Photo by J R Guillaumin

How would you like to work 15-20 hours unpaid overtime a week?

What about doing it for weeks on end because of unrealistic schedules?

How about a 65% chance of damaging your health from the stress of overtime?

And what if someone told you these were just occupational hazards, to be expected if you choose a career in the creative industries?

Earlier this year, Develop magazine conducted Quality of Life survey of 350 employees in the games industry. The results were published in the May 2009 edition of Develop, which you can download here.

The stats make pretty damning reading:

• 98% of respondents are not paid for the overtime they work
• 85% have to work ‘crunch’ – periods of intensive overtime before deadlines
• 60% have to work over 10 hours overtime a week during crunch — some as many as 25 to 30 hours per week
• 60% feel that they work too much
• 65% say that working crunch has impacted their health

As well as the statistics, the magazine published some very telling quotations from the anonymous respondents.

I am currently looking to leave the games industry, where I have worked as a programmer for seven years. The excessive overtime and minimal recognition is damaging my health, my sanity and my marriage.

Both myself and my friends have been forced to work a ridiculous amount of overtime, causing depression and bad physical health from lack of exercise and poor diet.

It’s no secret that prolonged workplace stress can lead to employee burnout, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety, depression, addictive behaviour, relationship problems and illness. Not to mention days off, sick leave, resignations, low morale and lost productivity.

Yet several of the survey respondents suggested that ‘crunch’ is normal and inevitable, not just in computer gaming, but in any creative industry:

Crunch seems to just be accepted as ‘the norm in creative industries’ — this attitude will only prolong the myth that it aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

Until we have fundamental changes throughout the industry … the only way to make quality games is to crunch. I don’t like it, but fundamentally I’m in the entertainment business, and a bit of pain is the norm in these.

Everyone is always aware why crunch is needed. No one wants to do it by choice, but in a milestone-oriented environment this is inevitable. It’s no different to film and TV, where creativity is integral to the product and boundaries are pushed. Especially now when we have a recession and so many small teams are on the brink of collapse.

The computer games industry does have a particularly bad reputation for overworking people (see: EA Spouse). It even has a special word for it — ‘crunch’ — which sounds as bad as it must feel. But it’s far from the only creative industry in which people are expected to work absurdly long hours to meet deadlines, often for little or no overtime pay or other compensation.

What’s going on here? Are crunch and burnout inevitable in the creative industries — or can anything be done to avoid them?

Should Creative Companies Do More to Protect Employees from Burnout?

Many of the respondents to the Develop survey were highly critical of studio management.

Specific accusations included poor planning and scheduling and unrealistic expectations:

• 65% disagreed that “projects are well-scheduled”
• 80% agreed that “crunch is caused by unreasonable or unrealistic expectations”
• 75% disagreed that “the crunch culture of games development is necessary to produce good games”

I would suggest another two management factors that contribute to burnout:

Poor people management skills. As we saw in my e-book on Motivating Creative People, it’s frighteningly easy to demotivate people through clumsy people management skills. Conversely, it’s possible to maintain morale under pressure (within reason) if managers are empathetic and supportive of their teams.

A cavalier attitude to competition. In some industries, where talent is plentiful and competition for jobs is fierce, managers sometimes adopt the attitude ‘Consider yourself lucky to be working here – there are plenty of people willing to fill your shoes if you don’t like it’. Which may be true on the face of it – but it’s also a brilliant strategy for demotivating people and making the least of their talent.

Reading through the Develop survey, it would be easy to paint the managers of games studios as the villains. But it’s only fair to remember that they are often under enormous pressure from publishers, especially regarding scheduling and deadlines.

And the survey results weren’t all negative. Respondents were fairly evenly split on whether they are “adequately compensated” for their work, and whether their companies have “a good attitude to Human Resources and keeping [their] staff happy”.

There were also signs of lessons learned by some games studio managers:

I am a manager and partly responsible for a hideous release and crunch period. I have personally made it my mission to do it better, and have spent the last two months studying different project management methodologies, practices and frameworks non-stop. My first child is due in five weeks: I have to do this better, I have no choice.

Are Creative Workers Partially Responsible for Burnout?

Two of the quoted respondents felt employees should take some of the responsibility for their predicament:

It’s a talented employee’s responsibility to leave an over-crunched studio. Let the good studios get the good employees, and let the poorly managed studios be staffed with the untalented.

The rank and file employees are also partially accountable on the crunch culture, because we agreed on the task and schedules and did not deliver it on time. It’s not only management’s fault that crunch happens.

While I’m not sure how much choice employees really have when they ‘agree’ to an unrealistic schedule, it’s worth considering how far employees contribute to their own burnout — and what they can do about it.

A few months ago I published an article on Lateral Action called Burnout: the Dark Side of Creativity, in which I looked at the elements of the creative process and the creative personality that make artists and other creative professionals particularly susceptible to burnout:

• Obsession — As we saw in The Joy of Work, creative professionals love what they do. Which is great, as long as we don’t overdo it and become obsessive, working more hours but becoming less productive.
• Perfectionism — Of course you need to be a perfectionist to do great work. But there’s a difference between high standards and nit-picky dissatisfaction and frustration. Do you know where to draw the line?
• Hypersensitivity — We put so much of ourselves into our work that any feedback can feel like personal criticism. Unless we learn to ‘let go’ and look at things more objectively, this can get very stressful for everyone involved.
• Control freakery — As with perfectionism, you probably won’t achieve much creatively without being a bit of a control freak. But you can’t control everything, particularly in a team situation – trying to do so will only make your life more difficult.
• The weight of expectation — High standards breed high expectations. No problem with that – as long as you remember that (a) you are only human, and (b) risk and failure are inevitable in any creative endeavour. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with expectation, maybe it’s time to go easy on yourself.

I’m not suggesting workers only have themselves to blame for burnout. But if you’re a creative worker feeling under pressure, have an honest look through the list and ask yourself whether any of them apply to you.

If so, maybe it’s time to ease up a bit and find some time for rest and relaxation. And talk to someone you trust about your situation. Workplace stress and burnout are sadly common experiences, and there are plenty of options for getting help if you need it – often the biggest step is acknowledging that you need it.

What’s the Cost of Burnout to Creative Companies?

Crunch is designed to boost productivity and meet deadlines – but ironically it can have the opposite effect:

this attitude will only prolong the myth that [crunch] aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

As we saw in the Motivation E-book, crucifying morale = crucifying creativity and productivity.

Some people argue that ‘deadline magic’ can have a galvanising effect on a creative team, giving them an adrenaline rush of energy and raising performance. There’s some truth in this argument, when applied to short bursts of energy, such as a musical concert, theatre play, sales pitch or other performance situation. This is because our ‘fight our flight’ stress response has evolved to help us reach peak performance instantly, to deal with immediate threats such as the proverbial sabre-toothed tiger.

