change – Page 3 – The Consulting Artist

Nail Varnish : Change is Hard

While visiting Manchester recently to take part in the 2015 CIPD conference, I had my nails done. I wasn’t driven by anything in particular, beyond the simple curiosity of trying something different, so I booked myself in for a manicure and off I went. The woman who painted my nails did an excellent job (sorry I cannot remember her name but here’s a link to the salon), and as she worked we talked, and I learned that although plenty of men come in for a nail clean up – I was the first in 18 months who had asked for their nails to be painted. Job done – I left and almost immediately ruined one of my new nails. Looking after these bad boys is hard work! I dashed back and after a quick repair I went on my way again.

Purple Nails — Matching nails and conference bag – on brand 😉

As I headed back to the conference I began to feel extremely conscious of my new fashion accessories and I became aware I was hiding them from view. I checked myself and tried to act naturally, at least as naturally as the first client in 18 months to have a nail makeover can.

As people spotted my nails, I began to receive feedback. The first person who saw them looked straight down their nose, blasting me with a first class Paddington Bear stare, before exclaiming ‘What on earth did you do that for?!’ I fumbled some kind of embarrassed response and excused myself. Others told me I was ‘brave’, and some folk told me they thought my nails looked great.

I kept my nails on for a few days (well I had invested £15 in them) and I was really interested in how I, and others, continued to react. My own prejudices surfaced a few times when I hid my nails from view as, with no evidence, I judged how some people might respond, based on nothing more than a split second analysis.

Nail Varnish — Sunday breakfast – shortly before the demise.

My nails were returned to their former unglory a few days later – this photo above is their final outing. For me – what started as a bit of curious fun, turned into an observation of how we respond to change, and to difference.

My experience reminded me of this excellent story by Bob Marshall, A Difficult Message to Hear. His poignant tale is of his own Mum, who when faced with a need to change her lifestyle for health reasons, chose not to. Marshall uses this powerful example to illustrate just how hard change is, and yet we have come to expect, and demand change from people in an organisational context, almost as if it were as simple as flicking a switch, or turning a tap.

My own ‘lifestyle change’ was simple to apply and simple to remove, and as far as I know, has had no lasting affect on my health. The experience has had a lasting affect on my learning though, through the simplicity of a manicure I’m reminded:

We often rush to judgment
We often react suspiciously to difference
We often find change hard

Routine – And The Importance Of Tweaking It

Do you have a routine, or are you a slave to it?

I don’t have a typical commute to work, I travel at different times, and often to different places. When I do travel in the rush hour, I’ve come to notice people waiting for the train, often stand at the same spot on the platform. Many people know precisely where the doors on the carriage they want to get onto, open. Gaggles of commuters huddle in bunches near these spots and I enjoy standing alone, in between gaggles.

I get funny looks from the gagglers. ‘Why’s that weirdo not standing in a gaggle? Doesn’t he know that we know precisely where the doors are going to open?’ I find myself taking an almost perverse pride in trying to find a different spot on the platform every time I travel.

My journey into London starts out in the suburbs, it’s a frequent service, and it takes just under 40 minutes. I can see how people faced with the prospect of fighting for a seat, might be driven to gaggle. In my case, regardless of the time of day I travel, I have never boarded a train from our station into London and failed to get a seat. Never. Not once. In these circumstances, I just don’t get the whole gaggling thing.

Yesterday I took part in a meeting at Workhubs – a really handy coworking venue run by Philip Dodson near Euston station. I was there to take part in one of a series of International Collaboration Days, organised by a bunch of interesting folk including Bernie Mitchell and the aforementioned Philip. We enjoyed good breakfast and good company. Here are a few notes I took:

99u – Insights on making ideas happen
750 Words a Day – the practice of writing
Routine – tweak it.
Only 3% of freelancers currently use coworking spaces.
Structure – you can hop from place to place on a scaffold, only up and down on a ladder (hierarchy).
Conversations – small groups. Four or five max – beyond that it’s more like a series of monologues? How can we help the quieter voices get heard?
It’s important to do a few small things, often.

I want to focus on routine. We all have them, and the conversation was around how to use our natural desire for habit forming to our advantage, rather than get bound up in it, like the gaggles seem to. A few suggestions were made which I found interesting.

Bookend your day with routine. Do your habitual stuff at the beginning and the end of the day – and try to practice being more free form in between.

Take breaks – don’t be a prisoner.

Do some of your routine stuff in different places. Lots of enthusiasm for working out doors bubbled up, and the recognition of limitations too – we were trying to keep it real.

Tweak your routine. I found this part of the conversation really useful as it helped me get more comfortable with the sense of having routine – something I struggle with at times, and something I’ve wrongly railed against in the past. There’s no doubt that since I found an appreciation of routine, I’ve got better at getting stuff done, and simultaneously I’m a fan of experimenting with different ways to work. I encourage my clients to try different things, so I have to find a way to get the routine stuff done, and the tweak idea interests me. Let’s go back to the travel thing again.

I routinely walk to the station. I get a mile walk under my belt and I enjoy being with my thoughts for the time the walk takes me. The tweak happens when it comes to which way I go. There are many routes I can take from home to the station, I’ve mapped out some of them here (nerd alert):

Some are a bit longer than others, and on the days I find myself ready to leave a few minutes early, I take a slightly longer route. The super sharp eyed among you will see that there are two stations on this map. I can and do use both – just to further mix things up. The walk is my routine, the route I choose is my tweak.

As a result of these conversations – I’m looking again at how I do what I do. Am I getting the mix right enough of the time? I’ll let you know how I get on. Meantime if you’ve any helpful ideas on how you make routine…less routine, please let me know.

Mixed Feelings and a Wall of Sound

Recently I’ve been thinking and writing about the importance of leaving spaces in between stuff, of leaving room for things to grow – particularly when thinking about change.

And talking with Heather Bussing this week she reminded me that dealing with change is about mixed feelings. It’s not about good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, nothing is absolute. It’s about good and bad, right and wrong, happy and sad. Being able to hold these conflicting positions together in our heads is part of what makes being human so exciting and scary.

So to counter the spaces in between I want to finish what has been an outstanding first week of our fifth year for What Goes Around with a little something that has absolutely no spaces in between. One of my very favourite songs and two minutes of the finest noise ever to emerge from the USA. ‘It’s good to be back in England and it’s good to see y’all again’: