NORTHERN PLANNER

Climbing hills by bike is one thing. Getting down again is something different altogether. 

The same hill I torture myself to get up, is also the slope where I teach myself to not hold on so tight and get down as fast as I can.

Because when you're confident riding a bike at 70kph, there is little else to fear. 

The more you loosen you're grip, the more in control you become.

 

Descending really is frightening. It's just you on a piece of metal, plastic and carbon, with the road underneath you a blur, the wind roaring in your ears, with scant protection except for flimsy lycra and a helmet.

Crashing hurts at the best of times, but when you fall at speed, assuming nothing gets banged up too much, you skid across meters of tarmac and the skin is grated off. 

So for years I was a nervous descender, always jabbing at the brakes, always holding on too tight. This perversely, made me fall off more, which in turn made me more nervous. 

Vicious circle. 

 

Until I decided to do something about it and began to not just climb to the top of my favourite hill with all I had, I started to make myself drop like a stone to bottom. 

I wish it were easier, but the only way to overcome your fear of doing something is to do it again and again. Take it from a nervous presenter, a shy introvert who fears crowds, a typical sufferer of imposter syndrome.

You have to do it, then repeat, then repeat. Then guess what? Repeat. 

 

Descending is an art, you need to let yourself work with the bike, not against it. The mind has to get itself to a point where it no longer fears the experience, solely focused on the task in hand.

You're holding the bars with the lightest of touches, trying to turn the bike with the body and mind, not the wheel.

You have to let go to be in control, alive to every sensation, every piece of feedback the machine and the road send.

The machine isn't the bike. The machine is you and the bike combined.

When you get to the bottom, its like waking up from a dream.

 

This is why descending re-arranges me. You learn to tell the brain to shut the fuck up and focus on the feeling of the wind rushing past, the rhythm of the wheels, the sensations of tarmac on the wheels, a soft focus on the road about twenty metres ahead. 

I suppose you would call it meditation. 

 

One of the hardest things is not looking at the road underneath, the focus needs to be what is in front of you. 

On my hill, the toughest challenge is the two major bends in the road. You can't swoop down in a straight line, you must get around the corners.

I used to brake all the way through both bends.

Then I began to brake just before going into them and then accelerate through, like you're supposed to.

The goal is to not brake at all, not even turning the handle bars, just guiding the bike around with your knee and core. I can do the first bend now, the second still eludes me. That one is close to the bottom and I'm going at nearly 70kph.

Soon. 

 

As with most things, the limit isn't the bike, its not my body. It's the arbitrary limits my brain sets on me. 

You don't descend with a bicycle, you descend with your mind. 

I'll be honest, I was never the smoothest operator in my youth when it came to the opposite sex. 

There was the girl who said she liked my hoodie. I replied, "Thanks it's from Gap".

There was the holiday rep in Magaluf, so pretty she made your eyes bleed, who told me this was her last night before flying home. "Lovely, what are you up to when you get back to England?"

There was the wonderful girl at University who, for over a year I thought just wanted to be friends (the women as friends thing is still an excellent way to live your life if your a bloke but it really helps to know which is which). 

Thankfully in my twenties the sheer number of single girls was made the odds, even for someone as useless as I, relatively favourable. 

But now I'm single in my forties and most women are not single. Being without hair, good looks, co-ordination and charisma means the odds are drastically reduced.

If that wasn't enough, to quote Barbara Streisand in The Way We Were, life in indeed was so much simpler then.

Time hasn't rewritten every line, there are no lines to deliver anymore, it's all profiles and selfies. It's online dating. 

It's not like it was in my twenties, when you went to party, had a few to drinks and found yourself talking to someone lovely as if by magic. 

Now you put together some honest, realistic but hopefully decent photos of yourself, write a witty, hopefully memorable profile and then start swiping left or right, in the hope someone else swipes right when you do.

That's only the beginning.

Then you go through days, sometimes weeks of striking up a rapport through messaging. Then, only then, if you get through all, you actually go out on a date.

You may be surprised, I know I am, to learn I've actually been out with a few people.

It would seem that having no hair and odd looks may not put everyone off, if you can spell and write a decent sentence.

Here's one thing I have learned in the process.  The 'E-Person' is rarely the same as the 'IRL' person.

In many cases, it's the pictures. Looks are not everything, however if there is no attraction, there is little point.