But the ‘fight or flight’ response did not evolve to help us deal with extended periods of stress, such as spending weeks working unpaid overtime for a demanding and unappreciative boss. In this situation, stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol start to damage the brain, blood vessels and other parts of the body, eventually causing a range of mental, emotional and physical symptoms.

For example:

Stress and crunch have caused me to take several months off work in order to recover. There was no help from the company in question. I’ll never let it happen again, and I won’t let any person that working under me go through it, either. Utterly unproductive.

The human cost of a story like this is bad enough. But if you’re tempted to play the hard-nosed businessperson, stop and think about the cost – in time, money, productivity and morale – to a company of having an employee signed off for several months with stress and/or illness. And make sure you factor in the effect on the entire team, not just this individual.

What Are the Alternatives to Crunch and Burnout?

So can anything be done to eliminate crunch and burnout in creative companies, or should we just grit our teeth and get on with it?

Here are some of the options that emerged from the Develop survey, plus one suggestion of my own.

Fair Rewards for Overtime

Develop Editor Michael French highlighted two very different approaches to the problem of crunch:

Epic Games (which rewards staff generously for crunch, by all accounts) and Relentless (which claims to have never worked overtime) might appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum given that one is pro and the other anti crunch.

Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, caused outrage in some quarters when he said the company expects people to work 60 hour weeks. But Develop Develop Deputy Editor Ed Fear points out in Capp’s defence that “while Epic does expect staff to work longer hours, it makes that expectation clear from the outset and rewards its staff with bonuses that exceed their base salary”.

Banning Overtime

Long-time Wishful Thinking readers may recall my interview with David Amor, Executive Director of Relentless Software, in which he described his company’s radical approach to management: employees have to clock in at 9 and work until 5, but are not allowed to work overtime! The Relentless website even proudly displays a counter showing the number of days/hours/minutes/seconds the company has been working without crunch.

Earlier this week I contacted David to tell him I was writing about burnout, and asked him to answer the question “Are crunch and burnout necessary evils in computer games development, or are there alternatives?’. Here’s his response:

I think that a lot of creative projects are hard to schedule and it’s easy for things to overrun, but that fact is often used as an excuse for poor scheduling and lack of planning. Worse than this are schedules that actually plan for weekend work; that suggests that the project scope could never be achieved within the budget.

Crunch and burnout are both avoidable with enough planning and contingency, but there’s a degree of tolerance and expectancy within the industry that seems to make them par for the course.

(David Amor, Executive Director, Relentless Software)

Tighter Regulation

In the Develop survey, 75% of respondents felt that “trade body organisations have a duty to monitor and restrict over-working of employees”. One of the respondents suggested that “we need an actual union for developers, not just something for companies to join”.

Better People Management Skills

With my background in stress management and managing creative performance, I naturally see a link between people management skills (often neglected in creative companies) and stress and performance levels. When the pressure’s on, a really good manager can act as a ‘buffer’ against external demands, maintaining rapport and morale, and supporting team members during the period of stress.

If you or your fellow managers are looking for some tips on how to get the best out of people in difficult circumstances, feel free to download my e-books How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) and Creative Management for Creative Teams. Both are licensed for free noncommercial distribution, so you’re welcome to forward them to anyone who may find them useful.

What Do You Think?

Should we accept overwork and burnout as occupational hazards of working in a creative business?

Should creative industries companies be doing more to protect employees from burnout?

Is intensive overtime necessary to meet deadlines — or does it impair productivity?

If you’re feeling daunted by the challenges of the recession – or if you could simply do with some inspirational and practical advice, then I suggest you download Defiant: Practical Tips to Thrive in Tough Times.

It’s a new e-book from Rajesh Setty, successful entrepreneur, respected author, columnist for Lateral Action – and a thoroughly nice guy who I’m pleased to call my friend.

A few months ago Raj asked me to contribute a practical tip or two for people under pressure due to the recession. I was happy to do so, and am delighted to find myself a co-contributor alongside stellar talents such as Seth Godin, Liz Strauss and Phil Gerbyshak.

As well as the ‘guest tips’ Raj has packed the e-book full of advice based on his experience of surviving and thriving through several recessions.

The e-book is completely FREE – you don’t even need to give your e-mail address. So once you’ve grabbed your copy and please help to help others by forwarding it to your friends and contacts.

Thanks Raj!

Photo by Criss!

At the beginning of 2008, I posted my New Year’s resolution on this blog:

I will sit still for five minutes every day.

The aim of the resolution was to establish a regular habit of sitting meditation first thing in the morning.

The result? During 2008 I practised meditation every day … except two.

Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

If you’re going to be strict, I guess you could say that counts as a technical failure. But as a recovering perfectionist, I’m happy to take a 99.45% hit rate as a success. Especially as it meant I achieved my goal of establishing the habit — which I’ve continued to this day.

I’m now sitting for 20 minutes every morning, sometimes 30 minutes at weekends. It feels like a normal part of my everyday routine, as automatic as cleaning my teeth.

The real test of the habit came a few days after New Year’s Day 2009. For a couple of days, I thought ‘Well, I’m on holiday and I managed to keep the resolution last year — I’ll give myself a day off today’. And the funny thing was, I missed it. It felt like there was something absent from my day. When I sat down to practice the next day, it was with a sense of relief — not at fulfilling an obligation, but just for the sheer pleasure of sitting down, letting things go and enjoying being present in the moment.

So how did I get to this stage? Last year I posted 3 Reasons Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail and 6 Tips for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolution. Now, I’ll pick out the four factors that made it easier for me to keep my resolution than to break it.

1. Focus on What Makes the Activity Rewarding

Any truly worthwhile activity will be difficult enough to arouse resistance, but rewarding enough to repay persistence.

It’s up to you which one you focus on.

Let’s face it, meditation isn’t the most exciting pursuit in the world. It can be incredibly boring. After a while, sitting still can be painful. And once you tune into your thoughts and feelings, you can experience all kinds of unpleasant states of mind — anxiety, impatience, frustration, sadness, irritation, anger and so on.

The same applies to any challenging activity — whether training for a marathon, learning French or the piano, or improving your golf swing, there will be plenty of times when you wonder why you’re bothering.

If you focus on the resistance, you can have as many excuses as you want for not following through: being too busy, getting bored, questioning whether it’s really worthwhile, taking up another habit as an alternative — the list is endless. And more you focus on the resistance, the harder it becomes to continue.

But if you focus on what makes the activity rewarding, the whole thing becomes a little easier. For many, the bottom line is I know I have a better quality of life when I practise meditation versus when I don’t. So when I found myself thinking of excuses not to practice, I kept returning to that thought.

Sometimes changing a habit can be intrinsically rewarding – like an exercise routine that becomes enjoyable once your fitness level starts to rise. Other changes are not rewarding in themselves – but they are worth persisting with because of the extrinsic rewards they bring. E.g. Stopping smoking is often difficult or unpleasant, but the rewards of health, self-respect, sense of achievement etc. make it work persisting.

