Christmas with Asperger’s Syndrome

There are lots of things I love about Christmas: I love all the sparkly stuff, the tree, the decorations, the lights. I love the excuse to prepare and eat special food. I love giving presents, even more than receiving them.

Christmas: what’s not to love?

What I can’t stand about Christmas is having to share these things with people who don’t value or enjoy any of them.

My mother loathes Christmas, but can’t bear to be away from her family during this period. This is exactly the problem with Christmas: tradition and/or social pressure make it impossible to be away from the people who drive you the craziest.

This year I invited the two people I find it the most difficult to be around to spend Christmas with us, my sister and my mother.

“Plans are useless, but planning is essential”  (Eisenhower)

This year I tried to think ahead. I tried to plan to avoid the usual conflicts and rows. Most of what I tried didn’t work.

It wasn’t worse than usual. I had one screaming row in the street on the way to the train station with my mother, and almost abandoned her on the train. I had one screaming row with my sister in which I threw her out of my house, (not physically: I told her to get out and go to her hotel, but to leave her son behind).

Actually, that’s pretty good. Remarkable, in fact, considering my sister spent six days with me, more time than we’ve ever spent together as adults, and my mother five days (three more than she originally planned). Perhaps some of what I tried worked.

“Guidelines for being a good guest in my home at Christmas”

On the 23rd of December, I listed all the things that drive me crazy about my mother and sister in my journal. It was a liberating, private rant, but then I thought I could turn it into some sort of ‘guidelines for a harmonious Christmas together.’ I would not think of doing this for any other guests. The reason I thought it might work is that I think my mother and sister might have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Am I an “Aspie”?

I have only just started learning about Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), although it has featured in the background of my life for the last five years or so. My brother’s son, diagnosed age 4 with ADHD, has now, age 12, been re-diagnosed as having AS, and I think my brother has as well.

My suspicions were first aroused while reading Penelope Trunk’s blog. She writes about having AS, and about it looking different in women. Reading about Penelope Trunk’s Asperger’s Syndrome initially convinced me that I have it. I even took the “test” featured in Wired, and scored 32 points, the threshold for suspecting you may have AS. As I continued reading, it started to seem like everyone I know might have AS. Even that the whole of Northern Italy might have AS.

Everyone has Asperger’s Syndrome

OK, it sounds ludicrous. But if I think, for example, of the handful of old school-friends I’ve reconnected with via Facebook in the last few years, one is a deep-sea diver, one is a Buddhist nun – when I met up with her she’d just emerged from a one-year solitary retreat – and one is a potter whose son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Then, I recently went to visit some cousins with my mother. These are my mother’s first cousins and they have two sons around my age, late 40’s. One is the spitting image of Richard Gere, and the other is also spectacularly good-looking. They are both single, live at home with their parents and are bad at making eye-contact. One is an architect and the other a lawyer, professions that attract people with AS.

Consider also that Milan, where I live, is the world capital for design, and designers as a population would score highly on any AS scale. Incidentally, Northern Italians in general don’t correspond to the Italian stereotype of being extroverted, exuberant, chaotic, spontaneous, open, friendly, etc. Think of the opposite of all of these characteristics, and you’ve got your average Northern Italian. (= Asperger’s Syndrome?)

Routine struggles

Anyway, I remembered that my friend, Michelle with the AS son, had done a lot of research into the subject. Her house had little cartoon diagrams hung around it, in particular in her son’s bedroom, in the bathroom and in the hall. She explained that they helped her eight-year-old son do routine things like clean his teeth and get dressed and undressed, that people with AS struggle with routine things.

Many of the things that drive me crazy about my mother and sister are small, stupid things, trivial incidents, but it’s the constant stream of them that wears me down, and the absence of any recognition, adaptation or learning on their part, that drives me, on a regular basis, into a wild-eyed, screaming fury. If the expression “tearing my hair out” didn’t already exist, I’d have had to invent it to describe how I get around these two. So that’s why I decided to try and list some guidelines for not driving me crazy over Christmas. My house, my rules.

Being a guest is hard work

I often feel like I’m walking on eggshells when I’m a guest in other people’s homes. I make an effort to minimize my guest footprint: I try to be tidier than usual, to clear up after myself, to engage, to entertain (exhausting!), to be appreciative of my host(s). My sister and mother never seem to make any effort to do any of these things. This isn’t a family thing because the rest of us make the effort in each other’s homes.

Then there’s food. My mother and sister are impossibly finicky eaters, and neither of them ever gives the impression of enjoying food. They both travel with their own supplies, bits of cheese, ham, fruit, nuts, carrots, with which they litter my house, and my mother isn’t happy if she can’t have broccoli and fish for every meal. They dislike fixed meal times and eat when they’re hungry, regardless of what anyone else has planned. On top of all this, when my sister arrived on Christmas Eve, (three hours late, see the next paragraph), she announced she was on the Cambridge diet (protein only) to get rid of her candida.

Both my mother and sister can be relied on to constantly change their plans, and to disappear without trace, or at least, without being reachable on their mobile phones, for hours at a time. My mother has an iPhone4, which she just can’t seem to get to work whenever you need to reach her, but which she manages to spend half her life on the rest of the time.

Do you need me to spell it out?

