June 27, 2010
Dear Clusterflock
What’s your fight?
comments
Leave a Reply
comments:
- Deron Bauman: It’s a start.
- Joel Bernstein: The first of many things, no doubt.
- Deron Bauman: I’ll pick him up at eight. He may not like the way I smell.
- Michael Smith: Joel’s Dream Date: Phantom Menace; Cat urine cologne; Deron.
- Joel Bernstein: For the record, if you pay to see this, you are no longer my friend.
- Deron Bauman: Meow.
- Joel Bernstein: This must be why I fuck so many cats.
- Michael Smith: Seems to me the experiment almost does itself.
- Casey Cichowicz: No. It is not possible. I can assure you.
- Joel Bernstein: Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes?
- LaurenH: I’m with those who say get that girl out of that household. The father has now very effectively...
- Rick Neece: Holee sh..!
- Rick Neece: Asian calligraphy, ‘cept instead of a brush, hot glass. The image of her controlling the glass and...
- Rick Neece: For the gull-wing, I’m sure it would knock me in the chin every time I opened it.
- Marco: Oh god yes.
Destroying the collective cultural stupidity surrounding Christianity.
Inertia.
settling into myself.
Randy Taylor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Deron–Cindy was wondering if you had noticed that!
Andrew–you and I are covering all sides of that fight.
Rick–Inertia increases sometimes, doesn’t it? I know I sometimes feel like an actual force is holding me down in my chair. It’s that sag that makes it seem like too much work to get up and go to bed / may as well pour another one. But, then, sometimes some bright thing gets me up and that other side of this law of motion kicks in.
is this its inaugural post?
Maybe so–I’ll have to look back and see. She made the category a couple of days ago.
Daryl
These words are coming out of me, at least in this way, for the very first time. For the last year or so, I’ve been coaching the managers at work around a coaching style Danny “taught” me. I’ll summarize it by saying, “Can’t do, don’t know how. Won’t do, don’t want to.” It’s about knowledge and motivation, and recognizing the difference.
The questions is “Why don’t I (or why won’t you?) do some certain thing that needs to be done?” And the type of management necessary to get yourself (or someone else) to do it.
With low knowledge, or low motivation, management needs to be direct. If it’s a lack of knowledge, “I don’t know how,” then management should show (train). For motivation, “I know how, I don’t want to,” it can be as simple as, “Just get up off your ass and do it, because I said so. You want to keep working (staying, living) here?”
With moderate knowledge or motivation, “I’m not sure how…, I’m not sure why…, management becomes advisory, “Here’s how, here’s why.”
When knowledge and motivation are at peak, management’s role should be merely to ask, “Do this thing.” And management stays out of the way to allow it to take place.
Self-motivation (on the low end) is more difficult without the other to give direct counsel. (It’s (only) one reason I have Danny and you have Cindy. Deron has Amy, Joseph has Ronya, etc.)
As for inertia, isn’t there a “rule?” Is it Newton? (I’m too lazy, just now (at rest), and on a roll (in motion), to look it up) that says: “Objects at rest, tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion, tend to stay in motion?” Moving myself from rest to motion is the trick. Once I’m moving, it’s easier to keep moving.
The fight comes with the first move.
(Wow, y’all! I’ve exhausted myself, punctuating-the-fuck-out of this comment. I think I need to lie down.)
My head.
Rick, I wondered why I get nothing done, because I do nothing – I’m guessing I kinda knew that. I also know I need to change it.
Thank you
The “questions is…” Good one, Rick.” (doofus typist) Phil, you do not do nothing…all the time. Joseph, you, too.
My favorite boss (who is now a friend) had a way of motivating that worked with me. Mostly he let me do as I pleased. He’d hired me because he liked and respected me and thought I had what it took, so he stayed out of my way and let me do what I did. But there was the odd occasion when things fell apart. And he would come downstairs to where my minions and I worked and thunder, “I want this fucking shit put right. I don’t want it tomorrow, and I don’t want it ever again.” And people would turn white in the face and get all quiet. He was (is) a large and imposing man. But he and I respected one another. And I would say, “It will be fixed today, and this is the last time you will ever have to mention it.” And I’d keep my word.
We had a good vibe. A good vibe reinforced by infrequent but necessary outbursts of fury.
Oh, Rick, I’m one lazy motherfucker! I guess knowing it helps – my aim it to get motivated before my ass gets so heavy that I am immobile!
I have a plan!
