To Manchester last Friday for the Leonard Cheshire Leadership Lunch.

Sometime I have mixed feelings about the whole charity lunch/dinner/ball thing, because I know I’m only really going to have a nice meal, a glass of wine and a chat with some interesting folk and, if lucky, a good speaker or band.

Interestingly, Leonard Cheshire have a fantastic emphasis on ‘ability’ – a strongly held belief that society should recognise and embrace disabled people’s abilities instead of keeping them invisible. And talking to others there, including some disabled people, it turns out that the opportunity to go somewhere for a nice meal, some wine and a chat is what most of us want. If you’re able to to help others at some point along the way - that’s great.

And our main speaker was Tatton MP and Shadow Chancellor , George Osborne, who gave a good talk and only got to eat his starter before dashing-off to another engagement.

New research from Canada now published in the book ”Your Brain on Music” shows that music has specific effects on the body’s physiology and is effective at moderating arousal levels, concentration and helping to regulate mood through its action on the brain’s natural chemistry.

Well, yeah, I kinda think we all knew that already (and so did Shakespeare), but it’s nice that science has now proved it!

Are you already actively using music to moderate your emotional state?
Maybe putting on that upbeat track when you need a lift; a Beethoven piano sonata to unwind too; something sad and melancholy when you want that catharsis?

My latest use is to have my MP3 player on when I’m on the treadmill at home. I’m currently listening to disc 2 of Kevin and Perry Go Large - yes I know how rubbish that must seem, but disc 2 is a fantastic collection of serious Ibiza-style dance tracks. When it’s playing I reckon my run-rate is boosted by about 20%.

My two top tips for using music to moderate emotional states:

• after a while, the effect of a particular track or habit (e.g. wearing your Ipod to work every day) begins to wear-off and the music just becomes aural wallpaper. You need to vary your listening content and habit for it to work
• don’t just go for the ‘upbeat’ all the time - trying to boost one single emotional state just doesn’t work; your body and mind need a full range and balance, so listen to music that stimulates the full range of emotions.

I haven’t really been following this year’s Tour de France, mostly because we have terrestial, non-digital TV - which shows only very brief highlights late at night.

But the Tour was very significant for me for a time, because it used to start a couple of weekends after my accountancy exams finished. I started that learning right at the very beginning, and I failed a stage, so the whole process took me some five years. Which meant four full days of exams every June. By the time I’d got through the revision and then sat the exams I was sooo ready to get my body moving again and to divert my head with something colourful and different; and the Tour really did the trick. Pheww!

Even now, some 17 years on, I still get a sense of freedom and relief when I notice that the Tour de France is about to start.

Fascinating, isn’t it, how things like that will stay with you? It’s mostly unconscious for me now - I see a bunch of guys in cycling jerseys straining towards the top of some Alpine hill on the TV news and my spirits lift.

And how about you?
What’s your equivalent of the tour de France?
What events or places have an impact on your emotional ‘meta-state’ because of some significant past experience?

And here’s some mildly diverting links:

Live Tour de France tracker

Official Tour website (English version)

Previous blog entry - review of Lance Armstrong’s book, “Every Second Counts”

Imagine you’re one of the big tobacco firms -say, just for example, that you’re British American Tobacco or Philip Morris International. Your traditional markets are shrinking or getting increasingly hostile - witness the ban on smoking in public places that came into force in England at the start of this month. What do you do? Throw your hands in the air and say “Oh well, it was good while it lasted. Maybe we should do something else now?”.

No.

Instead, as The Economist reports last week, what you do is to start targetting the poorer countries where most of the worlds remaining 1 billion male and 250 million female smokers live (and, as The Economist reports, half of the 5 million annual smoking-related deaths are in Asia).

Currently, each packet of cigarettes sold in the UK has to carry one of two “general” warnings:

1. ‘Smoking kills/Smoking can kill,’ or
2. ‘Smoking seriously harms you and others around you.’

And one of 14 “additional” warnings including:

1. Smokers die younger.
2. Smoking clogs the arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes.
3. Smoking causes fatal lung cancer.
4. Smoking when pregnant harms your baby.

Click here for the full EU Directive if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

What I’m most interested in this morning is what kind of mental and moral acrobatics must you have to do if you work at one of these companies?

You know I’m into motivation and how people struggle into work on a cold, dark morning and then have to inspire themselves and others to give of their best. How does that work when the product you’re seeing roll-off the production line has “Smoking causes fatal lung cancer” written all over it?