So this is the kind of thing that went onto my list of guidelines. On the offchance that the problem was that nobody had ever explicitly told my mother and sister what you should and shouldn’t do when you’re a guest.

Did it work? Maybe, partially. My sister managed to not disappear without agreeing first what time she’d be back. Mess was kept to a minimum, and there was a certain amount of clearing up. Mealtimes were strained but they were more or less respected. My mother is better than my sister at going through the motions of making polite chit chat and showing appreciation, although her performance is wooden and the effort makes her break into a sweat.

I am reminded of Sheldon in my favourite TV Series, “The Big Bang Theory,” who is aware that there are things that he doesn’t care about that most people seem to attach importance to. He understands that it’s in his interest to learn the rules of social interaction, such as going “There, there,” and offering a hot beverage when you detect that someone is sad about something. My mother seems to have understood, to a certain extent, that displaying basic social skills is important to most people. Perhaps my sister will someday as well.

Perhaps I need to consider that what I’m trying to do with my Christmas guidelines is like Sheldon’s “roommate agreement”. I recommend this clip from the series to understand what Dr. Sheldon Cooper is like.

10 ideas for preventing or coping with stress

A client of mine, who’s about my age, has started having heart palpitations. He’s not overweight, exercises regularly, eats healthily. His doctors have told him it’s stress-related. Last time we met we brainstormed what we do to manage stress in our lives. In doing this I realised I have given a lot of thought to this subject. Here’s a list of what has worked for me in the last 10 years:

Free your mind by organising your stuff

Some of the most helpful ideas I’ve ever found are from Getting Things Done by David Allen. I have only managed to apply a few of the ideas contained in the book but they’ve made a big difference in my life. The underlying idea is that you will achieve Nirvana when you unclutter your life, mentally and physically.

I have a tendency to hoard stuff and to be disorganised. Before adopting the solution below, just the idea of looking for documents I needed made me feel like giving up before I started. The best thing about David Allen’s system is that he isn’t on a mission to make you get rid of all the junk you’ve hoarded over the years, he just recommends you organize it. His filing system is simple and works. You can put things away and find them again, like magic. The basic principles are very simple:

1) Get yourself a decent filing cabinet and an electronic labeller
2) Create categories for everything you want to file (create as you go along, refine through trial and error). Order your stuff alphabetically. Tip: don’t overstuff your files. Make them easy to retrieve.

Voilà! However, like most apparently simple things, I would never have been able to put it into practice if I hadn’t read the book, which holds your hand as it guides you through the processes.

The “two minute or less” action

Even if you’re not a disorganized, compulsive hoarder, there are a couple of quick win ideas I’ve also found incredibly useful, which help you think about to-do-list items.

The first is a rule: whenever you are drawing up a list of things to do, if there is something that takes two minutes or less to do, do it now.

There are at least two benefits. The first is that it unclutters your list. The second is that there are some actions that I hate doing, even when they take almost no time, like making phone appointments, paying bills online, etc. This rule makes me realise that the level of anxiety I feel about doing these things is completely disproportionate to the time it takes to complete them. So I do them, instead of waiting until they become either moot or crises. The sense of achievement I get is also disproportionate.

Some actions are projects

Some items never seem to move off my to-do list. They linger, reproachfully, making me feel guiltier and more useless by the day. In Getting Things Done, David Allen points out that some actions aren’t actions but general headings for groups or sequences of actions. Without getting into project management madness, this idea alone has got me to break ideas down into doable bits, which I can then do.

‘Urgent’ not the same as ‘important’

An idea from time management courses is that urgent is not necessarily the same as important, and that it’s easy to neglect important stuff in favour of urgent. It’s one of those interesting but useless ideas, because the obvious solution, prioritise important over urgent, is about as easy as lose weight by eating less and doing exercise.

The best advice on how to prioritise I read a few years ago in an email newsletter, (probably from supercoach.com):

When you are feeling too overwhelmed to know where to start, ask yourself the question “If I only did one thing today, what would it be?”

This has at least one, and usually two effects: the first is that even if I only do one thing on my to-do-list, I’ll feel better than if I did nothing at all, which does happen when I get overwhelmed. The second is that usually if I start doing something, other stuff starts to seem less insurmountable. I do that too, and next thing, I’m back in the land of the living, feeling pleased with myself.

Stressed? You and your priorities are the problem.

After the second or third Time Management course I was sent on, the message was clear: it was my fault I was stressed and I needed to change my priorities. E.g. if my priority was to do a good job, but I didn’t have/wasn’t able to get the resources necessary to achieve this, I needed to change my priorities.

An employee interested in self-preservation and in furthering their prospects might conclude the following: “As far as my boss is concerned, it’s important to reduce costs and maximize efficiency, i.e. for me to achieve the same, or more, with less. No sweat, I can increase workloads and cut a few corners here and there, which will upset the people who report to me, but they’ll adapt and keep delivering. It’s not as if they’ve got a choice.”

Not being that kind of employee, I decided that I’d rather quit than undermine my relationships with the people who reported to me, which I believed enabled us all to do a good job, and have nice lives. I failed to muster up the motivation to change my priorities to help my boss achieve her performance-related bonus. (NB: if there had been a genuine, strategic, pro-survival need to cut costs, it would have been another story. There wasn’t).

