NORTHERN PLANNER

We all have fundamental human needs. Certainty is maybe the most powerful. A steady job means you know you'll get paid each month, you know you'll make rent. A long term relationship means you know what the other person is likely to say, you'll have your rituals at Christmas, you know you'll be held when it goes wrong (or maybe not).

Another though, is the very opposite. We crave uncertainty, we like not knowing. Sport is a waste of time if you know the result for example. More fundamental, a job may pay the bills yet we have no love for it and wish we were doing something else. At some point we must decide to sacrifice the dreamer inside or give that person a chance.

Just as the steady relationship with no passion or real feeling left provides ballast but doesn't feed your soul. 

You convince yourself of many things, yet eventually there may come a choice here between should and must.

Sometimes that choice is made for you.

 

Martin has collected some data that might depress you, or maybe make you see what we're living through now as a chance to change things.

The British hate change, I suspect and hope that since change is happening we never asked for, we may decide to create the change we want.

Here's to being less "British". 

It's a hell of a year for all of us isn't it? For myself, I managed to add separating from my wife into the, already pretty wild, gathering storm. I'm still here thankfully.

I won't lie, there were times when it felt pretty overwhelming but I'm lucky that, by and large, I handle stress pretty well, you want me in a tight spot. I'm also fortunate to have friends to talk to. 

The same part of my make-up that meant I always did best times in the bigger swimming races and under-performed in the others, means I it takes a lot before I start going under.

This year has been a lot.

Yet going through all this has only served to teach me what to work on, how to get stronger. The worst times can open all sorts of doors eventually.

So, yes, stress, the demon of our modern age. Or is it?

Stress is certain in life, especially is you want to live a life that isn't lukewarm, this much is obvious.

How we handle it less so. You do have a choice. You could harness it as a tool, or you could let yourself be crushed under its intensity. Seriously, it's not what happens to you, its how you react to it that matters.

The benefits are hard to argue with. The best athletes and performers switch themselves on when the pressure ramps up and find that stress pushes them to do their best work when it matters the most.

Our bodies are designed to recognise danger signals and chemically improve our performance. 

Think of our obsession with that natural stress inducer, coffee. There's a reason so many of us love it.

But the short term benefits of stress can become a living hell if we carry the effects with us for longer than we should. If our natural fight or flight responses are constantly on, we simply can't function.

its like sugar, great for a limited boost, horrible if it’s more than that. 

Chronic stress destroys us unless we learn how to manage it, eating us alive from the inside. 

There are many, many ways to manage stress, here's how I do it.

Mindfulness is the most reliable first step. There are load of apps that can help you with this. You need to learn to recognise that tsunami of stress arriving, actually feel gratitude for the years of evolution that have led to your body trying to protect you. Then learn to control it, or at least ride it out.

The control comes from a mix of training, outlets and support.  These are the things that work for me: 

Reading

Taking walks (seriously the most simple thing in the world, yet so powerful)

Meditation- learn to be able to observe your thoughts rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Spending time with people you care about, without a phone anywhere near you. Hold on to your friends for dear life, have good friends rather than many friends (or many good friends if your really lucky). 

Learn to prioritise.

Exercise – you don't have to be a pain junkie like I am. Just enough to get the endorphins flowing. It doesn't have to be hours, learn HIIT routines and you only need seven minutes a day. 

Finding your flow state -something that you love so much you lose yourself in it and nothing else matters.

Nature – just go near something green. Evidence for the benefits of this are legion. 

Breathing properly, few of us do. 

Finding someone you trust to talk to about anything and everything. ideally more than one, the more perspectives, the better. 

Getting enough sleep (easier said than done, I get it)

Building the courage to say no more often

 

What doesn't work? 

Pretending it's OK

Deciding to man up

Being strong

Bottling it up, not wanting to bother people

Surrounding yourselves with well meaning people who tell you to pull your socks up.

I was brought up to be a stoic. It's bollocks. 

Being British can be a pain in the arse too.  Living in a culture where we don't talk, keep our upper lips stiff and celebrate the Dunkirk Spirit is less than helpful. You might be British, but you are still a human.

Allow yourself to be one, you're enough.

I did some work for a brand on the bullshit culture of celebrating masculine strength, I believed in it, I still do. It takes more strength to be kind and admit your not all powerful. To admit you're wrong, that you need help. 

Not only is perfection impossible, it's bloody boring. Forget living your best life. Live your life, no one else. Did you know that Vloggers are all complaining of burn out? Go figure. 

Strength takes many forms, being vulnerable and admitting your human is probably the hardest, yet most important step you need to take.

So, there you go. You can can be free, control stress rather than it controlling you. 

The choice is yours. 

 

 

 

I did this talk years ago. I'd forgotten about it.

A talk in front of your peers, about what you care about. In three minutes (trust me, condensing it all into three minutes is harder than doing it in 20). 

It's about swimming but it's really about having the courage to do what you love. It's about the intense joy of doing something you love really, really well. Or finding what you're really good at and learning to love it. 

It's about celebrating the potential in everyone.

That's the thing about being a good planner or strategist. You'll do it really well if you truly love it. When it comes to cracking briefs, the trick is to find something you love about what you're helping sell – or perhaps more potently, why the company loves it. Don't believe the marketing folk, talk to the people who make it or do it, find a way to bottle that. 

Enthusiasm is infectious. Logic and precision are not. 

