One day, the time before last, when we were in Bangladesh we were really lucky to share a meeting space with a group of women who were, in turn, meeting with the Imam. The Imam wanted to borrow money and the women were considering his request. They decided not to agree but to ask the women who contribute to the community fund first. It looked like a pretty momentous decision. When he left the meeting after "not today" they all raised simultaneously from the floor, a thousand colours merging in unison to form a kaleidoscope of human butterflies. When they dust settled and the surge of adrenalin it took for them to say "no" seeped away we were given the space to ask questions. Always a tough one. What do I know of what it take to find the courage and imagination to haul up the anchor of poverty, steer toward a life and find the strength to lead and speak out amongst all that? Not much I can tell you about that but our visitor status and, worse, the colour of our skin means I am often asked for the benefit of my "opinion".
I had nothing to give that came anywhere near what they'd just done, or were doing. So I asked a question. They were leading their community.If I took them to meet women in the UK and asked them to define what leadership is what would they say? Kate grabbed a bit of paper and scribbled what they said. I have been looking for it all morning. I will post it when I find it. It says what you'd expect. Courage, inspiration, humility, self confidence, self awareness, compassion. That's not the punch-line of the story.
No, the punch-line is not that the women's definition was so breathtakingly inspiring. It is that knowing they have never been to school & had only just learned to write, for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, I was afraid the question might be too difficult.
Leadership isn't defined or understood by organisations, status or job role, it's defined by doing it. Even though I believe that with every ounce of who I am, even though I could see the evidence of it before me with my own two eyes, even though these women were doing it against odds I felt an atomic sliver of doubt. As I recollect it is crystal clear that the singeing flames of doubt had no right of place on the edge of my consciousness that day. They taught me a big lesson.
Saturday, 10 August 2013
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
It's not about ABBA
This post comes from a series of haphazard seemingly unconnected life events. I hope you see the point.
Scene 1. Cut to my first day at school. I was 4. I met Denise, my lifelong friend. It was an unlikely friendship, what with her being so little and cute and me being so big and gangly. That sourced endless jokes for people entering and leaving our lives for years... Cannon and Ball... Little and Large...Tom and Jerry.....
There’s something about friendship forged so early that, like family, it denies judgement. It just is. The rules of engagement were laid down long before we were consciously aware that we needed them. The comfort is in the familiar. The detail is rich. The connections limitless. We walked our separate life paths she and I, together and separate, together and separate, together and separate. The elastic strained but never broke.
Scene 2. Cut to this last month. Her 50th pending. M arranged a surprise birthday and I secretly robbed all her photos. The plan was to make a film of her life. Just a little one, to pull together the story and to stand back and love it and her in its splendor. The photos, many of them unseen or unremembered, plunged me back into life, memories and stories that were lost to me without them. I laughed and I cried. Her mum and I pieced together the background to the photos, the fragments of the story, to form something of a narrative of her life - in so far as that's possible anyway. I set them to music... Donny Osmond, Bay City Rollers.... Oh come on, don’t cringe it was our life! We were 10, what did we know about what was cool? We listened to it when we were playing phones and libraries. Together and separate, together and separate. Thinking about it, we were playing work. Like so many children's games we were unwittingly preparing for our life beyond. There's an irony in that, you'll see. Read on.
Scene 3. Cut to Saturday. The film was done and shown and she loved it. I watched as the notes to the soundtrack “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Great Gatsby in case you are wondering). It had all felt like an immense privilege, a huge responsibility and for the 8 minutes it lasted time pivoted wildly on her axis my eyes locked half on Denises and half on the screen. With the final notes the clock resumed it’s metronomic tick and, unburdened, I took a seat quietly in the lounge to replay the serenity of a perfect moment. Together and separate, together and separate.
