you could have done something wrong but did you really do it?

Would you ever admit you are wrong on something you feel so passionately about?

Hindsight may be 20/20, but only if our eyes are open.

Maybe there was a chill in the wind that told us keep our eyes closed, we sensed that something difficult was in front of us.

It would be a difficult life, living in that darkness.

The early days, we'll fall, tumble, scrape our elbows more than once, but the orientation will come. But it’s still pitch black; there's no colour,

no accurate depth of the world. 

Everything becomes an approximation, but a gentler, kindler one than if we opened our eyes.

And see the disappointment and unhappiness that have been inflicted on the people around us because of something that we did.

And those whispers in our head grow louder.

“You were wrong.”

you don't strike up conversations in emotional wastelands

did a radio interview recently for 3zzz, my first for a long time now.

What I like about playing an interviewer on radio is the expectation to make the interview exciting.

You feel it, the interviewee feels it, so you both work under this great pressure of making the chat interesting for all the listeners out there.

Even the nervous guests, i find, fight hard against their nervousness to present attractive titbits of themselves because they willfully buy into the idea of the exciting interview.

Now let's move away from the studios and into a plain undecorated meeting room, which suspiciously feels like it could also be used to interrogate suspects. There's a bookcase without any books in the room, and just enough space to push the chair back so you can stand up.

And the interview begins.
It's clinical and precise, what is this, who, where; and never lingers enough on a subject for you to probe what your interlocutor feels about it. No, you get shot down, and next item on the list.

The tricks you use in the studio:eye contact, mirroring, affirming, which could scrape some emotion from the dullest of subjects, does not stand a chance here. Your advances are
crushed like a can in middle of a busy highway of disapproving looks.

So no, don't crack funny anecdotes in front of potential employers

are your emotional weights collecting dust?

Seth Godin’s description of emotional labour got me thinking: do we spend time at all to finding new ways of doing things?

Emotional labour in a nutshell is the difficult work that you put effort into that creates and strengthen your connections with other people.

It’s a term applicable in a variety of situations, workplaces, relationships, society, and is the mental equivalent of heavy lifting.

It would seem that we spend a lot of time and effort on our rote tasks, but too few minutes on asking ourselves ‘how can we make this better?’

I think if there were 10% more people in the world labouring emotionally, the world would be a better place.