So you managed to escape from thinking about work over Christmas and the New Year – well, almost.

Well done you!

Now you just have to muster the will to engineer the reverse exercise. This is when you find out whether you are, what some people refer to as, a ’self-starter’. The magic property which enables you to get on with it all by yourself.

Me? I completely failed to start learning to touch type and I am now having to resort to the loser’s tool of choice: the New Year’s Resolution. My current excuse for five-finger-typing-whilst-watching-the-keyboard-and-still-misspelling-every-third-word is that my friend Tom who promised me a superb, ‘best in class’ book on the topic has not delivered, and frankly, until he can, I’m stuck. Job done. No need to continue with that one.

Part of the problem for me of course is that there’s no one giving me stress about my productivity; I just type, work and play at my own pace. I turn up to work when I feel like it and stop when I like. But, alas, like any company owner/diligent employee, I do far too little skiving/goofing off/resting. I don’t take breaks much, I often forget to have lunch, consider train journeys to be golden times to work on things and have to make conscious and specific efforts to stop having ‘brilliant ideas’ at weekends. But then, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I really like my job. So the most damaging aspect of not having a constant boss (I have as many transient ones as I have clients) is that when it comes to something that isn’t important to me, or at least important/urgent enough, I delay or just drop it from the list. So, I seem to have it taped. Lucky me. Well not quite actually. My self-starter approach has come with a high price: there are many things that I just haven’t stretched myself to do. I could say that I haven’t, until now, been very brave and so have played things rather safely. Here is where mentors come along.

I, like everyone else, need someone sometimes to chivvy me along; to help me to get into a difficult, higher gear. Some people depend on their manager to help more than others in this respect either because of the way they are or because of the circumstances in which they live and work. Many of us would show up to work only reluctantly if things were going wrong at home or if work was getting on top of us; repetitious or stressful jobs exact a personal toll which I can only guess at. In these circumstances we positively need leadership. And people who want to be stars at anything (think: athlete, ace pilot, politician, top academic etc.) also need some sort of leadership or at least people around them who perform elements of leadership on them – even when not requested.

We need to know there is someone there looking out for us, giving us an outlet for discussing work-based problems and the occasional home-side catastrophe. We also need someone to give us feedback (a nudge, or stronger) when we are about to take a backward step. So some of us need a leader to get us out of bed, others need one so that they can excel and still others need a leader for self-preservation: because of what the job takes out of them.

So what do we need this precious leader to provide us with under any of these circumstances?

Many things, but a few critical ones are:

1. Set the vision and communicate it to us
2. Determine direction and strategy and pass it on
3. Facilitate progress – make it as easy as possible
4. Provide consequences

Were you expecting number 4?

If you stumble across a poor performing team or a place where morale really stinks it will almost certainly be because there are few consequences to either good performance or poor.

Just reflect upon how you feel when you’ve done something really difficult and no one says anything.

How does it feel, when a little while later, someone fails to do something or gets it wrong (the notion of ‘fault’ is not relevant here) and there is no response, no consequence?

Even those of us who profess to be utterly self-sufficient and to not require formal leadership need consequences to our own actions if we want to get anywhere special. And we want to see consequences for those around us whose actions affect us.

Without consequences events and outcomes just don’t make sense. Fulfilment is never achieved, the will to improve or alter something doesn’t materialise within us. The worst consequence of the lack of consequences is that we give up trying because, when things are really difficult, anything bearable will do. The consequences provide the point. No consequences; no point.

So, I still can’t type and it’s a big waste of time and energy; I get tired and frustrated. I get documents done but without the satisfaction of doing it quickly. I waste brain power on doing corrections instead of using it to be creative, to write better. So the lack of external consequence for me not learning to type, far from freeing me up to remain a free agent, binds me to a situation I don’t like. It’s not big, but then again, it is a bloody pain. My only hope is that Dr Bill Baker will call me to embarrass me about his virtuoso Ukulele playing. At lunch, a few weeks ago, the deal struck between us was: “you learn to play and I learn to type”.

So what does all this mean to you and your team?

You might give them 1-3 as above and much besides. But if you don’t provide consequences for good and poor performance they will never, ever perform anywhere near their best, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may give a lot less than that because they will assume that it really doesn’t matter to you. And if it doesn’t matter to you, they will find a way to cope: making it not matter to themselves (cognitive dissonance).

So what are you going to do about it? That is up to you.

What am I going to do? Well, since my boss refuses to administer any consequences of note, I’m going to call Bill and get myself a consequence that I care about: his good opinion. That should nail it.

It will be interesting to see if you can actually stop working when the moment comes.

Let’s be honest now. You and I have struggled to keep going the last couple of weeks; a mixture of fatigue (why now?? see last post), social and environmental hypnotic suggestion (twinkly Christmas effect – technical term) and a raft of business reasons have made it very tricky to keep the productivity machine from stalling altogether. But the day is approaching when we are actually going to have to stop ourselves checking our various electronic devices for updates, actions and trouble; we are going to need to divert our attentions to our own, personal lives. But like a sick dog who isn’t permitted to eat but habitually sniffs it’s bowl anyway, we will both, you and I, have to find ways stop sniffing the empty work bowl for 10 days.

Habit is one thing and wish is quite another. A habit can dry up quite quickly, in the space of 40-50 experiences, even quite close together. So if you do glance at your Blackberry or iPhone and then realise that there is no real need, you may not have to go through this ritual many times before you notice that you are doing it less and less within a day or two. The point here is not so much can I stop the habit but do I have something better (more engaging) to do? Something that brings me a stronger (nicer) feeling than the little kick that I get from checking my mail/voicemail to see if I have received good news or a lack of bad. That part is of course a matter of personal choice. We can each choose to fill our heads with what is happening right now or to worry about what we left behind (unfinished tasks and troubles) and what is coming up next on the 3rd of January (more tasks and trouble).

The challenge for busy people is to exist in the present whilst creating outcomes for the future; to do what we are supposed to be doing now and not what we were supposed to be doing yesterday or what we should be doing tomorrow. Whenever you have decided to stop work, your new ‘To-do’ is to work at doing the present well – keeping your head in the now as the saying goes.

This thing about concentrating on living the day, the experience, the moment is the most obvious recipe for returning to work as happy and rested as possible. Not to mention the most obvious way to ensure that you have something to give, beyond your physical presence to the people around you during the few days that you have at your disposal.

Bottom line: just as you and I can choose how, when and how well to work, we can choose to make a really fine job of switching off and having a great holiday season – even if we must at first work at it.

My best wishes.

How do you feel about the approaching festive season? Are Christmas and the New Year brick walls on the approaching horizon that inevitably block your business path as people just stop making decisions or are they just lines in the snow that you can cross without breaking your stride – and time to join in with the childish fun?

It’s just a short break.

The Christmas phenomenon is theoretically simply a 10-day hiatus when everyone takes holiday at the same time. It is a brief period in the calendar when it is difficult to get any sort of financial transaction done here in the UK beyond paying the bin man his Boxing Day bonus. Actually, now that I think of it, even that is difficult since our corruption-paranoid council is in the habit of rotating the collection teams. It must have solved a problem, I wonder which one?

Waste collection aside, the period in question is actually really rather small – much shorter than the summer shut down with its huge penumbra that seems to extend for months. But Christmas day, small and neat as it is, reduces our keenness for action like a black hole swallowing up everything in the 4-week vicinity of its dark centre. The festive phenomenon is an indiscriminate magnet for everything to do with making progress in business: focus, energy, plans, determination, money, attention span, resources and even good health. All seem to vanish into the void of Christmas without trace or explanation. What is going on, year after year? Should we not be told?

Back to childhood?