Thank you Rick–and Danny for supplying what you describe here; I’m seeing from this that it is useful to codify complex processes as a means of clearing some of the emotional chaff that typically surrounds decision making. I’m finding that this description also fits much of what I encounter with students: their strengths and weaknesses and my strengths and weaknesses–and the need to find multiple patterns of approach within a group. I’m at my best with those students who have an actual love of the subject they have signed up to learn, but I get many who don’t care at all about the course–or even their own major. These often just want some end result, waiting in the future, to arrive as quickly as possible while they sleep, and they are always ready to blame others (me, as often as not) for rousing them from their semester-long naps. I never (or very rarely) give up on a student, and will work hard to get some motivation going, but it’s a real pain in the ass to have to make such efforts to generate what should be there already. So I would say that a central part of my fight is: confronting, at every turn, a lack of curiosity–a lack of the intensity of attention that is necessary if the learning of any art or skill is to be achieved.
On the other hand, another part of my fight is even more basic: I have an abiding contempt for abuse of power and authority, particularly when it is perpetrated in a smug way against those who have little power to object to it. I guess that makes it a fight about justice, guided by a sense of love and goodwill that is possible when people don’t cling to self-interest at all costs, blindness to privledge, self-righteousness, or simple meanness.
I love this question, Daryl.
Rick and Daryl, I admire your energy in addressing the question. Danny’s coaching is insightful, and Daryl’s sense of justice resonates with me. Overall, it is a great question.
When I said, “my head”, meant that that’s my fight. Self-doubt, imbalances, cynicism, fear… There’s a lot of love in there with a lot of other stuff I fight with to let it out.
It’s like walkin’ waist-deep through molasses some days, trying to get things done. Swimmin’ against the Colorado to stay in one spot. I don’t know about that Jesus guy, but maybe walkin’ on water wasn’t such a bad idea.
bless you.
Dave, I’ve said on more than one occasion, “Today was like slogging through hot mud.”
Cindy, I don’t have many days as you describe, though I have had them. What I know of such days makes me feel for you. It is a hard, hard place to be. You once mentioned those who “pull you up…out.” You know, I have such a person, too. (We are blessed, er, lucky to have such individuals around us, yes?)
Joseph, my fight, too, is internal. “There is so much more I should be doing instead of…” well, fill-in-the-blank.
Daryl, I think you and I are on the same page in the hymn-book.
Sheila, I count among my best bosses, someone similar to yours. There was no denying her. She set her expectations every day on a walk through Saks. I made lists, I delivered lists, work got done. Once in a while, something on the list wasn’t completed. She would ask about it. (She never had a note in her hand, but remembered everything. Much like you.) I would say, “Yes, yes, I’m sorry, I’m a failure on that point.” Once she nudged me with her elbow, “You will never be a failure,” she said.
I hope she’s right. At any given juncture, the possibility is ripe.
Joseph, I’m right there with you. Well, no, not really, but I mean that I experience a real struggle between what “needs” to be done, what “ought” to be done, what “could” be done (“ah, if I only had the time!”), and what I feel like fucking doing in the moment.
And then there is paying the bills…
And then there is masturbation…
And then there is consoling a friend in need…
Daryl – there is my fight.
if I could meaningfully carry any of this for any of you, I would.
My fight is with moderation. I’m part of a crusade for self-awareness, battling the (near) absence of personal responsibility and inclusivity.
Daryl, thanks for asking.
The unknowable fear that keeps me from doing anything (feels like.)
Also the phobias that get worse as I get older, not manageable. My fight is with myself I guess right now.
Deron. Jesus! The cross is mine own to bear. I ought to get off it. Someone, somewhere, could use the wood. (Thanks for the offer, though, sweetie, I love you.)
Kelsey, we own what we own and we deal, as you do.
Amanda Mae, it seems to me, the fights are all our own. Managing is all we have offered to us.
it just saddens me that we all seem to carry so much by ourselves.
if I wasn’t clear at the beginning of this thread, I struggle to settle into myself, to be comfortable in my body; I pretty much know now why but that doesn’t necessarily make it that much easier. the permission to allow myself to be in my body, to be comfortable with who I am and what I want.
I guess my fight has always been with myself. I had a long fight with the dark/black side of me. It was only when I realised what a positive force it could be and how it was where my creative side resided that things got better.
Things have never been as bad as Cindy describes, but, they were bad enough. I now embrace that dark side, I stopped the drugs and am pleased to feel again.
I know for many it ain’t quite as easy as that.
What Deron said.
No. Really. He summed up what the past 10 years with me have been all about.
I hate being a me too but the shoe fits.
What Amanda said. And what Rick said. And what Joseph said.
In a work context, I’ve often found myself in a Darylesque fight for justice against The Man on my colleagues’ behalf, but the rest of the time, I’m fighting myself, and I’m definitely losing.
[...] For those fighting a war within. [...]