500 Words a Week - Recent Ramblings

Rather than a coherent and structured blog post, this post will be an assortment of recent things I’ve learned or reflected upon.

Relationship/ Team Formation

This is something my boss described to me. In forming new teams/ relationships, be that at work or elsewhere there are several stages we go through. The process runs like forming – storming – norming – performing. A comment on this from my boss is that some relationships don’t get to the performing stage, they may be stuck in the storming phase, or they may have never successfully gone through the forming phase.

Tall Poppy Syndrome

People will criticize what goes beyond the norm, what challenges biases, what’s different. It’s tall poppy syndrome. That poppy that grows above the mean, is the first to be cut down. Often, those who criticize have rarely looked to put themselves out there, rarely looked at where their own biases may be. I think if you are doing things outside the norm, you must do it from a genuine place. A place where it’s the type of stuff you really enjoy doing and would continue to do in some regard if no one was watching, reading or looking. You mustn’t just do it for the sake of being different, for the sake of garnering attention.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I recently watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” again, and I think it’s a meaningful movie. Walter is a man going through life, going through the day-to-day motions. He’s a man who frequently gets lost in daydreams about what life could be like. Until he’s forced to go on an adventure, on this adventure he’s forced to do new things, interact with new people, and go beyond his comfort zone. As he goes through this, we see he starts daydreaming less and less. There’s a heck of a lot of living to do out there. We can’t let ourselves get stuck in the mundane routine, going through the motions, daydreaming about the if only and the what ifs.

Men and Communication

Men are awful at communication. Awful at sharing how we are feeling. Awful at supporting one another. We need to be better. We need to be better at communicating, better at praising each other and holding each other up when one of us is down.

Stop Looking for Tigers

We are biased to view the negative side of the world, to judge, criticize and complain. Stemming from ancient times when everything was related to survival. We hear a rummaging in a bush behind us, we were predisposed to thinking to worst, to thinking it’s a tiger about to pounce. This mode of thinking has stayed with us. Except now, the stressors aren’t as intense, but they are a lot more frequent. “Was that person’s tone harsh in response to what I said? Did I do something to affect the relationship? Are they annoyed at me?”. We constantly exaggerate little aspects of our day to day live, causing them to become bigger stressors gnawing away at our contentment. Currently, I’m trying to catch myself when I’m going through these loops and try to put a gap in-between response and stimulus. Not rushing to judgement, not rushing to the worst-case scenario that we so often easily do.