Could it simply be that our collective wish to forget all our problems and have fun is to blame? Maybe the twinkling lights and toy advertisements on TV rake up past demons who must be appeased with childish attention. Could it be that the twinkliness of Christmas, like the tortured call of the ice cream van’s crazy music, still has the power to make our collective pulses race? To hypnotise us? To make us forget what we are supposed to be doing as rational adults? Might it be that the daily reminders of the approach of the festive season unrelentingly chip away at our will to execute on business strategy, to be active in sales and marketing, to maintain business rigour and all the other things that we must do to keep our organisations up there, out there and growing.

Christmas seems to act upon our common sense to the degree that ‘sense’ becomes as uncommon as a perfectly roasted turkey. And yet I think the dimension of the festive season that really sends us beyond the fringes of reason is the notion of ‘The New Year’.

A new and better place? I think not.

We are annually taken over by the belief, at a profound, pre-conscious level that everything on the other side will be different and, more catastrophically, is a long, long way off. We start to foster irrational thoughts of new beginnings, fresh starts and clean slates. A new bright world where we can stride out and achieve the unachievable. Conversely, people with targets, having had their counters reset to zero and their quotas increased must face the nail-biting prospect of starting from scratch. But is there really any relationship between either of these two positions and reality? Don’t be daft.

The solemn reality that we must face is that Tuesday 3^rd of January, will be like any other day. The third of January does not know that it is the first day of our business year, 2012. The universe, in keeping the world spinning and the stars evenly spaced around us does not take into account our puny notions of time and relativity. It will, in the starkest reality, be a day like any other except for in one, essential way: how we feel about it.

Our feelings about the day, the preceding weeks, and about the weeks that follow will dictate how we fare: whether we overcome obstacles, if we meet our targets, the degree to which we feel fine, stressed or ill. The degree to which we are taken in by the idea that Christmas and New Year are a genuinely significant existential watershed will determine what we do now and in turn affect what happens around us in 6½ weeks’ time, and far beyond. At the risk of sounding like a Harry Potter film character, you and I shape events in the future by how we act now. You and I can actually change our destinies. How? Mainly, by not allowing our good sense and adult judgment to be sucked into the nonsensical black hole of the approaching holiday season.

Easily said, but how? By asking ourselves 1 simple question every time, in the next few weeks, that we are about to make, or postpone, a notable decision:

If it was 1^st September today,

what would I decide to do?

If your answer is substantially different to what you had decided to do when you factored in that you only had 28 working days left until Christmas, go and splash cold water on your face and think again.

The markers that we use to shape time, events like New Year’s Eve, a flotation date or the financial year end do indeed help us to make sense of what we have achieved and what’s coming next. And yet these same markers can also make us suckers for acting with only the instant result in mind.

Reckoning our objectives and achievements against days, weeks, months and quarters encourages us to go for only the most obvious goals, to shoot for the nearest horizons. Of course, chopping up our years into seasons and holidays does provide us with rest time and relief from our problems and fatiguing work but it also prevents us from having a really good go at things, from taking the long view, from tackling big problems with cooler, calmer minds.

Surrender but not yet.

And if there is one thing that we need as we hurtle towards the coming festive black hole it’s a cool, calm mind that will prompt appropriate action and not wait for the perfect day that will never come.

And yet, as the magic days draw close, their attraction will be too strong for you and I to resist. And then, for a few days, it will be time to surrender ourselves.  Because the part of you and me that will enjoy Christmas and New Year the most will not be the sensible adult who runs a business, but the child inside who chases ice cream vans and still believes that anything is possible.

My favourite shop is in the high street of the nearby town of Crabbs Cross. Teague’s Televisions doesn’t sell televisions, it repairs them.

Repairs them? But no one repairs things any more, surely. And a television? Actually, Mr Teague has also overhauled for me a favourite 25-year old Kenwood mixer and a Raclette machine that used to make all the lights go out when you switched it on. Teague’s Televisions is a small shop, full of used and occasionally decrepit electrical goods waiting for careful repair or collection by a grateful owner. The smell of dust and solder flux hangs in the air – it’s the smell of effort and of careful repairs.