Come to think of it, this is exactly in line with the results of a questionnaire my coach got me to fill in recently, to identify my values around work: it turns out that my top three values are “harmonious relationships”, “making an impact”, and “being in charge”, whereas what I value least is “financial rewards”. These would be great values if I had a private income, but are less than ideal for doing well in the average workplace.

I realise I am equating priorities with values, but then I have always been far more driven by my values than other people’s priorities.

Are you stressed because your priorities clash with your employer’s? Then you need to consider the problem-solver’s 4 option checklist.

The Pomodoro Technique

When there are important, but hard and/or unpleasant things I need to, but don’t want to do, sometimes the only way to get started is to allocate a “pomodoro” to them. The “pomodoro” is so named because of the tomato-shaped timers you find in kitchens. A “pomodoro” is a 25 minute increment of time that you can devote to specific tasks. You can devote as few or as many of these as you like, but even if you just devote just one pomodoro to that awful, impossible task, you’ve done something, you’ve made progress.

Catastrophize

I’ve always been a great worrier. According to my dad I was born with a frowny face. Worrying can be a bad habit, especially if your favourite time for doing it is 03.00 a.m., but it turns out that it can be an effective way of dealing with uncertainty. James Altucher calls this “The Law of Reverse Attraction,” (in the section “How to break free from the secure job” in the linked post):

“So picture this: you leave your job, you fail at your next thing: what’s the worst case scenario? What is the absolute worst? Is it as bad as you think? What will you do then? Really imagine it and see if you can deal with it. … . By really imagining the worst that can happen, most often it will never happen.”

Health/ sanity indicators

Have a checklist of personal wellness indicators. What are the things you know are good for your physical and mental well-being, that show that you are taking good care of yourself? Typical things for me would include going running, socialising, art projects, paying attention to my diet, reading novels, journaling, etc. These are things that typically require some attention and time, i.e. are not effortless. You can monitor your mental and physical health on a weekly basis according to how much time you’ve managed to devote to things you know are good for you. If you are managing to do few or none of the things you know help you hold it together, you might be in trouble.

PTSD – extreme measures

What about when prevention hasn’t worked and your stress levels are spiking off the scale? Then you need coping strategies. First of all, what, apart from palpitations, tells you that you’re maxed out? In my case, I get a kind of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), which I experience as vivid flashbacks from recent work experiences, played on an endless loop in my head. This prevents me from sleeping, from connecting with my nearest and dearest, from reading or doing anything engaging. It can last for days or weeks, and occasionally, months.

I have not researched this much beyond comparing notes with a few people, but I find I am not alone. One of my sisters, for example, who taught at a school in a particularly rough part of Bristol described exactly the same symptoms.

I don’t know if the comparison with PTSD is right. One of the reasons I want to change what I do is that I believe my work has been a kind of addiction for me. I get an intense high from most of my client-facing interventions, which almost always involve dealing with a lot of risk and uncertainty, and it’s precisely these experiences that cause the flash-backs and sleeplessness.

What has helped? In my case, watching TV series – entire seasons over one or two days of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Friends, Band of Brothers, etc. – until my eyes are practically bleeding and my head is full of stories that are not my own. This sounds compulsive and anti-social, and it has been, but it’s been the most successful/ least misantrhopic way of helping me transition back to the real world from my work world. I tell myself, “Well, I could be smoking crack, or frequenting swing clubs (like a friend of mine).”

Ultimately, what has helped is deciding to quit my company. Since then my TV series viewing requirements have dwindled dramatically.

10,000 hours

I saw a great TED talk, recently: Jane McGonigal claiming that “Gaming Can Make a Better World.” She has worked out that the average young person in countries where there is a big gaming culture has spent 10,000 hours gaming by the time they are 21. She finds this significant for two reasons: the first is that your entire secondary school eductation totals about 10,000 hours; the second is the idea, proposed by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that 10,000 hours is the time it takes to gain absolute mastery of anything. For her the big question is, “What, exactly, is it that gamers are getting so good at?”

I am asking myself a similar question: I reckon I have spent 10,000 hours watching TV series in the last 8 years or so. What am I a virtuoso at now?

How my sister’s ex stuck it to the man

This is the inappropriate story I told my clients that I referred to in this post.

From Private Eye July 1997

Superheroes

The last time I did some management training, three weeks ago, I remember thinking at the end of the first day, “This isn’t so bad. In fact it’s brilliant. Why would I ever want to give it up?”

Then I woke up at 4 a.m., with the usual adrenaline hangover, and spent the next three hours remembering all the reasons why I need to stop doing this kind of work. The following week I quit my company.

One of the things that enabled me to do this was that I have found some work teaching English in a company, which is giving me a) an income and b) some structure to my days.

Work causes/ prevents depression

Work, both consulting and teaching, has been a brilliant way of staving off depression, although it hasn’t prevented me from getting unhappy and burned out. Work is like a super anti-depressant, that keeps me cheerful and functioning, even while my life becomes an unsustainable nightmare.

Since deciding to quit my company I’ve been carefully monitoring my moods, looking out for any sudden surges in either very good or very bad feelings. I have had two episodes of feeling very bad, of feeling out of my mind recently:

• the day before going to Paris and quitting my company
• when I spoke to my sister on the phone about how long she’s intending to stay with me over the Christmas holidays (6 days).

