Northern Planner

How to not waste time as the demands on you grow

Time. It's the only thing you can't buy.

You'll find as you get older, as the work gets higher pressure, there are more demands on it than ever. 

Honestly, it doesn't get any easier and you're no less confused. Its just that when the buck stops with you more, you have no choice but to sort your shit out. 

I thought I was busy until I had kids, now I wish I had done more with all that time as a dawdling flaneur.

Here's how I flail though things these days. 

Create a ritual for mornings. Always know how you'll start the day. You can't control most of your day, but you can control how it starts. Drink water. Get a small win, when you feel good about yourself, you perform better, it could be as simple as making the bed for once. Exercise, it doesn't matter what, just do something, the happy endorphins are better than any drug. Look at what you need to achieve today, decide what must be done by you and what you can delegate.

Work in surges. Do 25 minutes of work, then 5 minutes break. The break helps you maintain focus for more of the day. Of course, if you're on a roll, keep going. 

Which means allowing yourself to Get into the Groove. Know what gets you into your Flow State. Create the conditions for that to happen. Music works for many - sometimes that might mean listening to the same play list every time you want to do Deep Work. I'm better in the mornings, even better straight after exercise, I work with that rather than against. 

Make mundane tasks all or nothing. Do one big shop, plan it. Do one mammoth house clean. Diarise one massive admin session a week.

Say no to meetings without an objective. Meetings suck time. Don't attend any without a defined point to them. 

Check your email less. If people really want you, they'll come talk to you or phone. Social media, even more so. Tell Slack to fuck off. 

Reward yourself. Without a treat, you'll lose the will. Give yourself a couple of hours of time for you if you can. Tired is stupid.

Develop a night ritual. I'm still working on this. For an hour before I go to sleep, ideally,  there are no devices, or screens. Its time to read or talk. Which in turn helps me sleep better. I'll get there. 

Don't beat yourself up. Learn from what is working and what is not. No one is perfect, it takes time to find your own rhythm.

Focus on the hour ahead, not the day. Once you’ve prioritised in the morning, live in the moment.  Take care of the hours and the days will start to take care of themselves. Any challenge is easier when broken down into chunks. 

 

Going Up

Just outside my village there's a very steep little hill, it's an effort to get up there by foot for most.

On the bike, it's murderous. I know I'm some sort of form when I can zip up without gasping for air.

Right now, I am not in form.

So I do it ten times in a row regularly in the hope my legs will begin to remember what they're suppose to be doing. 

It's not for everyone, but you find out about yourself when you climb, there are no hiding places.

Not just how strong you might be, how much of a beating you're prepared to take, how much the mind can master the body. 

Sometimes in life you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail. Climbing teaches you to be the hammer. 

When you get into a rhythm the body works with the mind, not against it, you forget what you're doing, yet you're completely present. 

All sorts of thoughts stuff comes into my head, with a sharp clarity that eludes me at other times. Issues, tensions, challenges, ideas. You are stripped of all the extraneous stuff and its just you laid bare. 

On physical and mental level, lots of questions are asked and answered.

If you don't want to find out, stay at the bottom of hill. 

 

Brakes off

Climbing hills by bike is one thing. Getting down again is something different altogether. 

The same hill I torture myself to get up, is also the slope where I teach myself to not hold on so tight and get down as fast as I can.

Because when you're confident riding a bike at 70kph, there is little else to fear. 

The more you loosen you're grip, the more in control you become.

 

Descending really is frightening. It's just you on a piece of metal, plastic and carbon, with the road underneath you a blur, the wind roaring in your ears, with scant protection except for flimsy lycra and a helmet.

Crashing hurts at the best of times, but when you fall at speed, assuming nothing gets banged up too much, you skid across meters of tarmac and the skin is grated off. 

So for years I was a nervous descender, always jabbing at the brakes, always holding on too tight. This perversely, made me fall off more, which in turn made me more nervous. 

Vicious circle. 

 

Until I decided to do something about it and began to not just climb to the top of my favourite hill with all I had, I started to make myself drop like a stone to bottom. 

I wish it were easier, but the only way to overcome your fear of doing something is to do it again and again. Take it from a nervous presenter, a shy introvert who fears crowds, a typical sufferer of imposter syndrome.

You have to do it, then repeat, then repeat. Then guess what? Repeat. 

 

Descending is an art, you need to let yourself work with the bike, not against it. The mind has to get itself to a point where it no longer fears the experience, solely focused on the task in hand.

You're holding the bars with the lightest of touches, trying to turn the bike with the body and mind, not the wheel.

You have to let go to be in control, alive to every sensation, every piece of feedback the machine and the road send.

The machine isn't the bike. The machine is you and the bike combined.

When you get to the bottom, its like waking up from a dream.

 

This is why descending re-arranges me. You learn to tell the brain to shut the fuck up and focus on the feeling of the wind rushing past, the rhythm of the wheels, the sensations of tarmac on the wheels, a soft focus on the road about twenty metres ahead. 

I suppose you would call it meditation. 

 

One of the hardest things is not looking at the road underneath, the focus needs to be what is in front of you. 

On my hill, the toughest challenge is the two major bends in the road. You can't swoop down in a straight line, you must get around the corners.

I used to brake all the way through both bends.

Then I began to brake just before going into them and then accelerate through, like you're supposed to.

The goal is to not brake at all, not even turning the handle bars, just guiding the bike around with your knee and core. I can do the first bend now, the second still eludes me. That one is close to the bottom and I'm going at nearly 70kph.

Soon. 

 

As with most things, the limit isn't the bike, its not my body. It's the arbitrary limits my brain sets on me. 

You don't descend with a bicycle, you descend with your mind. 

Online dating and loss aversion

I'll be honest, I was never the smoothest operator in my youth when it came to the opposite sex. 

There was the girl who said she liked my hoodie. I replied, "Thanks it's from Gap".

There was the holiday rep in Magaluf, so pretty she made your eyes bleed, who told me this was her last night before flying home. "Lovely, what are you up to when you get back to England?"

There was the wonderful girl at University who, for over a year I thought just wanted to be friends (the women as friends thing is still an excellent way to live your life if your a bloke but it really helps to know which is which). 

Thankfully in my twenties the sheer number of single girls was made the odds, even for someone as useless as I, relatively favourable. 

But now I'm single in my forties and most women are not single. Being without hair, good looks, co-ordination and charisma means the odds are drastically reduced.

If that wasn't enough, to quote Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were, life in indeed was so much simpler then.

Time hasn't rewritten every line, there are no lines to deliver anymore, it's all profiles and selfies. It's online dating. 

It's not like it was in my twenties, when you went to party, had a few to drinks and found yourself talking to someone lovely as if by magic. 

Now you put together some honest, realistic but hopefully decent photos of yourself, write a witty, hopefully memorable profile and then start swiping left or right, in the hope someone else swipes right when you do.

That's only the beginning.

Then you go through days, sometimes weeks of striking up a rapport through messaging. Then, only then, if you get through all, you actually go out on a date.

You may be surprised, I know I am, to learn I've actually been out with a few people.

It would seem that having no hair and odd looks may not put everyone off, if you can spell and write a decent sentence.

Here's one thing I have learned in the process.  The 'E-Person' is rarely the same as the 'IRL' person.

In many cases, it's the pictures. Looks are not everything, however if there is no attraction, there is little point.

