Week 2, 2024
What a difference a week makes?!
Both my mum and my father-in-law have shuffled back from death’s door and have returned home from hospital. My father-in-law has a long list of diagnostic test appointments to attend over the coming weeks and months, as well as a weekly anaemia check with his GP so they can spot if it gets worse before they’ve found and treated the cause (assuming they can). My mum is as well as she’s going to get because she’s slowly dying of heart failure; her challenge is to live as comfortably as possible in the time she has left, which isn’t easy when breathing and sleeping are getting progressively difficult. But she’s home, and feeling back to normal, so it’s a win. Naturally I have a load of reflections on my own health challenges, but we can have that conversation a different day.
I wanted to come back from holiday feeling relaxed, refreshed and reinvigorated to get back into work - but found I was anxious about my return. That’s because there were some big challenges for which the question “how are we going to get this done?” had been left unanswered before the Christmas break. Combine fog of returning to work with the fog of new project mobilisation and the fog of discovery, add a dash of overstretched colleagues and undercommunication, and you too can find yourself the proud owner of some fresh mild panic. Fortunately in our place if you share how you’re feeling, folks typically rally round you. And, of course, with all of these types of fog, it dissipates as you move forward. I can see the path forward now, so I’m feeling much lighter.
Thinking about this - my cortisol levels have dropped, so my fight-or-flight response has switched off. This means I’m able to be more optimistic, more open-minded and more creative as a result - which makes it more likely I can solve the problems I encounter because I be able to think strategically and laterally. And the optimism makes a difference. To mangle a Henry Ford quote: “whether you believe this will go well, or go badly, you are right”. I wholeheartedly believe this to be the case - for projects, sure, but also more widely. In my mind optimism is the single biggest influenceable* determinant of my success or failure in most of my endeavours. So I’m going to be thinking and writing a lot about optimism in 2024.
Other reflections:
art class. I’ve started a watercolour tropical fish this week. I found I learn more quickly, and am more confident and disciplined practicing and developing my skills (a) in a group, and (b) with a teacher in the room to answer the occasional question or nudge me when a small change will make a big difference. My takeaway: expert feedback, and sharing the journey with others (for fun, for accountability), is key when you’re trying to learn something new. We know this already - it’s just nice to be reminded.
working in the office. I did Monday and Wednesday this week, normally just do Thursday. They were both great days - I much prefer to kick-off a new project with a client team in person, nothing beats getting round a table with some of your favourite colleagues to get sh*t done, and strolling to Leather Lane food market for lunch is so much better than a slice of toast at my desk. So I want to do more of this. But I need to remember how much it takes out of me - the commute lengthens the day by a couple of hours at least, and as an introvert I find being around people for such long stretches really zapping. Both days, when I finally got home, I just wanted to time alone whilst my kids (who’d missed me) wanted a couple of hours with me before their bedtime. It’s fine - I just need to tweak my energy management to make those sorts of days work.
sustainability of our work. It’s a joy when I come across something I’ve worked on in the past and thought had failed to land, or fizzled out, when actually I’d planted a seed and created the conditions for it to come to fruition a few years later. Or where something didn’t work - but it did work elsewhere because when we work in the open our ideas and ways of working spread. Or because we’d been building in-house capability over the course of the project and when they moved on they applied what they’d learned to other problems in the system. But we do need to plan this in consciously - creating those conditions, sharing widely, building capability - because it’s too easy for the learning, the insight, the approach, the assets, to be lost. That’s when you find a client suffering discovery-itis; or running duplicate research; or finding a consultancy has sold the same model/framework/approach into different parts of their org multiple times. Knowledge management in the public sector is still broken. Working in the open makes it (at least a bit) better.
sharing and snarking. I believe wholeheartedly that people should share publicly their views and opinions and ideas without worrying too much that someone has said it before, or that no-one will be interested, or that it’s too obvious to write about. I wrote a blog post about it. [ https://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/blog/2023/2/4/yeah-buti-dont-really-have-anything-worth-sharing ]. But I need to act more consistently with that belief - which means working hard to avoid doing/saying/writing things that might discourage others from sharing. This week I failed on that - some of my inner snark escaped, I’m usually much better at keeping a lid on it - and I’m sorry.
confidence. I’ve found myself reflecting on this multiple times already this year. I’ve had a few people (friends, colleagues) remark on how much more confident I have appeared recently. Professionally my confidence is what it always has been - but my self-esteem linked to my appearance (for various reasons) has taken a steep dive. Perhaps naive of me, but I hadn’t expected the choice to significantly increase the effort I put into my appearance (to wear make up, change my hair, wear more colourful and flattering clothes, and diversify my shoe collection) to be interpreted as a function of greater confidence when it’s actually me trying to compensate for the opposite. I guess it makes sense though - and it’s proving to have a virtuous circle effect because when someone is treated as if they’re confident, they start to feel that way. Leaning into that as an idea, I decided to do some modelling for a life drawing class on Friday - hoping to try and feel more accepting of my body and more comfortable in my own skin. I was surprisingly at ease having all eyes on me during the modelling itself; but I did feel myself squirming when I caught myself in a mirror, and then again when the other models were up, as their bodies were more Botticelli than Rubens. I’ll definitely do it again.
connecting. My daughters and I are enjoying each others’ company much more this week. Maybe we just needed to get back to school/work? Emily and I found ourselves cooking at the same time last night (me paella, her tofu veggie noodles), and chatted and laughed while we were doing it - she told me she’s winning a challenge from her friends to communicate in Shakespearean prose for a week and it is hilarious, though her teachers finding it less funny. She doesn’t typically share much about her friends or school life with me so it felt special. Reflection here: connection and quality time may happen more organically if we just spend more time in each other’s company - rather than trying to force it with distinct/planned activities labelled “quality time”. Definitely a hypothesis to test there.
Okay, laters gators.
(*I say “influenceable” because my endeavours are situated within the context of patriarchy, capitalism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia/biphobia, ageism, classism, populism, as well as my own past, and my genetics etc).