So many profiles feature pictures from a few years ago. It's a bit daft, since nothing will kill a date quicker than finding someone looks NOTHING like their online image. It would be okay if they were actually better looking in real life, but strangely, this is rarely the case.

In fact, I think there should be a new dating law where the offender is made to buy as many drinks of their date's choice until beer goggles make then look a little more like the images in their profile.

Looks of course, are only skin deep though. There are larger challenges. 

The first is how we build up a picture of the other person based on what we hope they'll be like, rather than what they are telling us.

They don't tell us of course, an idea emerges from the stream of exchanged messages, but there is still a person forming in the imagination. 

It's natural for us all to ignore the facts that contradict what we want to believe, only focusing on the evidence that fits whatever we would like the person to be.

So you get your hopes up, only to find on when the meeting finally comes that, despite them looking pretty much like their pictures (strong start at least)  they're not what we thought, not what we hoped, because we read too much into what they were saying and ignored the bits that contradicted it. 

Loss aversion is a fundamental part of being human. The longer we have something, the harder it is to let go of it, so sometimes we go to a second, or even third date, simply because we're sure the person online will appear in real life eventually. 

They don't. 

On the other hand, there's the way we can't be true to ourselves online either.

We're not being dishonest, not even trying to show our better selves.

Sometimes, you naturally respond to what the other person is saying, they bring out different sides of you that may not come across in real life because you haven't explored them enough yet. 

Sometimes though, we've created an online persona we truly believe is the real 'me', yet it's more like the person we want to be online, than the person we are. 

So I've met someone far more charismatic and uncompromising in person than she was online, almost as if she subconsciously wanted to turn herself down.

Conversely, I've been on dates with people with a rapier wit online, yet nothing to say in person. 

Of course, it's fair to say despite the fact I'm honest, almost to a fault, I'm sure some people I've met will tell you I'm far more self-assured online than I am in person. Then again, I guess we all are. 

The solution? Simple, don't hang about.

Meet people as soon as you can before the illusion sets in. It's much better to have a few drinks and find there is no spark, than to get attached to an idea that won't happen in real life.

Phone calls work. I never plucked up the courage to ask for a video call, but in a post Zoom world, maybe more will. 

That said, I've met some interesting people who have brought out things in me I'd forgotten about and, in some cases, never knew were there. Others have reminded me what I don't want also.

No matter what happens, meeting different people is good thing. Like most leaps forward in science, coming from teams experimenting for something else, yet finding something they weren't looking for, dating lots of people has really good side effects.

You might not agree this is a good thing but someone reminded me I like writing stuff.

Someone took me wild water swimming.

Someone gave me a whole new perspective on the music industry.

Just because sparks don't fly, it doesn't mean you can't get a lot out of if. 

At the end of the day though, the only way to really meet people is to meet them.

The problem with online dating is, well, its online.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the easiest ways to see if you, or those around you, have changed is to keep to annual rituals.

How we change is rarely sudden, it is so gradual we don't notice it happening right in front of us. Even the big shocks that lead to supposed massive adjustments, in reality they tend to expose what was already there, we just hadn't realised yet. 

It's only when you come back to something that doesn't really change, that you notice you have, or the ones you love.

If you've ever visited your old primary school and found yourself astounded at how small it is, you'll know what I mean. 

The regular things, the yearly Christmas get together, the annual family holiday, this is where the gradual changes suddenly reveal themselves. 

Every August I take the children to St Ives to stay with my parents. This was the first time we'd gone a as three rather than four, yet we still fell back into the usual routine, which mostly consists of endless hours in the sea.

One big thing is the adventures in the biggest waves we dare.  

It's a long time since the ten year old felt the need to hold onto me, he doesn't fear the waves, he attacks them with the confidence of a grown man.

My little girl though. This year I realised the girl is imperceptibly slipping away and the young women is coming. 

Only a year ago, she'd cling to me, so brave yet so reliant. Its quite a thing to feel your own strength as you protect your youngest child from the elemental force of nature to remind yourself what it really means to protect someone. 

This year, we wade in, holding hands. We dive under the the first few like I taught her. Then we're out amongst the large ones. The boy is like a sleek seal in his wetsuit, jumping up and into the bigger ones without hesitation. Like me, he seems more adept in the water than out of it.

I move behind Evie, hold her by the waste, like always, ready to brace her and hoist her up. Yet she wriggles away. "I fine Dad!"

She's furious. I'm not, I'm crushed. I know what this means.

