A few of my favourite posts…

So you’re new here, huh?

You’re not sure quite know what to expect? What sort of writing you’ll be reading? To help you out (and to encourage you to subscribe!) I have listed a few of my favourite blog posts to whet your appetite. Bon appetit!

The first post you should read is How The Italian Broke my Heart. It’s a five parter, but oh, so worth it. You will learn more about me (and my writing) than probably any other post. Plus it’s a great read!

Next, I would recommend reading The Lottery of Location, which is essentially a post about gratitude, and how lucky I am to be born where I am. In Australia.

If you want to see me get my rant on, read Why job hunting sucks. The title of this post says it all, really.

Writing is about making the reader feel something. If you can read Why I walked 5 kms in a gale without being moved, then I have failed as a writer. This post also explains why I have joined the cult of running.

Commentary about social media and corporate communications is also something I do on a regular basis. How to tweet the @groovybruce way (and why it works) was viewed by Bruce Campbell himself. How do I know this, I hear you ask? Because he retweeted it, I respond. And you should have seen my stats on that day! Through the roof, baby

Speaking of celebrities, in I’ve got a confession to make (or how I spent the night with an amazing man), I talk about how I spent the night with Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters… in a non-groupie way, of course.

To counteract the last two recommended posts, and because I’m not just about celebrity adulation, you should read Why I am writing to an inmate on death row… and What people want.

And lastly, a contemplative post Letter to my 16 year old self, which will get you thinking about your life, and what you’ve learned and what you have achieved. I hope.

So. This post is a taste of what you can expect from other posts I write. And if you like you what you read, be sure to subscribe. I can guarantee that reading this blog will can only make you even more awesome than you already are!

I will find you…

I’ve been getting a little dark thematically with the last few posts. Thought I’d lighten things up by discussing one of my all time favourite movies.

I watch The Last of the Mohicans every few months, because I get so much out of it as a viewer. I am devastated that I only discovered it relatively recently (it was made in 1992). That’s 20 years of prime viewing that I’ve missed. For those of you haven’t watched it, I am hopeful that this post will send you to your nearest library or DVD store so you can see why I make such a fuss about this movie.

I discovered Mohicans via the original Shift Happens YouTube video. The music stirred something deep in my soul, so I searched to find its origins. I was surprised that it was from the movie, but must admit that I didn’t hurry to watch it. Eventually I did though, and completely fell in love with the story. The soundtrack is haunting, moving, beautiful. If ever I marry, I will walk down the aisle to The Kiss, a fiddler playing it. If you haven’t heard it, I’ve included it below for your listening pleasure.

Michael Mann is the genius behind Mohicans. The screenplay (which, according to Wikipedia is based more on the 1936 film by George Seitz than James Fenimore Cooper’s novel) is what I would describe as minimalist (don’t expect too much dialogue); the film is brooding and moody, with much of it being shot at night. Visually, it’s just stunning. The opening scene immediately hooked me. We see Nathaniel Hawkeye hunting elk with his adoptive Mohican family, Chingachgook and Uncas, complete with blood-stirring music. I’m not going to be a spoiler, though, so if you want an overview of the story, see the Wikipedia entry here.

While we see Hawkeye as the central character, Mohicans is Cora’s story. When we first meet her, she is a prim and proper Englishwoman, neat and coiffed. As she discovers more about herself and life in colonial America, she slowly sheds the facade and unleashes her true self. The love affair between Cora and Hawkeye is beautiful to watch, as is the unfolding attraction between Cora’s younger sister, Alice, and Hawkeye’s adopted brother Uncas. The final scenes in the movie are result of the latter attraction, and I never fail to howl at the moon at the unfairness of it. But the love that blossoms between Cora and Hawkeye is rich and deep, and I would love someone to woo me with: ”What are you looking at, sir?” “I’m looking at you, miss.”. Talk about swoony!

At the other end of the spectrum is Magua, surely one of the most compellingly evil villains in movie history. He is motivated purely and simply by revenge. The fact that he utters the chilling words: “I will kill the grey hair and wipe his seed from the earth” in such a moderate, reasonable tone makes him all the more psychopathic. Major Duncan Heyward is a character who would be easy to loathe because of his blind allegiance to the King and his willingness to massage information. His selflessness and sacrifice towards the end of the film forces me to admire him and feel compassion for him and the awful situation he finds himself in. If you’ve seen the movie, you’d have to agree that this is the ultimate in redemption scenes.

Like all good stories,  Mohicans is about love, loss and redemption. And like all good movies, I feel an emotional connection to the characters. I never fail to howl at the injustice of it all at the end of the film, and I’m glad for that. I would hate to be a person who felt nothing after watching Mohicans.

