When we confuse process with result

Here's the scenario: you decide to spring clean your closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. You pull everything out to see what's in there, and have it all spread over every available surface at the point where your blood sugar falls through the floor or you're called away to another task. It all starts to feel pointless and counterproductive. You shove it all back in, any old how, and mentally curse yourself for being such a slob that even when you're trying to clean up you're still only making a bigger mess.

Congratulations, you've confused the process with the result. The result is a tidy and organised closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. The process is chaotic and appears disorganised. (People never believe that random looking piles of stuff are a form of order.)

Our new fitness regime is likely to suffer a similar fate. We don't feel (or look) trim, taut, energetic and terrific when we exercise, so when we hit our lowest ebb, we wonder 'what's the point?' We're confusing the result with the process.

Take this human tendency into the field of human relationships and you just know its going to go kablooey.

Can you see this pattern at work anywhere in your life?

Gift giving - a moment of truth

Gift giving can give you an insight into the level of intimacy in your relationships. I'm talking about gift giving that is motivated by love, rather than by duty or social obligation.

There are people you love who you could pick a dozen appropriate and desirable gifts for, you know them that well.

There are people you love who you have no idea what they really genuinely like. Maybe you did 2 or 5 or 15 years ago, but now you don't.

If you're not increasing the intimacy of your relationships - the other person is becoming more 'real' to you, more complete or multi-dimensional - then you are decreasing intimacy, and paying less attention to them. Which can begin to merge into situational love rather than specific love.

So the only thing worse than not knowing what to buy someone you love, is knowing what this says about how you relate with them. Loving blindness is, as Billy Connolly would say, 'of use to no bugger'.

Generous, kind & considerate

Being kind is not the same as being considerate. Neither is being generous. Kindness without consideration can be infuriating or embarrassing for the recipient. It may even be both. Our kindness and generosity may inspire us to unwanted, inappropriate, uneven or even humiliating gifts...

Generosity and kindness tempered by consideration may understand, for example, that while you want to buy your loved one a car, you A) may rob them of their sense of ownership from saving for and choosing the car, and B) may purchase a car that's not what they wanted or not 'fit for purpose' but which they will feel obliged to put up with to save your feelings.

When we expect the worst & don't get it

Have you ever noticed that when we have negative expectations of someone's beahiour and they turn out to be unfounded,it doesn't change our mood mor our attitude the way it should.

For example, if you expect to be stood up (possibly based on previous experience)the last minute appearance of your loved one doesn't assuage much. Human nature being what it is, we can even feel aggrieved. We've just worked up a head of steam and now we're wrong footed. Our brain chemistry works fast, but not in an instant. Since our nervous system is still in high gear, we look for something to justify our feelings. If we look hard enough, we can usually find something. Even if it's annoyance for the past behavior that led us to our negative expectations.

Humans, we're an odd lot when you get right down to it.

Situational love

I'm a little suspicious of some kinds of love. Especially love that isn't specific and individual.

I understand that many - most - motheres and fathers love their children. Most children love their pareents. Some of us continue to love partners who mistreat us, or who no longer love us. I wonder though, where that leaves parents who don't like or even respect the children they've raised to adulthood. Or children who don't like or respect the parents who raised them? Or the men and women who continue to love an abusive partner?

Such love seems to me to be somewhat allied to ego. We love the object of our affection because it is ours, because of his/her/it's relationship to us. "What can I do? She or he is my _______ (insert relationship here)". It's situational love, and it centers on us.

Sometimes we can't help loving, in spite of a lack of reciprocity, because we love, understand and even admire the individual we so helplessly love. Or even because of habit. But where it's situational without individual specificity, I don't trust it. As Billy Connelly says, it's of use to no bugger. It doesn't help the beloved, and I'm suspect it doesn't help us.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds, sure. But love is not love that fixes on structural relevance rather than on the human being caught inside that matrix.

