradigm).
All this suggest a level of intellectual rigour and rationality that I approve of. So what’s gone wrong with Musk at Twitter?
Well, two things.
The first is that we are seeing Musk as he really is, not the carefully crafted image that was not subject to overmuch scrutiny until now. He has been unmasked and the tragedy, or perhaps the comedy, is that he has unmasked himself. On Twitter mostly. Ironic doesn’t really cover it.
The other problem is that he has fundamentally misunderstood the context he is operating in. He thought he had bought a software business that runs a social media platform. What he has actually bought is a social media company that runs on a software platform.
The first deals in complications. Like Tesla and SpaceX, it can be fiendishly complicated but it is a defined problem space. So he will probably be able to build his ‘everything app’. It’s just engineering, at the end of the day.
The second deals in complexity. The problems are wicked, the solutions emergent and evolving. So even if he builds his ‘everything app’, he probably won’t be able to persuade us to buy it because he has shattered his reputation and destroyed trust in the process of burying Twitter.
And he’s still a shitty employer, a narcissist with an ego you can see from space and an aspiring ‘super villain’. He’s not the new Steve Jobs, he’s Tony Stark without the emotional intelligence and introspection.
Besides, ‘X’ is a bloody stupid name for anything. Let alone everything.
Someone To Talk To
I often invite you to get in touch and I’ve had some great conversations with those who have. I’d love to hear from more of you, especially if this week’s missive has touched you, if you’ve got some ideas about what I should put in the ‘Corporate Survival Guide’ or if you would like to see if I can help you in any way. If you just fancy a chat, that’s cool too!
DM me on LinkedIN, email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com, or book a slot at https://calendly.com/colin-newlyn/30min
I look forward to hearing from you!
Thanks for the honest piece Colin.
Chat booked, thanks for the offer, always enjoy reading your perspectives on work.