Finding your voice without speaking

We’ve all got a voice, it speaks to us all the time, only it doesnt always make a sound.  We are often afraid to say what we are thinking, afraid to give it volume, afraid to be honest and particularly afraid to be honest with ourselves.  We confuse ourselves and lose ourselves.

And perhaps many of us ending up feeling like this :-

“My life swam around me, it took a look and drowned me, in its own existence”   Paul Weller

Although I love the lyric, I dont want to feel like that, so yesterday I can report that I was re-fuelled, re-inspired and re-energised by Jackee Holder and I wanted to share.  Jackee spoke at Barefoot Winter Conference on ‘Writing Between The Gaps’, and held a wide range of people in her thrall, transfixed, emotional, smiling, happy.  Filled with endorphins and oxytocin.  You see she is a proper writer and found her voice through writing, and loves sharing that with others.  To help them find their voice.  Jackee has written books and blogs and the like but started with a journal.  I say started because her house must now be full of piles of journals, notebooks, loose papers and luggage tags.  Boy the woman can write!

For me, I discovered a while ago the power of just grabbing a pen (or a sharp pencil – apparently its a thing?!) and just letting it dance around on a page, with no censorship, no inner critic, no thought of spelling, no thought of trying to write legibly (which is just as well!!).  And this was great, and I wanted to put form and structure on it, and plan it out, and blend it into a development plan.

All good stuff, reflective practice and all that, very adult, very sensible.  And it was good and is good.  To set time aside, to really write down honestly my own thoughts (hey, your thoughts are yours, you created them, no-one else put them there!) – and this is good and does work, and I will keep doing it.

But what Jackee helped me realise yesterday is that it had lost a little power, a little edge, a little of that deep personal, emotional sense of self.  Not lost much, but definitely lost something.  So yesterday, whether it was the words, the moment, the tools, the people or the room itself, (who has Roman busts of themselves in their house, honestly?!!), I found that lost edge.  I found it in the gap.

And boy was it emotional, filling me up, making my chest hurt and my head swim – reconnecting with myself, and re-finding my voice.  Re-energising me, giving me lots of tips and food for thought, and absolute clear permission to love trees!!

You see connecting with nature is very powerful (see Dr Dan Siegel, Healthy Mind Platter).  And there is something immeasurably powerful about writing down what you are thinking, with a writing implement, something elemental, and when read back the words can speak to you, give you fresh insights.  Help you to thrive and feel alive.

So, I wanted to finish with one thought, grab a pen (or a sharp pencil if you prefer), and some paper like stuff,  and just go for it.  Just write, and write and write and write and write.  You will find your style, your way and your voice in a way that no amount of actual speaking can ever give to you.  So speak up, silently, or you may not be able to hear yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

How did we get here?

So here I am eating goat and changing the face of HR with Mark Gilroy, but how did we get here? How do we come to be talking HR, psychology and neuroscience. Well Mark’s got a good excuse from academia and his job. But what’s my excuse? And how did I get here?

Like many people I sort of fell into HR. It wasn’t a conscious career direction so much as a current convenience. In the early days at H.M.P. it was most definitely Personnel anyway. Keeping records, processing pay and making sure that sick notes were current – thrilling stuff huh? And then I stumbled onto this weird HR thing, that you could actually study, and get qualifications in. So I decided to do that. Learning about how to interview and avoid discrimination, how to conduct disciplinaries and grievances, and some stuff on learning and reward I seem to remember. It all went rather well. I passed and joined the CIPD and eventually moved into a commercial role. Funny thing was that I was still keeping records, processing pay, making sure that sick notes were current but now I could deal with the odd disciplinaries and any interviews that you could throw at me – lots of volume, lots of process, not much variety – real coal face HR stuff. And I got quite good at these things, I got a better paying job doing all the same stuff with the added badge of being the policeman of the organisation – enforcing rules and policies and making people fill in forms and wait for permission from HR to proceed.

