Roz Savage's Blog, page 14

I recently read a book by Margaret Wheatley, called Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. If this isn’t an uncertain time, I don’t know what is, so I thought I would share some of MW’s thoughts. If these resonate with you, I recommend the book in its entirety. She shares many wonderful (and faintly Buddhist-flavoured) insights into hope, surrender, and the beauty of shared human endeavour.

 

The New Story is Ours to Tell

For a long time, possibly inspired by Isaac Newton, we have had an image of human society as a machine, and we have mostly focused on creating better-functioning machines.

“And we give this image such hegemony over our lives because it seems our only hope for combating life’s cyclical nature, our one hope of escape from life’s incessant demands for creation and destruction. When we created this story of complete dominion over matter, we also brought in control’s unwelcome partner, fear. Once we are intent on controlling something, we feel afraid when we meet with resistance. Since nothing is as controllable as we hope, we soon become entangled in a cycle of exerting control, failing to control, exerting harsher control, failing again, panicking… I would like to characterise the new story as a tale of life. Setting aside our machine glasses, we can observe a world that exhibits life’s ebullient creativity and life’s great need for other life. We observe a world where creative self-expression and embracing systems of relationships are the organising energies, where there is no such thing as an independent individual, and no need for a leader to take on as much responsibility for us as we’ve demanded in the past…”

So MW is endorsing a way where we let go of our white-knuckled death-grip on fate, and relax into the trust that life is not out to get us. In all honesty, our ability to control life is limited (as COVID has reminded us) and we can either fight that reality, or accept it with grace and work with it.

MW endorses self-organising systems, analogous to what we see all around us in nature. Nature has no CEO determining its strategy, nor deciding what species gets “promoted” and which is “fired”. It is a beautifully messy, chaotic, but ultimately intelligent system that has done an amazing job of evolving without anybody taking charge.

This kind of organisation is:

Adaptive
Flexible
Self-renewing
Resilient
Learning
Intelligent

… attributes found only in living systems.

[Self-organising systems “have the capacity to create for themselves the aspects of organisation that we thought leaders had to provide. Self-organising systems create structures and pathways, networks of communication, values and meaning, behaviours and norms. In essence, they do for themselves most of what we believed we had to do for them. Rather than thinking of organisation as an imposed structure, plan, design, or role, it is clear that in life, organisation arises from the interactions and needs of individuals who have decided to come together.”

The human desires that lead people to organise – to find more meaning in life, to bring more good into the world, to serve others – come from this new story of self-organisation.

“Life seeks organisation, but it uses messes to get there. Organisation is a process, not a structure.”

This process of organising involves:

Developing relationships from a shared sense of purpose
Exchanging and creating information
Learning constantly
Paying attention to the results of our efforts
Coadapting
Coevolving
Developing wisdom as we learn
Staying clear about our purpose
Being alert to changes from all directions

In this new story, we discover a world where life gives birth to itself using two powerful (but sometimes contradictory) forces:

the need to be free to create one’s self
the need to reach out for relationships with others.

“In human nature, we struggle with the tension between these two forces. But in nature, successful examples of this paradox abound and reveal surprising treasures of insight. It is possible to create resilient and adaptive communities that welcome our diversity as well as our membership.”

To create communities that thrive in the paradox, ask these questions:

What called us together?
What did we believe was possible together that was not possible alone?
What did we hope to bring forth by linking with others?

And this requires a new kind of leadership:

“Leaders who live in the new story help us understand ourselves differently by the way they lead. They trust our humanness; they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us. They trust that we can create wisely and well, that we seek the best interests of our organisation and our community, that we want to bring more good into the world.”

In other words, they don’t try to bribe us with job titles or financial rewards, which ultimately lead to disengagement, envy, and bitterness. (See Barry Schwartz’s short but powerfully insightful book, Why We Work.)

There are 3 conditions of self-organising organisations:

Identity: the sense-making capacity of the organisation. An organisation with a coherent centre is able to sustain itself through turbulence because of its clarity about who it is. To return to natural analogy, no species tries to be another – apart from maybe the occasional family dog that wants to be a human (see The Art of Racing in the Rain – a charming story, written (obviously) by a human pretending to be a dog who wants to be a human – hmmm, charming, but how very anthropocentric.)
Information: the medium of the organisation. Only when information belongs to everyone can people organise rapidly and effectively around shifts.
Relationships: the pathways of organisation. Who is available, what do they know, and how can they reach each other?

We recognise that no one person or leaders has the answer, that we need everybody’s creativity to find our way through this strange new world.

Goodbye, Command and Control

“Amid all the evidence that our world is radically changing, we retreat to what has worked in the past. These days, leaders respond to increasing uncertainty by defaulting to command and control… we don’t need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone’s intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.”

Leaders need to:

foster experimentation and tolerate “failure” so long as it leads to learning
help create connections across the organisation
feed the system with information from multiple sources
help everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be

When Change is Out of Our Control

Strategies that used to work, don’t (see my post on The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire), and organisations often sacrifice the leader who “failed” rather than examine the system as a whole. There is a danger that people who have honed their skills to predict the future have been rewarded well for them, but their expertise blinds them to what is happening in the present.