Power poisons the weak

This is the next series of posts from hand-picked guest bloggers about power; they have also written about trust . The idea for this series was kicked off by me rewatching Game of Thrones and thinking about its twin themes of power and trust.

The first to write about power for this series is Cullen Habel, who I know personally, but first met via Twitter. If you haven’t read it, his first post about trust was a fabulous, enlightening read. I have great respect for Cullen because he is a straight shooter and tells it like it is, and this brilliant post is no exception (being a straight shooter myself, I know what a burden this can be!). Cullen has worked in academia, sales, hospitality, retail and a long time ago in a radio workshop. He has a habit of trying to look beyond the obvious. You can connect with him via Twitter or his blog.

On the face of it, we all might imagine that power and trust are somehow linked.

It’s certainly where I was headed when I first started thinking that trust to me means I don’t think you’re a deep down asshole and we got an insight of it when @naturalgrump posted that trust is about power – I give the electricity salesman the power over a half hour of my time in the expectation that he will give me the economic savings he promised.  No wonder I feel a sense of betrayal when lured into a mind numbing, unproductive meeting so that somebody can tick a KPI or a “consulted” box.

I started mentally writing this post three weeks ago and it’s taken some unravelling. My dear wife operates a leadership consultancy and is a practitioner in choice theory, and I feel like I’ve spent my entire working life in a trust/power spin cycle. The themes of power and decency are never far from the practice of our lives.

Power, to me, is the ability to have an effect on other people’s lives. It might be as small as putting too much sugar in your boss’s coffee, or taking everything that’s important away from a person.

Power may occur in a good way, such as building another person’s self-esteem or in a bad way, such as provoking a sense of dread when you enter the room.

Having an effect on other people – isn’t that a fundamental driver of human behaviour? Even if the effect is only that the other people leave you alone or don’t trash you. My experience is that everybody sees it that way.

In fact the abuse of power often becomes a bit of a “dad joke” when I play the caricature of a power poisoned boss.  Recently, as we walked up to the locked car I barked: “Come on Mia… get in the car… don’t waste my time!”.

Mia: “Dad, the car’s locked.”

Me: “I don’t want to hear your excuses.”

So, there are a few topics on my mind here:

1. Internal strength and power poisoning

I’m not sure it’s as simple as George Orwell’s “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” but I think it’s a part of it.  I once saw a lovely young kid go crazy when I told him that as the oldest he was in charge. Bizarre. I’ve seen people of strength become almost embarrassed when given the responsibility of authority. The best of those are the ones who move past the embarrassment, and do the leadership stuff out of a sense of duty, not superiority.

2. Refusing to become toxic is not weakness

I have also seen weak people hold the stronger in contempt: “He hasn’t got the stomach for it”.  I knew a manager in retail who was dictated to terminate an employee that senior management didn’t like.  It ended up with this store manager losing his job.  He thought that it was better him than a person who didn’t deserve it.  Plenty more crappy jobs for bad companies out there, he mused.

3. Dark power is not strength

It is not a measure of your strength that people clam up when you enter the room.  If you believe that, then your lens is cracked.

4. The armour of goodwill

If you wield this dark power, then people seem to take any opportunity to take a shot at you. This forces you to continually defend. Compare that to the mountain of goodwill that – say – the Vinomofo guys command.

For over 40 years I have watched dark power and bright power at work.  It seems there’s a choice between the armour of goodwill and the illusion of strength.

I hope I have chosen the right path, and can walk it.

No one important

The other day, someone I knew said I wasn’t important. He didn’t say it to me directly. He said it to the Twitterverse, but I knew he was talking about me. It saddened me greatly, because this was a person I counted as a friend. He had helped me, and I had helped him. We laughed about life and discussed love, and he told me I had integrity. I thought he did too…

The reason our friendship ended – I think – was because he became involved with someone. I was happy for him, because he was looking for love. But it also meant that he drifted away: I hadn’t seen him for months. I tried to catch up, but there were excuses and cancellations and no-shows. There is a wise saying to which I adhere in these situations: don’t make someone your priority, when they aren’t prepared to make you theirs. I got the message – loud and clear – that I was not his priority. It seemed I wasn’t even on his radar anymore!

This week, I reached out one last time – on Twitter – and was disappointed – again – that I heard nothing back of substance. So I unfollowed him. Quietly and without a fuss. And he saw (everyone has Push notifications set up these days), and to other followers commented, among other things, that I was no one important. And unfollowed me just as quickly.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he decided that I’m someone he no longer wanted in his circle of friends. It’s not like we were even that close in the scheme of things. I would have been fine with that, but it would have been nice to know. I wouldn’t have even needed a reason: “I’m just not that into our friendship anymore” would have sufficed. I would have said ok, and left it at that. A quick painless death is much better than the slippery, spiky slope into friendship oblivion.

