Archive for year: 2020

As we emerge from lockdown we are like hibernating animals waking from a long winters sleep into the blinding light of a spring day. For many of us, in the hibernation of lockdown, we have forgotten who we are, what we do and how we function. We have forgotten how to be useful.

Many of the people that I have been talking to over the last three or four months do not want the world to return to how it was before lockdown. What does this really mean?

Time

Many have had the realisation that they have been working too hard. For some there is the realisation that they can now work differently. They do not have to spend hours travelling to meetings struggling through traffic and other people’s bad tempers. They can now do it all online from the comfort of their home office. We seem to be developing an appreciation of and understanding of time and how we use it.

Stress

So many people have said how they feel much more relaxed while at the same time doing the same amount of work from home. Some have said they have been even more productive yet don’t feel the same level of stress that they did when they were going into the workplace.

Connection with colleagues

Some are saying that they need to touch base with colleagues, that there are times when they need to see people in real life, not just on a screen. However this usually comes with the caveat, “not everyday of the week. Maybe one or two”. It seems that a lot of us now like working from home and event prefer it to going into the workplace.

Family

A great many report feeling that their family relationships have improved. Even in crazy situations when both parents are working from home and attempting home schooling at the same time. People are telling me that they feel closer as families and that this is something that they would like to continue.

Pollution

The realisation of pollution and our effect on it has come as people are seeing clearer skies and brighter colours. The move towards bikes rather than cars and the new experiments with scooters would suggest that we are all becoming more aware.

How to be useful

So, how can we be useful in this new post lockdown world? I guess that number one is ensuring that we don’t create another wave, through inappropriate behaviours and flouting the rules about social distancing. But if you now have time or are needing to change your work situation how can you be useful to yourself and to others?

What will your work look like from now onwards?

Before I started writing this I was online with someone who has been told that they will not be able to return to work before January 2021. Luckily they will continue to be paid a furloughed wage but cannot perform any of their roles from home. They have time to fill.

So if you, like so many, have time on your hands what can you do with it? Who can you help?

Helping yourself

While some people have been jumping around to Joe Wicks and keeping fit many have put on the pounds and become more sedentary. Helping yourself out of lock down might include getting off your butt and moving your body. Walk, run, join an outside exercise class or boot camp, do some online workouts, do some home weights.

Next is your diet. We know that eating carbs makes us feel good because the brain responds by secreting more serotonin, the happy hormone. Many have been overdoing the chocolate, biscuits and crisps and now we have the issue of the takeaways opening up again. Then there is the booze. Alcohol consumption in the UK has spiked in lockdown, plenty of calories there. Time for some booze free days during the week, helps with both the weight and the exercise regime. Perhaps now is the time to dust off the bike in the shed and get peddling.

Helping others helping ourselves

One thing that has been highlighted in lockdown is the number of people who live alone and have therefore not see anyone for months. Who is there around you that would benefit from a chat or an offer to do the shopping?

If you do have time on your hands what about the charities that have been starved of resources during lockdown? How many could benefit from your help and your time?

What about the community that we live in? Have you noticed that there has been no body cutting grass verges or the weeds that are growing in the gutters or at the bottom of walls? It wouldn’t take much to nip out with a mower or cutter and tidy it all up.

Have you noticed the amount of rubbish building up in the streets? As council staff have been furloughed it has tended to be left to mount up. Well a few minutes with a bin bag would really help.

The next step

Over all if we look at what is happening and what will be happening we do have choices. We can choose how we work, how we live and the state of ourselves and the places that we life. There needs to be a fundamental shift and if we stop waiting for or expecting that other people will make ‘it’ right for us and we take the responsibility for making it right. I know that many people feel let down by government and the systems over all right across the world. We have choices, we do not need to be victims, we can get involved we can create change.

So, what do you want to happen next? What are prepared to do about it?

Maybe nows the time to sit down and have a think about it?

Take care

Sean x

This week I posted this question on Facebook ‘If a liar believes what they say are they lying?’and got some very interesting responses. If you have ever had to deal with a liar you may well have a very strong point of view. The word ‘liar’ is an interesting one.

We have what are known as ‘little white lies’ when we avoid telling somebody something that we know might hurt them or distress them. Most of us, at some point, will have varied reality to help another person. Perhaps you child has just failed at an exam, sports event or a performance and so we may play it down and tell them how wonderful they have been. In these cases we bend the truth a little to make the other person feel better.

Only we can decide if our feedback to others is based in honesty or a doctored version of the truth that verges on being a lie.

Many people will use a version of the truth to further their cause. We see this everyday in politics. Currently with Covid we have examples of this everyday. The classic has been over the testing, when we later discover that figures were a convenient version of the truth so that the test figure included all those test that had been sent out not those that had been completed and a swob of a persons nose and mouth counts as two tests, and so on. Politics is full of what Winston Churchill referred to as ‘lies, damn lies and statistics. He was also reprimanded by the speaker for calling an MP a liar. He apologised and changed the wording from liar to a ‘terminological inexactitude’. I have known many people who have been otherwise known as liars.

Lying moves from these, what I might call good lies, to those that are deliberately and directly negative bad lies. These may be used to con you out of your money, get you into bed, or make you do something that you never intended or wanted to do. If I tell you a lie about a mutual friend telling you that they had said bad things about you or had done bad things to you it could understandably wreck your relationship with them. I have seen these types of things happen in the workplace when someone is attempting to get promotion and they lie and stand on their colleagues emotionally to achieve what they want.

