Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re doing ok.
You’ll read below about a Terms of Reference that I was involved in recently. I happily volunteered to lead the working group but I underestimated how much work was required. This led to my feeling under intense pressure to get a good result. We were going to release this document to many senior people who, I was sure, have much more experience in writing these things than me. I’d rapidly moved to the role of imposter, for a little while least. It turned out great by the way (spoiler alert for next week… oh wait I should have written that first), so let’s look at the mental wellbeing angle. The pressure I created was all my own. That pressure cast waves over everything else I was doing during that two week period. It made everything else seem much more difficult. But the delivery board are a bunch of professional and supportive people so I didn’t need to worry. There were a bunch of outstanding questions that I couldn’t possibly know the answer to without the rest of the board members so I didn’t need to worry. But I did worry and by allowing the problem to expand in my mind it consumed much of my available mental bandwidth leaving little left for anything else. Years ago I remember a counsellor giving me some advice. They said that I should identify the hot thought and analyse it as if I were helping someone else. What would I advise them to do? Then do it for me. Of course I didn’t do this (I don’t know why). A Cognitive Behavioural Therapist once described the mental bandwidth thing as a bucket filling up with ping pong balls. As it fills, it gets noisier and noisier, a little like our brains. I took this analogy a step further in a mental wellbeing talk once. I used a metal waste paper basket and ping pong balls, filling it up as I gave my talk and rattling it. Towards the end of the talk I scattered the ping pong balls all over the room, emptying the bucket representing a breakdown. I could have avoided this by emptying the bucket before it filled up (in real life this is achieve by good mental wellbeing practices). So how did I turn my Terms of Reference situation around? I spoke to a colleague who challenged me to think differently, moving me into a positive frame of mind. It was like the clouds had parted allowing the sun to recharge me. I drew up a positive brief for the board, outlined the progress made (lots!), questions that needed answering and made a proposal to accept this as version 1.0, further refining the document as required. It went down really well with a positive response and a good discussion. So if you’re finding everything difficult and you’re wondering why, write down all the things you’ve got to do and see if you can identify the hot thought then either analyse it yourself, or better yet speak to a friend or colleague about it. If you can get into a positive frame of mind you might find that everything else becomes manageable once again.
I facilitated a meeting for our Mental Health Awareness network this week. We got together with our User Centred Design colleagues to look at how we could improve the user journeys on our site to help people get to the resources they need. It all started because we thought about publishing some Frequently Asked Questions. A colleague highlighted that good content and experience makes FAQs unneccessary. Our site is currently structure around our five pillars of wellbeing which are Mental, Physical, Financial and Digital. The main topic of discussion was the question of whether a user of our site will know which pillar they need to follow to get to the information or support they need. We didn’t conclude that discussion but it was interesting and something we’re going to followup on.
I had a Curious Coffee with a colleague fro Policy that I’m on a organisation design forum with but have never actually met. I still love the random nature of our Curious Coffee that matches people up for introductions across Companies House.
I led a subgroup of our delivery board in reviewing and refreshing our Terms of Reference. We had loads of great input from the main group. It was much harder than I thought to incorporate everything while keeping the document concise.
I met our new Head of User Centred design who’s really nice and has loads of great ideas and energy. They start in December and I’m really looking forward to working with them. It feels like the existing Heads of Profession (including me) have moved into the Performing stage of Tuckman’s Five Stages of Team Development so it’ll be great to add her passion for User Experience into the mix. Although I guess we should consider we’ll probably go through the previous three stages of team development again. I believe that changing/adding/removing one person from a team should be thought of us a new team.
We went to Afan Forest Park to ride the Y Wall trail on Friday afternoon where my buddy got a puncture. It’s ok though as he had tubeless tyres with a tyre insert that protects the rim of his wheel so we could just pump the tyre up after it self-sealed the puncture. Oh but the tubeless tyre unseated and we couldn’t get it to seal. It’s ok though as he had a spare inner tube. Well that worked but then he had this long piece of foam covered in messy sealant that he had to tie around his waste. But after all that… we had a good ride in the beautiful Afan valley in all it’s Autumnal Glory.
Be excellent to yourselves and each other,
Si
