Euan Semple's Blog, page 63

Asleep at the wheel

You know that feeling when you are driving a long distance and realise that you haven’t been aware what has happened for the last few miles. You drove on autopilot. You missed what was happening around you.

This is how we spend most of our lives.

Organising principles.

Organisations are not machines, they are organisms.

Healthy organisms require the cells in them to be healthy.

Instead of fixing your machines, help your cells to become healthy.

They will then work out what they have to do.

And the only place to start is with yourself…

Enough

Our whole lives we have been made to feel that we don’t have enough, that we are not good enough, that we don’t do enough. This dissatisfaction engine has been seen as essential to keep the wheels of modern society turning.

But it just fell off the tracks and as result we are currently recalibrating “enough”.

When we realise that we have enough, do enough and are enough we have more.

We have more time.

We have more patience.

More of us are focusing on those we love.

More of us are helping those around us.

The more we remember this the more chance we have of a better future.

The Do Lectures

The Do Lectures are a very special event that happens in a remote glamping site in West Wales and I was lucky enough to be asked to speak – a rather frightening ten years ago now!

As ever the joy of these events is the people that you get to meet. This started on the way there for me as I gave the fascinating Craig Mod and inspiring Maggie Doyne a lift from Woking station to the event. Great conversations before we even got there.

The other unexpected highlight was to sit round a campfire, late into the evening, sorting the world out with Sir Tim Berners Lee and David Allen (of GTD fame), pinching myself to convince myself that it was happening.

The guys at Do are in the process of making the recordings of the talks available as a podcast and you can hear my own efforts here.

What matters

Normal was making us miserable and killing the planet.

Normal was already falling apart.

Beware the vested interests of those who want to rush back to normal.

Coronavirus is giving us the opportunity to reset.

It is forcing us to ask some really big questions and removing the option of complacency.

We have the time and opportunity to consider what matters as individuals, families, communities and beyond. Why not make the most of that opportunity?

Less

It has been interesting having to make do with less.

Less money coming in, less money going out.

Less going places, more being wherever I am.

Less people, more time for conversations.

Less aspiration, more contentment.

I could get used to less…

Perspective

It’s amazing watching Alby watching his world as we sit side by side in the sunshine looking out onto our back garden.

To me I just see “garden”. Pretty undifferentiated. I know some of the names of the plants, I can see the various sections. But I just see garden.

He on the other hand sees opportunity! Opportunity for carnage and destruction. He can be sitting apparently at peace on the patio and then with blistering speed, and laser like precision, run the length of the garden and grab some small animal.

It struck me that life and work can be the same. Some are content to see the big picture, take in what is happening, and unless something needs tending leave it be.

Others on the other hand are looking for trouble, opportunities to have impact, and aren’t always aware of the destruction they leave behind…

Missing my trucks

The thing I miss most is the very start of the day. The feeling of pulling myself up the several steps into the cab of a new truck for the very first time. Even this was risky. One driver I know didn’t maintain three points of contact, slipped, and fell backwards off the truck damaging his back!

Once in the cab the first thing I’d do would be push the digital tachograph card into its slot and run through the menu options to start recording my time. It is important that you do this before you do anything else as you are legally required to spend 15 minutes on a rigid and 30 minutes on an artic doing your vehicle checks.

If the weather was cold and the window frosted I would start up the engine to clear the glass but otherwise I’d leave it off as most trucks automatically cut out after a while if you are not moving to reduce pollution.

I would then run through my vehicle checks. All trucks have a vehicle check form on board that you are required to complete, even if you drove the same truck the day before. This ensures that you have checked things like wheels, tyres, side protection, lights, brakes, etc. All trucks have safety checks every six weeks at a garage but it is still your responsibility if something fails and you had not done your pre-drive checks.

Most jobs I had to do my own loading, but even if the truck had been loaded by a forklift I would be responsible for securing the load. This usually involved large ratchet straps and some loads took a bit of skill to ensure that the straps did their job and didn’t slacken while on the move.

I would then pick up my manifest, the list of drops for the day, and put them into my sat nav app on my phone. Some drivers put their next location in one at a time but my iPhone app, CoPilot GPS, allowed me to plan the whole route. This gave me an overall view of how much driving I had to do and where it would make most sense to take my driving breaks.

Last thing, I’d adjust my driving position. The seats tend to have lots of adjustments, and they also differ slightly in design from truck to truck so some days it would take a bit of fiddling to get it right. I’d also, more often than not, be driving a truck that was unfamiliar to me, so adjusting the mirrors, and working out what I could and couldn’t see in them, was really important.

And that was it, checks done, I’d fire up the engine, slip into gear, release the powerful parking brake, and ease away.

There was such a thrill in that first feeling of the power and the bulk. It’s that that I miss the most.

Maybe one day I’ll do it again.

Should

In my recent post I mentioned what a pernicious word “normal” was. Right up there with it is the word “should”.

Should is primarily used to encourage socially acceptable behaviours backed up with the threat of guilt. “Children should be seen and not heard”, “You should respect those in authority”, “You should wash behind your ears”

Once we have been exposed enough to shoulds from those around us as we are growing up we start to own them and apply to our ourselves. “I should be trying harder”, “I should be more successful”, etc.

In our current enforced lockdown the power of these shoulds increases tenfold and the attendant guilt increases likewise. “I should be making better use of my time”, “I should be helping more people”, “I should be exercising”, “I should be eating more healthily”. When the shoulds are coming at you thick and fast from “experts” on the internet the situation becomes untenable.

But like the word normal, there is no such thing as “should”. It’s up to you to work out what matters. It’s up to you to decide what action to take. It’s up to you to decide when to be content with “enough” – or not.

Normal

Normal is such a pernicious idea.

How many people have been ostracised for not being normal? How many times have you worried that your thoughts are not normal? How many ideas never see the light of day because they would call on people to do things that are not normal?

And yet people worry that after COVID-19 things will never get back to normal.

I hope they don’t. In fact they can’t. Normal doesn’t exist!