Out of my mind

When I feel out of my mind, I feel like my attention, which seems to be controlled by some kind of sphincter muscle, has been reduced to a pin-prick. If attention is like oxygen, then I am having a mental asthma attack. I barely have enough attention to remain upright, and all I want to do is lie down on the sofa and watch TV series until it passes.

It’s very hard to function in this state. The day before I went to Paris it required a supreme effort to focus my remaining attention on my students, with all the distress signals clamouring around my head. I could see myself saying and doing stupid things, telling inappropriate stories (how my sister’s ex stuck it to the man the day after he resigned from his job), being insensitive to my students (e.g. today’s topic: “managing change”, in a company that’s about to be restructured). I felt beside myself. I felt like a helpless observer, a parent of an out-of-control adolescent. I could see that something was wrong, but was powerless to do anything about it.

This reminds me of a recent conversation with my mother, in which she was denying that she’s an anxious person. She doesn’t seem to know how she’s feeling, but she exudes anxiety from every pore. It’s in her voice, her posture,  in everything she says and does. I think I am like this as well, sometimes. It’s like we have some sort of emotional leprosy in my family, a loss of sensitivity, of feeling, a pervasive numbness that ultimately causes you to accidentally burn or hack bits off yourself. It’s unsightly and contagious, and causes people to people shun you.

The equivalent of an inhaler in this situation is to make me laugh, or reassure me, make me feel safe, which isn’t easy. The other day, after I got off the phone with my sister, my significant other, M,  got me back into myself, (sufficiently to book a hotel room for my sister, which should reduce the stress for all of us), by finding an episode of “Christmas with Jamie Oliver” on the iPad. Anything with Jamie Oliver, who I worship, makes me feel like the world is a warm, friendly place.

Superheroes

Superhero: The Vicar of Dibley

There’s a technique called Superheroes which involves conjuring up inner resources by thinking about people you admire. You identify your heroes, living or dead, real or fictional, and list what you admire about each of them. This should remind you that the world is not entirely a cold, hostile place, in which everyone is doomed.

For example, I admire Jamie Oliver tremendously, not for his cooking, which features too much butter and bacon for my tastes, but for his attitude: his boundless and infectious enthusiam for whatever he turns his attention to, and his incredible perseverance in the face of the many, apparently immovable obstacles he encouters in his mission to change the way people eat.

Apart from Jamie Oliver, other examples of ‘heroes’ that help restore my faith in human nature are The Vicar of Dibley, French & Saunders, Scott Adams, Charles Schultz, Heather Armstrong of Dooce, whose mommy blog I follow, not because I feel any kind of affinity with her seemingly perfect life, but because she writes movingly and amusingly about her struggles with depression. I notice that my heroes are comedians, cartoonists, chefs and mommy bloggers, who probably wouldn’t feature on most people’s top 10 most inspiring people in the world. Hero worship is a personal thing, and you need to identify who really gives you that warm feeling.

Superheroes: French & Saunders

If you’re trying to tackle a specific problem, then you need to proceed to the second part of the exercise, which is to ask yourself “What would [superhero] do?” This can give you a surprising number of new ideas and insights into your situation. A good example of someone using this technique is James Altucher listing in this post all the things he’s learned from Charles Shultz.

You can get also use anti-heroes that you don’t admire at all. I have done this exercise using Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair, a company I loathe with every fibre of my being. Using anti-heroes forces you to adopt a point of view which, by definition, is not your own, which will automatically produce new ideas and insights about your situation.

The original Superheroes technique gets you to use actual superheroes, Superman, Spiderman, etc., but I’ve found this doesn’t work too well with the Italians or French, who grew up reading very different kinds of comic. Also, hero-worshipping doesn’t seem to be part of Italian or French cultures. My French and Italian trainees often find it difficult to come up with people they admire.  This is what happens when I use this technique with French or Italians:

French or Italian trainee: “I don’t admire anyone.”

Me: “Oh, come on. There must be someone you admire.”

French or Italian trainee: “…”

Me: “What about, I don’t know, Steve Jobs? You’re a fan of Apple products.”

French or Italian trainee: “Steve Jobs is arrogant. I don’t admire him. I admire Apple products.”

Me: “Ok. What about Gandhi? Mother Teresa? Are they arrogant?”

French or Italian trainee: “… No …”

Me: “So, do you admire Gandhi? Mother Teresa?”

French or Italian trainee: “ … Ok. The person I admire is my mother.”

I swear I have had this exact conversation on 10 different occasions.

My right brain hates me

Tilda - my right brain "persona"

Journaling is a writing technique that has kept me sane for the last few years, which involves getting all the rubbish in your head down on paper, uncensored. It’s like an emetic or enema for the brain, for when your thoughts are better out than in.

Ideally, you should write long-hand rather than type. I think the benefits of handwriting are that:

• it’s harder to edit yourself when you handwrite: there’s no “delete” button, or cutting and pasting.
• I can’t handwrite as fast as I type. This forces me to slow down and get into a rhythm of thinking one sentence at a time. For some reason this improves the logical flow of ideas.
• handwriting uses sophisticated motor skills. Handwriting feels like a whole body activity compared to typing.