All this in stark contrast to the constant upgrades and improvements, the throw-away-and-replace mentality which we practise, and are exposed to, in every sphere of our lives. Every time I buy a toothbrush it has more bristles, of more colours and of more textures than the one I was able to buy 2 months before (I have a soft spot for new toothbrushes). And try buying a bar of normal, uncomplicated chocolate, in a hurry. You’ll be faced with myriad bars of all shapes that involve chocolate mixed with 20 other ingredients. Somewhere in there you may see a bar that has only been mixed with chocolate – if you’re lucky.

Children at school now have something called Forest School. About 3 years ago someone in Westminster decided that school subjects were just too boring to be taught as they were or that our children were just too lacking in attention spans to be able to cope with didactic teaching methods that had worked well for 250 years. So now our children are taught in a draughty canvas shelter in a field, 100 metres from the school building. Something about team work has been mentioned… Neither of my children, or any of the teachers, has ever been able to explain how teaching maths and English in the middle of a field works better that teaching it in the classroom.

It seems that we just can’t leave things alone or at least that we are allergic to the thought of keeping it simple and applying a little more effort. If you believe in the ideas around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you could be forgiven for thinking that we have recently shot out of the top of the pyramid, zooming past the self-actualisation zone without a pause, onwards and higher, to the hitherto unknown: fiddle-about-and-make-things-complicated-so-that-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-what-we-don’t-like zone.

Well, I suppose we solution-providers have played our part in feeding this hunger for the effortless solution. We have been furnishing a seemingly endless stream of ever more intriguing and comprehensive ideas, models, theories and solutions to whoever shouted for help. Solutions to things that may not have needed a new solution at all but just the original one re-applied, more consistently, more carefully, for longer. I suspect that sayings such as ’persistence pays off’ and ’if it sounds too good to be true, it is’ have a greater potential to nudge us in a constructive direction than have many serious books by clever business authors and assorted gurus.

But whilst tiny gems of wisdom such as these are quick to bring to mind, they are even easier to dismiss. And although simple they require an amount of personal investment to make them real. And it can be at this stage of personal investment that we fall. We are frail creatures, we want things to be fixed so that we can get on – with as little effort as possible. We like our solutions on a plate, not in a recipe book.

Going for the big, complicated, branded solution is the ideal meal on a plate. It looks fresh, it looks substantial and it costs enough to be good. There is little room in this thinking for the simple solution. The fact is, the simple solution is a bit embarrassing, at least in part, because it negates all that time and money that we wasted on the complicated stuff that we’ve just tried. But worse, it takes away the hiding places; no complexity and learning curve to shelter behind. Simple solutions are a tough sell not only because they lack the ‘wow’ factor but because they require immediate action which entails personal effort and even individual discomfort. And yet, self-generated improvements are like toys that don’t need batteries. There’s nothing to run out and there’s nothing to say that you can’t fix them when one of the little wheels falls off. It’s the solution you’ve always wanted and it was in your pocket all along. You know what you need to do: think ‘simple’.

What are you waiting for? Close your laptop and fix something.

This month, and for the next couple, I will be exploring not only what keeps us from changing but what questions we need to ask ourselves if we are serious about adopting new ways.

Quick and gone

Speed is seemingly a characteristic of many habits; by definition, habits produce action that happens quickly and without conscious thought. Many of our habits are sparked off by, and happen in, social situations that are fast-moving such as not joining in with a conversation, missing opportunities to give praise or reacting defensively to feedback. All of these happen in quick-time. OK, but what about something like smoking? That doesn’t.

Smoking is an interesting habit because it does indeed, happen relatively slowly, and you would think that we would get plenty of warning when we were about to do the damaging behaviour. As it happens (you may know this already) the urge to smoke can be based on one or a mixture of two elements: chemical addiction and ritual addiction. The chemical element speaks for itself; the ritual element is the one which fulfils the need for a structured activity that brings some pleasure or relief. Pipe smokers and cigarette smokers who roll their own are a great illustration of this. They choose to go through a long ritual to get to the bit where they actually get to smoke. This suggests that they probably derive as much ‘benefit’ from the routine as they do from the intake of nicotine. Does this mean that we can get addicted to routine itself? More likely that what we are becoming hooked on is the feelings of calm and safety that a routine can provide us with. Performing routine behaviours gives us time to contemplate, to rest our minds, to celebrate our abilities like rolling the perfect cigarette, splitting the log perfectly down the middle, mixing the perfect drink or laying the perfect log fire.