So many profiles feature pictures from a few years ago. It's a bit daft, since nothing will kill a date quicker than finding someone looks NOTHING like their online image. It would be okay if they were actually better looking in real life, but strangely, this is rarely the case.

In fact, I think there should be a new dating law where the offender is made to buy as many drinks of their date's choice until beer goggles make then look a little more like the images in their profile.

Looks of course, are only skin deep though. There are larger challenges. 

The first is how we build up a picture of the other person based on what we hope they'll be like, rather than what they are telling us.

They don't tell us of course, an idea emerges from the stream of exchanged messages, but there is still a person forming in the imagination. 

It's natural for us all to ignore the facts that contradict what we want to believe, only focusing on the evidence that fits whatever we would like the person to be.

So you get your hopes up, only to find on when the meeting finally comes that, despite them looking pretty much like their pictures (strong start at least)  they're not what we thought, not what we hoped, because we read too much into what they were saying and ignored the bits that contradicted it. 

Loss aversion is a fundamental part of being human. The longer we have something, the harder it is to let go of it, so sometimes we go to a second, or even third date, simply because we're sure the person online will appear in real life eventually. 

They don't. 

On the other hand, there's the way we can't be true to ourselves online either.

We're not being dishonest, not even trying to show our better selves.

Sometimes, you naturally respond to what the other person is saying, they bring out different sides of you that may not come across in real life because you haven't explored them enough yet. 

Sometimes though, we've created an online persona we truly believe is the real 'me', yet it's more like the person we want to be online, than the person we are. 

So I've met someone far more charismatic and uncompromising in person than she was online, almost as if she subconsciously wanted to turn herself down.

Conversely, I've been on dates with people with a rapier wit online, yet nothing to say in person. 

Of course, it's fair to say despite the fact I'm honest, almost to a fault, I'm sure some people I've met will tell you I'm far more self-assured online than I am in person. Then again, I guess we all are. 

The solution? Simple, don't hang about.

Meet people as soon as you can before the illusion sets in. It's much better to have a few drinks and find there is no spark, than to get attached to an idea that won't happen in real life.

Phone calls work. I never plucked up the courage to ask for a video call, but in a post Zoom world, maybe more will. 

That said, I've met some interesting people who have brought out things in me I'd forgotten about and, in some cases, never knew were there. Others have reminded me what I don't want also.

No matter what happens, meeting different people is good thing. Like most leaps forward in science, coming from teams experimenting for something else, yet finding something they weren't looking for, dating lots of people has really good side effects.

You might not agree this is a good thing but someone reminded me I like writing stuff.

Someone took me wild water swimming.

Someone gave me a whole new perspective on the music industry.

Just because sparks don't fly, it doesn't mean you can't get a lot out of if. 

At the end of the day though, the only way to really meet people is to meet them.

The problem with online dating is, well, its online.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smell the flowers while you can

One of the easiest ways to see if you, or those around you, have changed is to keep to annual rituals.

How we change is rarely sudden, it is so gradual we don't notice it happening right in front of us. Even the big shocks that lead to supposed massive adjustments, in reality they tend to expose what was already there, we just hadn't realised yet. 

It's only when you come back to something that doesn't really change, that you notice you have, or the ones you love.

If you've ever visited your old primary school and found yourself astounded at how small it is, you'll know what I mean. 

The regular things, the yearly Christmas get together, the annual family holiday, this is where the gradual changes suddenly reveal themselves. 

Every August I take the children to St Ives to stay with my parents. This was the first time we'd gone a as three rather than four, yet we still fell back into the usual routine, which mostly consists of endless hours in the sea.

One big thing is the adventures in the biggest waves we dare.  

It's a long time since the ten year old felt the need to hold onto me, he doesn't fear the waves, he attacks them with the confidence of a grown man.

My little girl though. This year I realised the girl is imperceptibly slipping away and the young women is coming. 

Only a year ago, she'd cling to me, so brave yet so reliant. Its quite a thing to feel your own strength as you protect your youngest child from the elemental force of nature to remind yourself what it really means to protect someone. 

This year, we wade in, holding hands. We dive under the the first few like I taught her. Then we're out amongst the large ones. The boy is like a sleek seal in his wetsuit, jumping up and into the bigger ones without hesitation. Like me, he seems more adept in the water than out of it.

I move behind Evie, hold her by the waste, like always, ready to brace her and hoist her up. Yet she wriggles away. "I fine Dad!"

She's furious. I'm not, I'm crushed. I know what this means.

The first big one comes. She dives straight through it, then shoots me he favourite 'told you so' look.

Then the next one flattens her.

No word is said, there's no need. The little hand goes into mine again. That's as far as it goes though. 

Next year it won't be there.  

 

 

Why you should avoid people who say 'When I worked on/at xxx' at all costs

I remember a dreadful time years ago when my boss resigned and my line manager was no longer a Planning Director, it was the Head of Client Services.

Let's be honest. There are two kids of Head Suit.

Either the ones on the way to becoming CEO, with real talent and the annoying skill of being good at everything.

Or the talentless politician who no one knows what to do with, but a couple of clients like too much, so they can't be got ride of.

This was my new boss. It was never going to go well, but even worse, this individual suffered from one of the most dreadful afflictions in marketing.

WhenIworkedonitis.

We've all met them, more often or not a One Hit Wonder that somehow, was in the right place at the right time. They can't help, at every opportunity, telling you to bow to their wisdom, because they worked on some mythical campaign, or for an agency or brand owner at the zenith of their powers. 

Despite the fact they are completely and utterly useless now. Even worse, they're incapable of seeing their flaws. Everything you do get's watered down or rejected as they say, 'But when I worked on xxx we did it like this'. 

Everyone does it to some degree. The amount of creative directors who claim to have worked for John Webster for example, beggars belief.

The people who claim to have worked at HHCL in its heyday, at Mother maybe.

I'll admit to sometimes telling people I worked on ghd when it was good, it's just that I've done some other things since.

Of course, people with experience should be respected. However, having spent a year at a great agency, or pulling off one campaign does not make you an industry titan if that's all you've done. 

The people who say 'when I worked on xxx' tend to have nothing since and have little to offer now.  

The ones who haven't stopped moving forward, embracing difficult and adapting to change. Those are the ones you want to be around.

The ones with 'Wheniworkedonitis'? Run for your life. 

In case you're wondering, the boss in question had worked for Little Chef.

In the 2000s.

Seriously.

That's right, not when this great brand with it's Olympic Breakfasts was a much loved fixture of UK motorways in my childhood.

During the final death rattle when they'd forgotten why the hell they existed. 

Perfection is bollocks and not that attractive

I may have mentioned I can be clumsy. In most cases cases, this isn't very endearing. Not to the date I managed to throw wine over, not to my shins crying out at the bruises gained from walking into things.

I'm the proverbial accident waiting to happen.However, it does have it's plus sides.

There was one of THOSE workshops a while back, on social media stuff, with a group of corporate stakeholders who would rather have been anywhere else. No one was playing ball and it felt like this was going to be three hours of long, slow, tortuous death.

Until I had my first sip of coffee.

Coffee that never went anywhere near my mouth, thanks to a loose lid.  The searing liquid poured all over my clothes, the table, the floor, everywhere.

Obviously it was funny, thankfully everyone helped clean up. 