Takeaway: before you establish a new habit, ask yourself ‘ What makes this rewarding?’. If you can’t think of a good reason, don’t bother even starting! But if you can, write it down and look at it every time you’re struggling and asking yourself ‘Why am I doing this?’.

2. Set Mini-Goals to Overcome Resistance

My ‘big picture’ goal was to establish a regular habit and make meditation part of my everyday life. In order to achieve this, I deliberately set myself a ridiculously easy ‘mini-goal’ — just five minutes every day — in order to get myself over the biggest hurdle of all, which was sitting down to practice.

If I’d only done five minutes a day then the resolution would have been pretty worthless, so beware of setting yourself goals that are so low that achieving them won’t give you any satisfaction. But I knew that the first five minutes of practice are always the hardest — once I’ve sat for five minutes, the initial restlessness has gone and it’s much easier to sit for the rest of the session.

The result was that I sat for at least 15 minutes most days. There were only a handful of days when I was rushing around on such a tight schedule that I only had time for 5 minutes. The value of the 5 minute goal was getting me over the threshold of resistance and eliminating the temptation to skip a session.

Takeaway: Where are you likely to encounter a ‘threshold of resistance’ to doing your new activity? What’s the minimum goal you can set yourself, to get over this threshold? 5 minutes on the treadmill? 50 words of your novel?

3. Make It Part of Your Daily Routine

Any time you have to decide when you should be practising your new activity, you open the door to procrastination and resistance. But if you allocate a set time of day to it, there’s no argument — when the time comes, you either do it or you don’t.

After a while, Pavlovian conditioning takes over. When I walk into my living room first thing in the morning, my reflex action is to slide out the meditation mat and unfold it. Once I’ve done that, there’s no going back …

There is a flip side to routines however. Remember the two days I missed in 2008? Both times, exactly the same thing happened: I was staying at a friend’s house, woke up, had breakfast in unfamiliar surroundings, and had to get going quickly to catch a train. And because none of the usual triggers were in place, I completely forgot about meditation until the next day. D’oh!

Takeaway: When will be the easiest time of day for you to remember and practice your new habit? If possible, include a physical reminder in the appropriate place. E.g. attach a note to your toothbrush, or put your running shoes at the side of your bed, instead of your slippers.

4. Make a Public Commitment

Why do you think I announced my resolution on this blog? Because it increased my investment in success.

How would I have felt as a coach and agent of change if I’d had to write this post as How I Screwed up My New Year’s Resolution?. Now, I’m sure that post could have been full of valuable learnings — for me as well as you — but frankly I’m glad I’m writing this one instead.

I’ll be honest and say there were a few occasions when I really, really didn’t feel like sitting down to practise, and the main thing that got me to do it was the thought ‘Well, you told your readers you would do it — what are you going to say to them?’.

Takeaway: tell the world what you’re going to do — whether ‘the world’ means your blog audience, MySpace friends, or just your partner or best friend. When you’re tempted to quit, imagine what you have to say to them.

What Have You Learned from Changing a Habit?

If you made a resolution in the last couple of years – how did it go?

What have you learned from attempts to establish a new habit – or to break an old one?

Photo by Lex in the City

Interruptions are one of the pet hates of creative people. There are few things more frustrating than having your attention scrambled by an intrusion just as you are becoming pleasantly absorbed in creative flow. Whether the interruption comes in the form of a phone call, e-mail, or someone hovering over your desk and saying ‘Can I have a quick word?’ the result is annoyingly similar – your concentration is broken, your time is taken up by someone else’s needs, and it’s hard to pick up the thread of your work afterwards.

I’ve previously written about the creative problems caused by interruptions in Why you need to be organised to be creative (the first chapter of my e-book on Time Management for Creative People) and offered some tips on minimising their impact in Ring-fence your most creative time.

I was also interested to come across scientific evidence (via 43 Folders and the New York Times) that ‘Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information’. For example:

in a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites. (NYT)

So there it is. Focused creative work and interruptions just don’t mix. QED.

Or so I thought until I stumbled upon a new kind of interruption, while trying to solve a different problem…

How interruptions cured my backache

I’ve written before about the difficulty I’ve had with back pain caused by too many hours hunched over the laptop. Now, as a trained Reverse Therapist I’m fully aware that the back pain is a not-so-subtle message from my body, prompting me not to spend so many hours hunched over the computer. But I’ve never been one for taking this kind of hint gracefully: ‘It’s all very well for my back to wimp out, but how else am I going to get my work done?’

The key, of course, is that my back pain came not from using the computer per se, but from sitting hunched over it, for hours on end. Hardly what Mother Nature intended. I managed to improve the situation slightly by moving the screen to eye level and building regular exercise into my day. I also sought the help of Aarti Shah, my wonderful chiropractor – I always leave her office feeling 2 inches taller, which may actually be the case.

Aarti reminded me of her usual advice for computer users – make sure you look up and stretch every few minutes, and take a 10 minute break every hour. It was hard to argue with that advice – but harder still to put it into action.

I like to think I’m reasonably self-disciplined, but the hypnotic effect of the computer meant that once I became immersed in my work, hours could fly by before I became aware of my surroundings again – usually prompted by the tension in my back. And it wasn’t as if I was spending those hours blissfully absorbed in creative flow. I usually experienced a certain amount of flow while writing in the mornings, but by the afternoon my energy dipped, the pain increased and I found it harder and harder to concentrate. At one point, I started to wonder whether I’d be physically able to continue blogging at all.

Then I stumbled across a piece of software called AntiRSI, via this description in Lifehacker:

AntiRSI schedules inobtrusive 13 second pauses every four minutes (if you don’t take your hands off the keyboard for the full pause, it restarts the timer). Likewise, breaks happen every 50 minutes, and last for 8 minutes (again, you have to stop typing for it to count).

At first glance this was about as appealing as getting twice as many e-mails every day. Surely the last thing I needed was more interruptions? But I was running out of options so thought I’d give it a go.

To begin with I thought there was something wrong with AntiRSI timer. It felt like it was interrupting me every 30 seconds rather than every 4 minutes. I was amazed to find how quickly I became absorbed in the computer. But I persevered. Every 4 minutes, an image flashed up on my screen with a 13-second timer. This was my cue to stop, look up and stretch my arms and neck. Every 50 minutes it was time for a 10 minute break, which I used for small, tasks that engaged my body and senses – washing the dishes, taking out the rubbish, filing papers, aikido exercises.

The biggest surprise was that I wasn’t annoyed by the interruptions. Once I got used to them, I even started to look forward to them, and the feeling of relief they brought. And several times I found myself instinctively stopping, stretching and looking around – a couple of seconds before the ‘micro-pause’ message flashed up on the screen. By training myself to pay more attention to my body, I was noticing and responding to the signals prompting me to readjust and compensate for my habit of tensing up.