So, on one hand, the speed at which some habits happen make them tricky to change because we have to be super-alert to stop ourselves in time and yet other habits, that occur at a snail’s pace, are hard to change because of the feelings of comfort and wellbeing that they afford us.

Sell it to me!

Leaving tobacco and log fires behind, there are of course other powerful characteristics of our psyche that make it difficult for us to change the way we behave. One of the most potent would seem to be our ability to justify, to sell a concept to ourselves as a way of releasing us from the need to do the difficult thing – changing. Rather than stand up to our compulsion we devise elaborate explanations to justify our U-turn. We literally sell the old, undesirable habit back to ourselves because we don’t want to admit that we have decided to go against our previous good decision (“shouting at people is OK because at least it gets things done around here!)”. That sounds harsh doesn’t it? It is but it’s not the whole story. If you want the truth, step this way down the dark corridor of your personal feelings and hidden desires.

The truth is that we are driven by fear and pleasure. That’s it. Fear and pleasure, fear and pleasure; day in day out. When we are trying to break a habit we are fighting against the primitive drives of escape and attraction. The rest is window dressing.

Some examples: If I find it hard to delegate it’s probably because I fear being let down and looking stupid. People who find it hard to stop arguing are often worried about what might happen to them if they appeared weak, left out or not in charge. To cite a particularly common example: those of us who find it hard to prioritise don’t lack organisation ability, we probably get hijacked by our fears and desires:

• Fear of not being able to do the difficult task (so we ignore it)
• Fear of losing control on the appearance of too many tasks
• The pleasure that comes from doing ‘this’ but not ‘that’
• Fear of running out of time and getting into trouble (so we do a bit of everything, in the wrong order, badly)

So, it seems at first glance that we have to tell stories to ourselves to cover up the fact that we haven’t stuck to a promise to change. In reality we are probably being hassled by our fears around negative outcomes but then rather than facing those fears and talking them through (even with ourselves) we make excuses for why we back-tracked and all is well again. Except that we haven’t changed.

Too much, too long, too radical

And as if things aren’t already difficult enough we often make our own attempts at changing even more difficult by setting unattainable objectives in the first place. For example, I might decide that I’m going to get into really great shape this year. So I go out and buy a load of fruit and vegetables, a juicer, a gym membership and a tracksuit. And then, knowing me, I go to it really hard for a week, maybe two. I run every day until I feel sick, I have fruit for breakfast until I’m fainting for lack of carbohydrates; I cut out biscuits and chocolate completely, which makes me miserable, and then drink enough water to render my blood dangerously thin. Not surprisingly the excuses then begin: “I shan’t run today because my shoes are still drying out from yesterday. Oh and I’ve eaten all the bananas so I can’t do my 2 litre smoothie. I’ll have Coco Pops today as a special one-off treat to give me a bit of a boost and because I have been so good!”.

New habits don't come easy

There are two problems here. Most of us can’t voluntarily handle drastic change, be it in our personal or in our professional lives; physical, emotional or intellectual; the fact is that we really don’t need to because the stakes aren’t high enough – the consequences of giving up simply aren’t dire enough.

Secondly, when we set huge goals we may even only be doing so to impress ourselves. We perhaps try to give ourselves something really exciting to go for with the added safety net of having made the goal so unattainable that we can put our failure down to unforeseen circumstances.

So what do I have to do to change?

Setting out to change something about my behaviour is primarily about making change happen in my feelings and thinking. Because I can’t fool my feelings or my mind in the same way that they can fool me, I must ask probing questions of myself to get anything like a true picture of my start and end point. I have to think carefully about what exactly I am thinking of changing and for what reason. Most importantly of all, I can get valuable clues about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ by scrutinising my real end game:

1. What do I really want out of this?
2. Who am I doing this for?
3. Why does this need to happen now?
4. What has altered in me that makes lasting change at all likely?

