Double rainbow over Regent's Canal.Performance and Total Work
I listened to a few really interesting podcasts that happened to both be about regulating your nervous system. One was from Farewell and talked about how athletes deal with anxiety on the biggest sporting stages. The usual stuff came up around reframing and self-talk. For example, when elite swimmers feel nervous at the start of a race, they tell themselves that these are the signals that their body is ready to perform.
Another podcast from Steve Magness shared an anecdote of a British coach who asked his heptathletes how hyped up (the technical term is 'aroused') they need to be on a scale of 1-10 for each event. Because sometimes you want to activate your fight or flight and get that adrenaline boost. You might want to be an 8/10 for a jump or a sprint, say, and more like a 5-6/10 for the 1500m. Then when you know that, you can employ techniques to get you in the right state. I went through a phase a couple of years ago where, before a meeting, I would pick a persona that I needed to channel in the meeting. For example, do I need to be like Steve Jobs, do I need to be like Pete Carroll? I find this kind of prep really helpful for getting the right outcomes from meetings.
The third podcast, that appeared serendipitously in my feed, was Jonny Miller on the Decision Making Studio Podcast. Jonny runs a training called Nervous System Mastery, teaching the techniques you can use to move yourself up and down that 10 point scale of arousal both when you need to get in the right state of mind, and when your nervous system is being hijacked by something external. It's really worth a listen. There's a lot of focus on breathwork and, given it's a podcast on decision making, there's a strong link to the workplace.
This got me thinking about the idea of Total Work, the idea that work is becoming so central to meaning creation, that we gear more and more of our lives around it until it overtakes it completely. We see this through the lens of performance at work, the idea that we should be exercising, taking breaks etc. to improve our work performance places all other activities in service of work. There's an emerging trend of people microdosing for work performance, though if you've watched Wolf of Wall Street this might be a spreading trend rather than a new one.
I think about Total Work a lot because I really do want to perform well at work and, because I am into running, I take a lot of approaches from that field into work performance. (Though, just like in sport, I draw the line at performance enhancing drugs.) I could definitely slip into a trap of placing work above everything else. So I'm trying hard to focus on techniques that will have benefits in all aspects of life. For example, the nervous system mastery stuff has applications in parenting and other life decisions, as well as at work. Of course, then you run the risk of falling into the Instagram/TikTok hole of life optimisation, a place full of people who essentially sell their own lives as marketing for their services. And that is another flavour of Total Work.
British Pianos
I met a chap this week who used to run the factory of a large scale (5-6k a year) piano makers in the UK. Kemble Pianos was the last British piano maker and closed its doors in 2009 (it had sold to Yamaha before that). In it's heyday, there were 360 piano manufacturers in the UK. But falling down this British piano industry rabbit hole, I found that there is still a British piano manufacturer based in Yorkshire: Cavendish Pianos. Rather than setting up a single factory to produce pianos, Cavendish is run as a co-operative of individual craftsmen.
Many components also continue to be made in this country. British felts and cloths are widely regarded as the worlds finest. String-makers still exist who have learned the specialized skill of hand winding piano strings have practised all their lives. British oak, ash and walnut is used for components and cabinets. A high grade hammer and British made strings and design give Cavendish Pianos their distinctive classic, European tone.
Building the Freelance Pipeline
I'm really enjoying having an excuse to go and chat to a bunch of lovely people doing really exciting things in very interesting ways.