The first morning of using AntiRSI, I was pleasantly surprised – my energy and alertness continued throughout the morning and well into the afternoon. I felt physically lighter. I noticed what a fabulous view I had been missing – the sky and skyline of the Canary Wharf towers. Each time I looked up I noticed how the sky changed colour and the clouds had shifted formation. Even as I worked in the virtual world of my laptop, I felt present and connected to the physical world around me.

Two weeks later, my back is feeling much better. The tension hasn’t gone completely, but the pain is definitely fading away – and I’m able to spend enough time on the computer to get my work done.

Can interruptions help creative flow?

As well as the physical benefits, I’ve noticed a definite improvement in my ability to think clearly and focus on creative work. Each time I stop and stretch, I feel my concentration sharpen up. It seems that the AntiRSI interruptions are actually helping me to stay in creative flow.

At first it didn’t seem to make sense that interruptions could help me stay in flow. After all, one of the key elements of flow described by Csikszentmihalyi is that ‘distractions are excluded from consciousness’. So how could such a deliberate distraction as a message flashing up on the screen have a positive effect on flow?

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think the clue lies in another of Csikszentmihalyi’ elements of flow. He tells us that flow occurs when ‘there is a balance between challenges and skills’. Relative to our skill level, if the challenge of a task is too low, we will get bored; if the challenge is too great, we become frustrated. Csikszentmihalyi is writing about the external challenge we face, but I think the same principle of balance applies to the way we approach a challenge: if we don’t make sufficient effort, we won’t make much progress and will become bored; but if we push ourselves too hard, we are likely to tense up, get stuck and become frustrated.

As I discovered to my cost, it’s very easy to get sucked into a compulsive state of mind while working on the computer, leading to physical and mental tension rather than the effortless quality of flow. The micro-pauses and breaks prompted by AntiRSI keep pulling me back from the brink of tensing up, allowing me to balance effort and relaxation in order to stay in flow.

Another explanation is suggested by the scientific studies mentioned above, about the effect of interruptions. Now, I’m no neuroscientist (and the NYT doesn’t give titles or links for the research papers), but it sounds to me as though the experiments were measuring the effect of switching from one task to another. E.g. from ‘writing reports or computer code’ to ‘responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages’ and then back to writing. The negative effect of task-switching seems to be caused by the change in mental activity – if I stop writing a report and start responding to e-mail, I am not only changing the subject of my attention, but also changing thinking styles – presumably engaging all kinds of mental circuits that were not involved in the first task. Then I switch back to my report and have to change mental gears all over again. No wonder it takes me a while to pick up again where I left off.

But the kind of interruptions created by AntiRSI are very different. They don’t prompt me to switch from one mental task to another, but to create a ‘micro-pause’ in my work, where I do nothing but stop and reconnect with my body and surroundings. I don’t check e-mail or start reading something else – I just stop, look, listen and breathe. It feels as though I’ve ‘reset’ the system and regained a bit of mental and physical balance.

Based on this totally unscientific subjective experiment, I suggest dividing interruptions into two categories:

1. those that involve task-switching and have a negative effect on concentration and creative flow
2. those that are only pauses in the current task, and which can help maintain concentration and creative flow.

Another activity where concentration is of critical importance is meditation. So it’s interesting to note the availability of meditation interval timers, which can be set to chime ‘every 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes’ – to help meditators stay centred and focused.

How to use pauses to stay in creative flow

These tips are based on my experience of using AntiRSI, but they should be easy to use with a different means of creating automatic ‘pause prompts’ – such as an automatic chimer/alarm. PC users can try WorkRave (also recommended by Lifehacker). I can’t test this myself so if you try it please leave a comment below to let us know what you think of it.

1. Set up automatic timed ‘pause prompts’ – it’s very important that you don’t rely on your own self-disciopline to do this, unless you have superhuman discipline!
2. When it’s time for a pause:
   - stop and look around, firstly paying attention to your peripheral vision, then focusing on the furthest point you can see
   - focus on the sensations in your body – start with your feet, then sweep your attention up to your head, so that you are aware of all the sensations in your body
   - take a deep breath and stretch your arms and shoulders.
3. When it’s time for a 10 minute break,
   - stand up and do something that engages your whole body and senses
   - e.g. a brief walk, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, yoga, tai chi or similar exercise).
4. Experiment with the spacing and duration of micro-pauses and breaks, until you find a rhythm that suits you best.

How about you?

• Do you find your creativity and energy dips after long spells on the computer? How do you deal with this?
• Have you used AntiRSI or similar software to keep you focused and relaxed? How did you get on with it?
• Can you recommend any other software that does a similar job?

If you find AntiRSI beneficial, I’m sure Onne who created it would appreciate a donation – Paypal link on his site.

Table of contents for An Introduction to Business Coaching

1. An Introduction to Business Coaching
2. What Is Business Coaching?
3. Coaching Is Not Training, Mentoring or Counselling
4. Different Types of Coaching
5. The External Coach, or Coaching Consultant
6. The Manager as Coach
7. Coaching and Leadership
8. Key Coaching Skills
9. The GROW Coaching Model
10. Formal and Informal Coaching
11. The Business Impact of Coaching
12. Why Coaching Matters to Creative Companies
13. Recommended Business Coaching Books

The ‘Introduction to Business Coaching’ series is now available to download as an e-book, Creative Management for Creative Teams. It’s licensed for free noncommercial distribution so you are welcome to share it with your colleagues and contacts.

Having spent most of this series outlining the What and How of coaching, it’s time to consider the Why – the key benefits to a business where coaching is an integral part of managing performance and developing people’s talents.

I’ve left this till late in this guide because until we’re clear about what coaching is and how it works, it’s hard to consider its impact on an organisation. With all complex ‘people skills’, it is hard to draw a straight line between particular skills and practices and business results. This is particularly true of coaching, as it is essentially a facilitative approach. Whether managers or consultants, coaches act as catalysts for various processes within an organisation, so it’s often hard to separate the different elements that contribute to success.

However we can identify factors that coaching seeks to influence, and consider how it does this. In each case, note how the personal benefits (to both coaches and coachees) are intimately linked to the business benefits. Ideally a company should be looking for a dynamic balance between the two, especially in the context of a creative business.

Commitment

It’s impossible to create commitment – but you can encourage it by giving people an opportunity to (a) work towards goals they find personally meaningful as well as delivering business results, and (b) use their creativity and initiative to do the job in their own way. Coaching offers a wealth of options for doing both of these. In fact, the coaching approach is founded on the assumption that the coach’s role is to act as a facilitator, while the coachee has the biggest emotional investment in the goal and the responsibility for committing to action.

