Once all the matches have been burned, you can’t use them to light any more fires. It’s not the best metaphor, but it’s the one you’re getting.
If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.
Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering
I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly
as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!
When I got back to work2,
I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this”
experiences:
The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from
my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too
long, without compassion for yourself and your needs
I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!
Footnotes
1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely
surprising.
2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of
coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
After a few wishy-washy prompts earlier in the month1,
suddenly this is a spicy one!
“I’mma just hide here until next Bloganuary and do one of those prompts instead, a’ight?”
I’ve had sufficient opportunity to confidently answer: I’m most-scared… to express personal vulnerability.
For example –
I’m prone to concealing feelings of anxiety, shame, and insecurity (out of for concern that I’ll be perceived as weak);
I exhibit rejection sensitivity, especially when I’m under stress (which leads me to brush-off or minimise other people’s gratitude, respect, or even love);
It can be difficult for me to ask for what I want, rather than what I think I deserve (so my expressed-needs are at the whim of my self-worth).
“Oh my god you’re actually typing this stuff onto the Internet‽ What will people think of you, Dan!”
Two things I oughta emphasise at this point:
I’m doing much better than I used to.2
I “pass” as well-adjusted! My fear of vulnerability still causes me trouble, especially if I’m emotionally low or stressed, but nowhere near as badly as it used to.
I’m still learning, growing, and improving. I’ve had the benefit of therapy3,
coaching, and lots of self-reflection, and I’m moving in the right direction.
What would it take me to face or overcome this fear? I’m already working on it, day by day. Time and practice, just like you’d use to overcome any other obstacle. Time, and practice.
I’m glad that this challenging question came last in Bloganuary, after I felt sufficiently-invested that I had to finish. If this were the first question, I might
never have started!
2 The best evidence for the fact that I’m less afraid of expressing vulnerability than I
used to be is… well, things like this blog post, which I couldn’t conceive of writing say a decade ago.
I’d love to claim that my desk isn’t always so chaotic and that much of this mess resulted from a recent shelf collapse1,
but it’s rarely much better than this.
But perhaps the most-valuable place I could reduce clutter would be… in my head!
Y’know… in here.
If you were to open up my head and look inside, what you’d see would probably look a little like my desk2: remnants of
dozens of half-finished or in-progress projects, all piled on top of one another in a chaotic muddle that’d take some kind of wacky radical mind to reverse-engineer.
Of course, some of the physical clutter in my life right now relates to the fact that we’re having our attics converted right now, and so everything that was formerly stored
in them (or otherwise would be in the way of the builders) is now stacked… well: here.
That’s not to say I’m disorganised (although I am at least some of the time!), but it does mean that I’m perhaps more-prone to distraction and context-switching than I might prefer.
Compared to times in my life that I’ve been less “clutter-brained”, I find it harder to gain and maintain focus.
“It turns out your inner peace was inside you all along, sandwiched between a murder mystery game concept and an idea for a social
network for dogs. You couldn’t find it because this half-baked idea for a content management system was on top of it.” Also, does
this image seem familiar to you?
One of the goals I’m going to be proposing to my coach this year will include an examination of how I clutter my thinking (and whether my
environmental clutter is a reflection of the same), and what I can do to get better at channelling my creativity into fewer things at once3.
But perhaps I could stand to do a little decluttering in my physical space, too.
Footnotes
1 True, but that was a while back and I haven’t found time to put it up again, so I oughta
take some responsibility.
2 This is, of course, a metaphor. If you actually open up my head you’ll see, like, brains
and gunk. Also, it will invalidate my warranty, so don’t do it.
3 Note that I said at once. I still want to keep those bajillion projects on a
go. I just want to be more organised and disciplined about compartmentalising them so my energy’s less-divided when I’m trying to focus on a single thing for a while!
I find winters are generally bad for my creativity
and motivation, usually until I bounce back in the Spring.
In an attempt to keep me writing daily, I’m giving Bloganuary a go this year. It’s sort-of like the NaNoWriMo of blogging1. And for me, Bloganuary’s very purpose is to overcome the challenge of getting disconnected
from blogging when the nights are long and inspiration’s hard to find2.
The Challenge of Staying On-Task
But outside of the winter, my biggest challenge is usually… staying on-task!
It’s easy to get my focus to wane and for me to drift into some other activity than whatever it is I should be spending my time on. It’s not even
procrastination3 so much as it’s a
fluctuating and changing field of interest. I’ll drift off of what I’m supposed to be working on and start on something that interests me more in that moment… and then potentially off
that too, in turn. The net result is that both my personal and professional lives are awash with half-finished projects4, all waiting their turn for me to find the
motivation to swing back around and pick them up on some subsequent orbit of my brain.
