Have the last laugh

What would happen if you changed the way you relate to each moment – you’d be happier, healthier and better at your job, says Tim Roberts who explains how the ability to be spontaneous, tangential and to ask better questions is vital for leading and influencing in such a complex organisation like the Police Service

Let’s start on a cheery note. You’re only here temporarily. This life is rented and one day you’ll have to give it back. Have you got that yet? I mean, have you really got that? I notice that when some people grasp this notion deeply they live their moments differently – and with more appreciation and joy.

Why didn’t I write live their “life” differently? There’s a simple answer for that, a whole life is too big for us to grasp with our thoughts and all we can really deal with is the unit of the moment. This may not sound like much but it is more than most people can do.

Too many of us get lost in worries about the future to be focused and present right now. Many times we chase after subtle delusions and get subsumed by busyness. These people (I’m one of them) are missing the point as their life ebbs past.

What would happen if you changed the way that you relate to each moment? The answer is that you’d probably be happier, healthier and better at your job too. You might want to experiment with this.

As soon as we become aware that life is really just this moment, we have the chance to relate to our whole life differently. Life is really only this moment – always has been and always will be (contemplate that).

How do we connect with the moment? It’s a matter of noticing
differently and often this is most easily accomplished through
relaxing into what’s happening and becoming aware of our body
and its sensations.

It’s also about searching out and relishing absurdity (see
below). Many people use an awareness of their breath to
anchor them inside the moment as it unfolds. (If you’re interested in this look up mindfulness.)

Stroking egos
On a related note, one of the funniest things to me is this
notion of expertise that the majority of folk applaud and
subscribe to. We grow up being taught to look to expertise and
to become experts in order to get our egos stroked.

Our society values experts and this is certainly useful, conferring status on those who develop knowledge and skill and reinforcing society’s need for people to do things well. But there is a shadow side to expertise that robs us of the chance to live in the moment and distances us from the ability to make more useful decisions.

This shadow is borne by insecurity and our need to impress
others – it is a twisted form of domination and subjugation. Let’s face it, if we look deeply, we want to dominate others in the small sense that we want everything to go our way and to offer us predictable rewards.

Many times we crave the status associated with being thought of as an expert, so we fake it. This faking prevents learning.

Other times we seek expertise because it gives us a genuine
satisfaction for work well done.Yet, at the same time that this expertise offers us a platform to assess and influence, it also shuts down possibilities and novel approaches.

One of the biggest causes of failure in organisations is this
seductive temptation to chase domination by defining a problem only in terms of our current expertise. As soon as we create the idea of expertise we also create an idea of ignorance.

How many times do we think: my expertise is more relevant
here than his or her ignorance!

The reason we do this is to play to our strengths. It also stops us feeling anxious about not having the answers; but it means that we look to the old solutions that worked before but they frequently disappoint in a new and unknown situation.

We tend to filter all information through our expertise and dismiss that which doesn’t fit, even though it may be vital to future success.

Expertise, when used like this, insulates us from the moment because we run only those existing patterns and exclude what we are really living through. In this way we are living through the past and missing the present. At this point we are disconnected with life. We may also appear far too serious for our own good.

Think holistically
An antidote to this is to remain open and in the moment before
closing down to the expert quick fix. This ability is very challenging and some of the hardest work you will ever do – especially if you prefer to think in details and in a step-by-step or linear way, rather than intuitively grasping the big picture and thinking more holistically.

This ability to hold out for longer, and live the moment more deeply, is sometimes referred to as beginner’s mind or staying with the not knowing. The phrase beginner’s mind comes from Zen Buddhism.

I can almost hear the cynical reader saying but what about
those dangerous situations that need immediate command-andcontrol approaches! If that is the only thing that will work
then do it... but how will you know for certain unless you become open?

In Leading for a Lifetime, authors Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas explain that 50 years ago leaders were expected to be highly experienced with abundant expertise. They quote Churchill as saying: “I rate the capacity of man by, first, courage and ability; and second, real experience under fire.”

However today’s society calls for a radically different
approach and values beginner’s mind. Bennis and Thomas
describe this as “fresh insight unfettered by experience.” It is
also hallmarked by the ability to be spontaneous, tangential
and to ask better questions. All of these are vital for leading and influencing in a complex organisation or society.

This all sounds quite serious – and it is, but so is the need for
fun. Fun is very serious! It was noted earlier that living in the
moment is characterised by joy. Joy and its sister emotion, fun, is fuel for the brain.

The ability to laugh with others energises the brain and boosts
our chances of connecting with other people’s brains. If
businesses took fun seriously they would make it a strategic
imperative because fun and playfulness are linked to better
thinking and higher resilience and these can be used in better
performance.

In Affluenza, psychologist Oliver James talks about a form of
motivation that is self- sustaining and he calls this intrinsic motivation. James links intrinsic motivation to higher job satisfaction and better mental health. He claims that playfulness is a pillar of this motivation.

Laughter fights stress
In The Joy of Laziness authors Axt and Axt-Gadermann review
research suggesting that laughter is the number-one stress
fighter. They had earlier described the considerable health benefits of relaxation but add that: “Just one minute of
laughter equals 30 minutes of relaxation training.”

They support this by pointing out that a mere 60 seconds
of laughing is just as good for our health as ten minutes of
running. The reasons for this are that laughter relaxes tense
muscles and releases hormones which, as well as being healthful, strengthen our immune system, make it easier to stand apart from the problems we face and not be consumed by them.

Laughter also oxygenates the blood. This sounds so easy to
do until we read on and discover that children laugh up to 400
times a day but adults laugh 15 times a day at most. Take a minute (in the moment!) and work out how many minutes a
day during the last three days that you laughed.

Axt and Axt-Gadermann offer us the following advice: get
into situations that make you laugh, select comedies to watch or listen to more serious programmes, look for absurdity in your daily routines and laugh at yourself more. As you’d expect, staying in the moment allows you to better notice and
appreciate these.

I’m going to sign off now and find some absurdity that makes
me chuckle. Then I’m going to give myself a damn good laughing at for 60 seconds to relive the stress of writing this
article!

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