Scene 4. Cut to the sofa, eyes closed basking in peace. Feeling I’d done what I set out to do. Relieved. My head slipped to the back of the chair, my eyes closed and I rested in the moment. Words, sounds, laughter bubbled up. Her voice, my mum, my sister, her brother, Nancy from class, her mum, Chris, my mum, Steve, Denise... each voice taking turns to lift itself above the others and fade away. I was listening to the sound track to my life and I couldn’t tear my ears away.
Scene 5. Cut to yesterday. I went to visit someone we support, nothing to do with that other story, right? Another story?
We are in a transition. We both get that. It’s not goodbye. We’ll stay in touch, only the form will change. A connection forged through a tough night maybe two years ago makes sure of that. Awake all night, we counted minutes, counted seconds, counted milli seconds each one carrying us a minuscule distance further away from the scene of a threatening nightmare. Readmission. We promised each other we’d be OK, we'd make it through the night. There. Would. Be. No. Readmission. We fought for it, we were terrified, we were sad, we paced, we fought for it again and we made it to morning. No-one walks stories like that and comes out unchanged. Our landscape altered and we came out the other side friends. Whenever we see each other now thoughts, life and our conversation turn back to then, to understand that night, that journey, that success. Hold the recipe tight and hard, we may need it gain someday. We relive it, each of us determined to award the happy ending to the other, truth is we did it together, together and separate.
We are in a transition. We both get that. It’s not goodbye. We’ll stay in touch, only the form will change. A connection forged through a tough night maybe two years ago makes sure of that. Awake all night, we counted minutes, counted seconds, counted milli seconds each one carrying us a minuscule distance further away from the scene of a threatening nightmare. Readmission. We promised each other we’d be OK, we'd make it through the night. There. Would. Be. No. Readmission. We fought for it, we were terrified, we were sad, we paced, we fought for it again and we made it to morning. No-one walks stories like that and comes out unchanged. Our landscape altered and we came out the other side friends. Whenever we see each other now thoughts, life and our conversation turn back to then, to understand that night, that journey, that success. Hold the recipe tight and hard, we may need it gain someday. We relive it, each of us determined to award the happy ending to the other, truth is we did it together, together and separate.
When we talked yesterday I talked of my weekend, of the story of Denise and of the sound track. He loved it. Eyes bright he put his head back, just as I did. He in his story echoing me in mine, listening. He was listening for his own sound track. I invited him to share.... “What do you hear”...............
“There’s screaming, anger, crying, everyone is shouting, they are shouting at me, I can’t hear properly, I think its the drugs. It’s all arguments, only arguments. It's awful. The click of the door on the seclusion room, I can't stand it. I am the only person they use it for. I can't stand the click. I can't stand the silence behind it. Ten minutes is a lifetime”. I faltered as, like you just did, I realised he hears the sound track of the many hospitals that built his late teens and twenties. The music is not nice. It's like nails on a blackboard, tin foil on a filling, it's worse. It's real nightmare stuff. He thought he'd never get out. He feared he was going back.
“I am OK aren’t I here in this life Judith”? ..... “Yeah, you're OK mate, this sound track, this today, is not controlled by the people with syringes you told me about. It's controlled by you. It's you now, you are OK”.
“There’s screaming, anger, crying, everyone is shouting, they are shouting at me, I can’t hear properly, I think its the drugs. It’s all arguments, only arguments. It's awful. The click of the door on the seclusion room, I can't stand it. I am the only person they use it for. I can't stand the click. I can't stand the silence behind it. Ten minutes is a lifetime”. I faltered as, like you just did, I realised he hears the sound track of the many hospitals that built his late teens and twenties. The music is not nice. It's like nails on a blackboard, tin foil on a filling, it's worse. It's real nightmare stuff. He thought he'd never get out. He feared he was going back.
“I am OK aren’t I here in this life Judith”? ..... “Yeah, you're OK mate, this sound track, this today, is not controlled by the people with syringes you told me about. It's controlled by you. It's you now, you are OK”.
The lives we create for people in a so called benevolent service system that sets out to care eh?
