optimism – The Bartlett Bubble

When you’re a 9-year-old boy, where things fit in the world seems very important. I know this because at any one time, my 9-year-old son Jack can tell you where he fits amongst his friends and classmates. Who’s older and who’s younger (very important). Who’s taller than him and who’s shorter (also very important). Who’s a faster runner and who is slower (you get the idea).

Comparison is how Jack sees the world at the moment. What’s better, what’s worse? He could tell you his favourite chocolate bar, and his second favourite soft drink or tree. Jack, dear reader, could tell you his third favourite colour. He also has a long list of favourite songs and can give you information on how those have been carefully stratified. Within that, there will, I am sure, be a specific sub-list for songs by his favourite artists. He can tell you, quite specifically, what he likes about playing football and how that tracks against what he likes about playing rugby. He has clear views on whether that superhero would beat that superhero in a fight.

“First: Superman; Second: Thor; Third: Iron Man”. Took him about 10 seconds.

Because that’s the way Jack thinks, he thinks other people think that way too. As the brilliant and heartbreakingly short-lived American writer, David Foster Wallace once noted (with irony, of course):

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.”
David Foster Wallace

[If you want to put this snippet in context, I urge you to listen to the speech it comes from, a 2005 commencement speech to graduates at Kenyon College in Ohio in the US. It’s all about the importance of living in the trenches of adult life with awareness and compassion, but I can’t do it justice so you can hear it for yourself here, or get a copy here. He struggled with depression and tragically took his own life just three years later in 2008.]

So it’s not surprising that a 9-year-old thinks that everyone thinks like him, because his only experience of thinking is the thinking he does, right?

The result is that you don’t have to spend much time at all with Jack before he’s asking you what your favourite something is. He expects you to have a favourite, and he will push you if you say you don’t. I now have a third favourite colour, because it’s easier than not having one.

On the whole, I go along with Jack’s world of categorisation because it’s interesting to question your own view of the world in a way that you usually don’t. Hang on a minute… what is my third favourite colour??*

The other morning as we drove through the hedgerow-lined country lanes between our house and Jack’s school, which sits in the village perched on top of a hill on the other side of the valley [yeah it does sound pretty idyllic, doesn’t it?] we chatted about his tendency to rank things and why he did it. After a couple of failed attempts to get some insight (“I like it because it’s good to know what you like the best”), I hit a breakthrough…

“I like asking myself questions. It makes me think about what I think about things.”

Woah. Pretty deep for the school run, right?

So once I’d managed the massive hit of dopamine that paternal pride dropped into my system which made we want to hug him and burst into tears and shout his name from the top of the church tower in the distance all at the same time, I gathered myself and told him I was proud of him and that asking himself questions was really important and he should never, ever stop.

Then, once I’d dropped him off at the drive-through turning bit [he doesn’t need me to come into the playground any more because he’s Year 4… I also haven’t got a hug from him at school for quite some time, but we do have a “Bartlett Boys Fist Bump™” – my little man is growing up too fast] I found myself thinking about what he’d said.

He doesn’t know this, but what he’s doing is called ‘meta-cognition’: the process of thinking about one’s own thinking. It’s what David Foster Wallace was talking about, and taken to the next level you get to meta-emotion which is considering how you feel about your feelings. Being able to take a step back and consider your thoughts and feelings with objectivity and ‘detachment’ is actually the fundamental idea of Buddhism, and much of meditative teaching: you are not your thoughts; you are not your feelings.

I’m not saying Jack is on the road to enlightenment just yet – he’s much too ‘attached’ to the idea of getting the football into the top corner of his little goal in the garden, for a start – but I’m not sure I was thinking about my thinking at his age.

But the point of all this stuff is not just to get you thinking about what you think, or even exploring how you feel about your feelings. It’s to tell you about what this desire to question and categorise has led young Jack, and where I’ve gone with him on the journey.