The Great Paradox is that it is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be:

“The best way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust each other. If we can rely on one another, we can cope with almost anything. Without each other, we retreat into fear.”

This reminds me very much of the Statement of the Hopi Elders, which carries great wisdom for these times, and which MW has also written about, in Perseverance, the only book I took with me on my boat.

Life is uncertain: “The reason we don’t like life is that it behaves like life.”

Life is cyclical: David Whyte: “If you think life is always improving, you’re going to miss half of it.”

We can choose to resist, or to embrace the gifts of confusion:

“Knowledge is born in chaotic processes that take time. The irony of this principle is that it demands two things we don’t have – a tolerance for messy, nonlinear processes, and time. But creativity is only available when we become confused and overwhelmed, when we get so frustrated that we admit we don’t know. And then, miraculous, a perfect insight appears, suddenly… Great insights never appear at the end of a series of incremental steps. Nor can they be commanded to appear on schedule, no matter how desperately we need them. They present themselves only after a lot of work that culminates in so much frustration that we surrender. Only then are we humble enough and tired enough to open ourselves to entirely new solutions.”

Old-school as they may sound, metrics are important, but they have to be the right kind of metrics:

“Measurement is critical – but only when it provides feedback. All life thrives on feedback and dies without it. We have to know what is going on around us, how our actions impact others, how the environment is changing, how we’re changing. If we don’t have access to this kind of information, we can’t adapt or grow.”

Feedback (yin, right-brain)
Measurement (yang, left-brain)


Context-dependent
One size fits all


Self-determined. The system chooses what to notice.
Imposed. Criteria are established externally.


Information is accepted from anywhere
Information is put in fixed categories


The system creates its own meaning
Meaning is predetermined


Newness, surprise are essential
Predictability and routine are valued


Focus is on adaptability and growth
Focus is on stability and control


Meaning evolves
Meaning remains static


The system co-adapts with its environment
The system adapts to the measure

MW offers some useful questions (reminiscent of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize winning work on the management of the commons):

Who gets to create the measures? Generated by those doing the work. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know the most about what is significant to measure.

How will we measure our measures? How do we keep our measures useful and current? How will we know when they are obsolete? How will we check for unintended consequences?

Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? How do they invite in, and encourage, freshness and surprise?

Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to grow the purpose of this organisation? Will this information help us grown in the right direction? Will they help us achieve our purpose?

What measures will inform us about critical capacities: accountability, learning, teamwork, quality, innovation? How can we measure these without destroying them? What ways of measuring support the relationships that give rise to these behaviours?

The real capacity of an organisation arises when colleagues willingly struggle together in a common work that they find meaningful.

The New Leadership

“I strongly believe that the old leadership paradigm has failed us and that our current systems will continue to unravel. This has changed what I do and whom I choose to support. I no longer spend any time trying to fix or repair the old or to improve old leadership methods. I spend all of my time now supporting those giving birth to the new, those pioneering with new approaches to organising and leading. In communities all over the world, many brave pioneers are experimenting with new approaches for resolving the most difficult societal problems. These new leaders have abandoned traditional practices of hierarchy, power, and bureaucracy. They believe in people’s innate creativity and caring. They know that most people can be awakened to be active in determining what goes on in their communities and organisations. They practice consistent innovation and courage – wherever they see a problem, they also see possibility. They figure out how to respond. If one response doesn’t work, they try another. They naturally think in terms of interconnectedness, following problems wherever they lead, addressing multiple cause rather than single symptoms. They think in terms of complex global systems yet also work locally.”

Surrendering to Uncertainty

The many perils of information overload in the modern world include not only dogma, but also intellectual fragility:

“Gradually we become more certain but less informed… in a changing world, certainty doesn’t give us stability; it actually creates more chaos… I believe that this changing world requires much less certainty and far more curiosity. I’m not suggesting we let go of our beliefs, only that we become curious about what someone else believes. As we open ourselves to the disturbing differences, sometimes we discover that another’s way of interpreting the world actually is essential to our survival.”

Rudolf Bahro: “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”

MW advocates the idea of groundlessness in the Buddhist sense, of stopping seeking solid ground to stand on:

“Hopelessness is not the opposite of hope. Fear is. Hope and fear are inescapable partners. Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear – fear of failing, fear of loss. Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating.”

This reminds me of Pema Chodron, in her wonderful book, When Things Fall Apart:

“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon Hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Everyday in everyway, I’m getting better and better.” We hold onto hope and it robs us of the present moment. If hope and fear are two different sides of the same coin, so are hopelessness and confidence. If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation… Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, not to run away, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on. If we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.”

