How do you plan your goals?
I have never really bought into the idea of visualisation. You can’t visualise yourself into success unless you have the circumstances that allow you to succeed, whatever they might be. When I think of my goals they tend to be reactive not proactive. It’s about making the best of what life throws at you. People who don’t reach their goals aren’t, in general, less committed to them, they are less fortunate with the combination of personal qualities and opportunities required. You can have the former but you must have the latter. We have seen so many examples of poor quality people reaching the top to pretty much confirm this, especially in global politics.
So, is there any point in setting goals? Well the phrase God laughs at man’s plans indicates not! However, the verse this is derived from is less clear cut. Proverbs 16:9 says ‘A man’s heart plans his course but the Lord determines his steps.’ If you don’t believe in a higher power you can replace Lord with universe or fate, but the message is the same. We can set our goals to give ourselves direction, but we have to accept what eventually transpires. The most important goals in my life have tended to be reactions to the situations I found myself in. That doesn’t make them any less important, and it makes them more realistic. As a child my goal was to be a sports writer and I ended up writing reports for my son’s baseball team for a season and my daughter’s junior football team for seven years. I didn’t get paid but I took the chance to achieve my goals in a way that meant so much more to me.
I have set myself goals for the next stage of my life after deciding to give up full time year round teaching for a very good reason. I am still determined to do well in whatever form that takes and the focus I have given myself has put me in the right frame of mind to keep growing and learning. Do I expect to achieve everything on my list? No. Will I add to my list with a clear expectation of reaching those goals? Of course! To do anything else would be to live an aimless life, but I fully accept that what transpires may be very different from what is planned.
Good luck with your goals but remember the pleasure lies in aiming for the target even if you don’t hit it.
Create an emergency preparedness plan.
I tend to catastrophise quite a lot as many things tend to activate my fight or flight mechanism. One thing I have learnt over the years through hard won experience is that most things are not the emergencies I imagine them to be.
So, the first item in my emergency preparedness plan is a sense of perspective. I have to step back, look at the situation as objectively as I can and decide how much of a problem it is. The use of Calm – see the post two days ago for a free 30 day trial – has helped where age and experience just seemed to make it worse! I am more able to look at the long view and realise that in a year, for example, I may still remember it but most others won’t. On that basis there have been very few situations that have required an emergency preparedness plan.
If it so happened that I did need to have such a plan, the first thing I would focus on is the safety of my family. If they are OK then everything is just an added extra. When there was an earth tremor in Japan measuring 4 on the Richter scale we simply took the children out of the house and went to a park whilst the after shocks were happening. All our possessions could be replaced if the building collapsed but we couldn’t. As it turned out we had a very nice trip out and when we got back, all was quiet again.
Where we live now, climate change is making suburban wild fires far more likely so that is the main concern. If we were told to evacuate we would take Albus, our cat, and a small bag each with the things we couldn’t bear to lose. I think it’s difficult to say here and now what those things would be because if we wanted to take everything that might come into that category we would need an Uber! When all is said and done though very few things are that central to our lives that we would risk our safety.
I suppose what this says is that the people I love are the centre of any emergency preparedness plan I may have. If they are safe I can survive anything.
What is a word you feel that too many people use?
I don’t have one word that too many people use to take aim at, but a whole language of words! One of the most irritating developments in the last 20 years or so has been the proliferation of management speak. It was, at first, a language used by mediocre people to disguise the fact that they were mediocre.
Yuppies in the 1980s were the forerunners of the trend with their huge ‘brick’ phones and flashy clothes. Many of them succeeded on the basis of image and they developed a communication style that excluded others, a very common tactic. Once you exclude others you feel that you are better than they are.
Then somewhere along the line, probably when LinkedIn became necessary for so many, it became essential for managers to use it. It turned them into, as one of my former colleagues put it, soulless drones. The use of an exclusionary vocabulary excluded the workers they were supposed to mentor and support, and management became their own self congratulatory cadre of ‘talent’ who were somehow better than the rest of us.