When we started again, everything changed. The group was engaged, laughing (at my expense) and ready to do work.

What happened? The Pratfall effect.

I didn't do it on purpose, however the evidence is pretty conclusive that making little gaffes makes you more likeable. 

Imperfection wins people over.

Yet scroll through Instagram, put up pictures of most advertising if you can stand it, and you'll see a towering wall of glistening perfection.

It's bollocks. 

Perfection erases humanity, it's boring, it's no fun and it's exhausting.

Now look at this video of what Jennifer Lawrence said, after falling on the way to picking up her Oscar.

 

Watch Casey Neistat dealing with getting a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. Human, funny, real.

 

Look at Jessamyn Stanley

 

Look at my favourite ad ever. Not because it makes you feel something, not because it celebrates the suffering behind true greatness. Enjoy it because it shows that great success if born out of failure. It speaks the truth that not even the best can be the best all the time.

 

On a personal level, it's really liberating to realise that you are enough. I like being 46 and too old to care what people think anymore. That doesn't mean I'm stopping working on myself, in fact, I'm going through lots of changes right now so 'myself' hasn't felt so open in years. Still, nowadays you can take me as you find me. 

When it comes to the day job, for a few years, people have claimed to want less perfection from brands. I don't always buy the 'brand as person' metaphor to be frank, but if you're going to use it, might as well use it properly and admit no one is perfect. I do think real life is far more interesting than the fake one in brand world, because it's messy and full of tension. 

I've written elsewhere how 'brand story' stuff (I know yawn, yawn) is far more than the usual 7 plots. Get into what REALLY works in story telling and you nearly always have flawed characters who can't reconcile their view of themselves/the world, with how things really are. 

Buzz Lightyear doesn't know he's a toy.

Alan Partridge doesn't know he's tragic, he thinks he's a massive talent.

Han Solo can't accept he's really a nice guy.

In my own work, I learned to write bad propositions in creative briefs and litter the rest of the brief with gold. When the creative gangsters write a better one for you, they've thought of it themselves and are on board. You avoid that first review when they show how they've fought tooth and nail to work to their own strategy.

I make little mistakes in presentations, leave out gaps, so when people correct me they're part of it, not being talked at. I put myself into the narrative, imperfect, real me.

I'm not saying throw coffee over yourself, or throw wine at women or men (hot coffee burns). I am saying rejecting perfection is a lot less knackering and leads to better work.

This is, of course, why this blog is littered with typos. I'm actually a pedantic detail freak, I just want you to like me. Honest. 

Most people don't do their best work because they don't say no

Nowadays we live in a world with more distractions and less time than any other era. Ever. 

Yet doing your best work requires focus. You need to be so lost in the task you're not thinking about it anymore. The flow state takes effort, it takes practice. 

The mortal enemies of flow is the smartphone, Zoom calls and 'can I have a sec'. Doing your best work means being ruthless at blocking out distractions and the people who create them.

Multitasking is a skill, but that quantity gets in the way of quality. Multi-taskers bash out a lot of average.

If you've read Deep Work you'll know you need to create three hours a day free of distraction. It's tough, but if you can achieve it. those three hours will be worth eight of the Slack addicts.

They'll be working longer AND their output will be shallow, barely scratching the surface.

Caving in to office gossip, photos on Instagram or some email that could wait, means they won't have the focus to solve difficult problems or hack through average to get to exceptional.

Every distraction takes 22 minutes to recover from, to get back into the momentum you left.

22 minutes.

'Just a sec' is a hell of a lot more than just a sec.

Just three hours of focus. Three hours saying no. That's it. 

Then you can spend the rest of the day saying yes. To gossip, WhatsApp, whatever.

You have time, with added satisfaction of a job well done. 

 

Make a friend of the cold

If you take a daily cold shower, you'll heal your muscles at a quicker rate. It naturally reduces inflammation, which is great news for anyone who exercises a lot of course. 

You really don't need all those supplements if you exercise hard. Massage the soreness out with a foam roller or the thumbs of someone who knows what they're doing and embrace the cold. 

However, if you'll forgive the pun, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It increases the white blood cells count in your body, which in turn boost immunity.

It build alertness. Nothing wakes you up more.

It's a natural anti-depressant/mood enhancer.

So what are you waiting for? Yes, at first it's bloody awful, but then so is your first taste of coffee or alcohol.

Get through your first few, know that the initial pain develops into an addictive rush and you'll be hooked.

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. 

 

You need to believe it first

We can all sense belief a mile off.

We can detect the opposite just as easily.

We often don't know we're doing it, yet it's governs so much of how well we do.

When people meet you, they don't respond to what you're saying, they're judging you on how you say it.

Yet how many of us allow jobsworths to nit-pick over your font in a deck, rather than listen to how you deliver the presentation. No one cares. seriously.

So much of what we communicate has little to do with what we’re saying. 

I don't mean your clothes, your hair or how you look in general either (although its not said often enough, that clothes can change how you feel about yourself, change your internal dialogue rather than rather simply express or conceal it).

If you deliver with confidence and enthusiasm, your are most of the way there.

 

 

Prince's best album and why every man needs a girl who is a friend, not just a girlfriend

If you put a gun to my head and made me pick a favourite album, I'd probably pick Sign 'O' the Times by Prince. As with most music, much of this is to do with who and where I was when it came out.

Thirteen and all over the place. Who isn't at thirteen?

The album’s strength is it’s lack of focus, trying and failing to make sense of the time it was written in, or the person who wrote it.

This is a claustrophobic outpouring of talent from a man working alone, with too much in his head to ever simply bottle.

Or not quite. This is Prince's best album because he had editors too.

A record company made him reduce the album by a third, while his sound engineer was brave enough to tell him no.
How ever good you think you are, don't let your ego get in the way of feedback.

That's not the main point I want to make though.

Some songs, some films, some albums when you experience them for the first time, they immediately connect.

Music especially can engulf you, so you listen to the record over and over until eventually, that thunderclap of inspiration fades and you move on to the next thing.

Every now and then though, while that first rush is never the same again, some  stay with you.
In many ways they get better, changing as you change. 

Sign 'o' the Times is like that for me. Leave it a while, come back and it re-connects in new ways. 

It's why you need a leave your own project for a bit then come back. It's the only way to know if you merely fell in love with your first idea. 

Anyway. This album isn't the same because I'm not. My context is very different. 

Take 'I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man'. It could have been written specifically for online dating for over 45s. 

The crowning glory of the album though, is 'If I Was Your Girlfriend'. I used to love this because it's just so, well, different. 

Now though...

 

It's a song about a man jealous of the relationship the woman he loves has with other women.

Back when most most men didn't even know this was a problem, there Prince was nailing the simple fact that men are pretty crap.

They have relationships side by side, rarely face to face and just don't talk about things the way women do, in fact many still don't know they want to.

For most blokes, it's hard to let your guard down with other men. Even with your partner in some cases.It's all suppressed until it explodes all over your life.

It’s exhausting being strong, “Why can’t we just hang out, go to the movies and cry together?”

Naturally, it should follow that menfolk should get their act together and thankfully, this is happening in places. However, I'm convinced there's an easier solution. More men should be encouraged to make friends with more women.

