Do you know where you’re going to? The Teaching of Guru Garth

There is a profound teaching in the movie Wayne’s World. When asked by the evil Benjamin “How do you feel about making a change?”, Wayne’s friend and side-kick Garth responds in a deadpan voice “We fear change.” It’s a popular part of the movie, with thousands of references to it online, and like many jokes it has a significant truth at its heart.

We really do fear change. We don’t know what change may bring us, and for many people that fear of the unknown is so strong that it not only stifles their growth and development, it keeps them in abusive relationships or jobs that they hate. For many people the security of the familiar, however unpleasant, appears preferable to the uncertainty of change.

I recently took part in some training on the Solution Focus coaching methodology OSKAR, and I was very struck by the way that this approach is particularly effective in working to overcome our innate fear of the unknown.

As you’ve probably guessed, OSKAR is an acronym, and the O stands for Outcome. (I don’t intend to explore the whole methodology here, you can follow the links if you’d like to know what the other letters stand for.) In OSKAR, Outcome has two aspects:

• clarification of what the client wants to achieve, both overall and within the context of the particular coaching session (known as Building the Platform)

• imagining a Future Perfect, in which a miracle has taken place and the desired outcome has been fully achieved (in Solution Focus this is known as the Miracle Question)

In demonstrations of the OSKAR approach I was struck by the way a whole session could focus almost exclusively on clarifying what the client wanted to achieve. Sometimes we’re so hung up on what we don’t want in our current situation, that it’s hard to see through to what we do want instead. Just gaining this clarity about the desired goal can be all that we need – a strategy and the imperative to act seems to naturally emerge from it.

Of course different people have different responses to the idea of change, and different responses to life itself. In Buddhist psychology a simple distinction is made between what are traditionally known as ‘greed types’ and ‘hate types’. I usually explain this by asking people to imagine a buffet table at a party or event. A greed type will approach the table and have an internal discourse along the lines of “Ooh look, mushroom vol-au-vents, I like those … and there’s some nice looking samosas … oh, and look at the puddings!” because he (or she) pays attention to the aspects of their situation that they find attractive.

In contrast, a hate type’s inner discourse will be much more along the lines of “I hate eating standing up … and I can’t eat chicken wings … and look they’ve put celery in the salad, I can’t stand celery … and those puddings are really fattening”, because they pay attention to the aspects of the situation that they dislike.

When they look at the future, greed types and hates types imagine very different things: greed types get excited and enthusiastic about all the things they’re looking forward to, and hate types worry about how everything might go wrong! Greed types are natural optimists and hate types are inveterate pessimists, and as the pioneer of positive psychology Martin Seligman points out in Learned Optimism, optimists live longer, healthier, happier lives – albeit with an occasional tendency to naivety and seeing life through overly ‘rose-coloured spectacles’.

Of course I’m exaggerating the differences here to emphasise a point. We are all greed types and hate types to different degrees at different times, depending on circumstances and how well-resourced we are. Nevertheless this simple model can be one of many useful lenses to look at our habits and help to address our resistances to change.

Useful though the OSKAR methodology can be, the importance of clarifying your goal is fundamental to change of any kind. It’s not a new observation, but we seem to need reminding of it again and again. Back in the 1940s the Hindu teacher Swami Ramdas was unequivocal: although many embark on a path of spiritual development few make progress because most lack a clear idea of the goal they wish to reach, and they also lack a clear idea of how to get there.

If you don’t like where you are now, then be careful to clarify where you’re trying to go at the very start of the journey, otherwise fear of the unknown may undermine your ability to get anywhere at all.

My Twitter Credo

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and notice that I seem to have a different approach to it than many – especially those who are trying to make money out of it!

Not long after I signed up as @jnanagarbha I began to get people that I didn’t know starting to follow me. When I commented on this, I got one response that made me think that the person was expecting me to say profound things because I’m an ordained Buddhist. I felt a degree of pressure to do this for a while, and made some half-hearted attempts, but I soon found this rather uncomfortable. Not least because many of the people following my Tweets are also ordained Buddhists, and some of them have much more experience and greater depth of practice than me.

In the end, I decided to set up a second account @BuddhistCoach which I use to send out the odd (hopefully) useful comment, and open to the idea that I might get some more work through my engagement with Twitter.

Over the weeks I’ve noticed a few trends in Twitter and in my own Tweets, and seeing some of my friends seem to share some of my perspectives (Hi @Bodhipaksa!) I thought I’d write some stuff down. So, onto my credo

I’m only going to follow you if I want to read your Tweets

The people I mention above who started following me were ordinary folk. After a month or so this began to change, and I began to get more followers who were either seeking to put across a particular vision, thought I might share similar beliefs, or wanted to sell me something. Although I can’t begin to guess why someone who sells luxury cars (automobiles) in California would think that a Buddhist in south-east London was a likely customer!

There seems to be something of a convention (or even obligation) that when someone follows you, then you follow them back in return. Many people seem to try to get followers by following people – sometimes at random – in the hope that they’ll follow back and then click on links offered to various deals or whatever. You can even pay people to do this for you.

I’m not going to automatically follow you back. If someone follows me on either of my accounts then I go and look at what they’ve been Tweeting. If I find it interesting (and I explain some of the things that influence my decision below) then I’ll follow, if it doesn’t then I won’t. This is because…

If I follow you, then I am going to try to read your Tweets

Perhaps this is a little old fashioned, and maybe I’m looking at Twitter in a similar way to email, but I do try to read all the Tweets I’ve received. This is because I’m more interested in depth of connection than breadth. This will limit the number of people I can follow and stay sane, so I’ll say something about…

Some reasons that I won’t follow you – or will stop

• I don’t follow people who are trying to sell me something – even if it’s something I might be interested in buying. Call it stubbornness or a point of principle, I just don’t like being hassled.