Ladies and gentlemen and all those who identify as they wish, I give you:

The Power of IF

Allow me to explain. A little while back Jack came to me and asked who I thought would win in a match between his beloved Liverpool Football Club [YNWA] and England. At the time there were a couple of Liverpool players who would be in the England team, and so I told him that wasn’t possible – who would they play for? To which Jack replied…

“Yes but what IF they played each other”

For Jack, IF is the get-out clause – the escape from the realm of reality into a place where anything is possible. Because whilst you can know that in reality, it wouldn’t be possible for a team to play another team with some of the same players on each side, there remains the question of IF they did, who would win?

I know a grizzly bear won’t ever fight a tiger in the wild, but IF they did, who would win?

I love the freedom of that thinking. It’s the stuff we leave behind when we become adults and become constrained by the things we know to be true, rather than exhilarated by the potential of those things that could never actually be, but what if they could?

And it’s that additional word, turning IF into WHAT IF that has become something of a guiding principle for me over the last year or so since “my little episode”. WHAT IF? is a commitment to the possible. And the magic of this little phrase is that the positive always, without exception, has the ability to trump the negative.

What if it doesn’t work?

Yeah, but what if it does??

What if we could create this amazing thing that feels impossible? Wouldn’t that be cool? Well shall we try to actually do it then? Rather than dwelling on all the reasons why it’ll be too difficult?

What if you could get past the difficult conversation that you’re worried about starting because you don’t get to choose how the other person takes it? What if it works out? That would be pretty great, right? So go and work out how you’re going to at least try to do it.

What if you say “I love you” first and they say “I love you too”? Yeah, I get it’s one of the most vulnerable things possible, and yeah, what if they don’t? But what if they do??

It’s become such a positive influence in my life that I’ve done what I tend to do in this situation and had it tattooed onto my arm, so that whenever things get stuck I can envisage the positive endpoint and make a commitment to go for that.

And that, dear reader, is what I’m going to ask of you today. No, not the tattoo. You don’t have to do that if you’re not up for it. No, I’m asking for a commitment, just with yourself, that the next time someone uses ‘what if’ negatively you flip it to the positive and embrace the possibility of a positive outcome, and commit to go towards that.

So yeah, what if we lose? What if they hate it? What if they say no?

I get that you’re nervous. It’s a big deal. But we’ve done all we can. And what if we win?

Yes, there’s a risk of that. They may hate it. But what if they absolutely love it?

And just imagine, for a second. Let yourself go, and give a little thought to this…

What if they say yes?

Good luck. And let me know how it goes.

*[I thought about this only this morning for the first time. My favourite colour is yellow – always has been. Bright, positive, unmistakable. Next (because I had to choose) comes blue, because of the sea and the sky and calmness and all that. And I thought my third was green, but when I told Jack he said “Oh, I thought it would be orange”. And actually, I think he’s right. So it turns out that not only does Jack know his own third favourite colour (turquoise, surprisingly), but he also has a better idea about mine. He can probably help you with yours, too.]

First thing yesterday morning, for a change of routine*, I went for a walk with a friend who lives down the road. We walked and talked for an hour or so before the working day began, through the woods, down the hill, round and back up; squelching through the mud and breathing in the cold, damp air as the day woke up around us, the mist lifting from the ground, as the sun strained to force its way through the early morning cloud.

[* The ‘change of routine’ was, in and of itself, so important, and made such a difference to my mental state. Worth diving into that in more detail another time for sure. Watch this space.]

My friend happens to be a clinical psychologist, which always makes for a fascinating and introspective conversation. So as we walked we talked about the world and how, as simple, habitual creatures, we’re uniquely unable to process or handle the situation in which we find ourselves. Like many domesticated animals we have become defined by routine of one kind or another – and we build our lives around those routines.

Day by day and week by week we have the commute, the office, that place we go for lunch, the coffee shop, the takeaway on a Thursday night, the drinks after work, the visit to the Grandparents, the pub lunch on a Sunday.

Those fit within a more expansive set of routines, too. A couple of weeks somewhere in the Summer, a camping trip with friends, maybe a festival, gigs and plays and birthdays and traditions, getting together for the holidays.