Creativity

Following on from Commitment, because the coach is a facilitator, asking questions, listening and giving feedback in order to stimulate the coachee’s thinking, it is a highly creative process. Not in an abstract, fuzzy way, but in challenging people to come up with ideas that are new, useful and practical – and then to put them into action and see them through. For more on coaching and creativity see How coaching creates creative flow and my next post on Why coaching is vital to creative companies.

Empowerment

When people are given the opportunity to pursue meaningful goals using their own ingenuity and initiative, this results in high levels of empowerment within an organisation. There are obvious benefits to the team members being empowered in this way – in terms of using their skills and talents to the full and gaining the satisfaction, recognition and rewards of doing so. And having these people work at full capacity obviously benefits the organisation too. But it is not so commonly noticed that delegating responsibility and empowering people has huge benefits for the managers themselves – when they can genuinely empower people, managers are able to free up their time and energy from micromanaging and use it for the ‘big picture’ thinking and action that is crucial to the company’s success.

Accountability

Commitment, creativity and empowerment are all very well, but if left unchecked they can create more problems than they solve. Coaching balances these freedoms with a strong emphasis on accountability: goal-setting, questioning, listening, giving feedback and reviewing progress all enable managers to monitor progress, detect problems and help people to correct errors, solve problems and deal with unexpected outcomes. This ensures that good intentions and creative freedoms deliver tangible results.

Performance improvements

Because coaching balances creative empowerment with rigorous monitoring of results, it can have a big impact on performance. Other reasons for its success in raising performance are the facts that it is highly focused on the day-to-day realities of work, and the typical format is one-to-one – so it is very flexible in adapting to the specific needs of the individual and the situation. When these individual improvements are multiplied and co-ordinated by ‘cascading’ coaching throughout the company (i.e. so that managers are coaching each other throughout the levels of the organisation) then the impact on performance can be dramatic.

Morale and retention

It’s fairly obvious that staff who are empowered and supported to use their talents in the pursuit of meaningful (to them) goals are likely to be happier than if their enthusiasm is thwarted by old-school ‘command and control’ approaches to management. But the impact on company morale and staff retention are easier to overlook. In their classic study of the effect of management behaviours on business performance, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman make the findings of their research crystal clear:

Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. (Break All the Rules, p.11)

Coaching offers the ‘immediate supervisor’ a set of principles and practical tools for managing this relationship in the most productive and satisfying way for all concerned – increasing the chances that the talented employees will hang around and do their best work in your company.

Skills and knowledge

Coaching focuses on learning on the job, ensuring that results are delivered and lessons are learned simultaneously. Over time, this results in a more highly skilled workforce who are able to take on more ambitious work and complete it to a higher standard.

Intellectual capital

In addition to developing skills and knowledge, continuous coaching will contribute to the development of the company as a learning organisation. When learning is an ongoing, integral element of an organisation it enhances not just its operational efficiency but also its ‘intellectual capital’ – a vital asset in a knowledge-driven economy. In their book Coaching and Mentoring, Eric Parsloe and Monica Wray present the case for the learning organisation, beginning with the premise that ‘we are moving into an era of global, information technology-driven organisations’. They argue that ‘ Storage, transfer and retrieval of information is essentially technology-driven, but application of that information is people-driven’ and that ‘ Only organizations, and individuals, that actively manage their learning processes will be successful – or indeed will survive!’ Coaching and Mentoring, p.17). Their ‘new agenda for the learning organisation’ includes ‘encouraging as many people as possible, and certainly all managers, to become coaches to ensure learning occurs in the workplace and elsewhere’ (p.22).

Jane Greene and Anthony Grant make a similar case for coaching in a knowledge economy:

We are moving from an industrial era in which wealth lay in raw materials, machinery, goods – what Karl Marx called ‘the means of production’ – into a world where wealth and power lie in ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information you control. (Solution-Focused Coaching, p.4)

They quote an article from HR Focus magazine, January 1996, stating that ‘The emergence of the knowledge-based economy requires managers to act as coaches’.

These writers present coaching as a vital approach for all companies managing learning and performance in a knowledge economy. I believe coaching becomes even more valuable in the context of the creative economy and creative industries – where ‘ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information’ are the lifeblood of every creative business. I’ll elaborate on coaching and creative companies in the next post in this series.

Photo by pascalgenest

Photo by givepeasachance

From the outside, the writer pottering around the house while the laptop gathers dust, and the performer shaking with fear backstage might look very different. But having personally experienced both writer’s block and stage nerves, as well as coaching many writers and performers through them, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are basically the same thing.

To see what I mean, let’s take the idea of a block literally, and look at the phenomenon of board breaking by martial artists.

To see someone break a board, brick or concrete block with bare hands or feet looks amazing, but the evidence suggests that it’s a question of technique rather than magical powers. Given the proper training, anyone can learn to do it. In the Kung Fu Science project, kung fu expert Chris Crudelli teamed up with physicist Michelle Cain to investigate the physical forces at work.

On the Kung Fu Science website, Crudelli explains the key points of the technique of breaking boards, one of which is particularly relevant to creative blocks:

Speed and Point of Focus

‘The most important thing is to make sure the hand is moving fast enough when it hits the wood. Advice often given is to imagine that what you’re hitting is actually well behind the board. This ensures the hand doesn’t slow down before the point of impact. Confidence is also important here; you have to believe that your hand is going straight through the board, or you will naturally slow down to avoid hurting yourself.’

Photo by scottfeldstein

So what can writers and performers learn from this?

Well for starters, all of these artists, martial and otherwise, are trying to break through a ‘block’, a barrier that is more mental than physical. Michelle’s scientific training meant she could logically calculate that it was physically possible for her to break the board – but she admitted she was still nervous at the prospect of actually doing it. Similarly, there’s nothing physically impossible about writing or typing a few words, or standing on a stage and performing the required actions – the block is in the mind.

Chris highlights focus, speed and confidence as the keys to board breaking. Focus is important to both writers and performers – where they differ is in the balance between speed and confidence. Let’s look at Chris’s pointers and see how they apply to creative blocks and stage fright:

1. Focus beyond the block

Chris tells us to ‘imagine what you’re hitting is well behind the board’. If you are focused on the board itself, ‘you will naturally slow down to avoid hurting yourself’ – which ironically makes it more likely that you will hurt yourself.

Similarly, creatives can become obsessed with the obstacles in their way, to the point where they lose sight of their original vision, of the work they are trying to break through to, on the other side of the block. So the writer looks at the notebook or laptop and sees only boredom and frustration. The actor thinks of the stage and sees only fear. Like the nervous kung fu student, this makes it more likely they will get stuck.

If you are feeling blocker or nervous about creating or performing, stop for a moment and clear your mind. Remember what it was like the last time you broke through the mental barriers and found yourself in creative flow. Take a few moments to remember the sense of ease and pleasure, and notice the kind of images the memory conjures up in your mind. It may help to look at the work you created at that time, or to run through the steps of that old performance again.