The first big one comes. She dives straight through it, then shoots me he favourite 'told you so' look.

Then the next one flattens her.

No word is said, there's no need. The little hand goes into mine again. That's as far as it goes though. 

Next year it won't be there.  

 

 

I remember a dreadful time years ago when my boss resigned and my line manager was no longer a Planning Director, it was the Head of Client Services.

Let's be honest. There are two kids of Head Suit.

Either the ones on the way to becoming CEO, with real talent and the annoying skill of being good at everything.

Or the talentless politician who no one knows what to do with, but a couple of clients like too much, so they can't be got ride of.

This was my new boss. It was never going to go well, but even worse, this individual suffered from one of the most dreadful afflictions in marketing.

WhenIworkedonitis.

We've all met them, more often or not a One Hit Wonder that somehow, was in the right place at the right time. They can't help, at every opportunity, telling you to bow to their wisdom, because they worked on some mythical campaign, or for an agency or brand owner at the zenith of their powers. 

Despite the fact they are completely and utterly useless now. Even worse, they're incapable of seeing their flaws. Everything you do get's watered down or rejected as they say, 'But when I worked on xxx we did it like this'. 

Everyone does it to some degree. The amount of creative directors who claim to have worked for John Webster for example, beggars belief.

The people who claim to have worked at HHCL in its heyday, at Mother maybe.

I'll admit to sometimes telling people I worked on ghd when it was good, it's just that I've done some other things since.

Of course, people with experience should be respected. However, having spent a year at a great agency, or pulling off one campaign does not make you an industry titan if that's all you've done. 

The people who say 'when I worked on xxx' tend to have nothing since and have little to offer now.  

The ones who haven't stopped moving forward, embracing difficult and adapting to change. Those are the ones you want to be around.

The ones with 'Wheniworkedonitis'? Run for your life. 

In case you're wondering, the boss in question had worked for Little Chef.

In the 2000s.

Seriously.

That's right, not when this great brand with it's Olympic Breakfasts was a much loved fixture of UK motorways in my childhood.

During the final death rattle when they'd forgotten why the hell they existed. 

I may have mentioned I can be clumsy. In most cases cases, this isn't very endearing. Not to the date I managed to throw wine over, not to my shins crying out at the bruises gained from walking into things.

I'm the proverbial accident waiting to happen.However, it does have it's plus sides.

There was one of THOSE workshops a while back, on social media stuff, with a group of corporate stakeholders who would rather have been anywhere else. No one was playing ball and it felt like this was going to be three hours of long, slow, tortuous death.

Until I had my first sip of coffee.

Coffee that never went anywhere near my mouth, thanks to a loose lid.  The searing liquid poured all over my clothes, the table, the floor, everywhere.

Obviously it was funny, thankfully everyone helped clean up. 

When we started again, everything changed. The group was engaged, laughing (at my expense) and ready to do work.

What happened? The Pratfall effect.

I didn't do it on purpose, however the evidence is pretty conclusive that making little gaffes makes you more likeable. 

Imperfection wins people over.

Yet scroll through Instagram, put up pictures of most advertising if you can stand it, and you'll see a towering wall of glistening perfection.

It's bollocks. 

Perfection erases humanity, it's boring, it's no fun and it's exhausting.

Now look at this video of what Jennifer Lawrence said, after falling on the way to picking up her Oscar.

 

Watch Casey Neistat dealing with getting a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. Human, funny, real.

 

Look at Jessamyn Stanley

 

Look at my favourite ad ever. Not because it makes you feel something, not because it celebrates the suffering behind true greatness. Enjoy it because it shows that great success if born out of failure. It speaks the truth that not even the best can be the best all the time.

 

On a personal level, it's really liberating to realise that you are enough. I like being 46 and too old to care what people think anymore. That doesn't mean I'm stopping working on myself, in fact, I'm going through lots of changes right now so 'myself' hasn't felt so open in years. Still, nowadays you can take me as you find me. 

When it comes to the day job, for a few years, people have claimed to want less perfection from brands. I don't always buy the 'brand as person' metaphor to be frank, but if you're going to use it, might as well use it properly and admit no one is perfect. I do think real life is far more interesting than the fake one in brand world, because it's messy and full of tension. 

I've written elsewhere how 'brand story' stuff (I know yawn, yawn) is far more than the usual 7 plots. Get into what REALLY works in story telling and you nearly always have flawed characters who can't reconcile their view of themselves/the world, with how things really are. 

