☕ Grab a cuppa and make yourself comfy... this is a longer blog than usual.
Ooooh my gosh, was I excited about 2023.
In 2022, my Strategic Thinker Development Programme (STDP) had been piloted as a 3 day course, then completely redesigned into an 8 week programme, tested, tweaked, and proven, with exceptional feedback. I had sales on the books for the first 6 months of the year, I was signed up to a marketing course, and most exciting of all, I had plans afoot to take on some admin support which I knew would be a game-changer.
My two strategic themes for the year were consolidation (focusing on the STDP - getting systems in place and getting it running really smoothly which would free up my time), and balance (having learnt my lesson the hard way in 2022). In my head, I also had ideas percolating and forming about what my next steps were. I knew that once I could give myself permission to tick off the consolidation piece, I had the makings of the rest of the business, which would make it properly profitable and allow me to help a lot more people.
The nightmare begins...
I got as far as late February. I had recruited and onboarded the lovely Yvonne and was just starting my first intake when I got Covid. It was no flu for me. Not so much as a runny nose, but did I sleep! Bone-crushing exhaustion and brain power, zero. I couldn't concentrate long enough to switch between windows on my computer and remember what I was intending to do, or even string a series of physical tasks together (I even got muddled RAT testing myself).
The first week was a write-off, and the programme dates were shuffled to accommodate. I could not have been more grateful for Yvonne at this point! After that, I gradually improved over the next 3 weeks as I battled through my (thankfully all short and online) programme modules. I discovered a few things that helped, and would schedule breaks to get through. The participants were wonderfully understanding.
At this point, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself that it was taking so long to get through this (see my disappointed face below), but I was heading in the right direction so I felt optimistic that with a little patience I would get there. However, four weeks in, after a weekend camping trip, I crashed big time. It took me a week just to get back to where I had been.
Devastating. Where on earth was this going??
Surgery I had scheduled in April to repair some internal childbirth damage got postponed to August after I queried the Anesthetist about the wisdom of proceeding. I never dreamed that by August I would still be dealing with this.
Month 2 and 3
What followed was a two month period of many more crashes and desperately slow recovery grinds. It was demoralising. All the while, I was prioritising ruthlessly, so as to focus my limited energies on delivering to my existing clients to a standard that would ensure I had a business at the end of all this, whilst still filling as much of my role as a mum and wife to my long-suffering family as I could. Not conducive to the goal of preserving my business was having to neglect all other tasks, including marketing. It felt like I was trapped in a nightmare, and one that no one else understood.
During that time, I wrote this article - Seven things I learnt about strategic thinking from having Covid. What you can't see in the article is the month it took me to write it, and what it cost me - of one of my biggest crashes. In it I mention "probably taking two months to recover" and having to drop an STDP intake to make space for recovery. It ended up being nearly 7 months and 3 intakes.
The nightmare I can't wake up from
It was at the 3 month point that I had to accept the unofficial diagnosis of Long Covid. That was a really hard moment. I'm not even sure I can put that into words. Or that I want to linger in the memory long enough to try.
Around that time, a friend recommended a physio who, after having Long Covid herself, had set about getting her hands on as much knowledge as possible about how to assist recovery. With her help, I learnt to read my body's signals and accept just how much rest my brain needed. Initially, that meant 7-9 rests per day of between 10 minutes and an hour. A proper cognitive rest means total shutdown. No reading, looking at a screen, listening to anything, talking to anyone, looking at anything. I can only describe it as being an amoeba on the couch. Over a period of a month, I stabilised. I started feeling ok between rests and then very, very gradually found I could stretch out the time between rests. It was like regressing to being a newborn dropping naps.
At 6 months, I had had some time off work and was getting there, but I was still desperate for the nightmare to be over and for my every decision to not revolve around my energy levels and rest schedule. So many people had recommended or suggested things to try. I had a long list of options, none of which I could quite muster the energy to invest in. Looking back, I realise now that when you are in this kind of position, the investment required to go down a certain path of 'treatment' is huge. It's not just the time, money and energy to find the right person, and make, attend, and pay for appointments either. It's the 'hope cost'. You invest your hope in a solution and that is the most daunting and exhausting of all. If it doesn't work, you are back where you started, with said hopes dashed, on top of the misery you were already in.
I was in this undecided space. In reality, by not deciding, I was by default deciding just to ride it out with the tools I had. At least it was more of a known quantity thanks to the physio. I knew my limits and was heading in the right direction. But I still had no idea how long it was going to take. And I still wasn't really living. Strenuous exercise was still off the cards, as were any remotely challenging work ambitions. I needed to get me back, and my family needed me back too.
The Lightening Process
That's when I heard from friends about a mutual acquaintance, Nikki Bray, who ran a course called The Lightening Process. Google it, and you will find a degree of controversy and some very divided opinions. Now I'm a psychologist, and my training drummed in the importance of evidence-based practice. I am not one for hocus pocus or unfounded alternative therapies and I went into it VERY sceptical, yet hopeful. In truth, I probably wouldn't have gone down the path at all if it were not for the fact that I had a lot of respect for Nikki after seeing her in action in other arenas.