Advice: just another word for affirmation?

When you ask someone for advice, what are you after? Do you want their unique and different perspective on the issue? Or do you want them to uncover what you - perhaps unconsciously - think, or want to hear? Do you even ask for advice?

Some people ask for advice as a form of attention-seeking. Most of us are flattered to be asked for our sage advice. Remember: the other person is not obliged to take our advice, but it's polite for them to listen to advice if they ask you for it.

Have you ever had someone solicit your advice, and then when you give it, argue that your perceptions are plain wrong? Have you ever been that someone? This is a case where your affirmation is desired, rather than your advice. Rather than, "what do you think?" you're being asked, "do you think I'm right?" (or even, "I'm right, aren't I?")

It's a win-win situation for the advice-seeker: you affirm their opinion now and they get to blame your bad advice if everything doesn't work out the way they want later. Here's my useful side-step phrase when you recognise you're in this situation: "Wow, I'm flattered you want my opinion, but I don't feel qualified to comment."  If the advice-seeker presses you, you can follow up, "You're a fully-fledged individual in charge of your own destiny, I'm confident you've already worked out what you feel is best to do, and that's what's relevant here."

Don't try to fix the people: they aren't the problem.

Don't try to fix the people, just work on the process. Fixing people is cripplingly expensive: in time, energy, goodwill and - often - sanity. Usually, it doesn't work because usually the people aren't the problem.
While a clean sweep has it's appeal at times, it's too easy to start and too hard to finish. Most of us aren't ready for that much change or that much hassle for a mirage.
I can guarantee that, most of the time, if you were to replace the broken people in your life you would still have problems with the (new) people in your life. They'll just be different problems.
Tired of managing your stick-in-mud, cynical seat warmers? Great! How about you swap them for some high achieving, ruthlessly competitive, individualists?
Focus instead on the process. This holds true whether the process is a business process, or a family relationship. Why is the situation not working? Is it lack of understanding of what's needed (and if so, why)? Is it lack of cooperation (and if so, why)? Is it ingrained risk aversion (and if so, why)? Is it just a habit of mediocrity that now feels comfortable?
The two near eternal needs are more money and better personnel. Genuine success rests on first improving what you can do with what's available of both.
This is post 23 of 43 posts.
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Are your loved ones pieces of you?

Watching parents with their children is always interesting, but it recently prompted an 'ah hah' moment. The degree of embarrassment or distress a parent feels at their child's behaviour is an indicator of the degree the parent believes the child is a piece of themself. The old saying is, 'a chip off the old block'.

A toddler who throws a paddy in the middle of the bank is always going to leave a parent feeling some frustration and exposure. If the parent instinctively accepts the toddler as their own person, a completely separate - if currently dependent - entity, then the parent feels the annoyance or anxiety of the situation alone. Sure if some people 'tut tut' it's aggravating, but it's the kid who's having the paddy, and the kid is toddler, and stuff happens. If the parent views the child as an extension of themself, then the child's behaviour reflects on the parent to such an extent that, for all practical purposes, the child IS the parent.

It's a cliche that teenagers go through this in spades when they find their parents so horribly, horribly embarrassing: they're not embarrassing because they're parents, they're embarrassing because they're MY parents. [You may prefer to substitute your relationship of choice here.]

Husbands and wives do it all the time too. A social faux-pas is not just a faux-pas by your partner, it somehow reflects poorly on YOU as well. This is encouraged by the common human behaviour of manipulation, whereby person X wants something from Y so they ask Y's life partner for advice/help/permission/emotional blackmail.

If you catch yourself being mortified or made angry by the behaviour of someone around you (friend, colleague, family member, etc.) remind yourself that their behaviour is their behaviour alone. See if that helps you be less overwhelmed by the sticky social situation which ensues. Our loved ones are not pieces of us, they are themselves first and foremost, and our child/parent/lover/colleague/boss/etc second.

