Everyday just as I am about to write on 750words.com my head goes blank – so instead of walking around waiting for my muse I just write to see what happens. Of course this comes with the health warning that it could be total drivel by the time I post it here. I am writing here to ‘ship’ not win fans or get a book contract.
If you are reading this in 2020 and have gone back to my past blogs you’d be right think either of these two things:
1. Fuck? What happened Bernie’s writing was much better in the early days, what happened? What made him sell out and write the shit he does now?
Or
2. Wow! Bernie has come such a long way. His early years since 2008 when he started posting were horrific! Good job he read that Copy Blogger Book!
So here it is Saturday and 8:27 and I am really wanting to sit down, check out and watch a movie. In fact I just can’t be bothered to choose a movie, it is one of those things I just want to happen to me.
We have had fun running around all day with #Babybernie – buses, trains, went to Ellena’s house for a bring and share lunch with people I’d never met.
As I was cooking it occurred to me that I was totally comfortable in the house and really enjoying it, I even went round and said hello to everyone without thinking about it.
Lorena would have had to drag me out the house kicking and screaming. Well not kicking and screaming, I just would have shut down and not been honest about how I felt.
It is a really dumb thing about how we are not clear about how we are feeling or where we are at. Keeping up appearances, maintaining stories and worrying what people think.
The people I work with best are the ones that are just really clear and honest what they need and how they feel about what is going on.
A line like ‘I have no money to come out and I don’t like that bar anyway’ is better than ‘I have this thing and then Pete might come round and then…’
Last year when I told people I’m depressed and some of my projects were loosing money and that depressed me even more opened up amazing new channels of communication, people were much more honest with me because I was much clearer with them.
I notice that every so often I meet someone I have not seen for five years or so and slip back into ‘how I used to act with them’ – then I get confused in my head, do I tell them I am acting and or do I over compensate for my acting by not acting and then probably end up acting even more. AAGGHH.
I am really content with the people I spend my time with, some of them have fallen into my life and some of them I made sure I stuck with (ask them if that is good for them or not 😉
I was going to write something else that connected to this line but I have lost my train of thought….
So I need to jump to this: I worked on a Youth Project (about the time Oasis were HUGE) Anne an Ursuline Nun that led the project was doing a ‘360’, or evaluation or what ever the horrific word is. She called it a ‘cup of tea to see how we are doing’ which was exactly what it was, Anne suggested that one of the things that was not ‘doing very well’ was I always seemed that I had very own agenda.
Of course I denied this, I had no agenda, let alone my own – and of course if I did have an agenda I’d give it up for the good of the team – which is what I thought she needed to hear.
Anne, much calmer, wiser, empathetic and all the other things I was yet to discover and recognise as qualities to work on smiled and kindly suggested I think about it.
Unfortunately I walked out the session even more self-righteous than I was when I came in, again Anne was supportive and kind about the way I was driving my part of the team, I swear she had a secret cup of tea with Gandhi and Mandela before these meetings.
We still see each other and I am forever grateful for her ‘agenda’ line that day, it has taken a lot of ups and downs and life events to get to the level of realisation I am at now, I am sure there is more to look at.
Really my agenda was me, it was not a plan to be anything, it was I did not know where I was going and that made my agenda.
I also had a slippery sense of ‘self entitlement’ that, to be honest, I’ve only managed to get under control in the last two years.
Setting out to be very un-attached to outcomes and banishing my agenda in the bottom draw and locking it has made everything move faster and more fluid, amazingly even more is going my way than ever.
It is easier for people to plug in, offer help and vice versa – a lot of this freedom of movement has come from saying no a lot. I have a clearer head and can make connections between people and projects more accurately.
A lot of my learning around this has been shaped by working with OuiShare and with Neil and Phil on #iCollday – when you are walking around evangelising about collaboration and transparency you need to be eating your own dog food – or as Anne’s good friend Gandhi said – ‘be the change you want to see.’
Thanks for reading!
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