And we’re so caught up in these routines we can’t help but hope and even plan for their return, despite the fact that this planning is a pointless and possibly damaging exercise. Because every time we plan, we create too much hope, and hold that hope tighter and tighter as the plans threaten to break apart once again.

Wondering if the plans for the wedding will go ahead. Plans to visit the family for Christmas. Plans to get the kids back to school. The holiday postponed from last year to this, and now… who knows?

Each time we hope that this milestone or that will be the one. We’ll be out of this by Easter. We might be back in the office by July. Surely it’ll all be over when the kids go back in September. Christmas is still a way away, surely…

And now we’re wondering about half term, and bloody Easter again. Do we just go round again? Keep on rolling the dice? Keep on predicting the future, and feeling so disappointed when we get it so wrong. Perhaps even feeling a bit stupid and bit naïve for thinking it’d be that simple…

As we walked through the woods [perhaps a little out of breath on the big hills] my psychologist friend told me a tale of an American airman by the name of Jim Stockdale, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1965, captured and sent to the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” – a prisoner-of-war prison where American prisoners were held through the Vietnam War. Stockdale was kept in a windowless cell with a bare light bulb on 24 hours a day. Routinely tortured for information, during his time in captivity he had his leg broken twice. Every night he was locked in leg irons.

Yet where many of his fellow POWs died, he survived. For 8 years until his release, he refused to give up hope. In his words:

“I never lost faith in the end of the story… that I would prevail in the end”

Stockdale, L-R: just hours before his ill-fated flight; being greeted by his son on his return; and later in his career as a highly decorated war veteran

But this isn’t a story about keeping hope. It’s a story about how to keep hold of a kind of hope that doesn’t destroy you bit by bit; piece by piece.

Because when asked in an interview with author Jim Collins about those who didn’t make it, Stockdale was quick to reply:

Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
US Navy Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale

Personally, I don’t mind a bit of optimism. When we all went to festivals back in the day I was always the one who would always look up at a cloudy morning sky and say “I reckon the sun will burn this off”. Sometimes I was right, too. But I didn’t pin all hope on it, and so if it didn’t that was okay. We had a lot of fun dancing in the rain.

But having the discipline, the fortitude and conviction, to confront the brutal facts? Right now, I think that’s as true for us as individuals as it is for any of us as family members or business leaders; as simple, social animals, desperately missing our connections in ways we cannot comprehend.

Maybe the brutal fact is that this, in some form, is going to be part of life for longer than any of us could possibly have imagined, and rather than predicting the future we must accept the situation as it is and make the very, very best of it, keeping faith that we will prevail in the end.

Maybe the brutal fact is that those most valued friendships will just have to be nurtured over video calls. Yes, young children you’ve known so well will be growing up and changing and you will miss some of that. Maybe the wedding isn’t going to be able to go ahead this year, either; at least, not as it was planned. But remember that you can stay connected, that love is patient; and keep faith you will prevail in the end.

Maybe the brutal fact is that the work will suffer in some way, or change in a way you weren’t expecting, or develop into something that you don’t understand. But be authentic and genuine, keep your integrity, stick to your values. And keep faith you will prevail in the end.

As a leader in times like this, getting the balance right is really important. Mentioned in these pages before, Harvard professor Nancy Koehn ran a webinar last year [when we thought we were in the middle of things but in retrospect perhaps were only at the beginning] about leadership in crisis. In this she talked about getting the balance between brutal honesty and credible hope.

The brutal honesty [interesting that it’s the same visceral, violent word – brutal – as Stockdale used] is that we cannot be certain. That we are at the whim of an enemy we cannot see. That predicting the future is a fools errand, as it always is. That we may yet find even darker days.

The credible hope comes from our dependable dedication to the values and ideas we hold most dear. We show up, every day, in service to the mission we have set. And yes, we can paint a picture of the future, whenever it may come, that has meaning and, yes, even brightness.

Because a bright, fresh, new dawn will come, as sure as day follows night. Perhaps not the one we imagined, or hoped for. But it will come.

So keep faith in the end of the story. We will prevail, in the end.

Tag: optimism

What if?

Hope, optimism and faith