I like the ideas explored in “The Reflective Practitioner” that reflection is like a conversation with the situation. Nothing fully fleshed out yet but notes for the future:

• What is the problem and how have I framed it?
• Can I solve the problem I have set?
• Do I like what I get when I solve this problem?
• In solving this problem in this way made the situation coherent?
• have I made it congruent with my fundamental theories and values?
• Have I kept my enquiry moving?

It makes sense that what experienced practitioners do is to set problems they think they can solve.

I’ll qualify that. A problem that helps them understand situation and change it. They don’t necessarily know if the new problem is solvable. The point is that the way they set it out and frame it sets a pattern to the enquiry in which they have confidence they’ll get to some type of answer.

Questioning how much I like what I get when I solve this problem is also a very powerful idea. I can see it makes me acknowledge that many answers may be possible. That there is always going to be a judgement call based on my theories and values.

Previously I’d always previously seen unintentional consequences as a failure. Its really quite powerful to see consequences as a way of listening to feedback from the situation. A way to start a new conversation, evaluate, even to stay curious as much as it is a measure how successfully I’m solving the problem I’ve set.

Each time I learn more. In working out what feels like a workable answer I learn more about what my own values are – what matters to me, and to others I’m working with along the way.

Have I kept enquiry moving is a great question to ask at the end. Whether this is my enquiry or someone else’s. I want to be able to give back something that can be used as a new starting point. If I can’t do that it may be a sign that the answer is too fragile or just hasn’t been explored enough.

I didn’t get round to empathy yesterday. The part I find tough is the listening. When I pause shut up and really listen life is far easier.

It is very easy for me to hear every conversation as either a request for action or a criticisim or both. My mind races and I am into full scale flight fight or solution mode before the sentence is finished. Groundhogmum complains that if she mentioned there was a paint in B&Q she liked I’d be at the store before she had chance to tell me the colour.

When trying on someone elses shoes I should at lest wait to get them on my feet and feel where they pinch before I start trying to run. Otherwise the results can be painful and embarrassing.

I’m getting fed up with the same articles being rehashed about how to filter the noise out of your social networks

Perhaps I’m missing something. Everyone uses these networks in different ways but I’ve thought hard  and I don’t understand the appeal of building the biggest network possible as quickly as I can. People matter too much for that.

I want to keep my network to the people I care about or am at least interested in. Yes people say stuff that is irritating or irrelevant. That is important. That is one of the things I love about conversation – it goes in new and unexpected directions. If I wanted an effcient network if just trawl ‘mashable’ and the like all day.

I’ve made a call today that I’ll prune my own network not by relevance or usefulness but how much attention I can afford. I want to contribute more and worry less and I would far rather have the space to really listen to all of what people are saying.

If I don’t have the space to do them that courtesy then I’m not really following them at all.

I have just finished reading Carl Rodgers on becoming a person and the articles that struck home for me were personal thoughts on teaching and learning.

The core conditions he picks out just feel right. Simple enough to remember and the reasoning makes sense. They also feel like a physical core. If you take the words practices and techniques away from all theother helpful systems I’ve ever seen – its pretty much what remains.

There has to be a genuine problem that someone wants to solve.I know myself that if deep down I don’t care no matter how sensible the argument for change more urgent things will undermine my best intentions.

Being honest with ones self and others congruence, integrity whatever you want to call it matching actions and feelings again – he’s spot on. I know myself that need to be able to trust myself , and for others to be able to trust me, and its far easier when what you say and wghat you dont say are in sync. This needs work I worry a lot about how people will react to what I say and so find it tough to be honest and open all the time.

A lot of it comes back to maintaining positive regard. I find it far easier to see the best in others than I do in myself. It is a form of dishonesty that I need to tackle. At some other time I need to look at why if I trust others I don’t trust their reactions to me

My time is up empathy and practice vs systems will have to wait for another day

It has been a long time since I’ve written anything here.

Reviewing my old post its clear that starting this blog I had no  clear idea what I wanted to write or how to write it.  I still don’t. But at least now looking at it with a bit more perspective I have a better idea why I started writing and why I couldn’t make it work.

I started this blog at what was a really high time in my personal life and a low time in my professional life.The earth shatteringly good pleasures of being a father were conflicting with a a dull ache that was my a professional life.

The company I work for had been through some tough times and many people who had survived were feeling bruised. Peole were still enthusiastic for what they did but trying to adapt to a less certain future with different opportunities.

Through all this I was ’surviving’ but it didn’t feel right. I didn’t have the same luxury of being able to read, study, and use my spare time to find ways forward. Work and ‘free’ time  had to be compartmentalised in a way I’d never had to face before. It was the only way  to find the space and time my family deserved.

Looking back, the blog was mean to be almost my ‘notes to self’. Tracking the good things in the 7 minute gaps I had. My way of making public commitments to things to try and goad myself into action.

It never really worked because it was too nervous.  I was too half-hearted, too focused on doing something clean shiny and professional for a mythical audience to write what I was really feeling.

So I’m going to try again keeping it as simple and genuine as possible.

What a lot of great articles there were yesterday – I’ve had a fun time just reading through a fraction of the contributions for Blog Action Day.