You know how sometimes a stock image says exactly what you need it to? This isn’t one of those times.
It’s the kind of productivity antipattern I’d bring up with my coach, except that I already
know exactly how she’d respond. First, she’d challenge the need to change; require that I justify it first. Second, she’d insist that before I can change, I need to accept and come to
terms with who I am, intrinsically: if this flitting-about is authentically “me”, who am I to change it?
Finally, after weeks or months of exercises to fulfil these two tasks, she’d point out that I’ve now reached a place where I’m still just as liable to change lanes in the middle of a
project as I was to begin with, but now I’m more comfortable with that fact. I won’t have externally changed, I’ll “just” have found some kind of happy-clappy inner peace. And she’ll
have been right that that’s what I’d actually needed all along.
Maybe it’s not such a challenge, after all.
Footnotes
1 Except that would be NaBloPoMo, of course. But it’s a similar thing.
2 Also, perhaps, to help me focus on writing more-often, on more-topics, than I might
otherwise in the course of my slow, verbose writing.
At school, our 9-year-old is currently studying the hsitory of human civilization from the late stone age through to the bronze age. The other week, the class was split into three
groups, each of which was tasked with researching a different piece of megalithic architecture:
One group researched Stonehenge, because it’s a pretty obvious iconic choice
The final group took the least-famous monument, our very own local village henge The Devil’s Quoits
Love me some ancient monuments, even those that are perhaps less authentically-ancient than others.
And so it was that one of our eldest’s classmates was searching on the Web for information about The Devil’s Quoits when they found… my vlog on the subject! One of them recognised me and said, “Hey, isn’t that your Uncle Dan?”1
On the school run later in the day, the teacher grabbed me and asked if I’d be willing to join their school trip to the henge, seeing as I was a “local expert”. Naturally, I said yes,
went along, and told a bunch of kids
what I knew!
I’ve presented to much-larger audiences before on a whole variety of subjects, but this one still might have been the most terrifying.
I was slightly intimidated because the class teacher, Miss Hutchins,
is really good! Coupled with the fact that I don’t feel like a “local expert”2, this became a
kick-off topic for my most-recent coaching session (I’ve mentioned how awesome my coach is before).
I originally thought I might talk to the kids about the Bell Beaker culture people who are believed to have constructed the monument. But when I pitched the idea to our girl she
turned out to know about as much about them as I did, so I changed tack.
I eventually talked to the class mostly about the human geography aspects of the site’s story. The area around the Devil’s Quoits has changed so much over the millenia, and it’s a
fascinating storied history in which it’s been:
A prehistoric henge and a circle of 28 to 36 stones (plus at least one wooden building, at some point).
Medieval farms, from which most of the stones were taken (or broken up) and repurposed.
A brief (and, it turns out, incomplete) archeological survey on the remains of the henge and the handful of stones still-present.
Quarrying operations leaving a series of hollowed-out gravel pits.
More-thorough archeological excavation, backed by an understanding of the cropmarks visible from aircraft that indicate that many prehistoric people lived around this area.
Landfill use, filling in the former gravel pits (except for one, which is now a large lake).
Reconstruction of the site to a henge and stone circle again.3
It doesn’t matter to me that this henge is more a modern reconstruction than a preserved piece of prehistory. It’s still a great excuse to stop and learn about how our ancestors might
have lived.
It turns out that to be a good enough to pass as a “local expert”, you merely have to know enough. Enough to be able to uplift and inspire others, and the humility to know when
to say “I don’t know”.4
That’s a lesson I should take to heart. I (too) often step back from the opportunity to help others learn something new because I don’t feel like I’m that experienced at
whatever the subject is myself. But even if you’re still learning something, you can share what you’ve learned so far and help those behind you to follow the same path.
I’m forever learning new things, and I should try to be more-open to sharing “as I
learn”. And to admit where I’ve still got a long way to go.
Footnotes
1 Of course, I only made the vlog because I was doing a videography course at the time and
needed subject matter, and I’d recently been reading a lot about the Quoits because I was planning on “hiding” a virtual geocache at the site, and then I got carried away. Self-nerdsniped again!
2 What is a local expert? I don’t know, but what I feel like is just a guy who
read a couple of books because he got distracted while hiding a geocache!
3 I’ve no idea what future archeologists will make of this place when they finda
reconstructed stone circle and then, when they dig nearby, an enormous quantity of non-biodegradable waste. What was this strange stone circle for, they’ll ask themselves? Was it a
shrine to their potato-based gods, to whom they left crisp packets as a sacrifice?