And I started to notice a few things. Little things. Like work colleagues changing the tone of the conversation when I arrived, actually saying “Shhh, HR’s here now”. The same work colleagues saying “I’ve got an HR issue, what are you going to do about it?”. Saying things before interviews like “You’re better at asking questions, so you can do that”. My God! I had become the HR cliché. Is this how things should be? To borrow from Freddie Mercury:-

“Is this the world we created, what did we do it for?”

But there is a better way, a way to have fulfilling and rewarding jobs in HR. A way for us to add value and grow capability. For us to have a ‘bonfire of policies’ (Peter Cheese, CEO, CIPD) . To stop being the policemen, and to start being people not an HR badge. To help grow management and leadership knowledge and capability, to help to grow all our people. Through honest adult conversation, through being less HR and more business partners, through trusting and empowering people to figure things out for themselves. And how to go about this is all over social media, the leading thinkers blogging away and sharing, and inspiring.

This isn’t for everybody though. There are many elephants in HR (see Nigel Risner, “Who is the Zookeeper?”). People who have been doing this a long time, people who love rules, policies, procedures and forms. People who have such things as part of their identity. People who are scared by this new thinking.

So when I’m bringing back this new thinking, trying to share and inspire, some people love it whilst others really resist. This is ok. There will always be people who don’t agree with me, much like last night’s goat burger!

But I am making a positive choice to not stay in that space with them. I’m making a new map.

One small step for mankind, one giant leap for me

So, here it is.  My very first blog.  I’ve been threatening to do this for more than a year.  I’ve hob-nobbed with top bloggers and Twitterati, looked at how they do things, written out so many blogs, and never quite made this giant leap.

Being honest (it’s a fault I know) I’ve been too scared.  Scared to be published, to stick my thoughts out there, after all what the heck do I know?  What can I possibly speak with any sort of remote authority on anyway?  What will people say? Will I look like a fool? Will I damage my professional credibility (assuming that I had a bit in the first place)? Aggggghhhhhh!!!!  The pain, the indecision, the lack of confidence……..

But here I now am.  With my very first blog.  To borrow from a boyhood (and continuing) hero of mine, Alice Cooper

“Welcome to my nightmare, I think you’re gonna like it…….”

And there you have a bit about me.  Something I do know a bit about. Classic rock albums of the 70s and 80s, and having recently bought a deck, amp and speakers, they are once again alive in my house #priceless

But I digress.  I’ll probably do a lot of that too.  You see, I like to talk and to share, and bounce ideas around and constantly re-examine my own thinking and what I think ‘I know’.

And this is how I come to be here.  Instead of talking to myself, in my head, in my office, I made a previous giant leap in February 2014 (yes, it really has taken me that long to blog!).  Encouraged by Dawn Smedley, Appreciatologist @dsmedders to attend #ConnectingHRLeeds I nervously went along and met some fabulous people and we just talked, and shared what we were doing and made connections and generally had a great night.  Thank you @HR_Em for organising.  It was amazing I started to feel more alive, more enthusiastic about my job, my profession and about myself.  And when you go to these things you might just bump into a leading CIPD thinker or even better @KingFishercoach – one of the nicest guys you could ever meet.

So that was the start and I couldn’t stop talking about it.  I shared with people at work, at home.  I even created a Twitter account!  Because that’s how these events are set up, and where the top HR thinkers and bloggers share links and their thinking.  On Twitter I’ve been guided by @HR_Gem (psssssst buy her social media book its brilliant!) and now we’ve even set up #ConnectingHRYork – thank you @HR_Kez and @thatmarkgilroy

And I’ve been to so many events, and read so much, and been inspired and enthused.  The whole thing has been like oxygen to me.  But the great/scary thing that I’ve ‘discovered’ relatively recently is that I do have something to say, I do have opinions on work and life, and I do want to talk and genuinely hear what others have to say and learn and grow from this.  Genuinely.  So, more of that stuff to come in future blogs.

But my final thought is this – if I can do it, aged 48+1, then so can anyone.