Now imagine what it will be like next time you experience this kind of breakthrough. Picture it. Feel it. Tell yourself how good it will feel. Remind yourself of the things you do when you are in this creative zone. When you approach your work, make this desired future your point of focus. The more you concentrate on what you want, the more chance you have of breaking through the mental barrier without even noticing it.

2. Writers need to speed up

For the martial artist ‘The most important thing is to make sure the hand is moving fast enough when it hits the wood’, so it has sufficient momentum to break through the block.

For performers, a lot of the necessary momentum is provided by the situation – timing is critical and you are surrounded by people who will expect, encourage, cajole and even order you to get going now! There’s not a lot of arguing with ‘Lights! Camera! Action!’ This means that performing is more (ahem) dramatic than writing – you often experience intense fear and excitement as you break through the barrier at top speed.

For writers, it can be hard to find this momentum. Far from split-second timing, it sometimes feels like it makes no difference whether you start writing now or next week. You approach the desk, you feel the twinge of fear, you shy away, like a nervous horse at a showjumping fence. Maybe you should have a cup of tea or a cigarette, or tidy the desk before you get going. Or just check your e-mail… Hours later, you realise the day has flown by with little to show for it.

If this is typical of your writing life, you need to inject some speed into your work. Time yourself. Five minutes on a set topic. A minute to draft the first scene. 10 seconds for the 10 most important points you want to make. Go!

Writing workshops can be a good way to get into this habit – the tutor and students give you a taste of the performers’ world, and timed exercises usually produce the goods. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you have to.

Deadline magic is a well-known phenomenon, so use it to your advantage – set yourself deadlines and if necessary tell someone else who can hold you accountable to them.

3. Performers need to relax

Crudelli tells us that ‘Confidence is also important here; you have to believe that your hand is going straight through the board, or you will naturally slow down to avoid hurting yourself’.

While performers receive plenty of impetus from the situation and people around them, this kind of external pressure can cause them to tense up in response. Like the martial artist, they have to believe they can do it or they will get hurt.

If you are finding yourself tensing up at the prospect of stepping onto the stage, it’s important that you learn to relax and go with the experience instead of resisting it.

Ironically, stage fright takes a lot of rehearsal. When I’ve worked with actors and other performers on this issue, I usually find that the nerves start long before the actual performance. When we look at their mental preparation, we often find that they are running ‘disaster movies’ of bad performances in their head – they imagine themselves failing publicly, in front of a bored or hostile audience. And the ‘inner critic’ is not far away – a negative inner voice telling them how terrible they are as a performer. All of which is taking them away from the relaxed body-centred awareness that is crucial to live performance.

If this applies to you, it’s time to start rehearsing success instead of failure. You have a powerful imagination, so use it to boost your confidence instead of undermining it – replace the disaster movies with re-runs of your best performances from the past, and imagining your next triumph. See the audience as receptive and enthusiastic, notice the words, music and/or actions flowing easily as you get into the performance. Notice the feelings of pleasure and excitement in your body. Give your inner critic the week off – s/he can come back after the performance to review it if necessary.

It may help you to take up a physical discipline such as yoga, tai chi or the Alexander Technique that will help you increase your body awareness and stay physically centred. If you have been practising regularly then it will be much easier to use breathing or movement exercises to calm and centre yourself backstage before you go on.

More on handling pressure in 7 Ways to Stop Worrying When You’re Under Pressure.

Over to you…

Have you overcome writer’s block or stage nerves? How did you do it?

If you’re a writer or creative who works alone – how do you create enough momentum?

If you’re a performer – how do you stay relaxed as well as energised for a show?

Photo by Solange Gaymard

My last post looked at 3 Reasons Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail. Now I’ll look at how you can keep yours. I’ll start by reviewing my progress on the three New Year’s Resolutions I posted on this blog last year.

1. Make my blogging more like my coaching

I had noticed that my blog was proving increasingly useful as a coaching tool, and wanted to develop my blogging style so that it was closer to my style of coaching. Part of this involved blogging more of the stories, ideas and examples I share with clients in sessions, and part of it involved developing the conversational aspect of the blog and making more use of questions.

I definitely think I’ve succeeded in the first respect, in posts such as 7 Ways to Stop Worrying When You’re Under Pressure, What Amadeus Shows Us About Creativity, my mini-series on Giving Feedback on Creative Work, and especially in my e-book about Time Management for Creative People. The fact that the e-book has been downloaded 25,000 times in a month tells me that I’m providing something valuable for my audience.

I also think I’ve made progress in developing the blog as a conversation and using questions to stimulate readers’ creativity – although I think I can do a lot more in this respect. I’ve certainly had some great conversations on this blog and elsewhere, and I’ve started to make more use of questions in posts such as What’s the Difference Between Incubation and Procrastination? and Should Artists Give the Audience What They Want?. So I’ve made a good start but think I can take this further – look out for more question-based posts this year!

2. Write More Poetry

Having finished my MA the previous autumn, I resolved to reclaim some of my writing time for poetry. I’m pleased to say I managed to do this, even amid the pressure of so much work-related writing (this blog, training manuals, client proposals etc). My success was largely down to joining Mimi Khalvati’s advanced workshop at the Poetry School. As well as the terrific feedback and encouragement I’ve received from Mimi and the rest of the class, the fact that I committed to bringing poems to the workshop gave me an extra incentive to actually write some. The class has definitely helped me improve my poems, which in turn makes it more enjoyable, reinforcing my motivation to write more.

Again, I can do more in this area, and I’m hoping to find more time for writing poetry this year, but I’m really pleased I got back into the poetic groove in 2007.

3. Make a habit of aikido practice

After spending two years doing the MA and one year writing this blog, my gym membership was a distant memory and I was seriously in need of exercise. But instead of rejoining the gym, Mrs WT and I enrolled at Meridian Aikido dojo. Aikido was something I’d been curious about for years, so I was really excited about it and wanted to establish a regular routine of practising some of the basic movements as well as attending classes.

With the exception of a hiatus in the summer I managed to do this, to the point where most weekdays I would spend a few minutes practising some of the basic movements and ki exercises. The summer break was a lesson to me – once classes finished for the summer, I made up my mind to attend a summer course to keep up the momentum. Unfortunately I was in the middle of a concentrated burst of writing course material – I felt ‘too busy’ and not only stopped classes but got out of the habit of doing my daily exercises. After too many days hunched over the laptop my shoulders seized up, requiring several trips to the chiropractor and a regime of daily yoga and aikido practice to relieve the pain.

It was a relief when the autumn classes started and I got back to more vigorous practice. I also started going to the gym again and I’m finding it a surprisingly welcome late afternoon break after a day spent at the laptop or in meetings. I now want to attend more than one aikido class a week, so the next challenge is to find the time to fit it in…

Looking back over 2007, it feels great to have got back into regular exercise and I hope the summer hiatus was a lesson well learned!

So how can you make sure you keep your resolutions?

