Monthly Archives: March 2018

I often struggle with expectations. I want things to be different than they are.

Take this blog, for example. I want it to be read by loads of people, but it’s not (yet). There are many reasons for this, not least that I’m not making enough of an effort at the moment to get it read because I’m still trying to form the habit.

When I started it again, I wanted to be posting every day: I saw myself waking up at 6am every morning, hammering out a tight, concise, witty, powerful post and putting it out for the world to see. Since I’ve really started to focus on it and carve out the time to write posts in the early morning I’ve still not managed to put out a post every single day. But I’m still trying.

Take exercise: it’s the same every time for me. I make a resolution to get back in the gym and I dive in head-first, going all out in my first session back and being almost unable to walk or lift my arms over my head, so I give up.

Take grief: whenever you lose someone, you think you’ll get passed it, but it creeps up on you every now and again and takes you completely by surprise. Or, conversely, you can hear of the death of a friend and feel almost numbed by it, without the kind of histrionics that you expect.

Expecting things to be different will never work. There are plenty of mindfulness teachers and practitioners who will tell you to completely let go of expectations, but unless you’re ‘full zen’ that’s almost impossible to do.

More useful, I find, is to recognise when something doesn’t meet your expectations, and look calmly at your own reaction to it. When I don’t manage to hit my target of publishing a post every single day, I feel bad about it, then note the things that made me miss my slef-appointed target: last week, for example, I was quite ill on Thursday and Friday and wasn’t able to spare the brain power to do both my job and this blog, so the job came first, and when I wasn’t working I had to let my brain swich off.

Similarly when grief hits, I try to see when I’m not reacting the way I ‘expected’ to react, and understand that whatever my reaction, that’s OK. Because we all react differently to things, all the time.

So the next time you catch yourself in a situation where you expectations haven’t been met, ask yourself if those expectations really matter, and look carefully at your reaction to the situation. There is no right or wrong to any of this, but clinging to expecations after the fact will only dampen or spoil an experience.

I have trouble sleeping.

There are a variety of reasons: I used to have really severe restless leg1 until a few months ago when I started on a treatment for it; I have mild sleep apnoea2; I sometimes over-think things and stare at the ceiling for hours while the day repeats in my head, or run through the following day instead. I sometimes have to read a book until my eyes are literally closing, even if I know it means a short night’s sleep, to ensure I’m not going to wake myself up thinking things through.

The reason doesn’t really matter, thought. What matters is the effect. A bad night’s sleep, or even just a shorter night’s sleep than is ideal, has a disproportionate impact on my productivity during the day, not to mention my mood.

I’ve become adept at functioning relatively normally – or at least appearing to – when I’m in the office, but it bothers me that the effort of doing that often means I’m not able to do it when I’m at home.

Sleep matters more than most of us think it does. Ensuring a good night’s sleep can make the world seem like a different place and provide a stability of mood that’s less and less possible when you’re not fuly rested. I struggle with that a lot, but the fight is on-going.

The irony, of course, is that the harder you try, the less likely you are to win.

1. Something called Rapid Limb Movement, with a score 100% higher than the classifiction of ‘severe’ [↩]
2. Quite embarrassing to admit, because it’s the kind of thing that is usually associated with older, heavier people than me. [↩]

I love blogs about habit, the power of habit, the reasons behind the power of habit, and of course it’s not hard to see from the minimalist design of this site, I take a lot of inspiration from Zen Habits.

What a lot of these writers appear to miss out, of course, is just how hard it can be to form a productive habit. This blog is a habit I’m trying to create: wake up, make coffee, write the blog, shower and get out to work1. It’s a good little routine except for two small things: what happens when you wake up super-tired, and how do you make sure you’ve got something to write about?

It takes discipline to form a habit. When it’s been a tough week and I’m lagging a bit, pulling myself out from under the covers into the cold morning air can be hard enough, let alone thinking of what I’m going to write. Luckily for me, the premise of this blog is pretty elastic, mostly focused on exploring life experiences, paired with a semi-instructional approach to telling great stories simply because that’s what I’m passionate about. I have the freedom to write what I like, so I can use the difficulties to inspire me to creation. Like I just have.

But today’s lesson is not about being able to write whatever I like, it’s about recognising just how hard forming new habits can be. I’m still doing OK on this so far, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ll start to slip if I think I’ve nothing to say. The discipline of forming habits is the toughest part.

1. Or ‘up to work’ on the days I’m working from home and commute to my eyrie at the top of the house. [↩]

Storytelling is vital to so many things that we do, even our everyday conversations are peppered with stories that we hardly recognise we’re telling. When it comes to having impact from storytelling, we have to find new ways to tell them.

Sometimes that may as simple as using a different medium: if you’re always written, try video; if you’ve always recorded audio, try writing something instead. Diversifying the method can help diversify the way the message gets across.

Other times it’s less about the media you use and more about finding a new way to tell an old story. Of course, we’ve been doing this for centuries – millennia even – if you hold with the idea that there are only seven stories in the world anyway1. And think of all the allegorical tales we tell. C S Lewis’s most famous work was a retelling of Bible stories with a lion as Christ.

For me, finding new ways to tell my own story has been a real challenge. Before my transplant it was really easy to help people understand how hard life with cystic fibrosis is, because I would turn up carting my oxygen behind me, skeletally thin, looking like death and all I had to do was saying “CF is rubbish” and people would agree.

Now, I look ‘normal’ so I’m not able to rely on the same visual aids to describe the challenges of day-to-day life with CF. Instead, I have to find a way to describe my experiences rather than show them, or use examples of friends to compare their day-to-day with the changes in my life. I have to be far more clever about the way I tell my story to have impact.

It makes me think more carefully about the way I approach my work, because finding new ways to tell old stories is both the hard part and the fun part of communicating with people. That’s the joy of being a storyteller.

1. A slight over-simplification, I know. [↩]