Buzz Lightyear doesn't know he's a toy.

Alan Partridge doesn't know he's tragic, he thinks he's a massive talent.

Han Solo can't accept he's really a nice guy.

In my own work, I learned to write bad propositions in creative briefs and litter the rest of the brief with gold. When the creative gangsters write a better one for you, they've thought of it themselves and are on board. You avoid that first review when they show how they've fought tooth and nail to work to their own strategy.

I make little mistakes in presentations, leave out gaps, so when people correct me they're part of it, not being talked at. I put myself into the narrative, imperfect, real me.

I'm not saying throw coffee over yourself, or throw wine at women or men (hot coffee burns). I am saying rejecting perfection is a lot less knackering and leads to better work.

This is, of course, why this blog is littered with typos. I'm actually a pedantic detail freak, I just want you to like me. Honest. 

Nowadays we live in a world with more distractions and less time than any other era. Ever. 

Yet doing your best work requires focus. You need to be so lost in the task you're not thinking about it anymore. The flow state takes effort, it takes practice. 

The mortal enemies of flow is the smartphone, Zoom calls and 'can I have a sec'. Doing your best work means being ruthless at blocking out distractions and the people who create them.

Multitasking is a skill, but that quantity gets in the way of quality. Multi-taskers bash out a lot of average.

If you've read Deep Work you'll know you need to create three hours a day free of distraction. It's tough, but if you can achieve it. those three hours will be worth eight of the Slack addicts.

They'll be working longer AND their output will be shallow, barely scratching the surface.

Caving in to office gossip, photos on Instagram or some email that could wait, means they won't have the focus to solve difficult problems or hack through average to get to exceptional.

Every distraction takes 22 minutes to recover from, to get back into the momentum you left.

22 minutes.

'Just a sec' is a hell of a lot more than just a sec.

Just three hours of focus. Three hours saying no. That's it. 

Then you can spend the rest of the day saying yes. To gossip, WhatsApp, whatever.

You have time, with added satisfaction of a job well done. 

 

If you take a daily cold shower, you'll heal your muscles at a quicker rate. It naturally reduces inflammation, which is great news for anyone who exercises a lot of course. 

You really don't need all those supplements if you exercise hard. Massage the soreness out with a foam roller or the thumbs of someone who knows what they're doing and embrace the cold. 

However, if you'll forgive the pun, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It increases the white blood cells count in your body, which in turn boost immunity.

It build alertness. Nothing wakes you up more.

It's a natural anti-depressant/mood enhancer.

So what are you waiting for? Yes, at first it's bloody awful, but then so is your first taste of coffee or alcohol.

Get through your first few, know that the initial pain develops into an addictive rush and you'll be hooked.

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. 

 

We can all sense belief a mile off.

We can detect the opposite just as easily.

We often don't know we're doing it, yet it's governs so much of how well we do.

When people meet you, they don't respond to what you're saying, they're judging you on how you say it.

Yet how many of us allow jobsworths to nit-pick over your font in a deck, rather than listen to how you deliver the presentation. No one cares. seriously.

So much of what we communicate has little to do with what we’re saying. 

I don't mean your clothes, your hair or how you look in general either (although its not said often enough, that clothes can change how you feel about yourself, change your internal dialogue rather than rather simply express or conceal it).

If you deliver with confidence and enthusiasm, your are most of the way there.

 

 

If you put a gun to my head and made me pick a favourite album, I'd probably pick Sign 'O' the Times by Prince. As with most music, much of this is to do with who and where I was when it came out.

Thirteen and all over the place. Who isn't at thirteen?

The album’s strength is it’s lack of focus, trying and failing to make sense of the time it was written in, or the person who wrote it.

This is a claustrophobic outpouring of talent from a man working alone, with too much in his head to ever simply bottle.

Or not quite. This is Prince's best album because he had editors too.

A record company made him reduce the album by a third, while his sound engineer was brave enough to tell him no.
How ever good you think you are, don't let your ego get in the way of feedback.

That's not the main point I want to make though.

Some songs, some films, some albums when you experience them for the first time, they immediately connect.

Music especially can engulf you, so you listen to the record over and over until eventually, that thunderclap of inspiration fades and you move on to the next thing.

Every now and then though, while that first rush is never the same again, some  stay with you.
In many ways they get better, changing as you change. 