Here are the principles I used to keep my resolutions in 2007, and which I’ll be using for my new resolution in 2008. As well as using them for your own resolutions, you may find it useful to keep them in mind any time you are planning a project or setting yourself a new goal.

1. Find something you want to do

This one might seem obvious, but as we saw in my previous post, we often think of resolutions in terms of what we don’t want – i.e. enjoyable things we ’should’ give up, or unpleasant things we ’should’ do. It will be far easier to motivate yourself if you focus on something you actively enjoy doing.

All three of my resolutions were based on things I really enjoy – blogging, coaching, writing poetry and aikido. To take the last one as an example – after all those months of studying, I was arguably more in need of a gym than an aikido dojo, but it turned out that aikido was the perfect way to get me back into an exercise routine. It’s not the most physically demanding form of exercise, but I enjoyed it so much I looked forward to the weekly classes and hardly missed any. That got me back into ‘exercise mode’ and after a certain point it was fairly easy to pick up the gym routine again.

Even if you don’t particularly enjoy the whole activity, look for the bits you do like. E.g. in the gym I enjoy doing weights but can get bored doing cardio, so if I’m trying to get started again I might ‘treat’ myself to a few sessions of weights-only.

Focusing on what you enjoy is particularly important if your resolution involves your creative work. As I said in my post about Amadeus and creativity, intrinsic motivation (i.e. enjoyment of the work itself) is highly correlated with creativity – so if you want creative success, you’d better enjoy yourself!

What’s the most enjoyable part of your resolution? How can you keep that at the front of your mind?

2. Focus on What’s In It For You

Not every resolution is based on things you enjoy doing. The actual business of resisting the urge to smoke, running on a treadmill for the first time in months, or going through the fear barrier of a new challenge can be pretty unpleasant. It’s vital that you find a positive focus to motivate yourself in these cases – by asking ‘What’s in it for me?’

For example, I can have the best accounting software in the world but the actual business of entering invoices and receipts is never going to be high on my list of favourite activities. But if I ask ‘What’s in it for me?’ to get this tedious job done, then I find there’s quite a lot – peace of mind, freeing my attention up for other activities, knowing exactly what I can budget for and make decisions.

If you’re faced with a tedious or unpleasant task, imagine what it will be like once you have finished it and can start enjoying the benefits. Take a moment to register the positive feeling (relief, pleasure, etc). Then remind yourself that every action you take on the task brings you one step closer to that feeling.

3. Aim low and overachieve

In an ideal world it might be great if you went to the gym 5 days a week. But if you make that your resolution then how are you going to feel the week where you’re so busy you only manage 4 visits? It’s amazing how we can sometimes demotivate ourselves by setting our sights too high.

Supposing you resolve to go twice a week and anything else is a bonus? It might not sound so impressive to start with, but once you’ve done a couple of gym sessions, the chances are you’ll be on a roll and feel like doing more.

I certainly don’t recommend ‘aiming low’ for all goal-setting – but remember, the point of a resolution is to get you to do something different. It’s much better to make a small resolution that leads to action than to formulate a grandiose plan that never happens.

With my poetry writing resolution, I knew that realistically I wouldn’t have as much time as I really wanted, but committing to write a few poems each term helped me to actually get some writing done.

What’s the smallest commitment you can make, which virtually guarantees you will do something?

4. Anticipate and avoid obstacles

We can all be ambitious on Day One of a resolution, but there are plenty of pitfalls lying in wait. Faced with getting out of bed on a freezing winter morning, going the extra mile to the gym after a hard day at work, or having that difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, you’re only human if you’re tempted to take the easy way out. But if you’ve already anticipated the pitfall and worked out a way round it, your chances of success will be much higher.

Being ‘too busy’ is a recurrent pitfall for me. So one of my criteria for picking an aikido dojo was that it had to be within walking distance of my flat, minimising the chances of it being ‘too late’ for me to get to the class after work.

What obstacles will you face in keeping your resolution? What can you do to avoid them?

5. Make a public commitment

After posting my resolutions on this blog I’d feel pretty silly (and pretty inept as a coach) if I didn’t keep them. Funnily enough, I still feel like that even though those of you who read them last year have probably forgotten them long ago. There’s something about making a public commitment that makes us keep it.

One of my first posts on this blog was about Anthony Trollope, who paid one of his manservants to wake him with coffee at 5.30 am so that he could write his novels before breakfast. That strikes me as a very clever way of setting things up. He was obviously committed to writing the best novels he could – but I don’t think that was the main thought in his mind when he woke up in a warm bed in December, with the old man standing over him. If he were alone, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to turn over for ‘five more minutes’ – but there was no way he wanted to lose face in front of his servant. So he got up. And got the novels written.

Sadly I don’t have an elderly manservant to bring me coffee in bed, but the same principle applied to my resolutions. Having told you about my ambitions for the blog, I’d have felt a fraud if I didn’t make an effort to achieve them. Having promised to bring a poem to the class, I’d have been letting the side down if I turned up with excuses. Having signed up for the aikido class with my wife, there were a few evenings where she raised an eyebrow at the suggestion that I was ‘too busy’ to come to the class tonight… and off I went.

You don’t have to tell the world – but tell someone who counts. Someone who will remember, and notice whether you do it.

6. Do it with others

Last but definitely not least – hang around with other people who are doing the same thing. When you’re in a group of people with a common interest, it’s hard not to be infected by their enthusiasm, easy to sympathise with their difficulties, and very rewarding to help each other succeed. Once you’re with the group, you hardly have to worry about motivating yourself – as Mark Earls tells us, it’s the most natural thing in the world for human beings to be infected by the feelings of others and to start copying what they do. So choose your friends wisely.

All three of my resolutions – blogging, poetry and aikido – involved interacting with other people, giving each other encouragement, support, feedback and inspiration. Most of my friends are still baffled by the idea of blogging, but that’s OK, there are plenty of you out there who give me all the encouragement I need to keep writing Wishful Thinking. Most people I know have no interest in poetry, but as soon as I walked through the door at the Poetry School several years ago, I instantly felt at home – here were people just like me, as obsessed with poetry as I was, and writing to a disconcertingly high standard – could I keep up with them?

As for aikido – if you look at the picture at the top of this post, it might look as though I’m winning the fight. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice that my ‘opponent’ is wearing the black hakama that signifies a black belt. And if the picture were in colour, you’d see that I’m wearing a lowly red belt, so the chances of me defeating a sensei like Huw Woodman would be pretty slim. In fact, the picture shows Huw very patiently teaching me how to execute a throw correctly, by allowing me to throw him over and over again while he gives me feedback on my technique. Huw’s patience and helpfulness is typical of the supportive atmosphere at Meridian Aikido, fostered by Tony Ecclestone sensei (looking on in the background). That atmosphere is what makes aikido one of the highlights of my week, and renders the concepts of ‘motivation’ and ‘willpower’ irrelevant in terms of keeping the resolution.