Ultimately, we have to accept that our fate is unknown, and unknowable, and our destination is in fact less important than the way we conduct ourselves on the journey there. As Thomas Merton wrote:

“Do not depend on the hope of results… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself… you gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people… in the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

 

Other Stuff:

I was delighted recently to be the inaugural guest on a new podcast from Germany, Ein Pod Kaffee (although obviously we recorded it in English – my O-level German was nowhere near up to the task!). The podcast and the related article are here: How To Find True Meaning For Yourself.

I was also interviewed by John McCarthy, the former Beirut hostage, for the BBC World Service: Solitude: Reflections on Faith in a Global Crisis. The producer was kind enough to suggest I should have my own radio show, and is putting it to the powers-that-be at the Beeb, but I’m guessing Auntie Beeb, like everybody else, isn’t hiring at the moment. But wouldn’t that be amazing?!

Oh, and please remember to buy my new book, or if you’ve already bought it, please buy another copy for a friend! 

And finally, following on from last week’s quest-fest, I have some more questions, this time of a more metaphysical nature:

We don’t know what the outcome of the COVID crisis will be. How can I sit with that yin-unknowing?

Is that the task of these times, to live with a kind of Schrödinger-style quantum indecision as to what the future holds?

Is it up to us to decide whether the cat lives or dies, depending on how we choose to respond to this situation, or how we measure it? We’ve been enculturated to behave like particles, but is this our opportunity to become waves?

What are we choosing to measure, observe, pay attention to?

What kind of awareness do we choose to bring to this – left-brain reductionist or right-brain holistic?

Is this really about the virus? Or is the virus pointing to something bigger we need to address?

As lockdown starts to lift, we enter into the (I hope literally) post-mortem stage of coronavirus. This stage will probably go on for a long time, as long-term impacts gradually reveal themselves. For now, there are relatively few answers, but lots of questions, and I wanted to jot down these questions before we move too far out of this liminal space and back into something that passes for normal – however deeply changed that “normal” may be.

This has been such an unusual few months that it may be hard to imagine our way back into it once it’s over. There are, for sure, lessons to be learned. So before we hurtle back into our pre-COVID busy-ness, I hope we will pause for just a moment longer to make time for a global debrief on what we can learn. We could just keep blundering on, convinced of our own rightness, or we could – and I believe, should – do some profound soul-searching around issues of social justice, healthcare, economic (in)equality, leadership, crisis response, and geopolitical governance.

Let’s make sure that the hardship suffered by so many – physical, emotional and financial – has not been in vain.

In no particular order, here are my questions so far. If you have others to add, please do so in the comments.

 

Post-COVID Questions

In some countries, surveillance was used to great effect to contain the spread of the virus. How much surveillance is desirable? Justifiable? Can surveillance be limited to positive uses and not subject to negative abuses?

How can we take an Upstream approach? What were the root causes of COVID-19? Humans expanding into animal habitats? Intensity of human population? Amount of air travel? All of the above? What else?

What has been best practice during the outbreak? South Korea? Singapore? Is it possible to create a one-size-fits-all best international response?

Conversely, what has been worst practice? Many died in India when people only had 4 hours’ notice of lockdown, and many migrant workers died on their way back to their villages. How to avoid these humanitarian disasters?

What will the next global crisis be? It may not be a pandemic, but for sure there will be something – possibly climate change related. How can we be prepared?

How can humanity collectively be better prepared for future crises? Do we need coordinated global scenario planning? How can we reconcile the global best interest with issues over national sovereignty?

What did we learn that we can do without? Business travel? So much shopping?

What did we learn that we love? Clear skies? Less traffic congestion? Our neighbours? Hugs?

How can we build more resilient supply chains? Do we need more local food production? More local manufacturing? More cottage industries?

How can we build capacity in our healthcare systems? More hospital beds, especially ICU?

What other systems have been under pressure recently? Fire fighters for wildfires, for example? How can we ensure they have the resources they need?

How was the global economy impacted? And what sectors of humanity were worst hit by those impacts? How can we make the system better able to withstand shocks? How can we better distribute the impacts, and/or reduce impacts on the most vulnerable?

How did people react? What human traits became more evident, both positive and negative? What can we do with that information to help us respond with greater dignity and public spirit in the future?

What industry sectors were most needed? Were they adequately resourced, in terms of numbers of staff and quantities of essential equipment? How can we improve that situation in the future?

What industry sectors were hardest hit? What countries? What demographics? What socioeconomic groups? How can we support those people, both in the immediate aftermath, and in the longer-term future?

Knowledge workers were generally less hard hit than workers in industries requiring physical personal contact. Is it an unavoidable fact that some sectors will always be harder hit, or are there ways we can improve resilience both at an individual and a societal level? Would it help to expand internet access to the 4 billion people who still don’t have it?

Are there economically viable ways to improve financial security across the board? Could a version of Universal Basic Income be an answer? Complementary currencies? At least worth more experiments?

What styles of political leadership did we see across the world during the crisis – not just national leadership, but also city mayors, county and state leadership? What leadership strategies worked best? Which failed? Thinking beyond pandemics, what leadership qualities are likely to work best in an uncertain future? (Ah, I’ve just written a doctoral dissertation about that!)