• I don’t follow if every Tweet is a link – I need some context and a sense that you’re a human being.

• I won’t follow, or will stop following you if you belt out dozens of Tweets in a row. I find a block of Tweets from the same person a bit overwhelming, so space them out a bit guys.

• I make a distinction between social Tweets and business & spiritual practice Tweets, both in my own Tweets and my following. I seldom follow people I don’t know on @jnanagarbha, and I’m likely to get bored with multiple Tweets about your cat or favourite bits of technology on @BuddhistCoach.

I’m not wishing to be rude here, but I’m afraid I’m not that interested in the minutiae of the lives of people I don’t know living in cities scattered across the planet – and I don’t expect you’re that interested in the sleep patterns of my toddler. In fact I don’t expect my close friends are that interested in such stuff either.

• I won’t follow you if your Tweets conflict too strongly with my values. I’m a Buddhist, I strive to make my communication honest, helpful, friendly and constructive. I’m not going to follow you if your Tweets are harsh, violent, consistently angry, or abusive. Nor will I follow you if you advocate violence or causing harm.

• I’m not going to follow you on both @jnanagarbha and @BuddhistCoach – that sort of duplication would just be silly. Although a few of my friends follow me on both, presumably they’re interested in what I have to say in both contexts.

• I’m not going to follow you if you don’t have any Tweets yet, or you don’t have a profile picture or any biographical information – because I don’t have enough information to make a decision.

• I’m not going to follow you if your name is a random string of letters or @(insert female name here)1987 – how dumb/ horny do you think I am? 

Twitter is a new phenomenon. Perhaps my approach to it will change over time, or I’ll just get bored with it and withdraw my energies. I anticipate that Twitter itself will settle down after a while into some more normalised patterns, and then something else will come along that we’ll all get excited about – I’m already venturing into boos, which seem like fun.

Practice makes Perfect – or does it?

In his recently published book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’, Malcolm Gladwell  draws attention to research that suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of experience to become excellent in performing an activity. His rule of thumb is that this equates to something like 10 years of doing the activity for three hours a day. 

One example he gives is of a German music college where staff were asked to divide the students into three categories: the potential stars, the likely professionals, and those who would probably not become professional musicians. In interviewing the students, it became clear that their level of prowess on their instruments directly correlated with the amount of time they spent practicing. There were no brilliant musicians who simply winged it with little practice, and there were no students who put in the practice hours but just weren’t as good as their peers.

Gladwell uses this, and a range of other examples, to make the point that many of the people we think of as being outstanding – in fields ranging from composing and performing music to computer programming – are exceptional not because they are born with some innate genius, but through what they have made of themselves. They have had the determination to spend huge amounts of time developing their expertise, combined with the good fortune of having the opportunity to do this. 

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for a few weeks now, and have some suggestions about their significance both for leaders in organisations, and for everyone else.

Keep Learning

The most obvious point that Gladwell is making is: if you want to be really good at something then do lots of it. I think this is great advice. 

At the same time, I’m not convinced that simply doing lots of something is enough on its own to develop excellence – or perhaps I should say that you can only develop a certain sort of excellence through unthinking repetition. I’m sure each of us has spent a lot of time in our lives washing dishes, or undertaking other routine tasks, but I’m not sure many of us have become expert at them. 

I was reminded of this recently when I was asked “when was the last time you got in a car and thought ‘this is an opportunity for me to drive better than I did last time’?” I confess that my answer was never – or at least ‘not since I passed my test over 25 years ago’. The sad truth is that I haven’t spent 25 years becoming a progressively better drive, I’ve just become really proficient at being a mediocre driver!

So, if you want to become a better leader (driver, dish-washer or whatever) you need to do more than just turn up and do the same as you always have. What you need to be doing is consistently asking yourself questions about how you could be improving, what you could be learning from your successes and failures, and those of your peers and competitors. Just putting in the hours isn’t enough on its own. 

You won’t get better just by hoping

On the other hand, you really do have to put in the hours. If there is something that you aren’t very good at, and you want to improve then there is no substitute for practice and experience. Unless you work at it, you’re not going to get any better at dealing with difficult customers, badly run meetings, your own states of mind, etc, etc. I’m afraid there really isn’t any way around this one – although of course you can always practice through role plays and in other less crucial contexts, so that you’ve improved your skills when you have to face real situations. As Gladwell observes, these people didn’t get excellent by working hard, or even working very hard, they worked very, very hard!

You need some skill and some interest

And of course, you do need to have some talent and interest too. There’s a virtuous circle here: it’s much easier to put in a lot of effort when you’re engaged and interested in what you’re doing. I’ll always be a better singer than drummer, not least because I’m much more interested in singing than drumming, and so my energies have naturally flown in that direction.

I had a client once who was crestfallen that he wasn’t going to be manager of the year. I didn’t do a very good job of explaining to him that his brilliance as a theoretician and problem solver had led to him developing a set of skills that were essential to the organisation, but not at all people focused. He could become manager of the year, if he worked very, very hard at it over a number of years, but it was hard to see that the effort require to achieve this would serve either him or his organisation well – it would mean that he had little energy left to do anything else. 

So, while it is always useful to be widening your range of skills, if you try to sail directly against the wind you’ll almost certainly take on so much water that you sink.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, an opportunity for me to lay out some of my ideas, or more often lay out the ideas of other people that I think are worth some attention!

I had been thinking of having a number of separate blogs – one on work and leadership, one with thoughts on spiritual practice, and maybe a third for me to just generally opine. However, I realise that since my work (both personal and professional) is about integration, it makes more sense to host everything in the one space - and use tags and titles to identify different strands. But I’d better concentrate on learning to blog-crawl before I start blog-running.

You can see my main website at Helping Change