As a psychologist, I could not ethically recommend something that I thought was unfounded or dangerous. In my opinion, some of the criticisms of it are based on misunderstanding, and others are valid concerns that warrant careful consideration about whether the course is right for you. Happily though, for this very reason, there is quite a process to go through before committing to the course, including four hours of audio teaching by the founder, UK-based Phil Parker, and a conversation with the local practitioner.
I won't make this article an in-depth one about the Lightening Process - you can find information on it elsewhere, and I am happy to chat to anyone about it further. However, I will give a brief description and share my experience.
In my own words, the Lightening Process is a way of retraining your brain out of neural pathways that impact negatively on your health or create outcomes that you don't want because they aren't life-enhancing. It is about creating new neural pathways that lead to the things you want in your life by leveraging your brain-body connection. I know. It sounds kooky. It's just really hard to explain without detailing it precisely and I wouldn't do it justice in a short article if I tried. But before you dismiss the idea of a brain-body connection, pause to think of placebo studies. The evidence-base is there, it is not at all far-fetched.
I really didn't know what to expect, but what I was surprised to find in the course content was a whole lot of familiar concepts. Even some concepts that I teach and use in my own work in a very different context. What is clever about it, is it combines a number of different well-researched and evidence-based ideas/techniques in a practical package that is easy to apply. Well ok, it does take a fair bit of work on the participants part so I wouldn't say easy, but certainly accessible. There are neuroscience concepts, behaviour change concepts, psychology concepts, therapy and coaching techniques, and neuro-linguistic programming (that part I am less familiar with, but we all know the power of language and self-talk).
So back to my experience - well, I was cured within a week! At my follow up appointment I said to Nikki, "I actually feel like I've just woken up from a bad dream. I've moved on, Long Covid is not a thing for me anymore". The journey over that week is another long story that I'll have to shortcut for the sake of the length of this article, but the essence is that I was able to use my brain (ie. neurology and psychology) to convince my body that I could have lasting energy all day.
Yes, I worried that I was toying with fire and that I'd instead be overdoing it and end up paying a nasty price. But I'd committed to going down this path and had decided to throw myself into it to give it the best chance of working. The sign for me that I was on the right path came at the end of the first day of 'doing' a Lightening Process instead of a rest whenever I felt tired. Previously, any form of overdoing it during the day led to poor sleep at night. That night, and the next, I slept like a baby, drug free.
I had my life back.
That was September. For about eight joyful weeks, I had my life back. It was like someone had just handed it back to me on a platter. Social events, travelling for work, cracking out a new workshop design and test, an overseas family holiday, and exercising without watching my heartrate or "just taking it easy" (ugh).
And then the next challenge…
I phoned to reschedule the surgery that had been postponed (twice now) and learnt that my surgeon was retiring at the end of the year! They managed to squeeze me in and I had three weeks to prepare for six weeks of sitting on the couch during the busiest time of the year and the summer holiday. Plus another six weeks of gradual rehab. Just when I was getting going! 😩
Although it is frustrating to be out of action yet again, and so so hard to not be able to enjoy an active summer holiday with family and friends, there is something very different about a rest that everyone can understand, and that has a known recovery timeline and a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not complaining, it will be worth it in the long run.
So what have I learnt??
Looking back on this year, I've spent 8 out of 12 months unwell, feeling rubbish, or limited in some way. Any challenging time leaves us with hard-won lessons, and this year was no exception. Here are four of mine…
Achieving true balance requires facing some hard-hitting truths.
Well, if balance was one of my priorities for the year, I certainly was forced to implement that to the extreme. Not quite what I had in mind, but the limitations I faced this year have definitely made me face up to my true priorities and sift out what is important, enjoyable and valuable, from what is essential. Along these lines, at some point I wrote a LinkedIn post where I mused on the idea that work is a gift among many other gifts. On further reflection though, the deeper lesson for me this year was that how we balance our gifts on the surface is a reflection of something more important - the state of our hearts towards those gifts.
If in practice, we start favouring one gift with our time and energy at the expense of another, which we nonetheless do truly consider a gift in theory, then something is out of balance. Our time and energy management may be out of balance, yes, but more importantly, something is drawing us too much into one gift and causing us to avoid, ignore or neglect the other. It might be work taking over family life, family life taking over personal time, or physical health in some way suffering for either cause, or both.
What is it that makes us trade off one truly valued gift over another? I think there are both simple and complex answers to this question. On one level, it could be nothing more than relative short-term rewards and the fact that we are not all that different from the rats and pigeons studied by early behavioural psychologists. Any of the gifts I listed above have the potential to be satisfying and enjoyable, or challenging and painful, making us instinctively lean towards or away from them. However, the past has a complex way of shaping our present and future, so surfacing our own answer this question will be a unique and personal journey for each of us.