Consider this tomorrow. Listen in. What kind of music do you hear when you close your eyes and open your ears in work? What music do we we create in the "support" services, the "human" services that form so much of ours and other people's lives? What must it be like to live a system, a life, where shift changes or worse are your musical accompaniment? What's it like when each time you close your eyes or take your ears off now's road your Eamon Andrews turns out to be Freddie Kruger? Maybe it's benign and the soundtrack is just an endless sea of faces for whom you are a job, some come, some go, most never stay. None of them know that Donny Osmond is the right tune for those pictures.
Is this a story about “natural supports”?
Maybe, but I think maybe more it just about music, my good fortune and a cracked record that needs to be updated.
Thank you for the music... the songs I’m singing..........thanks for all the joy.... yeah.....take it away maestro......
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Processing people?
I guess its possible to turn just about any form of human interaction into a process or to describe it in process terms? After all, all a process is is an effort to deconstruct and make sense of a complex set of interacting variables and put them in some sort of order so they can be replicated. It’s reductionist - I doubt anyone would deny that - my interest today though is in reconstruction.
This morning Kate and I spent some time Skyping from on opposite sides of the planet. Our focus was to provide support to one another, to share understanding and to enhance completely separate coaching and team development journeys each is on.
The coaching and organisational development books probably say what we found in considerably fancier ways. Forgive us if what comes next is nothing new. These felt like precious discoveries this morning.
Once process is taught and understood there are people who seem to really “get it”. They breath life into it and there’s something fundamentally awesome in their delivery and impact. Everyone can see it. No-one can name it. Others just “do it”. Watching them work is like looking at a body without life. It’s profoundly uncomfortable.
Whatever it is that one person can do that the other can’t it is superordinate and grappling an understanding of it seems urgent. Let me tell you why.
There’s not one of the processes listed above that are not in someway configured to alleviate human discomfort, confusion or bring relief to real life situation. Connect with people in any of these processes and fairly quickly you bump up against some kind of pain. A considerable amount of it comes from human interaction, other people or the lack of them in someone’s life and thoughts.
That’s a scary life truism. It is pretty terrifying in the context of human services. What else are we about? Who’d know that knowing we are in the people business we’d be so tuned out to the internal life of our people and the dynamics that go between them. Who’d have guessed that we’d spend so much time teaching process without really understanding the “life the body needs to make it live”.
We have decided to start to write, to start to put words around the “life” and not the process, to think about whether it’s possible to deconstruct that instead of process. We want to try to find names for it, ways to share it and ways to come to understand and apply it better in human services. Why? Because human services need humanity to be what they set out to be.
Our human service system will be eternally indebted to some incredible process thinkers for their contribution to improving the lives of people we serve and those who work beside us. It’s time to take it up a notch now. If we are in the people business isn't it obvious? I can’t believe I have missed it with this level of clarity until now. If we are in the people business surely it’s time to explore and understand the nature of people?
This thinking belongs to no-one and everyone. It’s ours and its yours. This isn’t a two person thought piece. We need as much help as we can get. Share your thoughts. Everyone of those is precious too.
Sunday, 21 July 2013
An Orenda moment
I know it's cheesy.... but..... I've thought a lot about what use I might put the blog to. It feels like I should write something erudite and change the world that way and I probably or at least possibly will. Maybe you will too?
Then again if you've known me for a while you'll know I had an aspiration to open a virtual museum. The museum of ordinary moments.... They were intended to capture the inspiration in the ordinary. Simple stories captured from ordinary life that hold life in them. Anyway it didn't come to much. I didn't have the self discipline or maybe the time to write them. Whatever.....
Today I found myself thinking about what a hard week it was last week. The pervasive theme was striving to meet demands that will always outstrip capacity... such is the day to day reality of leadership in social care. It's Sunday. I started doing the loop, mentally preparing all the doing I am going to need to do from Monday. I can never remember it all and even if I write it down, by Tuesday it's already getting the better of me. Maybe I need to go on a time management course?