Ian McKenzie (Ian’s Messy Desk) offered a nice straightforward list of practical suggestions Blog Action Day: How To Eliminate Poverty as did Ibrahim over at Zen College Life Blog Action Day: Poverty

Lifehacker had a rich set of contributions  during the day. I enjoyed the pragmatic guide to fighting poverty by getting rid of your old kit  Donate Your Old Hardware to Those Who Can Use It [Blog Action Day 2008] and Gina Trapani’s very personal and obviously heartfelt take Two Great Charities at Work to Beat Poverty [Blog Action Day 2008], however the one that struck a chord for me was Jason Fitzpatrick’s article  Attack Poverty Through Literacy [Blog Action Day 2008] which very neatly echoed the Sidonie Gabrielle quote that “Real poverty is lack of books.” used by Henrik Edberg in Three Timeless Thoughts on Poverty over at ‘Personal Development with The Positivity Blog’

Four Easy Reasons to Ignore World Poverty from Charlie at Productive Flourishing contained some eye popping statistics as well as knocking fown the type of myths and woolly-headed thinking that prevent people from doing more to help. A tack also taken by Jay White in  The Poverty Myth over at Dumb Little Man who soundly challenged the idea that as individuals there is nothing can do to help.

Celine Roque at Web Worker Daily wrote a very thought-provoking piece about her own experience of the empowering nature of web work Blog Action Day: Web Work as an Alternative to Overseas Worker Migration

LJ at  the SimpleProductivityBlog.com in Blog Action Day – Poverty suggested lots of ideas for helping locally while Ellie from Living The Law Of Attraction Don’t Fight Poverty… Support Abundance! showed that there are no geographic boundries to helping others on a personal and individual level through networks such as Kiva which I’d not been aware of before. Agentsully at Life Learning Todayalso mentioned kiva as one of her many simple and straightforward ideas in Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, When You Help Others You Help Yourself

In both articles there was a distinct message that by focusing on the positive rather than the negative – that creating abundance not tackling poverty should be our aim. A thought given an intersting twist by Lyman Reed Though Abraham-Hicks on the Economy – Charles Fillmore’s Prosperity – For Blog Action Day ‘08 who picking up on Ellie’s article showed that poverty through not making the most of your resources is a sin.

Who would have thought that poverty could produce such rich pickings.

I wanted to write something deep and worthy today – but reading through all the facts and figures I was caught by one amazing statistic.

According to the poverty facts and stats over at global issues 11 billion US dollars or roughly 6.3 billion ponds a year is spent on ice cream in Europe.

A large percentage of that ice-cream is made by companies that many parents, including myself and groundhog mum have decided that the don’t want to support for other ethical reasons.

That aside, as a simple thought experiment if every household in Europe made their own ice cream that would be a lot of households that would be better off.

Our own experience of using our own wee ice cream maker is that a litre of home made ice  cream costs less than a quarter of the commercial product. Scaling up that would release nearly 5 billion pounds which could be put to far better use.

Even if only one quarter of the saving was passed on to help eliminate the real grinding poverty that today is about thats one billion pounds would make a huge difference. All it would take is for those who can afford to to switch from buying expensive ice-cream and to put aside a few pence ever time they benefit from eating cheaper home made ice-cream.The more ice-cream eaten the more everyone benefits.

If you don’t know what to do with the money – then read some of the information at the link below. I defy anyone to read through the info and not find something to be outraged about.

Go on, make a difference make ice-cream together as a family and help someone at the same time.

Its certainly a campaign that would be supported by my family on grounds of taste alone.

First thing is to put my thoughts into some sort of order. For the past few months I’ve been using google reader to squirrel away articles that I though might be helpful. Looking through them there are several different things I want to change and so I can sort them into approximate piles:

• Workspace – building an environment that lets me be productive whether at work, home or somewhere on the move.
• Tools- possibly interesting or useful additions to my workspce or references that might be handy in particular circumstances.
• Attitude – Things I can work on to improve my communication with others,  ways to focus on why I’m doing things a particular way.
• Process – sytems, checklists and tools – ways to focus on the what and where of doing things a particular way
• Fitness – improving my resiliance, so I can tackle things better
• Money – improving the financial security of me and my family
• Coding – improving the specific knowledge and experience I need to do my job
• Books – articles, books and podcasts to be viewed or read later

Next step is to start actioning each pile.

Its been a great 24 hours – even the failure of my connecting bus service to connect, leaving me stranded in Glenrothis on a Sunday for an hour can’t dampen my mood.

For what its worth 15 years is possibly a little long between spending an evening drinking with friends watching dumb movies and eating crisps. I would definetly advise anyone to try doing it a bit more frequently.

Of course it doesn’t change any of the fundamental facts of my current situation, but its good to know that things can be put aside even for a little bit, and having had the chance to rest I now feel more capable of tackling them.

I’m writing this sitting on a bus heading towards St Andrews, a lot of memories and some very good friends who have made it very clear that I need to stop and unwind and take a breather.

The last 6 months has been long and complicated with a lot of work and personal crisis. However there comes a point when you can’t keep living your life in crisis mode. One busy few days very quickly runs into the next busy few days and things put on hold have a nasty habit of coming back and becoming urgent at the worst possible times. Missed chances leading to more work for everyone.

I have two wonderful daughters and their lives don’t go on hold because I happen to be busy at work, and similarly work does not go away and make room for personal crisis – so everything has to be juggled. The rusult increasingly shoddy results on all fronts recognised by me, recognised by groundhogmum, recognised by my friends and perhaps most embarrisingly for me recognised by my boss who pointed out in the nicest of ways that the best of intentions are great but when it creates more mopping up for everyone else it’s the results which count more.

As groundhogmum pointed out the problem of crisis mode is that judgment and learning are the first things to be counted as optional extras. The obvious thing  is to deal with this prediction to lead life in crisis mode all the time but for a couple of weeks that’s felt like “there’s a hole in my bucket”…

To get out of the crisis I need to do less and do it better. This means having the confidence to say no . This means not relying on others sprobation because sometimes no will be an unpopular answer. The means having confidence in my abilities and judgment. While I’m in crisis mode these are the vey things that I’m finding difficult and I’m having criticised.

Which is the point that everyone very gently said – time to stop, have a few beers and start again fresh.

I’ll let you know how it goes.