Being successful at change is largely about choosing the right change for the right reason. Willpower may play a part but should not form the mainstay of your personal change strategy. And finally, whatever state you are aiming to achieve, it must be easier than where you are now, not just better.

What do Gordon Brown, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Mrs Doubtfire have in common? Well, more than one thing actually. The most obvious link is the fact that they all get found out in the end – they are, after all, each fakes of one sort or another. The second thing is that all three resort to pretence to achieve something that seems impossible to them as they are.

The father in Mrs Doubtfire yearns to be near his children but can’t seem to grow up. So instead of growing up and settling down he pretends to be someone his wife would want him to be – the perfect nanny. The Grimm Brothers’ wolf decides that running after things in the woods is not for him so he pretends to be an old lady so that his food will literally walk in the door. And our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seems to think that he needs to be seen as warm, understanding and cheerful.

But all these strategies are doomed to failure from the beginning – the wolf is chased out of bed because his features give him away. The perfect nanny is caught taking a leak standing up and Mr Brown looks constipated and twitches when he attempts a smile. The exercise of bolting on a false persona, often the product of our perceptions of how people want us to be (nicer, stronger, braver, friendlier) almost always fails for one or more of these three reasons.

Why disguises fail

Firstly, we humans are shrewd observers – we can spot fake feelings, phoney behaviour and false words at sixty paces. In cases where we fail to spot deceit it is usually because we haven’t wanted to see the flaws in the act – having perhaps already committed ourselves to the prize (the money, the beautiful person, the quick conviction). In essence, we only fail to spot the fake when we make a choice, at some level, to collude with the trickster.

Secondly, faked behaviours and emotions are costly to produce over a long period of time – which means anything more than a few hours. The act often collapses unless it is being attempted by a highly trained operator in short bursts. And thirdly, it is probably a given that we all yearn to be accepted for who we really are rather than for a person we have temporarily pretended to be; in fact, many believe that we often give ourselves away on purpose (albeit through the work of subconscious processes) in the hope of being accepted for who we are.

Being true to ourselves

The consequences of exposure are, of course, unpredictable but in all these cases, the pathetic irony is that we can probably all get further, on many levels, by being true to our real selves. In the case of the three examples that I’ve mentioned, all of them could have probably got more or less what they wanted if they had only been prepared to face up to who they were and to develop what they already had within them. Robin Williams’ character could have learned to cook and clean without all the cross-dressing business; the wolf could have enlisted the services of a good running coach and Mr Brown could simply settle for who he is: difficult to fathom, bossy and serious.

Focussing on what we can already do and developing those talents is not just a wistful, idealistic notion cooked up by those good people in the HR department, it’s the only credible alternative to pretending to be someone we’re not. I believe that growing up as a person and as a professional is chiefly a project in uncovering our sometimes less-than-obvious talents. We may well need to enlist help with identifying and honing our strengths but at least we can look forward to the prospect of becoming truly happy with who we have turned out to be.

There are relatively few people who know how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. When using what is called bow-and-drill technique, the first thrill comes when smoke begins to issue from where the scorching sawdust collects in a gap under the point of the drill. At this stage, novice fire makers will usually discover that the aphorism ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ has little basis in bushcraft reality. It is not long before getting smoke is more irritating than encouraging, the learner having rather too quickly realised that the gap between smoke and flame is much wider than had been anticipated, or indeed, previously advertised. The next surge of adrenalin is provoked by the sight of embers in the small pile of scorched sawdust generated by the umpteenth flurry of determined drilling using the fourth, fifth or even sixth iterations of drill, base board, bow and handboard. In the early days, the novice will record their successive increments of progress with a calendar rather than with a watch. Because of the nature of the challenge that has been taken up by the individual – making fire from little more than a piece of string and some sticks – they often find themselves feeling more than a little ridiculous. The combination of the potential for Crocodile Dundee and Ray Mears jibes coupled with the incidence of smoke-without-fire failures drives many to practise in secret and thus with little external encouragement. The test on the individual’s perseverance with this most basic of human challenges should not be underestimated; a bushcraft warning from the wise reads:

People who do not know how to start a fire with sticks sometimes forget their matches. People who do know how to start a fire with sticks never forget their matches.