What kind of leader do you have to be to ’successfully’ head-up the strategy planning session where it’s agreed that the poorest parts of the world don’t have enough opportunities to test out  “smoking when pregnant harms your baby”?

I’m feeling like some kind of woolly liberal picking on an easy target right now, but doesn’t it make you at least a little curious about the mind-sets of these people?

One of the things I notice about myself and my coaching clients at this time of year is that we all seem to start feeling time pressures much more.

I’m wondering if it’s a combination of:

• spring-time “good ideas” coming to fruition
• holidays looming
• colleagues already taking holidays

- what do you reckon?

Thought I might put a few time-management type ideas on the blog over the next few days. I used to be really into time-management - even used to run courses on it and stuff like that. All part of some mad desire for efficiency and effectiveness - get a life Nick!

Anyway, here’s today’s tip:

Dealing with Boring Stuff That You’re Putting-off Doing (1):

Get one of those oven-timers or minute-minders.

You know that thing that you’ve been putting-off doing because it’s boring, tedious or has grown into a huge terrifying pile of overdue-ness?

Well, grab your oven-timer, set it for fifteen minutes and go wade into that pile of stuff and start work on it.

Yo’re only allowed to work on it until the timer pings - then you have to stop. And you’re not allowed to do any more to it today.

I love the sound of that “ping, ping, ping”!

OK, so fifteen minutes is not much; you may not even have made much of a dent in the pile and at this rate it might take weeks. But I bet that’s more than you’ve done on it for ages - and that you’ll finish earlier doing it for 15 minutes a day than your old, procrastinating, last-minute panicky way!

More tomorrow - if I have time!

Strange question, eh?

I’m asking it now partly because I’m in some degree of physical pain. I went for a tooth-whitening procedure last week and my lips got burnt - they’re swollen and cracked and they f**cking hurt. But they’ll get better. And I’m also emotionally cracked and swollen; I feel like a twat for not knowing the side-effects of this procedure and I’ve had to let down some important friends and miss seeing them in a special event - and that hurts too. And we’ll all get over it.

But I’m also asking it because I’m researching around “Emotional Resilience” at the moment and I reckon that learning to get hurt is a really important life-skill.

Research into what makes some people survive catastrophic incidents and some not survive points to, amongst other things, the ability to experiment, make mistakes, and to get hurt.

You see this with kids, as they realise that falling off a bike without stabilisers will hurt. Learn to get hurt and you learn how to ride a bike.

I remember myself at about age 15 learning how when I asked out that gorgeous girl, and she said no, it hurt! And the most important lesson came later, at about 18, when I realised that if you got over the emotional hurt of that great-looking girl saying “no”, well, you could ask out a lot of fantastic girls and quite a few would say “yes”!

And what about you?

What hurts and pains are you suffering or carrying around?

And what are you learning from those hurts?
Are you choosing to learn that it’s better not to get back on that bike, better not to call-up that brown-eyed girl?
Or is there something else that hurt has to teach you?

And a footnote. I have friends and family members who live with chronic pain. Sometimes people tell them it’s all in their heads, but current research suggests that’s not quite true. Learning to tell the difference between getting hurt and ongoing chronic pain has been pretty important for them.

Hmm,

just about to write a blog entry and my wife has come early with my son. See ya!

I think I’ve found the perfect way to do my bit for Live Earth this Saturday and help the environment:

…TURN OFF THE TV AND RADIO!!

Surely there can’t be any more has-been, wannabee and sad-o bands left now!?

http://www.liveearth.org/ 

I started a new exercise programme this week, which has me getting up at 6am - a major shift for me!

I’m not actually doing all that much exercise in it just yet, because I reckoned that the shift of getting up earlier and having the intention of creating a habit around that would be enough in itself, at least for a week or so. And that was right. My body is already feeling really tired. My first client has missed his coaching call this morning and without that stimulus my head and eyes are beginning to droop - and it’s only 9:30am.

Off to drink some more water and lie on the sofa for 10.

Just nipped off to the loo inbetween telephone coaching sessions (well, it’d be rude to go when actually talking to a client, wouldn’t it?) and caught site of myself in the mirror still wearing my headset.

This headset has already been the subject of a previous blog entry if you want to see it for yourself: http://nickrobinson.org/blog/?p=77

but now I’m worried that the thing bends the top of my ear over. If I’m wearing this for about 6 hours a day 3 or 4 days a week, is one of my ears going to stick out more than the other?! Or, worse, if I vary the ear used, will I end-up looking like Andrew Marr’s wayward brother!

Anybody know if there are any anti-ear-bending exercises or creams available?