 

If there is one I've learned it's this. Don't be a little bit in love. Fully commit. Don't spare yourself. To quote Yoda, do or do not, there is simply no try. 

That's for work and life. Wonderful doesn't come unless you're ready to be hurt. 

I love this song.

 

I think its supposed to be a song about love (I get it that way, believe me).

To me though, it's an eloquent, no, an evocative statement on just giving your all in the full knowledge it might not work, but doing it anyway.

"Cry until you laugh, laugh until you cry.

You look inside yourself, you take the things you like, you try to love the things you took.

You hope you it won't hurt, and even if does, you would just do it all again"

Failure to fully commit is often worse than not starting at all. 

Believe. Obsess. Be totally in, or totally out. Don't be in between. 

Know what you want, what you truly want, then fucking go for it. 

People mock you because they don't understand you, or what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes. most of the time, they fear you.

Seriously, it doesn't matter what people think if you have the courage to prove them wrong. 

If you worry about all the things Instagram tells you, you'll get nowhere. If you follow best practice, you won't make the best. If you do only what is expected of you, you'll please everyone except for yourself. 

What does matter is what you think. Believe you are enough. You are. 

So take yourself seriously. Go all in, fuck it. 

Creativity, ideas, work that makes you proud. The enemies are legion. To defeat them you need acknowledge they exist first. 

They are:

1. Long deadlines. Nothing sharpens a quill like feeling as if time is running out. Nothing stops decisions like more time. 
2. Short-cuts and impatience. Excellence requires effort, you can't get to wonderful without breaking through OK. 
3. Distractions. You're at your most potent in the Flow state, thinking without thinking. Slack, WhatsApp, 'got a sec?' all get in the way. 
4. Fear. It's easier not to try because failure, rejection, they all sting. The people that really change things have been hurt multiple times, they’ve learned to love the scars of war wounds, still afraid, yet do it anyway because when you’re scared you’re on to something.
5. Chasing popularity. People find new thinking uncomfortable, they hate change, more afraid than you are. Find a way to disagree, but try not to be too disagreeable. I never said this was easy. 
6. Not wanting to judged in case you look stupid. When pour all of yourself into your work, it's not just the work being judged, you are asking for approval of you. Fortune favours the brave. 
7. Setting out to please everyone rather than striking a chord with someone. This a short-cut to the kind of output that doesn't offend anyone because they are utterly indifferent to it.
8. Decisions by committee. The short-cut to getting nothing nothing done of worth.  Be a benign dictator, or a quiet rebel (I'm both, I don’t get that either). 
9. Allowing a culture that sees failure as, well, failure.  You need to embrace failure to know what doesn't work, greatness is much more about the process elimination than the great are willing to tell you. It doesn’t look as grand. 
10. Ego. You are not all powerful, you are good, but until you can accept what your weaknesses are, you can't work on them and find wonderful. Ego means you can't accept feedback – you need someone else someone to tell you where you're going wrong. There is a fine line between this and committee, but I think we're agreeing none of this is easy.  Nothing worthwhile is. 
11. Trying to follow a formula, yours or someone else's. This is short to cut to making the same as everyone else. 
12. Not asking the right questions. The status quo exists because no one questions it enough. 
13. Not asking the hard questions. This is part of fear, we hate asking questions we fear the answer to. The answers can hurt, but at least you know. This goes for far more than work by the way. Be prepared to bleed. 
14. Caring what other people will think. Get the feedback, love the feedback, but make up your own mind. Don't second guess everyone, the toughest committee is the one in your mind. 
15. Did I mention fear?

It doesn't seem to make sense, but if you want to get more done, switch off more. 

Take your body and mind somewhere else. 

It's so easy to become a busy fool, especially if you're in the problem solving business.

You can't escape doing the work, but sometimes no matter how hard you try, the solution refuses to reveal itself.

It's even easier in life to fall into the trap of doing more and more stuff. There's too much to watch in Netflix, too many tracks on Spotify and, well just too much.

Furthermore, culture is far more porous than it used to be. There is little about your age, status or whatever, that dictates you can't do this or that. Once upon a time your identity was fixed, now you can be who the hell you want to be, you can different versions of yourself at different times and it's not really a contradiction.

Who would want to sit on their hands? it's so tempting to just do more and more.

But.

If you have challenges in your life, the further away you get from a problem, the smaller it becomes.

If you can't crack that brief, when you take your mind elsewhere, the subconscious is still working. The less you try to think, the more it does your thinking for you. It's far cleverer than you too. 

So work hard, but don't work stupid.

I used to train for swimming every day. For about 5 hours. We never just pootled up and down, we did variations of interval training. Go as hard as you can, rest just a long as you need to do it again. Repeat again, then again and again.

If you go full pelt without stopping, you crumble. Sport it littered with casualties of overtraining.

When I started out, being over 45 was considered well past it. Some of this was wrongheaded worship of youth over experience, much of this was people simply burning out after too many late nights and weekends. The gun was empty and they just couldn't reload. 

So yes, it feels wrong headed, but if you want to do more, switch off more.

My children are like me, happiest in the water (maybe a close second for playing Fortnite, but lets leave that aside).

So they insisted in coming to 'Carolines'.

Obviously they loved it.

I need to do some things alone. I'm an introvert and eventually I need to rebuild energy levels though doing stuff alone.

But it doesn't take long for every part of me to want to be with them. 

The same environment, totally different experience. It really isn't just the place, it's the people you are there with.