Intriguing by-products of journalling

Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by some of the images and ideas that come up in a journalling session. Like the title of this post. The images from the journaling session below are probably the result of my fascination with the Lateralisation of brain function. This started when  I was shown a documentary at university, where I studied psychology, about split brain patients, people who’ve had their corpus callosum severed to prevent grand mal epileptic seizures. I’ll never forget the image of a woman, who’d undergone this surgery, physically battling herself while trying to get dressed. Everytime she’d choose a dress with her right hand, her left would snatch it out of her hand and choose something else.

The other unforgettable story regarding this topic is Jill Bolte-Taylor’s TED talk, “My Stroke of Insight”, in which she, a neuro-anatomist, describes the massive stroke that shut down her left hemisphere, and the completely different way in which she found herself experiencing the world as a result. In this very moving talk she explicitly describes the very different personalities of the left and right brains. Watch it, it’s fantastic.

Transcribed from my journal 09.12.11:

I’ve forgotten my computer, which was charging on my desk, ready to be packed. I never forget my computer. I was looking forward to working on some blog post ideas on the coach on the way to the mountains this morning. What is going on? When I do things like this it’s never an accident. My right brain is taking charge, and is trying to tell me something. My right brain does things like that. I’m convinced my right brain has a mind and personality of its own. I believe it’s my right brain that got me to sprain my ankle so I was housebound for 10 days, forced to contemplate my life and face my problems, on two occasions – once, twisting it while walking along the street (1990), another time by tripping over a mysterious speck of dust on the pavement (2000) – and the timing is always strategic: my life’s a mess, I can get sick pay and I need to make a decision. I haven’t been able to afford a twisted ankle or a restful bout of ‘flu for years.

The thought of being without my computer for three days is making me feel physically anxious. I could be sleeping now: I’m on a coach, it’s bloody early in the morning, and I’ve had a hell of a week. I’ve just come back from Paris, from telling my business partner that I need to stop doing this – this kind of work, but also working with him, although I didn’t say this explicitly.

The prospect of having this conversation was making me feel out of my mind all day on Tuesday, the day before I left for Paris, and I also managed to have an agonizing gas attack the morning I left for Paris, another right brain strategy for getting my attention. This happens once or twice a year and is incapcacitatingly painful, but is a complaint that elicits embarrassed giggles rather than sympathy. “What do you want??!!” I feel like screaming at my right brain, but my right brain is mute, or at least, can’t tell me with language.

The reason I might have “forgotten” my computer is that I am supposed to be having a Skype conference with my mother and brother about the family finances on Saturday morning. Just thinking about the prospect of this makes me stop breathing. So, cheers, right brain, here’s to a crude but effective strategy for getting me out of this. [I subsequently found out that my mother and brother had already talked, but had neglected to tell me.]

Later that day …

Crap, it’s happened again. The wine producer we’ve just visited thinks I’m M’s mother. If I look as half-dead as I feel, it’s not surprising. I’ve just had a related memory – that when I was 14, and having a bad time, people often assumed I was my father’s wife, so I obviously have a talent for looking old – not much of an advantage if you happen to be with someone much younger than yourself. Damn, I can’t even draw inspiration from Demi and Ashton any more (same age difference).

I hate not having my computer. Surfing the web, especially when you tell yourself it’s “research”, is a great way of passing the time, of not thinking, and of numbing out any pesky physical and emotional feelings.  Because I’m starting to feel things again, as if I’ve been anaesthetized for the last 5 years and it’s starting to wear off, and the blood is starting to circulate around my right hemisphere again.

I’ve been wondering recently if it’s possible for the brain to get calluses like hands from hard labour. I sometimes think that if you opened up my skull to look at my brain it would be all deformed and discoloured on the left side, swollen and arthritic-looking, like hands that have spent a lifetime washing sheets in mountain streams, and my right brain would look wizened, atrophied, like a wasted muscle.

Now I have to reckon with my right brain, who I picture as an angry, disappointed wife, as a vengeful witch, a She. My right brain’s persona would be Tilda Swinton, as the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

She makes the skin on my lips and around my fingernails curl up invitingly when I’m anxious, so that I peel layers of skin off until I bleed. Must get some plasters for my fingers.

The next day …

My right brain hates me. She made me slam my thumb in the fridge as I was clearing away the breakfast things. This is making it very difficult to use my blackberry – I was trying to email mum and Chris to express my opinions on the family finances question. What is your problem, right brain? I thought you’d be pleased.

Later …

Apparently my mother-in-law has a bitch of a right brain as well. She’s just burned herself picking up a hot lid, and is viciously cursing herself – she is literally calling herself a stupid cow.

I quit

Yesterday I informed my business partner that I need to stop doing the kind of work I’ve been doing as I’ve been unhappy for years and it’s affecting my health. I’m proud of how I managed this conversation – it could have gone in so many different ways.

Write a letter

My preparation work for my last coaching session was to write my business partner a letter. This was also, (like “brainwriting“), a surprisingly useful exercise. Writing things down, especially with an audience in mind – in this case, the audience was actually my coach – forces you to be logical, to stick to the facts, to be credible. And not just credible with your audience, but with yourself: getting things down in black and white gives you a chance to properly gauge what you are dealing with.

When bad things happen to me, I often find myself overwhelmed with a sense of unreality. I doubt myself, my thinking, my senses, my feelings. I think, automatically, “What did I do to provoke this?” I suspect I’m a bit mental, a bit inappropriate sometimes, that the cause is likely to be me.