Sign 'o' the Times is like that for me. Leave it a while, come back and it re-connects in new ways. 

It's why you need a leave your own project for a bit then come back. It's the only way to know if you merely fell in love with your first idea. 

Anyway. This album isn't the same because I'm not. My context is very different. 

Take 'I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man'. It could have been written specifically for online dating for over 45s. 

The crowning glory of the album though, is 'If I Was Your Girlfriend'. I used to love this because it's just so, well, different. 

Now though…

 

It's a song about a man jealous of the relationship the woman he loves has with other women.

Back when most most men didn't even know this was a problem, there Prince was nailing the simple fact that men are pretty crap.

They have relationships side by side, rarely face to face and just don't talk about things the way women do, in fact many still don't know they want to.

For most blokes, it's hard to let your guard down with other men. Even with your partner in some cases.It's all suppressed until it explodes all over your life.

It’s exhausting being strong, “Why can’t we just hang out, go to the movies and cry together?”

Naturally, it should follow that menfolk should get their act together and thankfully, this is happening in places. However, I'm convinced there's an easier solution. More men should be encouraged to make friends with more women.

It won't make you better at pulling, in case you think I’m driving at that. I've been lucky enough to have friends who are girls most of my life and I'm still useless at all that, even for a funny looking man with no hair.

It can make it easier to talk about stuff though, develop your emotional intelligence and get the odd hug.

I'm fine being single but I really miss physical closeness. Obviously you miss sex, but my body craves a more fundamental touch even more. 

It can also makes more able to reject the kind of relationships where, just because you’re a man you have sole responsibility for the big family worries, or expected to put up a shelf, or be the football coach.
Thank God for Me Too, but while it’s long overdue, it’s also time for more males not having to be ‘the man’.

Obviously I wasn't thinking much of this when I was a thirteen, but great pieces of art are like living things, not fixed static things.

They are like people. As you change, they change with you.

Some become nostalgia, which is still a great thing. To reach back and feel twenty again is quite something.

Like those friends from the past, great to see again, wonderful to catch up on old times. Yet you realise there is little else to talk about.

It’s painful to feel that person gone sometimes, especially if you still live with them. 

Yet a precious few reveal more about themselves as your experiences alter who you are.
Sometimes it’s the other way around and they reveal more about you. 

I’m no longer prepared to compromise on one hit wonders. 

Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile it was considered near impossible, but hen athlete after athlete began to break it.

Now its considered routine in elite athletics. Turns out the milestone was in everyone's head. 

In a TV series about Bannister, the actor playing him was an okay runner, when he copied Bannister's running style for filming, he was consistently faster.

He was better when he pretended to be someone else. Put another way, he conned his brain into breaking the limits he set on himself. 

Physical barriers are one thing, the greatest hurdle to leap over tends to be the one in your head.
If you tell yourself you can't do it, you'll almost certainly be right.

But what if you changed the narrative?

You are not a fixed thing, you can hack yourself in all sorts of ways. Good and bad. 

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer did a study on hotel cleaners. They did a healthy chunk of physical exercise every day in their job, but most didn't see their daily grind as working out, they saw it as work.

Amazingly, they all exceeded the daily recommendations for physical exercise, but their bodies didn't seem to benefit from the activity. Body fat, BMI, waist to fat ratios, they were more in line with the amount of exercise these women believed they did, rather than the actual activity. 

Exercise wasn't enough, the mind had to know they were working out. 

They were then divided into two groups. The first shown the calories their daily activity burned, the second were given no information at all. 

In just a month, the group with the information saw body fat, BMI etc, all reduced. The second group stayed exactly same.

The only difference was one group realised they were exercising and the other didn't. Exercising is not enough, you need to believe you are. 

In other words, if you can convince the mind, the body will follow.

If you believe you are exercising, your body will respond. Just as if you believe you're taking a pain killer, you feel less pain even if all you took was a sugar pill.

The implications are far reaching. You can make yourself creative, confident, diligent, who knows, I may convince myself not to be shy one day.

None of us are not fixed, we're not complete, we're not stuck. We just believe we are.

We all have our four minute mile barriers that only exist in our heads.

Many us may be already doing amazing things, we're just not able to see it that way. Just as the cleaners couldn't see their job as a daily workout. 

The mind can be trained, it can be fooled. The trick is to turn it into your friend instead of your foe.

That's quite a liberating thought isn't it?