Maybe he was hurt that I unfollowed him, and retaliated with words. I get that. I’m not above doing that myself on the odd occasion. But to see that you are not considered important by someone you liked, trusted and respected, well, that’s the deepest cut of all. It hurt.

The challenge of being a knowledge worker

In the 21st century, the workforce of the western world is supposed to be forged around knowledge. You can see this trend very clearly, with the slow, strangled death of manufacturing (despite being propped up by handouts from the government) and the rise and rise of digital work. Who knew coding apps would have been a job five years ago? Ditto social media, and the multitudes of jobs that has been spawned around this hive of industry?

The “supply and demand” of knowledge has had a major effect on our workplaces, particularly ones I have found myself in. I think it’s fair to say that a major side effect of knowledge “production” is that workplaces have increased in complexity. We are forced to work together in increasingly complex environments on quite complex tasks. There are grey areas about who does what, which project management principles, Six Sigma, TQM and the like attempt to sort out. But in many respects, we don’t actually “produce” anything. Nothing overtly tangible anyway.

I have never worked in manufacturing, but I imagine that each person who works on building something, or producing something, has an overwhelming sense of achievement. Call me a romantic, but there is something honest about being able to say “I built that” or “I contributed to the building or making of that”. In my own working day, I might write a plan, a brief, some copy. I may do something semi-tangible like update a website, create a Prezi, or produce a booklet or a pamphlet, but these things are ephemeral, and the sense of achievement is only fleeting.

For the average knowledge worker, this also means that despite workplaces being underwritten with employer branding messages, workplace safety legislation, competency frameworks, continuous improvement, management training, team building initiatives, value statements, and performance management and development plans, the horse-trading of information, power games and office politicking are daily activities that have to be navigated with care. Being a knowledge worker is not unlike being back in court in 16th Century England. There are factions, sabotage and behind-the-scenes power plays that would chill even the Tudors. Manoeuvering through this quagmire is akin to walking through a swamp filled with landmines. A foot wrong, and the whole thing is likely to blow up in your face. And take your career with it.

Or maybe it’s just the workplaces I’ve been “lucky” enough to work in that are like this?

Cards on the table

I have found in my 30 years in the workforce that there are two types of workplaces. The first kind is where information is freely available and moves in predictable, organic currents between people. The flow of information changes as and when it is needed to do the work that is required. In this workplace, people use the system and current of information for good, to enhance relationships and to build trust. In many respects, it’s like playing cards with an open deck. The cards are dealt, and everyone can see what’s on the table. There are no secrets; the cards are played honestly and players help each other to win.

The other type of workplace is where information is a commodity and held to ransom. In this workplace, information is a currency and is precious: who knows what about whom is kept closely guarded and is played as and when it is necessary, and not entirely for altruistic purposes. Information in this workplace is about manoeuvering oneself to either protect one’s ground (or self), gain ground, or sabotage the ground of others. Cards are held close to one’s chest, to be played only for individual gain, not for the greater good of the workplace.

Guess which workplace – in my experience, anyway – is the most common?

In Australia I trust

This is the seventh in a series of posts from hand-picked guest bloggers about trust. The idea was kicked off by me rewatching Game of Thrones and thinking about its twin themes of power and trust.  

My seventh guest blogger is Glynis  Rosser.  I first met Glynis on Twitter (of course!) but have only managed to cross paths with her once in real life.  She has two adult daughters (both of whom she likes to embarrass), and cannot remember her life being devoid of pets.  Glynis works in HR, has a keen interest in organisational development and can be found on Twitter at both @gdrosser and @HumResSources.

Di invited me to write a guest blog piece on the topic of trust.  Until this morning I struggled with the concept. I could not think what to write. Then I stood with my fellow Australians at the dawn ANZAC Day Memorial Service.

It was awesome in the literal sense, set in beautiful parkland at The Gums in Magill where I live.  The name of the park is a giveaway. It is chockers full of beautiful gum trees which this morning exuded the deep, cleansing perfume that only a eucalypt can.  It is a perfume which, since I was a child and I first arrived as a migrant, I identify as Australian.

It rained last night so the scent of the morning were heavy.  The gums, the sodden earth, the native grasses.  Above, a blue sky dawned clear and crisp and the birdsong was, simply, wondrous.  All manner of native birds, hundreds of them, seemed to be squabbling over the bright morning.  Just as the memorial service concluded a kookaburra sang loudly, and as it stopped, the Last Post commenced.  I don’t think I have ever felt more Australian, and more pride in my country, than I did at that moment. I was overwhelmed with emotion and I thought about how lucky I am to live here.  It was then I knew what I could say about trust.

