Psychology – Page 20 – Achilles & Aristotle

Avoid Big Egos in Small Numbers

A recent if obvious discovery (all the best ones are), is the very worst things in working life happen behind closed doors, in small numbers. Here’s some verse, to keep reminding me of that.

Avoid closed doors
Between rocks and hard places.
Unreasonable wants
And impossible asks
Come together in confined spaces

The acceptable is found
Not by arm-wrestling,
Shutting down or going to ground.
But by careful crowd-sourcing
And sharing the love around.

When being pressed to do something you don’t think is right, won’t work or will go wrong, it often feels like it would be worse in the company of others. But I’m finding if you can get others in, get it out and let the task hang in the air a moment – very often, the reasonable middle ground prevails.

The art is to fight the instinct to defend, avoid or close down. When bad things look likely to happen, it pays to ensure there are others in the room. Sometimes it seems, the more egos the better.

So my new motto is: ‘avoid big egos in small numbers’, one-to-one being the very worst format of all. Share the love around.

Life, Psychology, Work

Cheerfulness

Hard yards at the moment. Much ado at work and plenty on at home. But the top tip of this week comes from the Royal Navy – cheerfulness counts.

From the Battle of Trafalgar to the present day, Britain’s Royal Navy has run on cheerfulness.

Nobody follows a pessimist. And grumpiness ain’t attractive. However hard, keeping your chin up cheers everyone up.

So despite the temptation not to, I’m keeping smiling. Life’s too short. Cheerfulness counts : )

Life, Poetry, Psychology

Irrelevant Complexity 1) – Odd Jobs

‘Relevant complexity’ is my theory of everything: satisfaction and joy arise from the pursuit of complex, worthwhile and comparatively challenging pursuits.

Art history, particle physics, the raising of children, the preparation and enjoyment of good food etc etc – all relevantly complex.

You need to learn, improve, occasionally triumph – and sometimes feel you actually know almost nothing – to achieve the satisfaction of mastering relevant complexity with a good degree of skill.

Then there are hobbies. Same effect Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ – as one become adept or expert but some risks: becoming a bore or solitary obsessive. I have achieved ‘flow’ by hoovering well, even cleaning a fridge. But these are not monuments to my life’s work or relevantly complex pursuits I’d want defining who I am.

What’s in? An eclectic and erratic list: cooking, relevant; gardening, chore. Writing, relevant; drawing embarrassment. Cleaning the fish tank, chore (and only tolerable if I’m left to do it properly) odd jobs, drilling and hanging things source of great irritation and angst. Why?

Because it’s hard to get odd jobs right. Our walls are rubbish, you only ever do a thing once – so you make maximum mistakes, never get the chance to practice what you’ve learned. And the smallest thing can take disproportionate time for a disappointing effect; which then stares down at you in reproach for years. Aaargh. Irrelevant complexity.

My latest botched odd job stares down at me here:

Curtain derailed
DIY failed
Drooping drapes
In awkward shapes
Lots of screws
And hacksaw blades
Variety of fixings
Wobbling and fiddling
Scarcely blocking the sky
Humble pie.

But every cloud has a silver lining. After three separate wasted days on and off up ladders, with hacksaws, at the DIY shop, I definitively gave up in a huff on our lounge curtains.

Then a miracle intervened. My beloved took to the ladders, took up the drill and made it all hang together. Perhaps she found it satisfying enough that she might become Oddjob now… Fingers crossed.

Achilles, Children, Death, Life, Odysseus, Psychology

Dead Mum or Dinosaurs

I was debating with a friend yesterday whether he should feel any more concerned by the beliefs and values of his dead mum as the behaviours of dinosaurs. Both belong to the past; we live in the present. And soon we’ll be down with the dinosaurs – extinct.

We were on the topic of ‘self limiting beliefs’ – ideas we carry around which help us ignore reality or choose not to tackle the big questions in life. And the big question we were discussing was: how much to save for old age and how much to spend in the middle years.

I’m persuading him (especially if he’s reading this) that save, save, save and worry, worry worry are to be finally and fully vanquished. (Paradoxical that, as I bow to no man in my capacity to worry about the future). But he’s just about ‘home free’ financially and just ain’t rational to keep on saving when your days are numbered.

Just because your folks were thrifty until their last breath, doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Life is for living. We’ll all be dead before we want and it behoves us to get on and enjoy ourselves if we can afford to.

I’ve often worried much more about the years to come than the ones I’m living. So I’m with the dinosaurs, get munching those leaves and worry less about the meteor.

Psychology, Science

Brain Cocktail

Shaken but not stirred, I spotted this fascinating diagram yesterday. It describes moods, mental states and conditions in test tube form.

So which comes first – the chemical state or the state of mind? Are we in love or just hydrogen bonded. Are we low or just low on the right hormones.

It’s complex chemistry – but it is chemistry. The brain is a wet sugary computer – but that I think is why it’s so different from silicon chips and solid state physics. Hormones diffuse and dissipate they don’t switch on and off.

Computers are yes/no. Brains are a constantly changing cocktail of ‘maybe’.