What flaws in our social structures did the pandemic highlight – political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental? What can we learn from this experience? How can we address those flaws?

What strengths in our social structures did the pandemic highlight? How can we reinforce and reward those strengths?

What are the dangers as the world emerges from the pandemic? What short-term, possibly necessary, tactical measures would be undesirable as permanent features?

How will society and human interactions have changed? How can we measure the impacts, positive and negative? What might people want to pay attention to in order to avoid a “social isolation hangover”?

If COVID-19 was a mirror, what did we as humanity see in that mirror that we can learn from?

 

Individual

And some questions that we may want to take some alone-time to ponder…

When faced with our own mortality, what became clear to us?

If we felt fear, what were we most afraid of? What does that tell us about ourselves? How can we build resilience so as to mitigate that fear?

What did we learn about what really matters? When faced with an existential threat, what things seemed most important?

In my new book, The Gifts of Solitude, there is a lovely chapter about honouring this opportunity to take some time out of the everyday busy-ness, and make time for thinking, staring into space, and generally enjoy being rather than doing.

The irony was that I was utterly failing to take my own advice.

So now I am.

See you next week.

“Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavours to lead man to himself.

Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait…

Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism.”

– Herman Hesse

 

What would you think if a total stranger came up to you on the street and said, “I love you!”? I suppose your answer might somewhat depend on whether they were cute or not, but even if you very much wanted to believe that their declaration was true, you might think that they had mistaken you for somebody else, and/or they were delusional and should probably be locked up.

You probably wouldn’t believe that they love you, because they don’t know the first thing about you. They might lust after you, and want to get to know you better, but any love they imagine they feel for you is likely to be groundless and shallow.

Where am I going with this? We’re told we should respect and love ourselves if we want to be happy, and this is good advice, but first we have to know ourselves. If our respect and love isn’t grounded in self-knowledge, it’s just ego and puffery. Muhammad Ali used to claim to be “the greatest”, and he actually was, at least for a while. I’m sure we can all think of people who lay claim to being the greatest at what they do, but based on self-delusion rather than self-awareness.

The Persona is Not the Person

Speaking for myself, it took me a long time to get to know myself, and to appreciate myself for who I am, while accepting who I am not. Starting in childhood, most of us develop a public persona, which is an amalgam of the traits and behaviours that seem to win approval and make us popular. Over time, we observe how people respond to our words and actions, and modify our persona accordingly.

In children this is called socialisation, which is defined as “the process whereby an individual learns to adjust to a group (or society) and behave in a manner approved by the group (or society)”, or “a process with the help of which a living organism is changed into a social being… it is a process through which the younger generation learns the adult role which it has to play subsequently.”

Socialisation is generally regarded as a good thing, and an important by-product of the education system. We’ve probably all met someone who, for whatever reason – possibly being on the autistic spectrum, or just a natural rebel – hasn’t fully embraced socialisation, and they can be rather unpredictable and challenging to be around for us more conventional folks.

But at what point does socialisation become people-pleasing? When does fitting in tip over into losing ourselves? When do we start to mistake our persona for our true self?

 

What follows is an excerpt from my new book, The Gifts of Solitude, which came out on 20th April. As you will know if you’ve read my last few posts, I was inspired to write this book by the coronavirus crisis, and hearing that many people were struggling with feelings of fear, isolation, and loneliness. I spent up to five months completely alone when I was rowing solo across oceans, so I feel I am well qualified to offer some coping strategies – and above and beyond that, I also offer pointers to the beautiful gifts that come when we learn to be at ease in our own company.

The first half of the book is about surviving solitude, and is aimed at those who might feel they are drowning. The second half of the book is for those who already have their heads above water, and want to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as an accelerant to greater sense of purpose, emotional maturity and self-reliance.

The Amazon link (valid across all Amazon sites) is http://mybook.to/TheGiftsofSolitude. Please purchase, enjoy, and share the love! I would be most grateful if you can help to spread the word. If you’re on social media, here are some shareable posts to make this easy for you. Simply click on the link and share to your own channel. 

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Instagram

YouTube

Right, on with the blog post…

But Who Am I?

I have definitely been through this uncomfortable realisation that my socialised self had usurped the place of me, to the extent that I didn’t know who I was any more. All looked fine from the outside, but on the inside I became aware of a tiny, timid little voice that was crying for help. “I’m in here! Help meeeee! Let me out!” And I realised that I was going to have to integrate both my seen and unseen selves if I was going to be able to truly love and respect myself.

I can highly recommend spending over a hundred days at sea, alone in a rowboat, as a golden opportunity to get to know yourself. Self-isolation due to a pandemic also really works. In fact, any solo situation – a retreat, a long walk, traveling alone – is a chance to leave behind the socialised persona and get to know yourself better.

I realise this sounds like an immense amount of work, and possibly not very much fun. So why should you bother? Three main reasons.

First, as Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, said:

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

Thompson may not be your ideal role model – his dying wishes expressed that, after his suicide, his friend Johnny Depp should arrange for his ashes to be fired out of a cannon, so he was definitely out there at the quirky end of the spectrum – but on this matter I believe he was correct.