It won't make you better at pulling, in case you think I’m driving at that. I've been lucky enough to have friends who are girls most of my life and I'm still useless at all that, even for a funny looking man with no hair.

It can make it easier to talk about stuff though, develop your emotional intelligence and get the odd hug.

I'm fine being single but I really miss physical closeness. Obviously you miss sex, but my body craves a more fundamental touch even more. 

It can also makes more able to reject the kind of relationships where, just because you’re a man you have sole responsibility for the big family worries, or expected to put up a shelf, or be the football coach.
Thank God for Me Too, but while it’s long overdue, it’s also time for more males not having to be ‘the man’.

Obviously I wasn't thinking much of this when I was a thirteen, but great pieces of art are like living things, not fixed static things.

They are like people. As you change, they change with you.

Some become nostalgia, which is still a great thing. To reach back and feel twenty again is quite something.

Like those friends from the past, great to see again, wonderful to catch up on old times. Yet you realise there is little else to talk about.

It’s painful to feel that person gone sometimes, especially if you still live with them. 

Yet a precious few reveal more about themselves as your experiences alter who you are.
Sometimes it’s the other way around and they reveal more about you. 

I’m no longer prepared to compromise on one hit wonders. 

Are you in your own way?

Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile it was considered near impossible, but hen athlete after athlete began to break it.

Now its considered routine in elite athletics. Turns out the milestone was in everyone's head. 

In a TV series about Bannister, the actor playing him was an okay runner, when he copied Bannister's running style for filming, he was consistently faster.

He was better when he pretended to be someone else. Put another way, he conned his brain into breaking the limits he set on himself. 

Physical barriers are one thing, the greatest hurdle to leap over tends to be the one in your head.
If you tell yourself you can't do it, you'll almost certainly be right.

But what if you changed the narrative?

You are not a fixed thing, you can hack yourself in all sorts of ways. Good and bad. 

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer did a study on hotel cleaners. They did a healthy chunk of physical exercise every day in their job, but most didn't see their daily grind as working out, they saw it as work.

Amazingly, they all exceeded the daily recommendations for physical exercise, but their bodies didn't seem to benefit from the activity. Body fat, BMI, waist to fat ratios, they were more in line with the amount of exercise these women believed they did, rather than the actual activity. 

Exercise wasn't enough, the mind had to know they were working out. 

They were then divided into two groups. The first shown the calories their daily activity burned, the second were given no information at all. 

In just a month, the group with the information saw body fat, BMI etc, all reduced. The second group stayed exactly same.

The only difference was one group realised they were exercising and the other didn't. Exercising is not enough, you need to believe you are. 

In other words, if you can convince the mind, the body will follow.

If you believe you are exercising, your body will respond. Just as if you believe you're taking a pain killer, you feel less pain even if all you took was a sugar pill.

The implications are far reaching. You can make yourself creative, confident, diligent, who knows, I may convince myself not to be shy one day.

None of us are not fixed, we're not complete, we're not stuck. We just believe we are.

We all have our four minute mile barriers that only exist in our heads.

Many us may be already doing amazing things, we're just not able to see it that way. Just as the cleaners couldn't see their job as a daily workout. 

The mind can be trained, it can be fooled. The trick is to turn it into your friend instead of your foe.

That's quite a liberating thought isn't it?

Letting go of the steering wheel

We all have fundamental human needs. Certainty is maybe the most powerful. A steady job means you know you'll get paid each month, you know you'll make rent. A long term relationship means you know what the other person is likely to say, you'll have your rituals at Christmas, you know you'll be held when it goes wrong (or maybe not).

Another though, is the very opposite. We crave uncertainty, we like not knowing. Sport is a waste of time if you know the result for example. More fundamental, a job may pay the bills yet we have no love for it and wish we were doing something else. At some point we must decide to sacrifice the dreamer inside or give that person a chance.

Just as the steady relationship with no passion or real feeling left provides ballast but doesn't feed your soul. 

You convince yourself of many things, yet eventually there may come a choice here between should and must.

Sometimes that choice is made for you.

 

Crossroads

Martin has collected some data that might depress you, or maybe make you see what we're living through now as a chance to change things.

The British hate change, I suspect and hope that since change is happening we never asked for, we may decide to create the change we want.

Here's to being less "British". 

Stress isn't the enemy unless you allow it to be

It's a hell of a year for all of us isn't it? For myself, I managed to add separating from my wife into the, already pretty wild, gathering storm. I'm still here thankfully.

I won't lie, there were times when it felt pretty overwhelming but I'm lucky that, by and large, I handle stress pretty well, you want me in a tight spot. I'm also fortunate to have friends to talk to. 

The same part of my make-up that meant I always did best times in the bigger swimming races and under-performed in the others, means I it takes a lot before I start going under.

This year has been a lot.

Yet going through all this has only served to teach me what to work on, how to get stronger. The worst times can open all sorts of doors eventually.

So, yes, stress, the demon of our modern age. Or is it?

Stress is certain in life, especially is you want to live a life that isn't lukewarm, this much is obvious.

How we handle it less so. You do have a choice. You could harness it as a tool, or you could let yourself be crushed under its intensity. Seriously, it's not what happens to you, its how you react to it that matters.

The benefits are hard to argue with. The best athletes and performers switch themselves on when the pressure ramps up and find that stress pushes them to do their best work when it matters the most.

Our bodies are designed to recognise danger signals and chemically improve our performance. 

Think of our obsession with that natural stress inducer, coffee. There's a reason so many of us love it.

But the short term benefits of stress can become a living hell if we carry the effects with us for longer than we should. If our natural fight or flight responses are constantly on, we simply can't function.

its like sugar, great for a limited boost, horrible if it’s more than that. 

Chronic stress destroys us unless we learn how to manage it, eating us alive from the inside. 

There are many, many ways to manage stress, here's how I do it.

Mindfulness is the most reliable first step. There are load of apps that can help you with this. You need to learn to recognise that tsunami of stress arriving, actually feel gratitude for the years of evolution that have led to your body trying to protect you. Then learn to control it, or at least ride it out.

The control comes from a mix of training, outlets and support.  These are the things that work for me: 

Reading

Taking walks (seriously the most simple thing in the world, yet so powerful)

Meditation- learn to be able to observe your thoughts rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Spending time with people you care about, without a phone anywhere near you. Hold on to your friends for dear life, have good friends rather than many friends (or many good friends if your really lucky). 

Learn to prioritise.

Exercise - you don't have to be a pain junkie like I am. Just enough to get the endorphins flowing. It doesn't have to be hours, learn HIIT routines and you only need seven minutes a day. 

Finding your flow state -something that you love so much you lose yourself in it and nothing else matters.

Nature - just go near something green. Evidence for the benefits of this are legion. 

Breathing properly, few of us do. 

Finding someone you trust to talk to about anything and everything. ideally more than one, the more perspectives, the better. 

Getting enough sleep (easier said than done, I get it)

Building the courage to say no more often

 

What doesn't work? 

Pretending it's OK

Deciding to man up

Being strong

Bottling it up, not wanting to bother people

Surrounding yourselves with well meaning people who tell you to pull your socks up.

I was brought up to be a stoic. It's bollocks. 

Being British can be a pain in the arse too.  Living in a culture where we don't talk, keep our upper lips stiff and celebrate the Dunkirk Spirit is less than helpful. You might be British, but you are still a human.