This is post 12 of 365 posts in 365 days.

Tolerance

We can be tolerant of those we see as other: those from a different family, a different culture, a different race, etc.

The exotic is comprehensible: we understand when we go to a country we've barely heard of that they will be very different. We may even be charmed by the difference. At the very least we will be relatively tolerant of it.

We reserve our greatest resentment for those who are somehow like us, or of us, but whose differences - maybe quite minimal differences - mark them out as deviant, deficient and undesirable.

Parents may say, "He's no son of mine!" Partners may say, "You're not the person I married!" Of those further from our hearts (or our egos) we may say, "She's not REALLY _____ (fill the blank)." Not really a local, not really a member, not really one of the 'in' crowd, not really in the know, not really a countryman, not really "one of us"

We tolerate an obvious foreigner, but don't extend the same tolerance to naturalised migrants. We endure the vagaries of our new work colleagues with polite complaisance, but those of our housemates through gritted teeth, with no attempt to hide the effort of keeping patience.

We have more tolerance for misbehaviour in people we don't know and don't care about, than in our own families and housemates.

Yet we hate it when our nearest and dearest are intolerant of us.

This is post 6 of 365 posts in 365 days.
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Which roles do you play? Where do you play them?

Are you the helper? the strong one? the needy one? the ideas person? the one who brings everyone down to earth? the smart alec? the quiet one? the wild one? the doer? the overachiever? the people-person? the peacemaker? the argumentative one? the neat freak? the nice one? the go-to guy or gal? the suck-up? the sleaze? the optimist? the dreamer? the pragmatist? the humanitarian? the subversive? the radical?

It fascinates me to watch people role play, and to recognise my own masks or personae when I catch myself at it. I don't mean being false, or hiding our 'real' selves, just that most of us express different aspects of our personality in under different circumstances.

We can be quite different in different situations: with an old friend in a bar, with our work colleagues at the office, with our (ex)romantic partner whom we meet at party, with our employer during our annual review, with customer service staff while making a complaint, when we're ill, when we're happy, when we're sad, when we're angry.

We can be quite different people in different relationships. The Chairman of the Board of Directors doesn't treat his mother like he treats his underlings; his mother doesn't treat him the way his Board of Directors does either.

What is most interesting is not (necessarily) which persona we express, but which situations call out different aspects of us - and why.

This is post 85 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Illuminating

Today Mr O & I bought a lamp. When you choose a life partner, you ought to check compatibility of light sensitivity. No-one tells you this.

No-one tells you that the rest of your life will be a continual tug-of-war if someone nearly night-blind marries a photosensitive. It's a tale of woe and subterfuge, I assure you, with 45 watt globes being swapped out for 100 watt globes (and vice versa) to screams of outrage when next the switch is flipped. It's a tale of moaning about how impossible it is to read in the dark, countered by moaning about how the light is too bright and hurts.

On the plus side, after nearly 20 years we've learned a lot about indirect light placement and each other's wattage needs. So the purchase of a lamp that suits both of us is akin to an outbreak of peace in whichever international crisis is headlining today. It's a bonus that it wasn't even expensive.

Heat, air and lighting. Fashions in interior design come and go, but if you get the heat, the air and the lighting right, people will enjoy being in a space. They create comfort and lead to happiness (mostly by not impeding our progress toward happiness, the way cold, airless and dark spaces do).

I've come late to materialism, but there are some things that money can buy - but only money allied with awareness and discernment. Spending for spending's sake does not confer the same benefit. It's not the money, after all, it's what you buy with it. Heat, air and light. I find that thought strangely illuminating.

This is post 66 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Losing count

Wow. I've been posting from my iPhone via email and haven't kept good enough count. I think I had about 4 'post 55's back there... thought I was in Groundhog Day for a minute.

I'm used to losing count in my knitting, but I didn't realise it could happen with my posts as well. Might have to add a counter to my calender - at the moment I just have a repeating item. (It's all about the processes.)