Second, a bit later on in this book I’m going to come to the importance of having a purpose, as it’s enormously helpful in getting through any kind of hardship, including isolation. To find a purpose that really lights your fire, you need to know who you are, and find something that meshes with your unique gifts and passions. If you don’t know yourself, you’re likely to end up trying to live somebody else’s purpose, which won’t work nearly so well.

Third, speaking personally, I have been exponentially happier since I figured out who I am and what makes me tick. That’s not to say that I’m attached to the current version of me – indeed, I hope I will always be evolving and changing, or I would get very bored with myself – but I have a much greater sense of my own power and agency since I started being wholeheartedly me, rather than trying to be somebody else.

When I didn’t know who I was, I felt like I was trying to be several different people at once, and they were all pulling in different directions. Imagine a cart with six horses, and all the horses have a different idea about where they want to go. At best, the cart will be stuck at a standstill in the middle. At worst, it will get pulled apart. Neither scenario is good. Gradually I got all my horses heading in the same direction, and suddenly we were galloping off to the races at high speed. The ride is exhilarating, and I’m loving it.

Whoever you are, you have something totally unique to offer. All your accumulated experiences, desires, ideas – even the way you see the world – are not replicated, nor replicable, in anybody else in the whole world. If you don’t know who you are, it’s going to be an uphill battle trying to find your place and your purpose. It’s all a matter of knowing who you are, and once you’ve done that, you it will become clear where you fit in, and where you will thrive.

To Ponder

Where do you feel out of integrity with yourself? When you think of your various social situations – family, friends, work, community – do you notice any tension between who you feel yourself to be, and the face you present? Do you ever pretend to enjoy things that you don’t actually like?

If money was no object, what would you love to do with your time? Can you find a way to make a living out of that? (For heaven’s sake, if PewDiePie can make $12 million out of making videos of himself playing video games, isn’t there at least a chance that you can make enough to live on out of doing something rather more constructive?) What did you want to be when you were a child? Did you really have to give up on that dream, or can you rekindle it?

If you’re worried that people might not like you when you drop your socialised persona in favour of being you, please don’t. The integrity and energy that you generate when you become yourself are incredibly charismatic. When you are happy in your own skin, you become radiant and luminous, and people will be drawn to you.

Have you ever felt like the pace of life is simply too much? Like you need some time out, just to catch up with yourself?

During this time of coronavirus and lockdown, it might be that one of the gifts you find is that time to get caught up. If so, I celebrate with you your sense of accomplishment and achievement.

Or, alternatively, it might be that this time has revealed that those tasks that had been hanging over you weren’t so important after all, when put into the context of global disruption and significant numbers of deaths.

Either way, I hope you have found a way to simplify, tidy up, and otherwise reduce your psychic overload, which has become an increasingly widespread and problematic aspect of human life over the course of the last few decades.

 

What follows is an excerpt from my new book, The Gifts of Solitude, which came out last Monday. As you will know if you’ve read my last few posts, I was inspired to write this book by the coronavirus crisis, and hearing that many people were struggling with feelings of fear, isolation, and loneliness. I spent up to five months completely alone when I was rowing solo across oceans, so I feel I am well qualified to offer some coping strategies – and above and beyond that, I also offer pointers to the beautiful gifts that come when we learn to be at ease in our own company.

The first half of the book is about surviving solitude, and is aimed at those who might feel they are drowning. The second half of the book is for those who already have their heads above water, and want to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as an accelerant to greater sense of purpose, emotional maturity and self-reliance.

The Amazon link (valid across all Amazon sites) is http://mybook.to/TheGiftsofSolitude. Please purchase, enjoy, and share the love! I would be most grateful if you can help to spread the word. If you’re on social media, here are some shareable posts to make this easy for you. Simply click on the link and share to your own channel. 

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Instagram

YouTube

 

Right, on with the blog post…

Dunbar’s Number

For most of human history, life was relatively simple. We would interact mostly with the people from our family and our village. According to the British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, each of us can comfortably maintain around one hundred and fifty stable social relationships, a social circle in which we know who each person is, and how they relate to the other people in our group.

Yet now how many people do you try to keep tabs on, when you include family, friends, colleagues, and all the people you “know” through media and social media?

At the same time as having all these people in our orbits, we are also being bombarded with nonstop information. Scientists reckoned that in 2011 we were taking in (or at least, are subjected to) five times as much information as in 1986 – the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. I don’t know about you, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it.

Bigger Input, Smaller Brain

In fact, on some level, it is making our heads hurt. It’s our neurons that are having to do all the heavy lifting to process all this information, and they get tired. Literally. They are living cells with their own little metabolic system, requiring glucose and oxygen (cue reminder of the first suggestion in this book: breathe!), so they don’t have infinite capacity – they can only do so much, depending on how much blood sugar and oxygen is available. Too often, the important and subtle gets crowded out by the trivial and in-your-face.