Allow yourself to be one, you're enough.

I did some work for a brand on the bullshit culture of celebrating masculine strength, I believed in it, I still do. It takes more strength to be kind and admit your not all powerful. To admit you're wrong, that you need help. 

Not only is perfection impossible, it's bloody boring. Forget living your best life. Live your life, no one else. Did you know that Vloggers are all complaining of burn out? Go figure. 

Strength takes many forms, being vulnerable and admitting your human is probably the hardest, yet most important step you need to take.

So, there you go. You can can be free, control stress rather than it controlling you. 

The choice is yours. 

 

 

 

The joy of doing something well

I did this talk years ago. I'd forgotten about it.

A talk in front of your peers, about what you care about. In three minutes (trust me, condensing it all into three minutes is harder than doing it in 20). 

It's about swimming but it's really about having the courage to do what you love. It's about the intense joy of doing something you love really, really well. Or finding what you're really good at and learning to love it. 

It's about celebrating the potential in everyone.

That's the thing about being a good planner or strategist. You'll do it really well if you truly love it. When it comes to cracking briefs, the trick is to find something you love about what you're helping sell - or perhaps more potently, why the company loves it. Don't believe the marketing folk, talk to the people who make it or do it, find a way to bottle that. 

Enthusiasm is infectious. Logic and precision are not. 

 

Are you up for this?

If there is one I've learned it's this. Don't be a little bit in love. Fully commit. Don't spare yourself. To quote Yoda, do or do not, there is simply no try. 

That's for work and life. Wonderful doesn't come unless you're ready to be hurt. 

I love this song.

 

I think its supposed to be a song about love (I get it that way, believe me).

To me though, it's an eloquent, no, an evocative statement on just giving your all in the full knowledge it might not work, but doing it anyway.

"Cry until you laugh, laugh until you cry.

You look inside yourself, you take the things you like, you try to love the things you took.

You hope you it won't hurt, and even if does, you would just do it all again"

Failure to fully commit is often worse than not starting at all. 

Believe. Obsess. Be totally in, or totally out. Don't be in between. 

Know what you want, what you truly want, then fucking go for it. 

People mock you because they don't understand you, or what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes. most of the time, they fear you.

Seriously, it doesn't matter what people think if you have the courage to prove them wrong. 

If you worry about all the things Instagram tells you, you'll get nowhere. If you follow best practice, you won't make the best. If you do only what is expected of you, you'll please everyone except for yourself. 

What does matter is what you think. Believe you are enough. You are. 

So take yourself seriously. Go all in, fuck it. 

Know your enemy

Creativity, ideas, work that makes you proud. The enemies are legion. To defeat them you need acknowledge they exist first. 

They are:

1. Long deadlines. Nothing sharpens a quill like feeling as if time is running out. Nothing stops decisions like more time. 
2. Short-cuts and impatience. Excellence requires effort, you can't get to wonderful without breaking through OK. 
3. Distractions. You're at your most potent in the Flow state, thinking without thinking. Slack, WhatsApp, 'got a sec?' all get in the way. 
4. Fear. It's easier not to try because failure, rejection, they all sting. The people that really change things have been hurt multiple times, they’ve learned to love the scars of war wounds, still afraid, yet do it anyway because when you’re scared you’re on to something.
5. Chasing popularity. People find new thinking uncomfortable, they hate change, more afraid than you are. Find a way to disagree, but try not to be too disagreeable. I never said this was easy. 
6. Not wanting to judged in case you look stupid. When pour all of yourself into your work, it's not just the work being judged, you are asking for approval of you. Fortune favours the brave. 
7. Setting out to please everyone rather than striking a chord with someone. This a short-cut to the kind of output that doesn't offend anyone because they are utterly indifferent to it.
8. Decisions by committee. The short-cut to getting nothing nothing done of worth.  Be a benign dictator, or a quiet rebel (I'm both, I don’t get that either). 
9. Allowing a culture that sees failure as, well, failure.  You need to embrace failure to know what doesn't work, greatness is much more about the process elimination than the great are willing to tell you. It doesn’t look as grand. 
10. Ego. You are not all powerful, you are good, but until you can accept what your weaknesses are, you can't work on them and find wonderful. Ego means you can't accept feedback - you need someone else someone to tell you where you're going wrong. There is a fine line between this and committee, but I think we're agreeing none of this is easy.  Nothing worthwhile is. 
11. Trying to follow a formula, yours or someone else's. This is short to cut to making the same as everyone else. 
12. Not asking the right questions. The status quo exists because no one questions it enough. 
13. Not asking the hard questions. This is part of fear, we hate asking questions we fear the answer to. The answers can hurt, but at least you know. This goes for far more than work by the way. Be prepared to bleed. 
14. Caring what other people will think. Get the feedback, love the feedback, but make up your own mind. Don't second guess everyone, the toughest committee is the one in your mind. 
15. Did I mention fear?

Are you feeling it?

You can measure your life in many ways.

How much you money you made.

What your legacy might be.

How many friends you made.

But what about how much fun you had? How much you did things that made you feel alive rather than simply existing. 

What about the things that scared you to death, but you did them anyway?

As you get older, you get out the red pen and start to cross out the things that just don't cut it.

What if you only tried to focus on the things that excite you or even scare you a bit?

Things don't get easier when you're older, you just get a little better at hiding how confused you are.

What if you re-embraced the chaos in your work and life again? 

Because if you do only things that make you feel alive, you'll put more into them. 

The chances are, that means you'll do more things you're genuinely proud of.

Which may well mean you get noticed more in work.

In life you'll meet more people who love what you love. 

In work you'll be sought after for more of the things that mean more than a salary, which probably will get you paid more anyway. 

In life, you'll be the same person, but you'll have the thrill of moving forward and feeling less numb in a jaded world. 

In work, because it feels less like work and more like being genuinely alive, you'll always find ways to do it better.

Enthusiasm and passion show in your work, and your life, when you show up with enthusiasm and passion first. 

And I don't care how shy or anxious you say you might be, take it from a shy person, enthusiasm is infectious and breeds confidence. 

We remember how we feel about people things much longer than anything practical about them.

So you should want people to feel something about you and what you do.

Which means doing what makes you feel something in the first place. 

In other words, don't be lukewarm. 

 

Choices, ends, beginnings and finding yourself single at 46

Imagine being on your deathbed and being shown two films. One is the life you had and the other is the life you could have had. How would you feel? Much of what holds us back from the second one is nothing more than the choices we make in a few moments.

The moments we remember the most are the end and the beginnings of things, the choice is sometimes deciding which one it is.

When I was a teenager, there came a time I realised it was time to stop swimming to win and begin just enjoying it. Yet for months I carried on. I was too afraid of what would come after, of the end.

I don't know how secondary school was for you but it was okay for me. There were the usual bullies and anxieties, however it wasn't normal because I was living some sort of double life. Pupil by day and swimmer by night (and very, very early mornings).

When you go through a crisis with people, it brings you closer together and swimming competitively is sustained crisis. The shared pain and suffering, the traveling without your parents, the pressure to win. It bonds you. 

I connected much more with other swimmers than other pupils. My best friends were swimmers, my teenage girlfriends were swimmers. I wasn't good at football but killed it in the pool.

School was the bit I drifted through, waiting to put on the wet costume again, to become someone who wasn't quite like everyone else.