4 When we’re talking about people from the neolithic, saying “I don’t know” is pretty
easy, because what we don’t know is quite a lot, it turns out!
This post is also available as an article. So if you'd rather read a
conventional blog post of this content, you can!
This video accompanies a blog post of the same title. The content is basically the same – if you prefer videos, watch this video. If you prefer blog posts, go read
the blog post. If you’re a superfan, try both and spot the differences. You weirdo.
There are a great number of things that I’m bad at. One thing I’m bad at (but that I’m trying to get better at) is being more-accepting of the fact that there are things that I am bad
at.
I’ve also been thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about…
I’m also particularly bad at choosing suitable stock photos for use in blog posts.
Being Bad
As a young kid, I was a smart cookie. I benefited from being an only child and getting lots of attention from a pair of clever parents, but I was also pretty bright and a quick learner
with an interest in just about anything I tried. This made me appear naturally talented at a great many things, and – pushed-on by the praise of teachers, peers, and others – I
discovered that I could “coast” pretty easily.
But a flair for things will only carry you so far, and a problem with not having to work hard at your education means that you don’t learn how to learn. I got bitten
by this when I was in higher education, when I found that I actually had to work at getting new information to stick in my head (of course, being older makes learning harder
too, as became especially obvious to me during my most-recent qualification)!
Ignore the fact that you’ve now seen me trying to sledge uphill and just accept that I was a clever kid (except at
photography), okay?
A side-effect of these formative experiences is that I grew into an adult who strongly differentiated between two distinct classes of activities:
Things I was good at, either because of talent or because I’d thoroughly studied them already. I experienced people’s admiration and respect when I practised these
things, and it took little effort to stay “on top” of these fields, and
Things I was bad at, because I didn’t have a natural aptitude and hadn’t yet put the time in to learning them. We don’t often give adults external
reinforcement for “trying hard”, and I’d become somewhat addicted to being seen as awesome… so I shied away from things I was “bad at”.
The net result: I missed out on opportunities to learn new things, simply because I didn’t want to be seen as going through the “amateur” phase. In hindsight, that’s
really disappointing! And this “I’m bad at (new) things” attitude definitely fed into the imposter syndrome I felt when I first
started at Automattic.
Being Better
Leaving the Bodleian after 8½ years might have helped stimulate a change in me. I’d carved out a role for myself defined by the fields I knew
best; advancing my career would require that I could learn new things. But beyond that, I benefited from my new employer whose “creed
culture” strongly promotes continuous learning (I’ve vlogged about this before), and from my coach who’s been great at encouraging me towards a growth mindset.
“Good Luck Dan”, my Bodleian buddies said. But perhaps they should’ve said “Keep Learning Dan”.
But perhaps the biggest stimulus to remind me to keep actively learning, even (especially?) when it’s hard, might have been the pandemic. Going slightly crazy with cabin fever during
the second lockdown, I decided to try and teach myself how to play the piano. Turns out I wasn’t alone, as I’ve mentioned before: the pandemic did strange things to us all.
I have no real experience of music; I didn’t even get to play recorder in primary school. And I’ve certainly got no talent for it (I can hear well enough to tell how awful my
singing is, but that’s more a curse than a blessing). Also, every single beginners’ book and video course I looked at starts from the assumption that you’re going to want to “feel” your
way into it, and that just didn’t sit well with the way my brain works.
90% of what I do in front of a piano might be described as “Dan Mucks About (in B Minor)”, but that’s fine by me.
I wanted a theoretical background before I even sat down at a keyboard, so I took a free online course in music theory. Then I started working through a
“beginners’ piano” book we got for the kids. Then I graduated to “first 50 Disney songs”, because I know how virtually all of them sound well enough that I’d be able to hear where I was
going wrong. Since then, I’ve started gradually making my way through a transcription of Einaudi’s Islands. Feeling like I’d got a good handle on what I was supposed to be
doing, I then took inspiration from a book JTA gave me and started trying to improvise.
Most days, I get no more than about 10 minutes on the piano. But little by little, day by day, that’s enough to learn. Nowadays even my inner critic perfectionist can
tolerate hearing myself play. And while I know that I’ll probably never be as good as, say, the average 8-year-old on YouTube, I’m content in my limited capacity.
Let’s start at the very beginning. (A very good place to start.)
If I’m trying to cultivate my wonder syndrome, I need to stay alert for “things I’m bad at” that I could conceivably be better at if
I were just brave enough to try to learn. I’m now proudly an “embarrassingly amateur” pianist, which I’m at-long-last growing to see as better than a being non-pianist.
Off the back of that experience, I’m going to try to spend more time doing things that I’m bad at. And I’d encourage you to do the same.