With our attention being a finite resource, in everyday life we often feel like we’re playing catch-up. We don’t even have the capacity to step back and get strategic about where we want to put our attention, because we’re too busy fire-fighting our way through the trivia.

Sadly, our brains haven’t evolved to keep up with the onslaught of information. Actually, I hate to break it to you, but there is evidence that the human brain has shrunk around ten per cent over the last five thousand years, probably because we require a smaller range of sensory perceptions now that we’re no longer hunter-gatherers, who lived or died by their senses. So our attentional deficit situation certainly isn’t getting any better.

So if you’ve ever wished you could step off the world for a while to get caught up with yourself, a time of solitude, enforced or otherwise, is a wonderful opportunity to slow down and get some perspective, to recalibrate, and decide what is really important to you.

Where Does the Time Go?

When you think back over the last year or so of your life, do you ever wonder where the time went? Possibly you don’t – you’re prioritising the things that are important to you, and investing your limited time and attention exactly where you want to.

Or maybe you’re human, like the rest of us.

I want to emphasise, I am absolutely not saying that we should all try to be super-productive, all of the time. I can’t stand productivity gurus reminding me that there are 10,080 minutes in a week, as if to waste a single one of them is a crime against humanity. Doing very little is a valuable activity in itself. Effectiveness is more important than efficiency, and effectiveness needs room to breathe.

I also believe – passionately – that we all need time to meander. Life can be about setting a goal and heading straight for it, like an arrow towards a target, but in my experience, that’s not all that much fun. Often we need to try out things that might seem random, but if our heart calls us to do them, there is probably treasure waiting for us there.

What I am saying is that it’s good to get to choose. If we’re always reacting to what’s being thrown at us from all directions – demands on our time, intellect, attention – we never get onto the front foot and decide how we want to spend our time, time that we can’t get back.

A pandemic is a good reminder that we may not have all the time in the world. Time is precious, our one non-renewable resource, and we never know how much we have. How do you want to use yours?

To Ponder

When you look back over the last year, how do you feel about how you spent your time? Did you spend it on the things that really matter to you? Are there some things that you could just as easily have skipped?

I have a list of questions called “Before I Say Yes”. The theory is that I have to answer in the affirmative to at least three of the following before I agree to do something, including the last one. I don’t always follow the theory, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good one.

Is it necessary?
Will it bring greater good to my life or the planet?
Will it fail to happen without my participation?
Do I really want to do it?
Do I have the time?

If you knew you had just one year to live, what would your top priorities be? How do they compare with the way you’re spending your time now? What really matters to you? How can you make sure that you don’t have any regrets when you find that your time is just about gone?

 

I hope you are doing well in these strange times. Wishing you good health, happiness, and the gifts of solitude.

 

To my wonderful community of readers – I am delighted to announce that my new book, The Gifts of Solitude, is now available for purchase on Amazon sites globally, as an ebook and paperback.

As you will know if you’ve read my last few posts, I was inspired to write this book by the coronavirus crisis, and hearing that many people were struggling with feelings of fear, isolation, and loneliness. I spent up to five months completely alone when I was rowing solo across oceans, so I feel I am well qualified to offer some coping strategies – and above and beyond that, I also offer pointers to the beautiful gifts that come when we learn to be at ease in our own company.

The first half of the book is about surviving solitude, and is aimed at those who might feel they are drowning. The second half of the book is for those who already have their heads above water, and want to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as an accelerant to greater sense of purpose, emotional maturity and self-reliance.

The Amazon link (valid across all Amazon sites) is http://mybook.to/TheGiftsofSolitude. There is a temporary problem with the link between the ebook and the paperback, so until that is resolved, there is a separate link for the paperback: http://mybook.to/TheGiftsofSolitudePB.

I am really eager for this book to reach the people who can benefit – that was the whole point of writing it. So I’d like to ask you if you can help me spread the word far and wide so we can reach everybody who needs emotional support at this time.

Of course, I would be delighted for you to buy the book ($3.49/£2.81 for the ebook, $8.99/£6.99 for the paperback. In case you aren’t aware, you don’t need a Kindle to read the ebook – you can install the Kindle app on your smartphone or on your computer).

And then, to spread the word, here are some ways you can help – anything you can do would be much appreciated:

Write a review on Amazon

Buy multiple copies and send them as gifts (instructions for ebooks here or for paperbacks here  – please note that ebooks can only be sent within your own Amazon region)

Spread the word on social media. Posts ready for sharing are at:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Instagram

If you have a book club, suggest this as your next book

If you have a podcast, or know someone who does, forward them this link or newsletter and suggest me as a guest

And I’m open to other suggestions – I just want to get this book out there to anyone who needs it!

Thank you in advance for helping to spread the word. You will see in the book that I interview Steve Cole, PhD, a behavioural scientist at UCLA, who has demonstrated that acts of generosity and connection have a hugely beneficial impact not only on our emotional health, but on our physical health at the cellular, epigenetic level, increasing our longevity and boosting our immune resistance to – get this – viruses.

