After the stress comes .... something else

For the past four years my wife has been studying to become a doctor, most weeks away from home in London. For most of the year before that, she was busy doing courses, exams and interviews. Altogether it's been five pretty stressful years, bearing in mind that the economic crisis swept through everyone's lives in 2008.

Last week she took the last of her finals and we had five days of anxiety waiting for the results. She was sure she had failed, which would have meant losing a job lined up locally and resitting the exams in November.

On Monday the results were published. She passed. There's a graduation ball on Friday and the graduation ceremony in mid-July.

As we've said jokingly, she'll be getting her life back and I'll be getting my wife back. I'm pleased and proud and all that good stuff, yet somehow feeling flat and listless rather than euphoric. Maybe it's just a normal post-stress reaction.

Why England loses against Germany

The short reason is that for Germany, it's just another match towards the objective of winning the World Cup.  For England, it's about getting beyond a sense of national inferiority.  The weight of expectation on the England team against Germany is very heavy. 

Somebody on the radio yesterday was saying that Germans don't regard England as big rivals, so an England match for them doesn't have any special meaning.  He compared it with how the English feel about playing Scotland.  I was in Germany for a couple of days this week and the German colleagues I spoke confirmed this attitude.

FWIW I think the English "thing" with Germany goes way, way back.  In the 19th century Britain regarded Germany with huge affection, as a sort of protege.  Then Germany started getting its act together in industry and technology, and the English couldn't feel so superior any more.  The mood of apprehension was captured in The Riddle of the Sands before WWI

Britain and Germany went nose to demented nose in WWI and the two nations were arguably equal in power.  Twenty years later and Germany was obviously much more powerful.  Britain only escaped total defeat by the width of the Channel and the cunning and bravery of a few key people.  Britain emerged on the winning side ONLY because Nazi Germany had been mad enought to take on the United States and the Soviet Union.  Without the USA and the USSR, Britain was no match for Germany.

I firmly believe that under all the bluster and the racist comments about Germans, the British and in particular the English fear deep down that Germans are fundamentally superior at things that matter to Britain - sport, innovation, business, social justice, you name it.  Everything but entertainment, in fact.  Over the past 60 years Germany has been extraordinarily successful at everything it has attempted.  England hasn't.

The German comedian Henning Wehn put his finger on things very astutely at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago.  To paraphrase, in Britain people go deep into debt to buy 3,000 rotten bricks held together by mouldy wallpaper.  "You flattened all our cities and we rebuilt them properly.  If that had not been the case, we would be living in shitholes like you do."

Even if England wins against Germany, the English will continue to believe, with good reason, that Germany is the boss.

In praise of discrimination

You see the word discrimination and you can barely avoid thinking "racial discrimination". Modern Anglo-Saxon culture has labelled discrimination a bad thing. 

As with so many human skills and behaviours, it all depends on context.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no expertise without discrimination. Expert discrimination is the ability to notice small, critical differences and to use your understanding of those differences constructively. It's about being highly tuned in and constructive.

My wife has a highly-developed sense of colour - she can get upset or rapturous about shades of grey-green that are equally pleasing to me. I notice things about gait, posture and gestures that she doesn't. And we're both very tuned in to accents and language.

It's probably not practical or desirable to be equally discriminating about everything in life. However, if you don't develop or permit discrimination then everything seems the same.

Talking web browsers

I've been a great fan of Firefox for several years - I love the bookmarks bar that enables me to have 50 favicons ready for quick access. I love the Google toolbar that makes online research very quick. Unfortunately Firefox seems to be getting slower.

I like Safari too, although I don't like the way it doesn't show favicons and it doesn't let me do much customisation. It does sync with Xmarks, so I keep the bookmarks up to date but without favicons it's a bit like operating blind. Safari is fast.

I'm growing increasingly keen on Google's Chrome. It's fast and it shows favicons, which makes things quicker. However it spaces the favicons too much, so it only shows half of the 50 or so I have on the bookmarks bar in Firefox. 

In short, to get the functionality I need, I have to use three different browsers, depending on the task

Real results from just a few months of co-coaching

In March I started once-a-week co-coaching with a fellow member of the networking site Ecademy, The system is we have a telephone call once a week for an hour, with half an hour each to focus on whatever are coaching issues for us in the coming week.  I call it co-coaching, but neither of us stick to a strictly coaching framework.

The whole thing started because I asked if anyone was interested in trying it out.  As of today, since starting the co-coaching I've
-  finally managed to get my first website up >>>>>>
- become much clearer about my direction now and next
- held my nerve while working/earning less but preparing more for future activities
- decided the book I want to write - kick off meeting with Mindy Gibbins-Klein is next month.
- lost 9 kg, equivalent to 10% of my body weight - just 3-4 kg to go
- been networking more actively
- got the idea of working towards a research-based PhD and taken steps to make it happen

It may be that a lot of this is a matter of "the ripeness is all" which I call "catching the wave".  However, I can say with confidence that the co-coaching has been an important part of the changes (thank you Mark - you know who you are!).  And I can say with confidence that Ecademy has been an extremely important factor in my personal evolution and in helping me identify a great co-coach - so thank you Ecademy (you know who you are).

Dramatize your competence!!

A couple of years ago my networking group had a presentation from David Thomas, a memory champion who teaches memory techniques.  As part of the morning session, he taught us a technique and gave us a memory exercise, learning the order of ten random imaginary objects in five minutes.  Meanwhile, he set about learning the order of a shuffled deck of 52 cards.

At the end of the five minutes, he recited the order of the cards with 100% accuracy and then as a bonus, recited the first 250 places of Pi.  That last bit was easy for him - he had learned Pi to 22,500 places and was world champion for a while >>>>>.