Sometimes I think that normal people have some sort of internal behaviourometer that allows them to respond with the correct reaction at the right intensity to whatever situations they’re presented with, and when things are going badly for me, it’s because mine’s become defective. However, my behaviourometer functions very well on behalf of other people. I’m good at helping people judge how to react to situations, when they should calm down or when they should stand up for themselves. Perhaps I’m normal, and it’s normal to feel disoriented and disconnected when people treat you like crap.

I believe that my business partner is a good man, and believing otherwise is just too awful to consider. But now I’ve written things down I can see that I’ve got grounds for feeling mistreated.  And I feel less crazy.

The checklist

I am a great fan of the checklist, a staple of the management consultant’s toolbox, and one of my favourites is the problem-solver’s checklist, which describes the 4 options you have in any situation:

1. change the situation
2. change yourself
3. accept it
4. leave

So if this checklist is so great, why didn’t I have the conversation I had with my business partner yesterday a year ago? Perhaps because my default assumption is to assume I need to change myself, which isn’t useful when the problem isn’t actually me. Also, I loathe conflict, and option 1 often involves this, so it’s seldom an option even when it could be. And that makes me feel like I need to change myself, so I seem to spend a lot of time going around in circles between option 1 and option 2. I have only managed to break out of this a vicious cycle thanks to a friend who is giving me some coaching, who’s also helped me figure out that the prospect of option 3, accepting things and carrying on, is making me ill, so that leaves option 4.

Ask “why?”

In my last coaching session, my friend kept asking me “why” in response to anything I said. This is a technique that is used in many fields, from Total Quality Management, to psychotherapy, and when used correctly, delivers amazing results. When used incorrectly it makes you want to commit acts of violence towards the questioner, especially when the questioner doesn’t give you the time to think and answer and starts sounding like the Spanish Inquisition. This was not the case with my coach.

Another reason I didn’t have this conversation with my business partner a year ago, is that option 4, leaving, isn’t easy, and in fact, makes me feel almost as ill as option 3. My coach kept asking “why”, and I suddenly had another vivid memory, this time from when I was 17, and in my last year of school. I had been seeing a psychotherapist, who recommended to my parents that I move out of the family home, as my relationship with them was so bad. I truly believe that my psychotherapist cared about me and had my best interests at heart. She told me, explicitly, that I needed to stay away from people who treated me badly, starting with my parents. If I did this I would have a chance of being happy, of leading a fulfilling life. I took her advice to heart – and come to think of it, it’s probably been a guiding principle throughout my life. I moved out, to a room in a nearby house, and my old bedroom was immediately occupied by one of my younger sisters.

Remembering this brought up feelings of grief and anger that I didn’t feel at the time: that my parents – my mother in particular, who immediately agreed to my psychotherapist’s proposal – would let me leave so easily. These are the same feelings I’m having about my current situation with my business partner.

What was helpful about recalling this memory is that it made me realise that moving out and getting away from my family was a) terrifying, painful, traumatic, and b) the right thing to do, given that staying was also terrifying, painful and traumatic, and by leaving I got to have some choice about the challenges I picked. I believe this has, on the whole, worked out well for me.

All this is what helped me decide to neatly and diplomatically sever my relationship with the company I helped create and have invested the last 8 years of my life in. Let’s see how this works out for me.

How to change

Change or Die!

How incredibly hard it is to learn new things? Or acquire new habits? This article, entitled “Change or Die!”, discusses how hard change is, and I will quote from it:

“What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, you would die. Could you change?

“Here are the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you.”

The article describes a study of bypass surgery patients whose only real chances of survival require drastic life-style changes, but very few people are able to commit to these. The good news is that your chances of being able to commit to new habits are greatly increased when you focus on the benefits you will obtain, rather than the risks you will avoid.

The article goes on to describe instances of companies that have been able to apply this idea (Lou Gerstner leading IBM back from the brink of disaster, for example). But what does it mean for little old me, and little old you?

3 tips for change

The three takeaway ideas from this article are:

1. Don’t underestimate how hard change is. The odds are against you. Especially if you are old(er). If you are of the older persuasion, you’ll struggle with letting go of your precious hard-won knowledge.
2. Focus on the benefits of the change you’re trying to achieve, not on what you’ll be avoiding.
3. Big changes are easier to make than small ones. This is about the motivating effect of the visibility of the changes you make. You need to be able to perceive a difference between before and after, the sooner the better.

How does this apply to actual life? In practice, making small, ineffective changes seems to have been a lot easier than making the decision that’s been tormenting me all year, to quit the company I helped establish and have invested blood, sweat and tears in for the last 10 years. Especially in light of the fact that instead of  the company dying of natural causes, which was what I was hoping for, in the last two weeks we seem to have landed a major client so it looks like we’re in business again.

I have used two techniques recently, prescribed by a coach, one that made me realise just how long I’ve been miserable for, and the other that I am not the drama queen I sometimes suspect I am, and actually have been putting in exponentially more effort into the company than my business partner has for the last four years or so.

Draw your life’s experiences as an archipelago of islands

"Archipelago" - I was happy when I was "me, inc."