I was afraid of that ending, of my life as I knew it. I couldn't  see how I could begin a life without it. I wanted it to end, I didn't want it to end because I didn't have the courage to start again. 

Sometimes hating your current situation feels safer than the fear of letting go.

That end of course, was nothing of the sort.

I found a deep love for tennis and deeper connections with the friends I already had, many of whom are still my best friends. I've know my very best friend since I was four, I love him, you can't replace that tapestry of shared experience.

(Incidentally, I carried on swimming in a smaller way and raced at university  but it took a long time to get used to my body not being able to do what it once could. Golfers and tennis players can still wow the crowds with their skills for years, but in sports based purely in conditioning, the speed you lose it is light speed fast).

This is why so many people stay in bad jobs longer than they should, or bad relationships. It's easier than the fear of the unknown.

So I'm now 46, at a turning point bigger than the swimming thing. It feels like it's half-time. No matter how I look at it, half my life is done.

But half of it is yet to come and very unknown, because this year I became single again. 

It was up to me to view this as the final chapter or a brand new book.

Naturally there were remnants if that boy clinging on to what no longer worked, rather than embracing the new. Not now.

Of course, some things don't change. My love and devotion to my amazing children (which itself shows nothing is fixed as, even in my early 30s I fully believed I didn't want kids). Then again, you ask yourself what example you set for them, because that's how they learn. Not from what you tell them, they become the things you show them. 

There are things inside me I knew were there, never given a proper, full-throated voice (natural in a way as I've been told I'm far too quietly spoken).

As someone told me recently, cycling is something I enjoy but swimming is something I need (Sometimes I need someone to tell me what I think). Re-discovering the embrace of the water feels like coming home, it puts me in touch with a me that isn't a Dad, an ex-husband, strategist, clumsy fool or middling writer. It's me.

Still, I never thought I'd develop a minor obsession about swimming in lakes, which is what appears to be happening, yet it makes sense as, given the choice, I'd prefer to be outside. 

I knew I wanted to write again. but never made the time. I'm still not sure what I really want to write about, but the only way to find out is, well, start writing. 

There are emerging themes I've mentioned elsewhere. 

Yet other parts of me I never realised existed.

The part of me that wants to tell the unvarnished truth, in the hope others who can't express what they are feeling may be encouraged to do so too. Much of what is happening to me is new, I'll plunge straight in, I'll get much of it wrong, I might be confused sometimes, but aren't we all really?

The part of me dabbling in online dating and finding many of the things I thought I wanted from others were nothing of the sort. Perhaps more surprising, yet maybe it shouldn't be, are the things others bring out of you. 

The me that realised I have a lot more to offer than I ever thought and the more I find what that is, the more I'll have to show those children of mine. Hopefully, one day, there will only be one video we watch together when the second half is over too. 

 

Do more by doing less

It doesn't seem to make sense, but if you want to get more done, switch off more. 

Take your body and mind somewhere else. 

It's so easy to become a busy fool, especially if you're in the problem solving business.

You can't escape doing the work, but sometimes no matter how hard you try, the solution refuses to reveal itself.

It's even easier in life to fall into the trap of doing more and more stuff. There's too much to watch in Netflix, too many tracks on Spotify and, well just too much.

Furthermore, culture is far more porous than it used to be. There is little about your age, status or whatever, that dictates you can't do this or that. Once upon a time your identity was fixed, now you can be who the hell you want to be, you can different versions of yourself at different times and it's not really a contradiction.

Who would want to sit on their hands? it's so tempting to just do more and more.

But.

If you have challenges in your life, the further away you get from a problem, the smaller it becomes.

If you can't crack that brief, when you take your mind elsewhere, the subconscious is still working. The less you try to think, the more it does your thinking for you. It's far cleverer than you too. 

So work hard, but don't work stupid.

I used to train for swimming every day. For about 5 hours. We never just pootled up and down, we did variations of interval training. Go as hard as you can, rest just a long as you need to do it again. Repeat again, then again and again.

If you go full pelt without stopping, you crumble. Sport it littered with casualties of overtraining.

When I started out, being over 45 was considered well past it. Some of this was wrongheaded worship of youth over experience, much of this was people simply burning out after too many late nights and weekends. The gun was empty and they just couldn't reload. 

So yes, it feels wrong headed, but if you want to do more, switch off more.

Taking the plunge epilogue

My children are like me, happiest in the water (maybe a close second for playing Fortnite, but lets leave that aside).

So they insisted in coming to 'Carolines'.

Obviously they loved it.

I need to do some things alone. I'm an introvert and eventually I need to rebuild energy levels though doing stuff alone.

But it doesn't take long for every part of me to want to be with them. 

The same environment, totally different experience. It really isn't just the place, it's the people you are there with.

 

 

 

About Today

I'm not sure anyone can really have a favourite song, not really. Maybe a top 10, although I struggle to even narrow down my top 10 albums.

This however is my favourite at the moment. 

 

The video is pretty close to the released audio version. There are many reasons I like this track.

Some of it is to do with deceptive cadence, where you don't realise how much a song is building pace and tension until the crescendo hits.

It's like when I get on a bike after a tough day and didn't realise how much tension was building up until I can't stop pedalling like crazy, despite the lava agony flowing through my legs.

Some of it is the story in the song It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago and something that happened to me more recently. 

What's truly amazing though, the original version is just ok. It was on an early album, same lyrics, same chords. Just none of drama, none of the sheer SOARING this version achieves.

That's worth bearing in mind if you're doing presentations or crafting creative work. It's not the components, the execution is everything.

I saw them play live earlier this year, the last gig I went to before lockdown. I was with my best friend, last time we saw each other for four months. I'll never forget how it felt when they played this and it reached the crescendo.

Some things are correct, and good. Some things just go deeper and connect. I think it's worth chasing the latter. 

There's too much experience out there, we're all a bit numb really aren't we? When you find whatever it might be that makes you feel something, eventually you realise you need to work for it, fight for it and protect it when you’re lucky enough to attain it. You risk it hurting or falling down around your ears, but if it’s really worth it, well it’s worth it.

If you find whatever makes you feel something, fight for it with all you have. If it doesn’t work out, at least you know. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking the the plunge

So yesterday I swam in a lake. After pining for swimming in water and finding a pool not, I don't know, visceral enough, I decided to engage in the open water swimming sub-culture. 

And it really is some sort of secret society, or at least the Leeds version is.

A Facebook group you need to be accepted into, codes for names of the lakes you swim in, yet open arms for those who are willing to be inducted into the ways of the force.

I went swimming in 'Carolines' which to the laypeople, is a lake in a nature reserve on the far outskirts of Leeds. A kind soul offered to take me on my first adventure, simply to assist with the small codes and rituals you need to adhere to.

The biggest dilemma was wetsuit or not. This was the hottest day in August for ages. Added to this was the context that this little cult is divided between the moderates and the zealots. The moderates are happy to feel they are getting something more real than a chlorinated pool, while the zealots follow the one true path, where anyone foregoing bare skin is somehow lesser.

Sod it, it was hot anyway, bare skin it is.

Before you think its all weird, these little rituals and subtle ways of initiation matter.

I ride my bike. A lot. No one told me you don't wear lycra bib shorts without pants. That's right, those middle aged men in lycra are going commando, usually with a good dose of chamois cream (arse butter) to boot. In certain cycling circles, men without shaven legs 'just don't get it'.

