Yearly Archives: 2022

Harper Lee tells us “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The question we have to ask is this:

How often do we actually walk in another’s skin and how much do we just project our thoughts and feelings onto them instead?

How often does someone look at a person in a wheelchair and think how awful it must be because they can’t imagine being deprived of their mobility?

How often does someone immediately dismiss the views of another person because they don’t match with their own?

How often does someone think they’re being compassionate when they’re actually being patronising?

I certainly know how often people used to call me “brave” because of the way I dealt with (deal with, but less obviously now) cystic fibrosis and its life-altering, life-shortening effects.

But I’ve never been brave.

It’s not brave to wake up an hour before everyone else because I need to fit in a physio session and nebuliser.

It’s not brave to take time off work when you’re too ill to get out of bed.

It’s not brave to spend months of a year in a hospital room.

It’s life.

But almost no one stopped to properly walk in my skin and understand that it’s not brave to simply live your life. No matter how you deal with the adversity thrown at you, it’s not brave. It’s life.

Next time you find yourself dismissing someone’s views, next time you find yourself feel sorrow or pity or sadness for a disabled person, next time you find yourself in a tough conversation at work, don’t project your views onto them.

Stop and really think about what it’s like in their skin. It’s likely to be very different than you first think.

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

There are two vital things I learned (among others) in my year working for Autistica, the UK’s leading autism research charity. First, ‘neurodiversity’ should be used as a blanket term for all of us. Second is that I’m non-autistic neurodivergent.

Recognising, embracing and taking advantage of neurodiversity should be a fundamental part of any organisation’s people strategy. We all bring different things to the table. Full stop.

Being diagnosed as bipolar was an important step for me. Recognising how our brains work and how that affects our personal and professional lives makes an enormous difference.

It also helped me put more effort into understanding how I create the right conditions for me to thrive and do my best work.

That means trying to put meetings into the afternoon because I do my most focused work in the mornings.

It means being confident enough to ask to do audio-only Teams calls when I’m not feeling up to being on camera.

It means being comfortable enough that I can step away from my desk when I need to after those kind of meetings, even if that means telling someone I’ll be late for the next meeting.

It means that my mind is more open to the best way for me to succeed and, at the same time, more open to exploring and accepting how other people’s brains work, too. But more on that tomorrow.

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

Edith Head dressed just about every star you can think of over her 50 year career designing costumes for more than 1,100 films. A large part of that success came down to being the ultimate team player.

“Inside I was a Prima Donna who insisted that a costume be made my way or not at all. Outside I was the model employee, easy to get along with and always on time.”

For Head to succeed she needed to win the confidence and trust of the stars she dressed, including incredibly demanding performers like Marlene Dietrich. Doing that required her to dampen down her own ego in order to serve the people she worked with.

Had she behaved like the prima donna she wanted to be, she would never had been able to design and deliver costumes for 30-40 films a year.

Had she not enabled herself to work on so many films, she would never have been nominated for 45 Oscars.

She may have won some, but maybe not the eight she eventually had on her mantlepiece.

Ego is important (we have to believe in ourselves) but we have to be able to recognise when our ego becomes the enemy (hat tip to Ryan Holliday) and our behaviour needs to change.

Being able to keep our ego in check is a vital part of leadership. Sometimes we need to allow others to shine if we want to achieve our goals.

This post first appeared on my Linkedin profile.

Quiet people are heard least, but often have the most to add.

The more quiet someone is, the more they listen. The more someone listens, the more they understand. The more they understand, the more value they can add.

Make sure you’re creating space for people to speak, to share their thoughts, to have ideas.