Balance is not a once and done thing. It is a constant facing up to the trade-offs we must make in order to honour our true priorities. And it is constant maintenance of our relationship to all of the important things in our lives. I do not dare to think that I have this mastered just yet, but I'm convinced of two things:
Taking this insight forward out of this year, I can't say I'm unappreciative to have learnt it, even the hard way.
Ambition is a trap
I'm all for ambition. I'd say it plays a big part in one of my core values. But for me it's about challenge rather than ambition. It's the journey I revel in, and the growth along the way, rather than the achievement alone.
The problem with ambition for the sake of ambition is it becomes an arbitrary movable boundary against which you push. No matter how much you achieve, ambition keeps you pushing for the next thing, so satisfaction is short-lived and you never quite reach the finish-line. And often, balance as described above, is the antithesis of ambition. Ambition is going for success, usually in one pursuit, and the fine print is - it often comes at the expense of other priorities, and thereby alters our relationship with them and reveals the state of our heart towards them.
So for me heading into 2024, ambition for the sake of fun, challenge, balance and joy, is in. Ambition for the sake of personal achievement, financial gain, and ambition itself, is out. Dr Seuss agrees - watch out in late January for my blog about one of my fav kids books, The Lorax.
Rhythm over racing
I've always had a real tendency to get so drawn into what I'm focused on that I forget about my surroundings. I can even forget to go to the bathroom and eat or drink, then come up for air wondering why I'm low on energy or restless. When I was a kid, my mum says a bomb could go off next to me while I was watching cartoons and I'd never know. It's both a superpower and a curse. Ask my husband about it and he'll lean towards the latter. Once, when he was on stay at home dad duties for a period, I surfaced to make a cup of tea to find this:
He'd gotten the meat out for dinner, knowing I'd forget, and left a note to hang out the washing in the one place he knew I would eventually remember to look when I needed a cup of tea.
It's this superpower that has enabled me over recent years to do the creative work of synthesising piles of reading and creating my own ideas and models about strategic thinking, as well as traversing the huge learning curve of turning this work into a viable business. However, it can also see me driving myself harder than I should, and at times drifting closer to burnout and exhaustion than I'd like.
One of the bonuses of having been on a structured rest schedule for so long and having to read my body signals so closely is that I have learnt about the value of rhythm. Initially, a rest was a sleep. Then it was a deep almost meditative state of half consciousness. Later, I'd close my eyes but my brain would be more active and wandering. Eventually, when I was better I wasn't resting because I needed it, but because I craved to just stop and let myself catch up. I realised that just sitting long enough to enjoy a cup of tea at exactly the right temperature (aahhhhh, happy place 😊) and let my mind wander, does me absolute wonders. When I do this, I often remember things that I've overlooked, or my next post or blog will come to me. I learnt that having a rhythm of rest and activity need not consume much additional time, and actually makes me more efficient and effective.
When we are pushing all the time to be efficient with our time and get as much as possible done, there is no space for rhythm. Life becomes a race. Similar to the ideas about ambition, we constantly strive for the end of the to-do list without recognising that the faster we work on it, the faster it forms ahead of us.
This is another lesson that is like gold refined in the fire. I think I'll always need reminders of this as I un-do decades of habit, but I’m grateful to have grasped what is possible.
Being a strategic thinker is everything
This whole year has had one big theme right though it that has forced me to get really serious about taking my own advice: The need for constant application of a strategic thinking process. This came in the form of having to continually, in both the big and the small things, re-evaluate my priorities, goals and direction. That meant letting go of things I wanted to do and being realistic about how I approached things that would previously been done without a thought.
This lesson has reinforced for me the incredible value in learning to truly be a strategic thinker. Strategic thinking is more than a skill set, it is a way of being. I've written about this before in my blog How strategic thinking changes everything. When it becomes a consistent way of being, it becomes a tool of flexibility and adaptability that allows us to take life's (or work's) shocks in our stride.
The need to slow down this year came from changes in context. The big contextual factor was, I had Long Covid. Then I had surgery. But through all this, on a daily, hourly and even minute by minute basis, it was about being able to read the changes in the context of my decisions that came from within my own body. How I was feeling at any one moment dictated the plans I could realistically make. I am now convinced that the more we can grasp and be conscious of the context of each of our decisions, in all its fullness, the more likely we are to be able to see the strategies that move us forward.
Those who have completed my courses may find it easier to grasp this point, but I hope it is clear enough to others too. As humans we deal with, and filter, huge amounts of information each day. This is context. All of our decisions are based on this information, and yet we know from psychology and cognitive science that we don't see everything that is there. The very human challenge we face as strategic thinkers is appreciating more of what is in our context, and sifting out the 'noise' from the critical information that must shape our decisions.
Sayonara 2023. Bring on 2024!
I would definitely say I'm happy to see the back of 2023, but these lessons are so deeply valuable and formative that I also can't say I'd have it any other way.
I have a feeling 2024 will bring more lessons of its own (hopefully of a very different nature) as I learn to put into practice what I've learnt this year in the context of a now (thankfully) thriving business.
Wish me luck, and welcome along on the journey!
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