Simple Thinking. Gerver Richard

What did you love doing as a young child? When did you last do it? Go and give it a try right now!

      The idea that everything we do must be of value to others becomes quite a major theme in the way we lead our lives.

      I work with a few professional athletes; one, a cricketer, came to see me when his career had begun to stall. As a youngster he had been tipped for the very top; he had huge natural talent and flair but as he headed into what should have been his prime something happened and he hit a worrying streak of underachievement. He didn't lack passion or commitment but something wasn't working, which made the situation even more worrying. He sought counsel wherever he could. He would studiously listen to coaches, advisers and colleagues, desperately searching for the answer.

      We met at his lowest point; unsure if his contract would be renewed or even whether he would be able to continue his career in professional sport. We didn't do anything complicated during our work together. For most of the time, we talked; about him, his aspirations, his love of the game and his feelings as a young successful player compared to now. He had an absolute desire not only to succeed for himself but he had developed an, at times, suffocating desire to succeed for others. He had started to overthink everything about his life; constantly looking through the lens of what others would expect of him, what they wanted him to do, how they expected him to behave.

      Now this can be complex for most people. However, when your job is to hit a ball being hurled at you at nearly one hundred miles an hour, even a split second of self-doubt or second guessing can put you in harm's way. You might not just mess up, but end up getting seriously hurt in the process.

      Taking it back to basics

      Overthinking is a real problem.

      We talked about a number of things, taking much of his thinking back to basics. I remember him telling me how much he loved the smell of the fresh cut grass, of playing on a warm summer's day and even the sound of the birds in the trees and the smell of the equipment; leather and wood.

      So instead of walking on to the field of play, trying to juggle everyone's advice and expectations in his head, he started noticing those simple things. He started to focus on himself and trust his own instincts again, which in turn allowed him to be more objective in his reflections and more able to absorb advice into his own sense of what would work for him.

      He relaxed and started to trust his own instincts again; he began to reconnect with his own talent.

      The impact has been profound; he didn't just earn a new contract, he is now in the prime form of his career and is well on his way to fulfilling that youthful potential.

      

When was the last time you stopped and just enjoyed some of the sensory world around you? When did you last take time to look into the night sky?

      Our success or our own perception of success becomes so dominant in our thoughts. Yet, do we ever stand back to think about where those perceptions come from? How often do we reflect on whether they really are ours?

      Success = happiness?

      I have an older relative who was born in a different time and place. She was a gifted musician and performer who had dreams of acting and singing as a career. Her parents, who like most parents were desperate to see her make a success of her life, were concerned about her ambitions, partly because for a young, middle class woman, this simply wasn't the done thing. Her parents wanted to see her married to a successful young man with prospects, so that they could build a successful and therefore happy life together.

      She was raised well and deferred to their better judgement. She married young and settled down to have a family. She always had a piano and would often play; she even wrote the music for the first dance at her wedding.

      But life didn't really work out as planned for her. She had two children and has gone on to have a happy life with her second husband, but always gets quite emotional when she thinks about what could have been.

      Her joy comes in seeing her own children plough their own furrows; she has always passionately protected their right to define their own success and has always been there for them when they failed. That takes huge courage as a parent.

      Thank you, mum!

      Failure and the fear of failure is not a new theme of discussion but it cannot be ignored. As young children, failure isn't a bad thing, it's just a thing. We fall over, we get up. We make a mess, we tidy up. We mispronounce a word or a phrase, we laugh and we try again.

      There's failure and then there's FAILURE!

      When we are very young and we make a mistake, people laugh at us, we laugh, and it's fun. We are relaxed, there is no stigma; so we listen and learn, rethink a strategy and go again.

      As we grow a little and start school we still have a go, jumping at opportunities to try stuff out, to engage and to answer questions.

      A little later on we are rewarded for getting things right and sometimes punished for getting things wrong. For the school test champions comes the glory; certificates, stickers and jobs of responsibility in the classroom; and those parent consultation evenings when the ticks in your exercise books are held up as examples of just how hard you are working.

      The smart among us work out the game pretty quickly. We have to be “right” because right is the currency of the clever. Getting things wrong, however; now that's not good and must be avoided at all costs.

      As we continue to grow, we engage less and less at school in things we don't feel confident of mastering. We hide in the shadows during the lessons and sessions we don't fully understand and we let the Olympian question answerers take the medals of glory. That becomes OK too, because at least we didn't try and fail.

      Then, at last, we are through it: school, the constant questions and anxiety related to the possibility of daily humiliation; but the scars remain. They won't heal fast. For many, they never heal at all.

      So then we are at work, head down, doing our jobs to the best of our abilities and we find ourselves in meetings, chaired by our superiors; they are seeking our opinions on new ideas, strategies or data streams. Many of us learnt how to play the survival game quite well. We learnt that if or when we were asked questions as children, our job was to find out the answer inside the teacher's head. Like dodgy clairvoyants, we would probe them, observe their facial expressions and body language, waiting for the clues to fall into place. We could then stand glorious with the right answer. There we are in our meetings, as fully grown people, doing the same thing. The irony is that both we and the people chairing the meetings are feeling the frustration at the lack of honesty and dynamic. Sadly, we often play the same games in our personal lives.

      The poker chips of life

      Take a look at it this way. When we are born, most of us are born high stakes gamblers; we have to be, everything is a risk, everything is unknown, whatever we do, it's new and filled with uncertainty. Life is a little like playing the tables in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. Let's say we are playing at the roulette wheel. Life spins the wheel and rolls the ball. The croupier calls for us to place our bets. Each bet is a decision: answering a question, applying for a job, choosing a restaurant for a first date. As a young child, it can be stacking the blocks, trying to move on our feet rather than on our bottom. The younger we are, the more chips we play with, so we'll throw some big value on the odds or evens, the reds or blacks; we are certainly more likely to stake some of our chips on individual numbers. Why? Because we've got bags full of chips; we are the high rollers: suited, booted and dressed to impress. If the numbers come up against us, it doesn't matter because we can simply bet again.