(I don't care that you know I shave my legs, after one horrible crash, I skidded across 20 metres of tarmac and experienced a month of sleepless nights, as the layer of skin trying to grow back on my leg was hampered by the ooze of matted hair. Ever since then, it's all been whipped off. Attractive no?)

Before you decide to read something a lot less like a fetish website, I presume you're here because you're something to do with brands and agencies.

Consider the hidden rituals in your own tribe. Look at the uniforms in the, supposedly original creative department. Go to an all agency meeting for the first time and try and understand the acronyms cheerfully thrown about. We all love to belong to tribes, its just who we are. Some just take it further than others.

I digress. 

This is what you are greeted with when you arrive at 'Carolines'. 

It takes your breathe away.

And into the water I go, The sensation of the mud and reeds underfoot totally new. The cold water refreshing in a way the chorinated version can never be.

Skin is water proof, but nevertheless, the fresh water penetrates the outer layer and invigorates the soul.

I dive in properly. Then swim. Really swim. The cold takes your breathe away, but you keep going. Swimming is an natural to me as breathing, but experiencing it here was like doing it for the first time. Usually, it takes a while to loosen up, to really feel the water. 

Not today.

I do a circuit around the edge of the lake. It's about a mile and a half. At one point I have to swim around swans. I'm doing front crawl full pace, cutting through the water, the sun in my eyes and the cold on my skin. I zip past other folks, I'm not racing them, I'm just doing my own thing. Somehow more present in the moment than I've been for a while.

Everything feels different, yet exactly the same.

It's magical. 

By the time I do a full circuit, I have that familiar ache in my arms and shoulders. What's new, is the sense of feeling cleansed.

The cold has seeped into my bones. So when I'm done, I just sit on the grass and let the sun warm me. 

What did I like?

We're all bit jaded these days, even though I arrived with someone and joined a group, it just felt more real. It was just me, the cold, the sun in my eyes and the feeling of the water. 

I liked the feeling of doing something the usual people don't. You know when you like a band and it becomes really popular and ruined for you? It feels like 'somewhere only we know'.

Mostly though, I was born to swim. I've never lost that joy of doing something well. Doing it in a different context made me discover it all over again, like a renewing wedding vows or something. 

I'll be back. 

 

 

 

 

Work until something clicks

I became  became a planner after failing in client services.

I was always late and got the invoices wrong, just about surviving thanks to Writing briefs, annoying creative people with common sense, that type of thing. Thankfully someone told me I was a really bad suit but had the makings of a planner.

How this turned out is for others to judge.

It's fair to say I had to learn on the job, I wasn't brought up on the classical rules. So I didn't understand the need for a workshop to crack every single brief - I still don't to some degree. It took me a while to get my head around brand frameworks, overly long comms strategy process, endless rounds of research to tell you what you can find out by simply going out and talking to real people. 

This led to one or two bumps in the road. I've lost count of the times a could see an answer to something, yet it was mysteriously swallowed up by the monster known as 'proprietary process'. Over time, you learn to fit your voice to what others expect, yet retain your way of thinking and working. Seriously, it doesn't matter how good your work is if no one feels able to buy it.Them are the breaks. 

I wish I hadn't the retained the fear of being found out to some degree. We all have imposter syndrome, but learning on the job ramps this up exponentially. I'm always looking over my shoulder, waiting to be found out.

Without that doubt though, I'm not sure I would still feel like I can contribute something and move things forward. That's the point of doubt and fear, it keeps you sharp, as long as you can control it. 

I used to race at swimming and used to beat more naturally talented youngsters because I just trained harder. I've seen so much talent fall foul of complacency, I've learned to welcome the fear of not being good enough. 

With that in mind, let me share of truth about how everyone really works. It's simple really, don't believe the case studies, embrace hard work and messiness. 

Case studies and process are designed to make everything look predictable and professional. They are also designed to tell a story, usually, a progressive complication, a moment of crisis, a resolution and then it's all good. This bears little resemblance to the truth.  For me certainly and for most of the people I've worked with.

It's more like my experience of sport, specifically training. When I used to get into a freezing pool to do swim training as a teenager, nothing would work for the first few minutes. I was cold, stiff, the water didn't feel good around me and I wanted to be in bed.

Then I got through the warm up and things felt a bit better. Then we did the first hard set and though it didn't feel good, it didn't feel bad. After this would be the killer hard block and it would hurt so much you couldn't focus on anything but the pain in your shoulders, the fire in your lungs and the next lap. Then suddenly you stopped thinking at all, you didn't notice the pain, or you came to terms with it at least, and you enjoyed the sensation of doing something you knew others mostly could not.

In other words, I worked until something clicked. The more I did it, the more I was confident the click would always come. It did mostly. Those times it didn't, well that's when you find out about yourself. Willpower works in short bursts at least. 

That's how I work too. There's no flash of insight, no foolproof process that works every time.

I hate starting a new project, I fear I won't get the answer,  that it won't make sense, that I'll get found out despite having done this for years. I welcome it now, since it makes me bang my head against a brick wall, reading, writing things down, knocking stuff around until, finally something clicks. 

Not the answer, not the pristine insight or proposition or whatever. Something that works, I might not be able to articulate yet, that's a long way off, but I still get a wave of relief it will be OK after all. Then it's the graft to reduce, edit, precise, distill to get something watertight and exciting. 

I know the click will come if I'm prepared to work for it.

Fear and self doubt are potent tools if you can control them, rather letting then control you. Sometimes I think that's the difference between experienced people and those still learning.

No actually, the difference is those with experience understand, like a Great White Shark, if you stop moving forward you're done for, fear is a great way to stop that happening. 

I think that's why I'm able to accept and welcome curve balls in my life, even at 46. Change may be forced on you sometimes, it can be terrifying, but from that can appear all sorts of things you never expected, and they can wonderful. 

Lake swimming and still finding your voice at 46

I'm the clumsiest person you'll ever (or probably never) come across. To the point where if I meet someone new and it involves a beverage, I'll warn them they're likely to have it accidentally thrown all over them sooner rather than later. 

Be warned. 

Yet, when I get in the water, everything works. It's like I was born in the wrong ecosystem, maybe I'm really Aquaman, who knows. All I can say is that when I start doing a few strokes, things just start to fall into place.

So during lockdown, I've ached for swimming. Having pools taken away from me has been tough.

My parents live by the sea, not being able to see them was bad enough, not being near the sea for so long is difficult too. 

Now of course, we're allowed back into pools. So first chance available, I was bashing out as many laps as I could before I feared my arms would fall off.

When I used to race, there was never a day when my shoulders and arms didn't ache from all the training.  Having that pain back was welcome reminder of who I am, or at least who I was. No, definitely who I am, that person does't disappear, he’s just dormant. 

Swimming re-arranges me, pure and simple. 

But the sea, the sea. The tang of salt in your nostrils, the feel of pushing against the current, the sensation of smallness against the vastness of the ocean, the restorative cold, the shocking pain of the first icy grip that loosens into pleasant ache. 

I didn't realise how much I crave the sea until I wasn't allowed to be near it.

So it's with relief I can report I'm finally taking the kids to see my parents next week, to Cornwall. I can already see that first morning running down the hill, the three of use have body boards under our arms, ready to thrown ourselves into the waves.

