Can you be more Human At Work?
If you’re interested in building trust, connection and performance in your team or organisation, contact Mark McCartney or I to chat about our group programme. You can find out more here.
Being childish.
On my wedding day, my ten year-old nephew drew a picture for my wife and I, while he was sitting at the reception dinner.
The picture is of a tiered wedding cake. Each tier represents a different school subject (maths, history, geography etc). And each subject contains an insight he had woven around our relationship.
For example, in the geography tier of the cake, he drew a mini-map of the world with where we live (Berlin) marked out. Meanwhile, the maths tier of the cake has a simple equation ‘Jindy + Lucy = ❤️’ (I know, what a lovely boy!).
All of this was drawn in pencil on a sheet of A4, and was entirely improvised. We both, including my wife who is a professional creative, marvelled at the creativity and imagination required to conjure up this concept and then draw it. It lives on our fridge door, pride of place.
I’m obviously biased here but my nephew seems to have a particularly creative brain, by which I mean his imagination seems to go to far away places and come up with something unimaginable for most of us.
I’m also aware that all children see the world in a way that is much more wondrous and magical than adults. A child’s thinking is inherently more creative, because it is unlimited, unenclosed, and perhaps most of all, unencumbered by rules, logic, labels and concepts.
We acquire these things over time. Every single thing we encounter in our development is given a name, and placed in a hierarchy and a structure. The process of each thing is explained as far as possible by science.
So it is that the small thing we see moving through the air at speed is a ‘sparrow’, which is a type of ‘bird’, which itself is a type of ‘animal’ and we learn about ‘feathers’ and the physics that enable this ‘sparrow’ to fly.
All of this thinking helps us to order the world and make logical sense of it, which is essential for functioning as humans as well as for basic sanity.
But we overdo it. In Western cultures in particular, rationality has become an invisible religion.
Everything requires evidence, data, process, logic. These aren’t negative in themselves but they have elbowed other ways of being out of the way - intuition, magic, fantasy, imagination, dreaming.
We deem rationality as essential for our productivity-obsessed societies but it is a dry and rigid way to live. It is a barren place in which everything must be categorised, ordered and therefore explained.
But some things - many things - are beyond explanation. Some of them we know and feel yet cannot explain in any rational way.
Can you explain what love is? Can you explain the logic and process of feeling love for someone else?
Can you really explain it, not borrow from some half-baked scientific speculation about love being an evolutionary survival mechanism?
Of course you can’t. There is no rational explanation. And because there is no rational explanation or answer, as adults we avoid these questions altogether and place our attention on solvable problems.
We spend inordinate amounts of time figuring out things like engines and computer code. Even human systems like organisations and countries are reduced to rational explanations, that are anything but rational (have you ever asked yourself what the point of a country is?).
We spend our days engaged in rational problems and logical tasks. Even our relationships with others become an ongoing quest to place people in boxes.
We have lost our capacity to wonder. Children ask questions like ‘Where does the universe end? And how did it begin?’.
Because they haven’t been fully conditioned by our culture, they ask the most extraordinary and profound questions.
Where did I come from?
Why do those people want to kill those people?
How do trees grow?
What happens when we die?
At some point, a child usually asks a parent “Why do you have to go to work?”.
This is a phenomenal question to answer truthfully. From the perspective of a kid, they simply want to know what is so important that the person they love most leaves them and their home most days of the week. To them ‘work’ must feel like some mysterious god that must be obeyed.
And if we were to answer a child truthfully, we’d have to first be truthful with ourselves.
We’d have to talk about concepts like money and using it to buy things (some of which we don’t actually need).
We’d have to explain things like mortgages and rent.
We’d have to talk about things like desire and comparison in a consumerist society.
We’d have to explore things like purpose and our own needs for activity, or connection or meaning in our work.
We wouldn’t be able to give satisfactory answers to these explorations, which is precisely why we should consider them.
Most adults, whether parents, teachers or some other authority figure, eventually tell them to stop asking these silly questions. And most children eventually do.
In our lives, in our work, in our relationships, in our organisations, we could all benefit from being a bit more childish.
“We are afraid of the unknown. The mind’s craving for confirmation is rooted in our fear of impermanence.”
- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Tipping Point: sharing information on the climate crisis
“Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced."
Hope in common: David Graeber on hope and hopelessness.
About me.
I’m a coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation.
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to make sense of who they are and the world around them. You can find out more about my coaching work here and my work with men & masculinity here.
Love this post! You're so right man! Children access this realm so easily, and it's important we don't lose it as adults!