So by sharing this book around, you are helping others, but also doing yourself a power of good – literally! 

My video announcing publication, and offering some snippets from the book:

 

 

 

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Exciting news! Last night I hit the “Publish” button on Amazon to launch The Gifts of Solitude into the world. Like all new Amazon ebooks, it is currently being quality reviewed, and should go live within 72 hours. I’ll send out a newsletter with the links as soon as it is available. 

Meanwhile, here is another excerpt…

“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” – Muhammad Ali

There is a question generally attributed to the British after the World War II: “Did you have a good war?”

While war, like pandemics, can never be said to be good, the question’s meaning was more like, “Did you manage to make the best of a bad situation?”

When I was on my rowboat, the days felt very long. Even a single rowing shift seemed to go on forever, and the tedium could be almost unbearable. I was absolutely desperate to get to the other side, but the more impatient I got, the slower the time seemed to go.

I never doubted that I would get to the other side, but at times I didn’t know how I would get there without driving myself insane. I would get thoroughly sick of myself, bored to tears with my repetitive thoughts, and feel like I wanted to be able to crawl out of my own skull and be somebody else, somewhere else, for just one day — or even just one hour — of relief from myself.

The Present Bias

Here we run into another cognitive bias, the present bias. It is usually demonstrated in an economic context, as the preference most people have for a smaller financial reward now, compared with a larger financial reward later. Another way of describing it is instant gratification, and our entire developed world and economy have evolved to give us what we want, as soon as we want it (ideally before we realise we didn’t actually need it at all). Some entrepreneurs may take time to build a company slowly and carefully, but many are dreaming of the buyout before they’ve even registered the domain name.

We used to operate on longer timescales. If our ancestors wanted blackberries (the fruit, not the smartphone), no matter how desperately they wanted them, they had to wait for blackberry season. If they wanted a house, they had to build it. If they wanted a woolly sweater, they had to shear, and spin, and knit.

We’ve got so used to getting what we want, when we want it, that we’re worse than we’ve ever been at deferring gratification. During this pandemic, it has been interesting to be reminded that reality doesn’t always conform to our wishes. It might be frustrating to be forced to wait, or not to be able to buy what we want, or to have to postpone pleasures and plans.

But some things are worth waiting for.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Fun To Be Fun

A wise friend, a solo sailor called Adrian Flanagan, helped me reframe my situation, from one of frustration to one of fulfilment. He sent me a message…

There’s more! This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Gifts of Solitude.

If you want to know what words of wisdom Adrian had to offer,  I would be most grateful if you would go to the full article on Medium.com, which will earn me a few cents in these financially challenging times. I believe the algorithm gauges the number of people who read it, and for how many minutes, so please read slowly!

Please also check out the new videos and podcasts at the Gifts of Solitude website. 

In this day and age, across much of the developed world, we are bombarded by phenomenal amounts of input; here in the UK we’re exposed to around three and a half thousand marketing messages each day, trying to persuade us to want all kinds of things we didn’t know we needed, plus TV, radio, newspapers, books, and conversation. There are words everywhere.

On the ocean it is very different. There was very little input, and almost none of it is verbal. When there aren’t as many words coming in, you find that you start paying a lot more attention to the voices inside your own head — which is a mixed blessing. If you ever have a desire to get to know your inner demons, I can highly recommend spending over a hundred days confined to a rowboat with no stereo, and for the last twenty-four days, no satellite phone.

It might sound a bit weird talking about voices in your head, but we all have them — it’s not a sign of mental illness. So the first thing to do is to acknowledge their existence, to know that it’s normal to sometimes feel conflicted. It often feels as if there are two different viewpoints fighting for domination inside your skull.

But like all of our internal issues, the best way to handle them is to turn around and shine a bright light on them. When you don’t look squarely at something but only glimpse it out of the corner of your eye, it’s easy to imagine that it’s much bigger and scarier than it actually is. Picture the Wizard of Oz hiding behind his curtain. Once you pull back the curtain you find that your big scary demon is just a silly little man producing special effects deliberately to scare people.

Why the Brain Loves to be Negative

Our brains have an overwhelming preference for focusing on the negative, at the expense of the positive — and that goes for our internal reality as well as what is happening around us.

The reason we’re like this is easy to understand. This negativity bias is an evolutionary survival mechanism — way back when, we didn’t need to think about the ninety-nine percent of things that were good and safe and fine. We needed to focus on the one percent that could go very wrong, like the sabre-toothed tiger that was heading our way. The brain’s perception of reality has not evolved for accuracy — it has evolved for survival. We still have this tendency to focus on the problem — if we get nine positive pieces of feedback and one negative one, it’s the negative one that sticks in our mind. Sounds familiar?

As Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, puts it, those who are “more attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased the probability of passing along their genes. Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes but less urgent with regard to good ones.”

I found it got worse when I was under stress. These voices in my head, or the unruly crew of my internal ship, as I thought of them, would react to my stress like they’d had six cans of Red Bull. They would start running around like madmen.

You know the drill by now….!