So, here we have two distinctions in lying. The first is if the lie is to avoid hurting other peoples feelings or making a situation worse. This can happen at a funeral when the person in the box takes on the status of a saint and everyone says nice things about them when this may differ from how we knew them in life, who would it serve to “tell our truth”

Then we have the lies that are designed for the liar to get some advantage which could be money, position, status, power and so on.

Then we get into the world of psychology and mental health. A pathological liar is someone who lies compulsively. This is the result of an inner illness, syndrome, condition or even physical damage.

If someone suffering with Tourettes, who is disinhibited, may not be able to stop telling you that you have a massive big nose. In a sense they are being completely honest. The person who does not have Tourettes and is not disinhibited may also see that you have a massive big nose but does not say anything. Does that make them a liar?

Many psychiatric disorders can lead to someone always telling the truth, say what you see, to the point of offensiveness, others may appear to manufacture lies. Often these lies are not manufactured they are simply that person’s interpretation of events.

Anyone who has collected witness statements will tell you that a group of people experiencing the same events will tell different stories. None of them are lying it is just that they see the world from different points of view and are each telling their own truth they are not lying. When I was child and a Nun told me that smoking was a good thing and it helped distressed men relax and calm down she was not thinking of cancer or COPD.

If the engineers who put the cladding on high rise buildings, that we now know is flammable, if they did not know it was a fire risk they were acting honestly and not involved in any lies. Could we say the same for the manufacturer and the safety officers?

When a couple are getting divorced would we say that they were lying when they made promises to each other in the marriage ceremony  – until death do us part?

It would seem to me that unless you are being reckless and attempting to outwit others by not telling them the truth to take advantage of them, then the moving sands of time can change the way that we see the world. All we can do is to be honest to ourself in the present moment. Later we may realise that what we thought or believed was the truth was in fact a lie or not true. We then have a choice as what we can put right or not.

My hope is that most people are fairly straight and would seek to tell the truth. I do accept that there will always be the purveyors of terminological inexactitudes around us and maybe even leading us. Our job is to be aware enough to know the difference between the good lies, the bad lies, the psychiatric disorders and the truth. Though in the end my truth will simply be the way that I see it at that time.

Hey ho, aren’t human beings complicated?

Take care and be discerning

Sean x

 

Us Brits are not good at blowing our own trumpet. We have real problems in understanding the difference between positive self belief, which is really self love, and arrogance or being up your own backside. Now, I think this is really sad because self belief is essential for so many things in life. 

Self Belief vs arrogance

There is a very simple way to understand this. People that have arrogance do not actually have positive self belief they are looking to you to tell them that they are ok. Imagine this scenario. There is a party, a gathering of people to celebrate an event or simply a social occasion, you get the idea. There are two people that are a little different to all the rest. One is sat quietly in the corner having a meaningful conversation with someone else. The other, makes a grand entrance that is loud, demanding attention and, getting it. Which one is the most confident and has the most self belief and which once feels small and insignificant?

Well, people that make lots of noise, who are larger than life and, demand attention are those that need other people to tell them that they are ok. They need the attention to give them value and to convince them 0f their self worth. The person who is quietly getting on with life in the corner has self belief within them. Their value comes from the inside out, they do not need anyone else to tell them that they are ok.

Belief to me is not solid. Belief has that faith element that is found in religion. Confidence on the other hand suggest the solidity of knowledge, of knowing. Very often self confidence developer through experience. When we are confident we might not know how to do something but we have the confidence to know that we can work it out. This ability to problem solve is creativity in action.

Often those that seem to be confident and full of self belief are actually not. Those of us that need to make lots of money, to obtain expensive possessions, to be rich and famous are often those that feel the least for themselves and actually lack self belief. We often make the mistake of believing the opposite. We may see the material trappings as an expression of success and self belief. Often they are saying ‘please pay me attention and tell me that I am okay’. Those that are genuinely confident about who they are do not need to make great shows for others to applaud. They can be happy just being themselves.

People with self belief can deal with it when things go wrong or they make mistakes. To have positive self awareness of your skills, qualities and to be open to accept your failings and, to have the awareness to be getting better at being a human being equals positive self belief. 

What do we teach our children?

We, as a society, whether we are parents or not, have a responsibility to teach the children around us to have value in ‘who they are’ and not in ‘what they have’. In a materialistic society it is easy to mistake possessions for personal value and real self belief. So many programmes on TV from “the house wives of…” wherever to “Big Brother” often show us the worst kind of people, with the worst moral and ethical values assuming a sense of self importance and self belief.

There are times in our society when we need to be aware of how we are seen/experienced. I can rarely attend a business meeting in shorts and a tee shirt I need to be in a suit to be seen as credible by my peers. This kind of fancy dress is playing a societal game which, for me, is ok as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. I am saying that I have the same value as you.

Self belief and confidence comes from within. It is an expression of how we feel about ourself and not about what we have or what we can display to others. If you feel deprived you may need to create more wealth, change your job, adjust you living situation and there is nothing wrong with aspiration. However, it does not matter how many material things you manage to accumulate unless you feel good about you and who you are. With wealth you will only be miserable in comfort.

Time to develop some positive self belief and confidence. Look in the mirror every morning for the next one hundred days and say out loud to yourself “I Love You”. If you can’t do it you have little self belief. But, if you do it for one hundred days it will become a new habit that is inner self belief. Because, guess what, self belief is a habit! None of us popped out of the womb with positive or negative self belief. The way that we feel about who we are is what we have learned to be – maybe time to change?

Be happy and keep looking in the mirror 🙂

Take care

Sean x