I hope I'm lose count as easily in relationships. I'm not fond of transactional analogies for love. It's true sufficient "love deposits" will help if you ever stuff up big time, but it's easy to turn a friendship or a marriage into a trading scheme: I'll see you that venting session about work, and raise you a dirty kitchen and a half dozen homework supervisions.

If you're going to keep count, keep a gratitude list. Today I'm feeling particularly grateful for

• the sunshine after several cloudy days,
• a clean house,
• the especially delicious coffee made by my local barista,
• the smooth action and responsiveness of my (newish) sewing machine,
• a delicious and unexpected homemade apricot crumble, and
• crisp cotton bedsheets
• my loved ones.

This is post 62 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Clues up or clueless: how do we know which?

When it comes to the people we love the most, most of us are a strange combination of clued up and completely clueless. Often at the same time, or nearly.

I used to see it all the time as a Kindermusik educator, parents who loved and cared for their child, probably more than they loved breathing and yet who had almost no idea of the best way to manage the child. From the outside it's almost pantomime: look out behind you! The audience is shrieking it, but the characters tread blindly on.

In any relationship, each person brings their needs and their vulnerabilities to any interaction. The more we feel, it sometimes seems to me, the stupider we become.

I experience this sensation from time to time in my marriage for example. I have a certain reputation for emotional and social insight. In many professional roles I worked with individuals who had a reputation for being 'difficult'. It goes away if my husband and I have a disagreement. Not every time (or we wouldn't still be married). I know this man intimately, and we've been married for nearly 20 years, but it's still hit and miss with me when it comes to managing discord in our relationship.

So, if anyone knows a sure fire way to tell when you're being clues up or clueless, please do write in. I think we could all use the help.

This is post 56 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Expiring to-dos:

This topic has been on my potential topic list for a while. As I am posting this late, it seems very a propos.

Expiring to-dos are those things that need to be done by a certain date/time and after that there's not much point. They're dead and that's that.

Hotel rooms expire: if they're not booked, they're not. Having a guest the next night doesn't change that. Front page deadlines for newspapers expire too - if you miss one day's deadline the story same can't catch the next one.

Birthdays expire too, perhaps not as drastically. A belated birthday card is better than nothing - to some people, others find it 'too much, too little, too late'.

I believe a lot of our 'to-dos' are like this, where a belated effort is a bit better than nothing but not genuinely satisfying. If you don't order air-conditioning during the winter, then the summer will be as hot as ever and knowing next summer will be cool won't make you feel much better.

A bit like this post, really, post 40 of 100 posts.

Begin with the end in mind

I recently quoted Stephanie Dowrick who says we judge others on their behaviour, and ourselves on our intentions. Intentions are slippery things. What we intend to do, and the strategy we employ to achieve this end, are often at cross purposes. We humans are wonderfully complex and variable creatures!

We say: "I love my children and being a good father is important to me" then we stay at work late most weeknights until after they are in bed.

We say: "I want to lose a bit of excess weight" then we begin a mortification of the flesh that would impress the early desert fathers, and when we - inevitably - slip up, we give up and eat a whole tub of icecream to drown our failure.

We say: "I want to impress my boss, so I get a raise at my next review" then we hide any mistakes we make, even if this means we'll keep repeating them, because we don't want to look bad. Or we work long, long hours, without checking that our output is achieving what our boss needs.

It's fun pointing out other people's cognitive dissonances. The trick is to find your own. Try this sentence completion:

I want X and to get it I (do) Y.

I want my son to be confident and unselfconscious, and to get it I loudly point out to him times when he is shy, and push him into social situations even when we both know he'll just sulk and refuse to engage in order to resist me.

Ok, that was a cheap shot, but you get the idea.

This is post 15 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Paying Attention

The gift of attention is a precious gift.  