This morning I was talking to my friend Martin Dewhurt, whose background is in graphic art and top-level photo retouching.  That takes a lot of different skills, including acute awareness of colour.  One of his party pieces is recognizing the Pantone Reference for any object in a room then the corresponding CMYK separation.  If you have any experience of colour technology, you'll know just how impressive this is.  It's a great way for Martin to dramatize his competence - to present some of what he can do in a dramatic, memorable and relevant way.  Apparently,  "crazy as it sounds, we even taught the apprentices to make our cups of tea to specific Pantone colours"

Below is a sample of Pantone colours, just to give you an idea....

Put the iPhone down and read a good magazine

Yesterday I was catching up on my magazine reading.  Since getting an iPhone I've found that it's crept into those odd moments when I used to read a magazine article.

I take no daily papers but I do subscribe to a few magazines: The Economist (since around 1998), Wired US edition (since 1996), Wired UK edition (since last year), Prospect Magazine (since earlier this year) and most recently Frieze magazine (contemporary art and culture).

For me, the Economist is a must-read, just to keep up with things.  It has great covers, and often flags up things I should be aware off, such as Low-Cost cars (the subject of one of my recent case studies for a client).

Prospect is excellent in principle but somehow I find it disappointing - graphically and content-wise, it's much thinner than I hoped.

The magazine that I always find rewarding is Wired.  If you can deal with the wayward graphics, it's just full of very good writing on many interesting subjects.  I like Wired so much that I even subscribed to the UK edition. I'm surprised and delighted to find it is at least as good as the US edition.  Yesterday I read an excellent article on pain, pleasure and habituation - why we should interrupt pleasurable activities and just keep going to complete unpleasant ones.  >>>>>

For me, Wired consistently triggers the urge to share what I've just read with anyone who will listen - surely the measure of interesting content.

Fingers crossed for Frieze magazine.  And fingers crossed I can rein in the iPhone habit.

Apple, other shiny shinies and being human

I'm as seduced by the iPod this stuff as the next man - and woman. And yet...

Over the past 15 months since I got an iPhone, there are now fewer free spaces in my life. The miracle machine is always there with an app to fill that moment.

A few weeks back my iPhone suffered a water incident and had to be replaced, which took a couple of weeks. It was refreshing to have a plain vanilla mobile. I was of course pleased when the replacement iPhone came in.  But it was a useful pause for reflection.

I would say the things that give me most real distinct benefit are
- Weightbot, which has tracked the Harris tally down from 90 kg to today's 81.3 kg and counting
- Runkeeper, an ingenious app and website for tracking runs, cycle trips etc.
- New York Times app - there are full articles and the text is scalable making for excellent reading.
- Radiobox, which allows me to catch snatches of Radio 4 while I'm lifting weights or pottering
- iTunes but specifically the podcasts I listen to.

It's all still relatively new and I hope I'll develop the good sense and discipline to ensure it ONLY benefits my life rather than taking it over.

We really need to bear in mind that however many features and apps there are, we still only have finite attention to allot every day. In anything but a very superficial sense, multitasking may be possible for technology but it's not possible for humans, because we're still on the original OS. The likes of Apple, Nintendo and other technology companies will do their damnedest to grab every moment of our attention they can. It's important - very important - to keep some attention for the things that made us human before technology dangled the promise of making us superhuman.

You never know what conversation will turn up

On the phone with my friend Mark this morning.  He made a chance remark about something I had said a few weeks earlier ... He explained what that had made him think of ...

Then I picked up on a slip of the tongue he made and we tried assuming that his "mistake" was actually a message from his unconscious mind.  We played around with that for a bit and within a few minutes we had cracked a problem that had bugged him for ages.

He's confident that he will be able to enrich his work with a bit of his own magic.  Circle squared, thanks to an open-ended conversation between open-minded guys.

Some conversations energise you, others drain you and worse

I was chatting to my osteopath Anthony Weller about Richer Conversations, the subject of my next book. It really hit a nerve with him. He became very animated as he told me about a woman he knows who completely dominates conversation. He thought there was a connection between that and her husband's high blood pressure - the poor guy is continually having to contain his thoughts. He said that after a couple of hours with the woman he himself feels exhausted. He contrasted it with a friend he sees once a month or so, with whom he regularly has a whole evening of free-wheeling conversation that leaves him feeling energised.


Having benefited from Bioenergetic Analysis in the 80s and early 90s (built on the work of William Reich) I'm particularly interested in how body energy ebbs and flows in relation to what we're doing or thinking.


Conversations aren't just about the words and the subject matter.  They're also about what happens on an energetic level.  Energy can flow freely between and within people, or it can get blocked and thwarted.  You know what it feels like when the other party just goes off on a monologue, or when the other party hijacks ever turn of a conversation to make a point on their pet subject, such as politics.


I suspect Anthony's thought about blood pressure is close to the mark. When people regularly have frustrating conversations with other, that thwarted energy can end up causing health problems.

How do you know when you have learned something?

I was on a hypnosis course in Lancaster, PA, with an assorted bunch of people including a black athlete and sports writer called Len from Louisiana - great guy, very clued in.  He knew he had learned something when he got a "kick inside".  He explained that athletes really have to tune in to their bodies and the signals they give.

Most days I learn a lot about different things - the Internet is full of information and I've got plenty of books and magazines to keep me busy sucking in information.  However, I make a big distinction between learning about and learning how to.  Learning about is nice entertainment, like watching a documentary on TV, and the information may come in handy sooner or later.

However the sort of learning that I particularly seek is the sort of learning that translates into new behaviour, whether it's internal (thinking and feeling) or external.  You might call it "learning how to". 

As one of my favourite trainers and teachers Robert Dilts puts it, "it's just a rumour until it's in the muscle".  Or as I put it, "you don't know until you do."