The basis for this wisdom only really becomes apparent after the novice has danced Apache-like around his first blaze, taken a suitable warrior name for himself and been compelled to put the same fire out in response to the shrieking of his garage’s smoke detector. It is after all of this and after about the fifteenth attempt to duplicate that piece of pyrotechnic magic that our warrior realises that he doesn’t really understand what fire making is about after all. With knitted brow and jaw set for renewed victory our hero is within minutes presented with a series of questions and decisions: What is going wrong? Is it the bow? Is it the drill? Is it this is or is it that? He may not notice that what lurks in the background; a barely perceptible question demanding to be answered: “When do I give up?”.

Failure to address this issue in time substantially increases the chances of ultimate failure. If our new warrior continues to repeat the same mistakes over multiple attempts at drilling up a fire he will soon lose hope; when he loses hope he loses confidence; when confidence walks out, ingenuity and perspective go with it. Making fire takes its share of perseverance but it takes a steady mind to not get carried away with the energy of the physical activity. The fire builder must be constantly looking in from a mentally-generated distance, questioning which component is at fault and which is performing its function correctly; put more plainly still, he must know when to give up. He must develop a knack of knowing when to start from fresh with new components – to go backwards before he can proceed once more.

But having achieved smoke with one set of tools, it can be very hard to admit that it isn’t going to go any further and that it’s time to call it quits and to begin again with the first stages of whittling and preparation of a new set up. What feels like starting from scratch is both a shortcut to competency (through the repeated preparation of the components) and a shortcut to fire (because the young tenderfoot will simply succeed more quickly with the right components). ‘Intelligent persistence’ is the name of the fire builder’s game.

The fire can of course be anything you care to mention; the skills required do not vary. Our skill at judging when to persist and when to desist will decide whether the task will get the better of us, or we of it. In stopping too soon on one particular tack we run the risk of not exploring and mastering that opportunity well enough to reach an informed decision about its merits; in stopping too late we increase the chances that we will grow frustrated with the lack of progress and abandon the task altogether. Our success at getting difficult things done in life is perhaps less predicated upon our skill in addressing specific challenges and more upon our skill at approaching challenges in general.

It’s been a while since the last post and I was asking myself this morning – why? There’s an element of out of site out of mind (ha ha) but also a distinct lack of pressure to write when no one is beating me up for output or even encouraging me to put finger to keypad. This is not, I repeat, not a ‘poor me’ post but about why we find it so difficult to change even small things about ourselves without a good deal of support from some important person around us. In this case, the change is: start publishing your ideas and then keep publishing…

The really funny thing is that once I get going here I wonder why it took me so long to come back. Here are 5 ideas that come to mind and have an application in real life attempts to change (anything):

1. I thought I’d have to write whole, well-formed thoughts. I didn’t have any of those so I stayed away completely. Remedy: start something – anything – and then refine.
2. Fed up at the lack of feedback and encouragement. Remedy: ask for some (doh).
3. Balked at writing a whole post all at one go with pictures and all the fiddly stuff – groan. Remedy: Write something short and then save. Do something small towards the change and then save (realize/publish) what you have done to someone important.
4. Performance – the perceived need to give a complete and polished rendition will often stop me/people from getting out of their seats. Remedy: The performance will find its shape – just make a start.
5. Looking for that extra bit of energy – that little kick to send me hurling down the Cresta Run – and not knowing always where to find it. Remedy: Just make a start and the energy will come as the sled picks up speed.

Key idea: Make a start – any start. There’s more than enough fuel in the tank.

For more ideas and answers come and have a look at the FAQs bit of the PEC site.