The first technique, “Archipelago”, asks you to draw your life, or a period of your life, as it it were a journey through an archipelago of different islands. I ended up drawing 6 pages, each representing a distinct period during the last 10 years. The drawing on the right is number 2 in the sequence.

I’m a huge advocate of problem-solving tools that get people drawing, using an analogical, visual way of thinking – but I never get to use them myself. I can’t afford coaching at the moment, but a friend of mine, a coach, is very generously giving me some pro-bono sessions at the moment – she says it’s for giving her a lot of help when she quit her job 9 years ago. The point is, I wouldn’t have done this exercise if I wasn’t going to get to show it to a coach.

Being slowly boiled alive

As soon as I finished my drawing assignment, the night before our session, I looked over what I’d drawn and burst into tears. It was like looking at a profit and loss account of my life for the last 10 years, and for the last 5 I have clearly been making a loss. I’ve been like that frog, the one who would jump out of a pot of boiling water, but who hasn’t noticed that the cool water it was sitting in has been getting hotter and hotter, and it’s being slowly cooked alive. This is about being unable – or unwilling? – to notice gradual or small changes, and bears out the idea, above, that big changes are easier to make than small ones.

Get it all down on paper – writing as an emetic

The second technique I used, “brainwriting”, bears a strong resemblance to the “morning pages” journalling technique described in Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”, and involves handwriting pages of whatever rubbish comes into your head for a fixed amount of time without stopping. The idea is to weaken your internal censor, stir up your unconscious, and get your creativity flowing.

Today this exercise brought back a vivid memory from when I was working in Poland about 15 years ago. I was at a meeting with six colleagues, two of whom had just arrived in Poland, and we were welcoming them and showing them the ropes. I’d just come back from the UK, and during a break in the meeting I passed a couple of bottles of “Kalms” – over the counter herbal sedatives – to a colleague. One of our new colleagues noticed and asked what they were for. We then embarked on our favourite game – in the “Games People Play” sense of the word – in which we would compete to see who was the most stressed among us, a bit like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

Playing the Four Yorkshiremen game

What I realised today was that, even bearing in mind that there were two people there who’d just relocated to a strange new country, major life event and all, I probably won the stress game that day:

• I’d just split up with my partner, who’d returned to the UK – taking credit and reaping the rewards for a lot of the work I’d been doing
• I’d just given up my 40-a-day cigarette habit, cold turkey
• the branch of the company I was responsible for was three times larger than my colleagues’ branches, situated in a uniquely unattractive part of Poland, it was very hard to attract decent staff, blah, blah, etc. etc.

The realisation I had was that my life genuinely sucked at the time whereas my colleagues’ lives really didn’t. The problem is that I didn’t realise this at the time. Our game lulled me into a sense of “we’re all in this together”, but we weren’t really: my life was imploding whereas my colleagues were just playing a game.

The other problem is that I have been playing this game again with my current business partner. And winning. Old habits die hard.

The “d’oh!” moment

the string game

There seem to be a lot of myths about learning: that it’s fun, that it comes naturally, that once you learn something you never forget it (like learning to ride a bike), that it’s gratifying –  its own reward. The truth is, learning is hell, (which was the alternative title for this post).

There’s a game I sometimes get my clients to play: I ask them to “manacle” themselves with a piece of string, and then link themselves to a partner by threading one person’s “chain” through their partner’s before securing their wrist. You have to separate yourself from your partner without untying or breaking the string, and without slipping the “cuffs” off your wrist.

The exercise usually goes like this:

1. Each pair will start by confidently trying to twist themselves free of each other. They will persist with this strategy even when it’s clearly not succeeding because it’s sort of fun.
2. Frustration sets in: from total confidence that the puzzle can be solved in a jiffy, each pair will declare the challenge impossible.
3. I ask them to stop and define the problem. Someone obligingly describes it as being like trying to separate two links in a chain. I challenge them to re-examine the problem: “But is it two links?”
4. They figure out that the solution might have something to do with the loops around their wrists. One pair manages to free themselves from each other. I ask them to tie themselves together again and solve the problem again. None of the other pairs is ever interested in watching the pair that’s solved the problem do it again. Sometimes the successful pair actively tries to conceal the solution from the other pairs.
5. 50% of the time the pair that’s trying to replicate their solution only succeeds in further twisting up their strings together rather than freeing themselves

In fig.2 I have tried to describe the emotional states people typically go through during the string game: it takes about 3 minutes to go from total confidence to frustration through to hopelessness; there is a split-second high when you solve the problem which is often accompanied by a Homer Simpson forehead-slapping “d’oh!” moment, after which you stop caring very much, especially when you discover that the solution is quite hard to replicate and learn.This is what I’ve learned about learning from watching this game.

1. People don’t seem to want to learn from each other. They’d rather worry away at a problem on their own rather than see if anyone else has a solution. In fact, in some cultures that would be considered copying or cheating.
2. People are jealous of and secretive about their solutions and don’t want to share. Points 1 & 2 seem to go against what David Attenborough says about mammals, that our competitive advantage derives from our ability to teach and learn from each other.
3. Learning is an emotional roller-coaster. You can experience feelings of confidence, frustration, hopelessness, and, once you’ve found the solution, you may feel like an idiot for not having seen the blindingly obvious answer.
4. At first the problem seems familiar and the solution obvious, then it seems that this is a new problem with no solution, and most people are ready to give up at this point, and will without some encouragement.
5. The initial assumptions people make about the problem they are trying to solve are always wrong.
6. This (5) in no way affects people’s initial supreme confidence that they know what to do.
7. Once you’ve found out what the solution is, it’s often difficult to replicate, and if you do it wrong, you can actually make the situation worse.
8. If you don’t use the solution regularly you forget it. Faced with exactly the same game six months later, people have no recollection of what the solution is.
9. Teaching the solution to others is difficult (not least because of points 1 and 2). A manual would probably help, but who reads those?
10. Calling something a game does not make it fun.