That said, I've realised this is still not enough. While the pools were still closed, I began to investigate open water swimming closer to home.

I soon discovered a whole subculture of folks living a double life. Normal people with normal lives and jobs, who also happen to swim in lakes, almost right under my nose.

Sometimes it's legal, some times it isn't, but it's like a secret society, a cult who love doing something the usual people do not. They relish the visceral thrill of diving into real, bloody cold water, they way it stirs the soul as well the body. I realised I want that too.

So I'm going to start quietly driving to some of the lakes near me, getting in and seeing what happens. I don't know what will come of it, but there's only one way to find out isn't there?

I know I'll enjoy the deeper experience, I expect I'll enjoy being a quiet rebel, but mostly, I'll just love swimming under the sky more often. 

I'll still do the pool a bit, I simply can't give up the pain and suffering of cycling, but just want to try this too.

I've found that trying something new doesn't change you, it reveals something inside that was always there. Just as meeting certain people can give you a fresh perspective on who you are and who you want to be.

I suspect the yearning to do this is like that, you might want to call it a mid-life crisis, you might be right, but I just kind of think there are parts of be that haven't been given a voice yet. It takes getting to a certain point in your life to understand this. So let's what the voices want to say. 

 

Laws of powerpoint by Russell Davies

Russell has written his laws of powerpoint, you should read it. 

If you're newish to the job of planning, strategy or whatever it's called these days, you'd do well to go back in the archives of his blog and start reading from post one.

Back before blogging was a thing, years before Facebook, Russell was kind enough to share thoughts on how to do the job. They are not out of date.

66 days of blogging, being open and working things out publicly

So after this about building a habit over 66 days, it's only right and proper to publicly prove my point (or fail in the trying), by seeing if I can get into the groove of properly blogging again. 

That's right, a post a day for 66 days. No one is asking for it, I'm very aware, but why the hell not?

Don't expect lots of planning and strategy stuff, I'm not sure the world really needs much more of that.

Don't expect a stream of typo free, double checked prose. My brain works faster than my typing, it's how I roll. 

Do expect more rubbish about tea, swimming (and maybe open water swimming, we'll see) and what it's like being 45 and not having a clue what you're doing. No one tells you this, but older people flail just as much as anyone else, they just get better at hiding it. 

One thing about the day job though, I have to write and play around with a lot of stuff to work out what I think. Reductionism is a must in our job, but I've always found I need to go very broad, before I go very narrow. I find blogging like this.

It's a little like making small talk with someone before you hit on a rich vein of conversation. You could say these posts are like making small talk with myself before I hit on something I like talking to myself about.

It's why I like to talk things through with people I work with, suddenly someone says something, the eyes widen and you go, yes, this, lets crack on now, thank God for that. 

Come to think about it, on the subject of talking to oneself, you know that phrase, 'getting cross with myself'? Who exactly is getting cross with who?

Anyway. 

It doesn't get nearly as much traction as it should in culture, but the most miserable demographic isn't young men working out who they are meant to be and asking Google if it's OK to cry (they do by the way). It's middle aged men who have no idea either. Problem is, they have less people to talk to and find it really hard to express their feelings. 

I'm sure this is made worse by the British social disease where no one is really supposed to say exactly what they mean, and certainly not talk about how they feel. I'm lucky that my friends are very un-British and have more to talk about that football and cars. We certainly are there for each other. 

So I'm also going to write in a very un-British way about what's really going on. I know it will be a revolution of just one, but if just a couple of people feel they can be more open and not pretend to be something they're not as a result, that would be a result.

I remember when I did write a bit more about the job and the odd email would come through from someone starting out, thanking me for something or other then found helpful. That made my day.

Maybe now I can be a do something else and help people see, we're just as confused as you, and this is actually a good thing. 

Can't hurt trying can it?

We are what we repeatedly do

Long time readers of this corner of the internet may be aware I have a passion for tea. Not just any tea mind, it must be made in a warmed pot, with Yorkshire Tea Gold. Also, please put the milk in first. George Orwell was wrong on this, trust me. 

I could not, in all honesty, prove to you if this makes any actual difference to the quality of the beverage (with the exception of Yorkshire Tea obviously) but this is beside the point.

Because I believe it will taste infinitely better, it does. When I was little, this is how my Grandmother taught me to make it. My mother always made it this way, waiting for me when I got home from school. Since then, years and years of repeating the ritual have made it part of who I am. 

We all have these little habits and quirks burned into our brains. They've become instinctive and so hard to change hard to change it takes, on average, sixty six days to change them. It doesn't matter if it's a habit you wish to lose, or something you feel you need to begin, you're looking at over two months of doing it every single day before it really becomes something you'll stick with.

People fail at New Year's Resolutions, diets or so called 'fresh starts', not because they're short on willpower, but because willpower is a bit crap. It's a useful short-term resource, it can get you through a rubbish day, or having to listen to a Stereophonics song, it's just that it runs out of steam fairly quickly. Then you're back to square one, only this time scarred by failure, feeling you've wasted your time.

Real, lasting change happens because we have no choice,  or we've found a way to hack our own operating system.

Why am I telling you this? Because lockdown will have achieved the 'change without choice' thing. After one hundred and twenty days of lockdown, give or take, we've had double the time to break or pick up new habits.

So when we go back to normal, don't expect anything of the sort. 

Because we are what we repeatedly do, the new habits formed in lockdown will be hard to break. So I'd forget much of the rhetoric around seismic changes in attitudes, although, of course, there are bound to be some. What's maybe more interesting, but less talked about, is the sheer weight of all these new daily habits, so hard now to undo. 

We've got used to no rush hour, spending more time with the kids, not having to make the effort to dress for work. I was talking to someone else the other day who was surprised to have relished not having to socialise with people too much and has loved the time alone.  

Me? On the plus side, I don't think about daily meditation, I wanted to stay sane when all this hit and just did it, now it's just something I do. On the debit side, I'd been going to bed later and getting up later, not so good.  I'd got too attached to WhatsApp rather than calling people and really need to do something about getting distracted by phones. Also, I may have kept up with cycling, but I neglected pilates. 

Thankfully there are ways to hack my system. You can too. Forget willpower, use your own nature in your favour.

First, start with loss aversion, we naturally hate to part with things we have got used to. So build a streak. Just make a 66 day planner and tick every day you did, or didn't do, what you set out to. It will be hard at first, but soon you'll decide you haven't come this far to only come this far. You won't want to lose what you've already achieved. Those ticks will feel good and get you through.

Second, make it as easy to do it as you can. Whatever routine you now have, try and go with that flow as much as possible.

For example, every time I make a hot drink, I do a few core pilates exercises. My body doesn't care when I do them, just that I do them. I sleep with the blinds open and the natural light in the morning has woken me up - all I needed to remember for a while was to not shut the blinds before bed. I may have been groggy on a few mornings, but I've built up the habit of having a cold shower, which jolts me into feeling alive. 

So if you're a planner type and want to get to grips with how people might be behaving differently around whatever you're selling, you might want to look at their habits before their attitudes. You could be on to something.

If you want to change a few habits of your own, think about little changes that add up over time rather than relying on willpower. If you improve my 1% every day for a year, that's 365% by the time your done.

Change a little, change a lot.