You see, because I am Australian, I can wake up every day and trust that my home will not be bombed, or that I will not be caught in cross fire as a collateral casualty.  I can write, broadcast, tweet, about any opinion I may have about our government and trust that I will not be imprisoned or tortured or disappear because of my expression of that opinion.

I trust that I will be able to vote in all elections, even though I am not a member of any political party, and even though I am a woman.

Last week I read the sad story of the poisoning of girls in a school in Afghanistan.  A protest by the ignorant against the education of females.  By contrast I was able to trust in an education system that saw all the females of my family in Australia achieve multiple university degrees in humanities, business and medicine.  As the first in my family to obtain a degree, this was an opportunity afforded to me which may not even have been my option if my family had remained in the class ridden society into which I was born.

My friends and acquaintances hail from all parts of the globe.  They were born in Singapore, China, Greece, Italy, Britain, Ireland, India, Ukraine, Jordan, Lebanon, to name but a few.  In this country we have all been able to trust that we can achieve whatever we aim for if we work hard.  We have been able to trust that we will not be hindered by class or religious or racial prejudice.

I work in a law firm (forget the lawyer jokes, I’m in HR) and I am proud of the work we do.  I am most proud of the Westminster System of law we fairly administer in Australia.  An uncorrupted system of justice I can trust.  It is not perfect and errors occasionally occur.  Human error can never be obliterated.  However, I intimately know the officers of our Courts, the lawyers, the judges, some Attorneys General, and I know that they strive hard to ensure we have the best, uncorrupted, the most accessible, justice system in the world. A system constantly striving in this fast changing world to develop and improve.

I and various friends and family have at different times suffered emergency medical situations, retrieved by ambulance and rushed to hospital.  Sometimes this was due to illness and other times to a trauma.  Never, have any of us doubted that we would receive world-class, absolute best, medical treatment.  Never, in an emergency, has anyone of us been asked if we have insurance cover.  I trust that anyone in this country has access to and will receive the emergency treatment they need and if they do not have the means to pay they will not be denied that treatment (although I know the tyranny of distance can sometimes hinder the speed at which that treatment is administered).

I know we can do better in Australia.  I am sure if I were a refugee awaiting processing I would not feel trust.  I have gay friends who would like to legally marry but do not trust our politicians will listen to the voters and pass the necessary legislation.  If I lived in a remote Aboriginal community I would not trust that my children would finish school, let alone get a job, or even survive to adulthood.  If I were a homeless child on the street I would not trust I will find a warm bed tonight.  However, and most importantly, I trust that the people of Australia have a conscience and sense of fair go and as one strive to do the “right thing”.  I trust that debate in this country will eventually lead us to the point where everyone can experience the luxury I experience, of a peaceful, cosmopolitan, uncorrupted, free, healthy and educated environment.  After all, when our Diggers, our Service Men and Women, fight and die for us, is this not the ideal Australia they were, and are, fighting for?

Lest we forget.
ANZAC Day 2012

On truth and honesty

I have written here about honesty, and more particularly, about me being an honest person. It is part of my essence. It is who I am, almost like a personal brand. My brand promise, which is part of my underlying core values of integrity, authenticity and courage, is that I will always be honest. Without fail, and to the best of my ability.

But what I have recently realised is that people need to earn my honesty. Like trust, it is not something I should give away freely or without thought. I’m not saying that I should lie. That is not something I would endorse. But honesty requires courage, both from the teller and the listener. And not all people are brave enough for the truth. Not all people know what to do with the truth.

When you are honest, you put yourself on the line. But why put yourself on the line for people who would or could do you harm? I make an assumption based on my own values – and often incorrectly – that people are brave and authentic, and will act with integrity, courage and honour. That is not always the case, particularly in the workplace or in our personal relationships. Honesty is not an invincible armour, protecting the truth teller from barbs. Rather, it is the opposite. Honest people are easy targets.

Truth will set us free, we are told. However, the truths we tell are often bullets that less unscrupulous people use to finish us off. These people fire our words back at us, twist them for their own purposes, and imprison us with them. Mark Twain said: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”. Of course, but this does not address the inherent risks of being honest. I am more of an Orwell kind of girl: telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

I would always urge honesty. But do so, knowing what the consequences are. Weigh the pros and cons carefully. And consider who should hear your truths, because once they are heard, they should not be ignored. First and foremost, honesty – both telling and hearing – requires courage.

Last word

While I was thinking about this post, I stumbled on a wonderful website aimed at disarming workplace bullies, backstabbers and manipulators. If you are suffering at the hands of a bully (and the stats are currently sitting at about one in four), I would urge you to visit KickBully. This site has excellent information, but more importantly, psychological tactics on how to deal with these vile creatures.