This challenge is a lot like some types of problem one encounters in life (I wonder if there’s such a thing as a taxonomy of different problems?). Certain kinds of situations and tools require regular practice or exposure to really learn how to deal with them.  Things from my life that spring to mind are card games, HTML, Excel; using the computer to watch TV and manage DVDs and video and audio files is a lot more complicated than just using a TV and a DVD player and this is one of the areas where I struggle for technological independence from my partner.

So what can you do to make learning easier? Here’s an idea from consulting.

The 3 Diamonds Model of problem-solving

The 3 diamonds model of problem-solving

This model describes problem-solving in 3 stages: 1) explore the problem, 2) generate ideas and 3) generate a plan to implement or test the best ideas. Sounds simple? Banal?

Maybe, but we don’t seem to be wired to do this. We’re more likely to be wired to do two of the three stages really well, and skip over the third. And there are individual and cultural differences in terms of which stages we prefer to focus on. I have found that the British are highly prolific idea generators, and prefer to start by trying a known solution or a new idea, but they dislike spending time on analysing the problem. The French, on the other hand, love analysing problems, but generate relatively few ideas, and tend to stick to known solutions. Personally, I am very English in my preferences.

How do you apply the 3 diamond model to problems? The key to resolving the string game problem, and untangling other potentially complex routines, is to start by focussing on what, exactly, you are trying to do, and with what. Instead of launching into solution mode on the basis of your first – wrong – assumption, in this case, that you are trying to separate two rings, look at how many rings you are actually dealing with, and where and how you are joined. Then, generate more than one idea, more than the one involving twisting and turning. Have a plan B and C. Then test those ideas, systematically.

How will I apply this? The next time my partner tries to teach me how to watch video files on the TV, I will not be satisfied with his assumption that “it’s easy”. I will demand to know ONLY which buttons I need to press on which of the 3 remote controls that now seem to be in cirulation in order to achieve my viewing objectives. I will interrupt him when he goes off on a tangent about all the wild and wonderful things we can and can’t do with this new system. I will test my ideas by wresting control of the appropriate remote(s) from him and making him watch me as I try to navigate around the system, demanding clarification when things don’t work. I will prevent him from leaving my side until I’ve gained autonomy.

What did we do before Ritalin?

Ritalin in the 1970's

What did you do in the 1970’s, when, at school, you’d space out with boredom, and then tune in again a bit later to discover that the class had moved on to stuff you’ve never seen before and you had no idea what was going on any more?

 When your parents and teachers called you “scatterbrain”, “clumsy”, “chatterbox”, and your reports always said “could do better,” and “needs to concentrate more”?

What you did was, after school you went to the swings.

First of all, the swings, suspended from long, long chains, so you could twist your swing around on itself until you were forced to let go and and be twirled around at such a sick-making rate that it would twist itself up the other way, until you were whizzed back around the other way. Again and again until the day’s woes had receded.

The boys claimed that if you swung long and hard enough you could go all the way over, although when you did it, there was a point when the whole thing would start to vibrate and groan as if if the steel frame was trying to heave itself off the cement, and the chains would twang, and loose their tautness and leave you juddering in unrhythmic figures of eight. But there was a perfect bit before then, when it felt possible, that you never wanted to stop.

the roundabout

Next, the roundabout. I liked to sit on top, as close to the centre as possible, battling the centrifugal force that would drag me towards the edge and threaten to fling me off, with the world blurring around me. But sometimes I wanted the wind in myhair, and to feel like a stunt-man, and would cling onto the side rail with both hands and lean back with my head as close to the ground as I dared. Screaming was good too.

the launching pad

The see-saw: it could seat at least four, with tyres in the ground under the ends, all the better to launch our playmates into orbit with. You could run the length of it and weigh down one end while trapping your playmates in mid-air on the other.

The “witch’s hat” (pictured at the top): the cone was a climbing frame for the very brave who would perch high up and cling on while the whole thing spun and careered from side to side in dramatic ellipses, juddering in protest the faster it went, like a giant bell, almost but never quite hitting the central pole.

I played on these swings until I was eleven and then we moved to a different country. I wish I had swings to play on now. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there were playgrounds for people of all ages? Somewhere you could go and play with other grownups, where you could go and rock yourself into a trance on a swing?

An original way of telling a story

Below is a story about the seedy underbelly of consulting. I belive that this describes a tiny portion of the world of consulting – a case of a very few ruining it for the many.

The main reason I want to share this is the amazing use of PowerPoint as a way of telling a story, which I first came across in the book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” by Jennifer Egan. You can see the chapter of her book, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses”, which she presents as a slideshow, here.

Criminal Consultation by Kendra Perchant (a Goodreads Contest Entry)

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