We all enjoy being with someone who "gets" us, who is easy to talk to because we know they are really listening, who knows all our faults and likes us faulty as we are. Such people seem to see us for who we *really* are.  

Love without attention is like planting a garden and then forgetting to water it.  

We also know the perils of too much of the wrong sort of attention.  There is an attention that sees without joy: that always sees our flaws, our mishaps and the bits that could do with some improving.  It might love us in spite of our faults, but it almost feels like we're loved out of duty, and in spite of our good points too.

Love with too much negative attention is like having a garden, but only seeing the weeds - and even when the garden is weeded and perfect, bewailing the fact that the weeds will just come back!

So how do we develop the right sort of attention?  How do we get better at noticing?

There are two games I like to use.  The first one is a well-known concept of Mindfulness and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.  I just named it and turned it into a game. The second game I came up with all on my lonesome.  

Bear in mind, I'm not clinically trained, I'm just an opinionated childless woman, so use these games at your own risk.

Game One - Notice, Notice, Notice

This game, based on Mindfulness, is about direct experience.  Its allowing ourselves to be open to what is happening, to just notice it and try not to understand, judge or change it.  This takes practice.  

In relation to other people, it is usually more helpful to focus on the person rather than on what you're feeling yourself.  The next time you're with a loved one - a partner, parent, child or friend - spend some time just noticing everything you can about them.  (But don't choose a moment when the other person is trying to tell you something important, or not until you've had lots of practice...)

Use all your senses to Notice, Notice, Notice - what do you see?  what do you hear? what do you smell? what do you feel? and (if appropriate), what do you taste?  

Spend some time going into lots of detail.  If you see that your friend's hair is brown, what colour brown? Is it all one shade? What is its texture? Does it look different from the last time you saw it? Has she had a haircut?

As you focus on the other person, you'll probably get caught up in your own feelings about that person.  Note the feeling that arises in you, but get back to the actual experience of the other person.  So, if you're noticing your baby's soft blond hair, and thinking of how much you love to stroke it, that's fine, but move back to noticing your baby rather than staying with your feelings about your baby.

Game Two - Opinion Origami

The second is to think of opinions (or even judgements) you have about someone, and try to unfold how you came by them, then try to fold them up in a different pattern (hence origami). This works better with positive or neutral opinions than negative ones - negative opinions don't need reinforcing and you probably won't change them.

For example, you might feel that your niece (or brother/sister/nephew/friend) is keen on football.  That may be positive or neutral.  Ask yourself: why do you feel that?  Is it because she often wears team-branded clothing? Is it because she carries football swap cards everywhere?  It is because she talks to you almost exclusively about football when you meet?  

Try to include as much detail as possible.  You might consider how her eyes light up when you bought her a set of football swap cards as a treat.  Or how her voice gets a note of excitement when she is telling you about how she did a deal with a school friend for a rare card last week.

You will end up with a lot of information.  Now your job is to put that information together in a different way, so you end up with an alternative opinion about your niece. (The alternative opinion may or may not be true, that's not important.  It is important that you consider it.)

Maybe your niece is not interested in football, per se, just in football swap cards.  Swap cards may be the latest trend at her school.  The team-branded clothing may be a gift, or perhaps they're hand-me-downs.  Or perhaps she wears them for protective colouration, because they make life at school easier.  Perhaps she wears them to annoy her brother who supports a different team.  Perhaps she talks to you about football because that's what YOU are interested in, and she doesn't know what else to talk to you about.

At the end of Opinion Origami, you may not change your opinion, but isn't your experience of your niece richer?  You've called up memories that are visual, aural and tactile.  The next time you meet her, you're likely to regard her with a kind of wondering curiosity - partly you're testing out your opinions, and partly she is just more interesting now you've spent some quality attention on her!

This game also works well on strangers on public transport, or people at cocktail parties.  In which case I call it the Sherlock Holmes game.

Try one or both of these games this week - and do let me know how it went for you!