Whatever your resolution, if you can find a group of people with an attitude like that who all want to do the same thing, you won’t have to worry about keeping it.

Who else is trying to do what you want to do? How can you join in with them?

How about you?

How have you successfully kept a resolution in the past?

What are your plans for keeping this year’s resolution?

——-

In the spirit of public commitment, my next post is about my resolution for 2008.

Photo: The Temptation of St Anthony by RyanDianna

This time last year I posted my new year’s resolutions on this blog. I also promised to write about ‘Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail’. I’m pleased to say I kept all my resolutions – my next post will tell you how I did it, and how you can keep yours. I’m afraid I didn’t get round to the post about why resolutions fail – so here it is.

The following three pitfalls have been highlighted for me over and over again while coaching clients to keep their resolutions – and I can assure you I’ve made the same mistakes myself many times.

1. You focus on what you ’should’ do, not on what you want

This is an easy trap to fall into. After all, there are plenty of things we probably ’should’ do that don’t seem a lot of fun, especially at this time of year. For example:

‘I should really lose some weight’
‘I need to get fit this year’
‘I ought to give up smoking’
‘I have to do my tax return’

Have a read of that list again – how does it make you feel? Personally it gives me a feeling of mild disgust and aversion. The words ‘losing’, ‘giving up’, ‘weight’, ‘bad habits’, and ‘tax returns’ conjure up a succession of mental images that make me feel slightly depressed if I focus on them.

This is the problem with the ’should’ mindset. Logically, those are all sensible things to do – but instead of motivating you to get going, they have the opposite effect. This is partly because they are all ‘problem focused’ statements. It’s a classic case of ‘don’t think of a pink elephant’ – your brain can’t process these statements without making you think about what you don’t want. And nobody likes thinking about what they don’t want – our natural tendency is to put it to the back of our mind and forget all about it.

Another problem with these statements is the use of the words ’should’, ‘need’, ‘ought’, and ‘have to’. This kind of language dissociates you from your real reasons for wanting to do these things. It’s as if there were some kind of objective standard that you really ’should’ measure up to, or – even worse – as if someone else were telling you what to do. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand being told what to do – if someone offers me well-meaning advice my knee-jerk reaction is to want to do the opposite.

2. You rely on willpower

Hand in hand with ’should’ comes ‘willpower’. Smokers are particularly fond of this one. The idea is that if you exert enough of this magical force, you will somehow be able to overcome your real desires (’cravings’, ‘temptations’ etc) and stop yourself doing what you desperately want to (smoking cigarettes, eating cream buns, mainlining heroin etc.).

Willpower is basically an extension of the weird prejudice against emotions in modern culture – acting on your feelings may be OK for children or Romantic poets, but when we grow up we’re expected to put away such childish things and become reasonable, rational adults. John has plenty to say about this. But I digress.

The big problem with willpower is that it’s hard work. You have to force yourself to stay on the straight and narrow, and avoid giving in to weakness. You have to be vigilant at all times. And it’s hard to escape the nagging thought that you might not have enough willpower to see this through. After all, you’re only human – sooner or later, your resolution cracks and you wake up the next morning full of remorse, berating yourself for not being strong enough to resist temptation.

Fortunately you don’t need to worry about willpower, as it doesn’t exist. As the great sage Homer Simpson says, it’s ‘imaginary – like elves, goblins and eskimos’.

3. You try to go it alone

Self-improvement is a lonely place. When you’re going through the pain, struggle, fear and worry associated with changing long-established habits, it can feel like you’re the only person in the world who has had to deal with the difficulties you’re facing.

To give an extreme example – about 10 years ago I was working as a psychotherapist in the NHS with people with addiction problems. One of the questions we used to ask drug users and heavy drinkers was ‘Are you prepared to make some new friends?’. Because if you are a recovering addict hanging around with your friends at a party, in the pub or on the park bench and you are the only one who isn’t drinking, smoking, snorting or injecting something, then you’re likely to feel a bit left out. And the longer you sit there watching everyone else having a good time, the stronger grows the temptation to give in and join the merry throng. On the other hand, if you start hanging around with people who share your enthusiasm for golf or skydiving or embroidery then it’s a lot easier to keep your attention (and hands) occupied with these activities – and the cravings have a tendency to fade into the background.

OK so that’s an extreme example, but if you’ve ever tried to give up smoking and sat there in the pub watching your mates light up, or if you’ve ever been on a diet watching your maddeningly thin friends tucking into a second helping of chocolate pudding, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Mark has plenty to say about this.

Trying to make changes on your own also gives your inner saboteur plenty of opportunities to derail your good intentions. Like at the end of a hard day, when you can’t help thinking that ‘no-one would ever know’ if you went home and flopped out on the sofa instead of going to the gym as you planned…

So how can you make sure you keep your Resolutions?

If you want to make it easier and more enjoyable to keep your New Year’s Resolutions then I’ll offer some suggestions in my next post.

Photo by judepics: Planet Greenwich (home of Wishful Thinking)

Thank you for reading Wishful Thinking in 2007. It’s been great fun writing it and connecting with so many interesting and creative people – online and in person.

Here’s my personal selection of the best of Wishful Thinking in 2007, based partly on my own judgment, partly on the amount of visitors, comments and links they attracted.

I hope you (re)discover something to inspire you. Have a great New Year, see you on the other side…

January

How to Maintain Your Enthusiasm When Things Get Tough

7 Ways to Stop Worrying When You’re Under Pressure

February

7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm

Interview with David Amor, Creative Director, Relentless Software

March

David Armano on Management

An Introduction to Business Coaching

April

Chris Ritke Interviews Me at 49Sparks.com

The Manager as Coach

May

A Blog Is for Life, Not Just for Christmas – British Library Talk

Getting in Touch with Creativity – Roger von Oech’s Ball of Whacks

Brian Eno – 77 Million Paintings

June

Coaching and Leadership

Listen to My Issue of Magma on the Poetry Library Website

Key Coaching Skills

July

What Amadeus Shows Us About Creativity

Free E-book – An Introduction to the Enneagram (based on the series for Successful Blog)

August

‘Too Many Notes’ – How Not to Give Feedback on Creative Work

5 Tips for Giving Feedback on Creative Work

The GROW Coaching Model

September

What Seamus Heaney Taught Me About Giving Feedback

6 Tips for Dealing with Feedback on Your Creative Work

October

What’s the Difference Between Incubation and Procrastination?

Are You a Right-Brain or a Left-Brain Person?

November

Inspiring Boundless Creativity – an Interview with Tina Brazil, People Director, Profero

December

Time Management for Creative People – Free E-book (based on the series for Business of Design Online)

Three Ways to Assess Your Own Creative Work

Should Artists Give the Audience What They Want?

John tells us not to worry. If he can do it, so can we.