If you want to take one example of management speak that has done untold damage to the places we work, it is the change from Personnel, when I started working in 1983, to Human Resources. In an instant those in charge had rebranded us from people, the root of the word obviously being person, to resources that they could use up and throw away with little thought and less guilt. The vast majority of people who worked in Personnel cared about us as fellow human beings, whereas the vast majority of people who work in Human Resources see us as company owned factors of production on a par with computers.
So there you have it, I would get rid of management speak and watch the slow move away from the worst management class I have seen in 40 plus years of working. There are obviously decent managers, but they tend to hit a ceiling of middle management or, as in the case of a very good CEO I worked for, are summarily dismissed when they start talking to employees about what they need. The power of words is that we often fail to recognise their power until it is too late.
What brings you peace?
Read to the end for a trial for an app that brings me a measure of peace
Peace is something that I have always found elusive, particularly in my own head. My internal monologue starts up from the moment I wake up in the morning and doesn’t stop until I go to sleep in the evening. It’s always been the same ever since I can remember. My internal monologue isn’t always a particularly positive one, so I don’t really enjoy the experience. What could I do about it though?
Well, in my childhood and teen years I would read, watch TV, listen to music, make up entire games of cricket in my head (!), anything that I could concentrate on. While I was doing that I was quietening my inner voice. Also, I found that if I could completely exhaust myself with physical activity I could get some peace, at least for a while. Even in adulthood I found it impossible to drown it out with anything other than distraction activities. Then I discovered two apps on my phone that made a huge amount of difference.
Happy Color is the online equivalent of the old paint by numbers. I find it marvellously calming and I have set myself the target of completing every picture of the day this year (2025). The pictures are extremely varied, but my favourite ones are those which have symmetrical balance. There is something so satisfying with the repetition of elements that appeals to me. Anyway, it’s an app that takes me out of myself and silences that voice.
The other app is Calm which is a meditation app that I use every night. This has changed the content of that inner monologue and made it much easier to deal with. I follow Jay Shetty’s Daily Jay, which concentrates on helping you to develop your ability to stay in the present. It is a discipline that took a while to internalise but now it’s a central part of my bedtime routine from the three deep, mindful breaths onwards. I have a very different inner voice after two years of Daily Jay, and that has brought me some measure of the peace I seek.
If anyone wants to try it for themselves the link that follows gives you 30 days free of the paid app. It’s worth a go and it’s my thank you to my blog readers who have got this far!
Hey! Here’s a limited time guest pass to try Calm, free for 30 days. Calm is great for helping me manage stress and improve my sleep. https://www.calm.com/gp/NY6P4XTK83PEN7N8F3
Peace be upon you.
What profession do you admire most and why?
Seriously, did we learn nothing from the experience of lock down? We’re human beings so of course the answer is no! When the world changed it was the shop workers, the delivery drivers and riders, the nurses, support staff and carers who kept things running. The professions we ignore 99% of the time kept us going by braving a virus killing so many people to help us maintain a semblance of a normal life.
We should admire anyone who does a job to the best of their abilities. Just because a Doctor or a Lawyer or a Teacher has a degree, it doesn’t mean that we have to admire their work more than anyone else’s. In my earlier years I was an insurance clerk, an RAF recruit, a teaboy, a civil servant and a Town Hall worker charged with moving furniture and making sure the venue was secure. I never looked at any of those jobs and thought I was too good for them. All of them taught me the value of work in all it’s forms and I met people who were worth dozens of the worst managers I have worked under. When I was unable to get a teaching job I worked in a shop for 6 months to bring money in and I became part of a tightly knit team of people from a whole range of backgrounds. People who left full time education at 16 had so much to teach me about their work and I was happy to learn.
So, when this prompt comes up, you should use it to really examine what is important and, more than that, who is important. Never look down on any person doing a job – well apart from politicians of course who deserve our derision because they are in it for themselves!
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 