I don't think so. Look at what's happening here. I am trying to wind up one job and start a new business. I might have difficulty juggling all the balls, but juggling I am and both are getting my full attention. If any part of my life is getting short changed its the people indoors....I am working on it and that's another story!
So it's not busyness that's the problem here, its not capability and its not even really capacity. I am finding space to do better than what needs to be done. The real issue is where I put my attention and the discipline to focus where it matters.
So, turn down the lights, start the orchestra and lift the curtains on an Orenda moment.
Orenda means the power within people to make change in the world and in themselves...... lets see where that takes us....
Last week, in the week I just described as "hard", I was called at lunchtime to present myself to the forum of people we support. The forum didn't exist 6 years ago and it's had its' up and downs. I was invited because it's the last time they will convene whilst I am there and they wanted to say goodbye and good luck. They had thought about the occasion, they had some words and had bought me flowers. I stood at the front and said how proud I was of their journey, what a massive difference it makes to hear their voice and how the organisation's strength rests in their courage to speak for themselves and others. No compromise. That was what we agreed and I left and went back down to my office to be busy.....
An hour later E (the Chair) headed toward my door, her walking frame masking nothing of the determination with which she intended to reach me. D followed closely behind on his stick similarly fuelled with purpose and and a real fire in his belly. They arrived at my door. It's existence proved no barrier, instead they bowled right on by and took their place in the chairs we preserve for all sorts of formal business related busyness. It looked like I was "for it" and I waited pensively to find out what other bit of busyness I had not settled, sorted or resolved.
I waited. I waited more. I discovered their mission was to claim some time.... they came to demand some time, just time. There was no shape to it, no purpose in it, no ask, no complaint, no jobs, no nothing. All they wanted, all they took, was a little time. It was close on silent or maybe there were some words but what I noticed was the ask was simple. It was to be connected in warmth and regard. Just a little spot to let the sun shine, to enjoy each other's company, to reflect and to just be. They brought that to me. They gave it to me.
Wasn't that what I was always there for? When did the busyness become the habit? I hardly know, but what saw is that they chose to come, they shaped the space, they didn't see the door. They chose to take my time and gift it back to me.
That's my Orenda thought for today. I don't even know who did what in this story to make the difference to whom. I think its mere detail. Moving forward I am going to try to use this space to write more moments, when I see them.
You should do that too. I will make a space here, if you send me what you saw.
judith@orendaconsultancy.co.uk
Then again if you've known me for a while you'll know I had an aspiration to open a virtual museum. The museum of ordinary moments.... They were intended to capture the inspiration in the ordinary. Simple stories captured from ordinary life that hold life in them. Anyway it didn't come to much. I didn't have the self discipline or maybe the time to write them. Whatever.....
Today I found myself thinking about what a hard week it was last week. The pervasive theme was striving to meet demands that will always outstrip capacity... such is the day to day reality of leadership in social care. It's Sunday. I started doing the loop, mentally preparing all the doing I am going to need to do from Monday. I can never remember it all and even if I write it down, by Tuesday it's already getting the better of me. Maybe I need to go on a time management course?
I don't think so. Look at what's happening here. I am trying to wind up one job and start a new business. I might have difficulty juggling all the balls, but juggling I am and both are getting my full attention. If any part of my life is getting short changed its the people indoors....I am working on it and that's another story!
So it's not busyness that's the problem here, its not capability and its not even really capacity. I am finding space to do better than what needs to be done. The real issue is where I put my attention and the discipline to focus where it matters.
So, turn down the lights, start the orchestra and lift the curtains on an Orenda moment.
Orenda means the power within people to make change in the world and in themselves...... lets see where that takes us....
Last week, in the week I just described as "hard", I was called at lunchtime to present myself to the forum of people we support. The forum didn't exist 6 years ago and it's had its' up and downs. I was invited because it's the last time they will convene whilst I am there and they wanted to say goodbye and good luck. They had thought about the occasion, they had some words and had bought me flowers. I stood at the front and said how proud I was of their journey, what a massive difference it makes to hear their voice and how the organisation's strength rests in their courage to speak for themselves and others. No compromise. That was what we agreed and I left and went back down to my office to be busy.....
An hour later E (the Chair) headed toward my door, her walking frame masking nothing of the determination with which she intended to reach me. D followed closely behind on his stick similarly fuelled with purpose and and a real fire in his belly. They arrived at my door. It's existence proved no barrier, instead they bowled right on by and took their place in the chairs we preserve for all sorts of formal business related busyness. It looked like I was "for it" and I waited pensively to find out what other bit of busyness I had not settled, sorted or resolved.
I waited. I waited more. I discovered their mission was to claim some time.... they came to demand some time, just time. There was no shape to it, no purpose in it, no ask, no complaint, no jobs, no nothing. All they wanted, all they took, was a little time. It was close on silent or maybe there were some words but what I noticed was the ask was simple. It was to be connected in warmth and regard. Just a little spot to let the sun shine, to enjoy each other's company, to reflect and to just be. They brought that to me. They gave it to me.
Wasn't that what I was always there for? When did the busyness become the habit? I hardly know, but what saw is that they chose to come, they shaped the space, they didn't see the door. They chose to take my time and gift it back to me.
That's my Orenda thought for today. I don't even know who did what in this story to make the difference to whom. I think its mere detail. Moving forward I am going to try to use this space to write more moments, when I see them.
You should do that too. I will make a space here, if you send me what you saw.
judith@orendaconsultancy.co.uk
Monday, 8 July 2013
Study Visits
Fantastic study visit to Arduin in Netherlands last week, more about the learning to come. Thoughts include "outcomes are not a monitoring exercise" and creating social businesses takes enterprise....
If I was going to be supported, its them I would want to support me. Not least because I could choose a doing kind of life and I am a doing sort of person... well most of the time anyway.
Whilst you wait for the more learned parts of my learning here's a short story that reminds us why resting on tour matters. I will be back with the real lessons soon....
Post Script to a Study Visit......
If I was going to be supported, its them I would want to support me. Not least because I could choose a doing kind of life and I am a doing sort of person... well most of the time anyway.
Whilst you wait for the more learned parts of my learning here's a short story that reminds us why resting on tour matters. I will be back with the real lessons soon....
Post Script to a Study Visit......
I went for that massage I had
planned on Saturday afternoon. The masseuse said “do you want me to massage you
lightly”, I said “no, pummel me with a brick”. ......She did..... apparently.
My friend Valerie and I shared a
session and Valerie said it was pure comedy. This woman was belting me and
poking me in the back with her elbows and I was face down snoring like a
pig.
All I remember is.....” I would
like an absolute and unrelenting pummelling” please and then “excuse me madam,
excuse me madam”.... as she tried to wake me up. She came close to having to
douse me with ice cold water and shove me off the massage couch..... I
think....
I hope the massage was good....
It cost a bit that little snoozette......
I hope I learned a lot in Holland. I need to rest a bit to find out........
Saturday, 8 June 2013
Getting started
This blog starts as I am 83 days or 2 months and 22 days away from leaving reach and starting a new working life as Orenda. The journey is a month or so old already and I could /should have started blogging before now. Its probably the hardest change journey I have chosen to make and not because its not fun, I am loving it. Nope. Its just that I find myself having to dance with uncertainty like I haven't ever chosen to before. What a wild dance partner she is. The whole of my life is her stage. She whips through every conversation sometimes thudding out a flamenco and other times licking gently at the very edges of my awareness, barely there but unwilling to go completely unnoticed. So hey, welcome to the world to which I have beckoned others demanding that the only way to live is to step into the dance. Until it becomes something else, this blog traces the steps until the opening number. Who knows. It might be instruction enough to enable other great people to join. And......one ,two, three...one, two, three....one, two, three....and we are off.
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