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Gifts of Solitude. I would be most grateful if you would go to the full article on Medium.com, which will earn me a few cents in these financially challenging times. I believe the algorithm gauges the number of people who read it, and for how many minutes, so please read slowly!

Please also check out the new videos and podcasts at the Gifts of Solitude website. I made a video of myself talking about being your own best friend – here – and audio only here. 

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” — Carl Jung

Steve Cole, PhD., is a Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry and Biobehavioural Sciences in the UCLA School of Medicine. (And no, that’s not him in the photo.) We are due to talk over Zoom, although he has warned me that his bandwidth in California is probably worse than Tenzin Palmo’s at her nunnery in North India.

As it turns out, our only technical glitch is entirely of my making. Unusually, I had turned off the sound on my laptop with the intention of writing uninterrupted, and forgot to turn it on again for our call. So I logged onto my Zoom room, saw nobody else there so figured Steve was still getting online, so wandered over to another window to do email, expecting to hear Zoom ping when he checked in. At four minutes past the hour, I was getting concerned, so checked my messages — to find an email saying he could see me, but I didn’t seem to be able to hear him.

If there is one thing worse than being unwittingly watched, it is being unwittingly watched by a behavioural scientist.

Anyhow, onwards.

Steve goes on to be a wonderful interviewee, with a charming way of agreeing emphatically with things I say, which makes me feel as if I’m smart. He is obviously passionate about his subject, speaking in well-formed sentences, which makes my job of writing up our conversation exponentially easier. (I’ve edited only for length in what follows.)

He is looking relaxed in a white t-shirt under a dark blue fleece, with neat salt-and-pepper facial hair that is more than stubble but less than a beard, and becoming more salt and less pepper. He has kind eyes behind light-framed glasses, and seems like the kind of guy you could probably enjoy a beer with. I picture the countless research subjects that must have been through his lab, and imagine that he would always treat them with respect and empathy.

I had come across his work in a Guardian article reporting the UK’s appointment of a Minister for Loneliness. The article briefly described his research into the impacts of chronic loneliness on our health at the epigenetic level. We are born with fixed DNA, but how that DNA is translated into our physiological reality depends on a variety of environmental factors, including our emotional state. It also mentioned his finding that adverse impacts can be alleviated by embracing a sense of purpose.

This idea immediately resonated with me, as I doubted I could have endured the solitude of my ocean voyages if I hadn’t been driven by the sense that I was on some kind of mission. I had already been working on the theory, for my book on The Gifts of Solitude, that feeling connected to a greater purpose could help alleviate hardship of all kinds, so I definitely wanted to learn more.

What does Purpose have to do with Loneliness?

RS: Your work seems to fall into two distinct chunks — one on loneliness, and one on purpose, but there also seems to be considerable overlap between the two. Is that how you would conceptualise it?

SC: Yes, absolutely. Originally, we had thought of them as two different things, but what we’re learning when we look at loneliness is that it’s very hard to tackle loneliness head-on, particularly chronic loneliness, which is the toxic version. Transient loneliness really doesn’t have enough temporal scope to damage our health that much, but people who live loneliness as a lifestyle, as a worldview, as a way of being for years and years and years, that’s when the health toll really gets high. So it turns out a lot of that kind of chronic loneliness comes from a perception that you just can’t trust other human beings, and as you might imagine, it’s very difficult to therapeutically talk people out of not trusting other human beings — by saying, “Hey! Don’t be lonely, you loser!”

RS: It’s a bit like saying, “Be happy!”

SC: Yes, absolutely. Completely unproductive. So a lot of us have been thinking about whether there another kind of more oblique attack on loneliness. And the one oblique attack that really seems to work is to take the attention of a lonely person off themself and their own suffering, and get their attention onto something else and somebody else. Often those external causes are goals that you can’t necessarily achieve alone. So, many times, the most effective attack on loneliness is getting people together around some kind of shared ideal or aspiration, in which case they can learn that there are some other people who see the world the way they do, that value what they value, and that they can trust to partner in some sort of meta-organismic activity, coming together as a community and trying to get stuff done. Getting people together around shared purpose and value turns out to be a great way of tackling loneliness.

RS: That makes perfect sense, because throughout most of human history, that is what people did — come together to do things together that would benefit everybody. So people shouldn’t be worried that a short term lockdown is going to do them damage at the epigenetic level?

Ahhh, you know what I’m going to say now, don’t you?! 

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Gifts of Solitude. I would be most grateful if you would go to the full article on Medium.com, which will earn me a few cents in these financially challenging times. If you follow this “friend link“, you don’t have to pay to read it. I believe the algorithm gauges the number of people who read it, and for how many minutes, so please read slowly!

Thank you so much to all those who have already signed up to Medium to help support me. Today I got an email telling me I have so far earned the princely sum of £4.08 – woohoo! It would buy me a coffee… if the coffee shops were open! 

Please also check out the new videos and podcasts at the Gifts of Solitude website. The audio of my conversation with Steve Cole is available here. Enjoy! 

And thank you.