A new motto for this year: katsubou

2013-01-29 21:20:00

Well! It's not every day that I get a mention on a 7th dan sensei's blog :D

My motto for 2012 was enryo (遠慮): "restraint". 

• Professionaly, after a clear need for improvement to my methods at the office.
• In kendo, after my learning experience at the kyu-grade dutch national championships.

The motto has served me well and I will continue to be inspired by it. It still adorns my desk and it is on the inside of my dou. At the office I have become better at communicating and at sticking to boundaries and in kendo I have become less apt to rush in foolishly. 

For 2013 I will be adding a new motto, katsubou (渇望): "hunger, craving".

This motto comes through inspiration by four people whom I've come to respect very much. Donatella-sensei and Vitalis-sensei, after their instructions at the last Centrale Training. And Kris and Hillen-fukushou, based on their feedback to our recent kyu exams. Summarizing it: without stupidly rushing in (see above), I need to crave achieving yuko datotsu on my opponent. I need to hunger for "kills" and to show eagerness in all my undertakings. Only then will I be properly training and will I be able to show my current skill level in a shinsa.

Interestingly, this motto is also applicable professionaly insofar that I'm working to retain my CISSP certification. I'd slacked off over the past two years, but now I'm working hard to make up for that. In order to achieve this plan fully, I need to be "hungry". I need to keep at it, working on each successive goal in order to reach the final destination. 

It'll be an interesting year :)

kilala.nl tags: kendo, sports, enryo, work,

View or add comments (curr. 0)

Coaching: better than I expected

2013-01-12 13:45:00

Quite a while ago my dear friend Menno started a career in personal coaching. He's still a civil engineer, but as a side business he runs Rockover Coaching which is based on the co-active coaching formula. It took a lot of hard work, but he's now ready to start working with clients. As part of his startup year, he asked me whether I'd like to be a 'victim' and I gladly accepted. I may have an ingrained mistrust of coaches, but I know I can trust the guy who's been my best friend for 27 years ;)

Over the past few weeks we've used a lot of different techniques to explore various topics, such as:

• The wheel of life graph, to maybe pinpoint things in my life that I feel need immediate improvement.
• Communication between myself and Marli, mostly in situations where I fear conflict while there is actually very little chance thereof. This also focused on posture and being "open". 
• We used "perspectives" to look at my professional and political standing at the office. This works by first discussing how I feel and think about the subject, followed by exploring my thoughts and feelings on completely unrelated subjects (like the kale mash that Marli makes and like the Baumzipfelweg). We then try to find parallels for these feelings in the original subject, leading to a more positive view of the matter. Where I first was very critical of my own attitude and methods (because of how people had reacted), I now learned to also look at it like I'm a solid employee who can be counted on to cut through bullcrap to get stuff done. 
• We used "structures" to act as reminders for specific tasks or goals. Like the drawing of Dexter's talking dog, to remind me to shut my piehole more often. Or the pocket mirror on my desk, to check myself at times ("am I taking myself too seriously?"). He also challenged me to take smoking breaks with my colleagues, for more bonding.
• "Value mining", was done to discover more things that I find important in life. The keywords found would be used in later exercises.
• Visualization is used in many cases, to explore my feelings regarding various subjects by again putting them into a completely different jacket. Like yesterday, when we discussed my frustration about some of the goings-on in the Almere kendo dojo by imagining the problem to be an animal and going from there (what kind of animal? what's it doing? what are you doing? where are you? what's the place look like? how's the animal reacting to you? what does that do to you? etc).
• We started on the "Captain and his crew" exercise by visualizing and meeting my "captain". An internal second opinion if you will, "someone" I can approach with questions or problems and on whom I can count to provide another opinion than my own. Of course, technically this second voice will simply be an outlet for thoughts and ideas I have been avoiding or haven't thought of yet, but so far it's been very effective!
• Regarding my professionalism at work, I was asked to give it a score and asked which score I would like it to be at. We also explored what I think I would need to do in order to get there. 
• Thanks to both Menno and my colleague Rob I got my ass into gear with regards to my CISSP certification. With Menno I explored how I could achieve my desire to maintain and improve my work-related skills, while retaining a balance with my personal life as well as having fun.

So... After almost three months of weekly coaching I have to say it's a lot more fun and interesting than I thought before starting with Menno. I had a few other touch-feely courses (through work) before this, but none of those were as comfortable as this.

kilala.nl tags: life, work, enryo,

View or add comments (curr. 1)

Coactive coaching: DO-DONT structure

2012-11-05 07:35:00

Recently I started a coaching process with Rockover Coaching (about which I'll write more later). In our third fruitful session I was assigned a bit of homework: make a structure for use in the office, to remind me of some of my personal DOs and DONTs.

In this case the DONT is my at-times hyperactive approach in communicating: too fast, not letting people come to their conclusions, sticking my nose in and generally forcing an opinion. The DO is the polar opposite of this, which I have already set as goal for 2012: enryo, self-restraint, calmness and respect. The intention of the structure is to put something in place that inherently reminds me of these DOs and DONTs at any given time, so I chose to hang up a poster at my desk.

Looking for graphics that trigger the DO and DONT in my mind, the DO is obviously represented by the kanji for the word "enryo" (as discussed before). When it came to the DONT one thing immediately popped into my head: Dexter's Laboratory's talking dog. The overly excited, busybusy, shouty dog who yelps for attention exclaiming that "I FOUND THE THING! THE THING! I GOT THE THING!" Or that's how it went in dutch, in english apparently it's "found you", but hey.

So... The above poster is what I whipped up in a few minutes and as per this blogpost it's delivered to my coach. There you go sir! ;)

kilala.nl tags: coaching, enryo, work,

View or add comments (curr. 3)

Learning from my mistakes

2012-03-30 11:13:00

The past month I've been paying more attention to my methods of communicating and of working, all under the motto of enryo: "restraint". Overall I see improvement, but with the help of colleagues I've also recognized a number of slipups. 

A while back I stated a number of targets for myself, after a big kerfuffle at the office. Here's how things have gone so far.

• "Obviously I wlll refrain from contacting R in any way." 

This is by far the easiest target. I've simply refrained from contacting R or any of his colleagues in any way or form. Any work that needs to be done together with them was defered to my colleagues. However, there was also a bit of misunderstanding on my part: this target was not only targeted at R and his team, but also at the other team. So, no less than two weeks after the troubles I made the mistake of contacting E from the other team, which blew up in my face. So, the target's been extended to: "I will refrain from contacting R, E and their teams in any way".

• I will make absolutely sure to stick to my and my team's areas. 

I almost stuck my foot in a hornets' nest yesterday! 

Almost a year ago I helped out one of the big projects going down at $CLIENT to achieve their über-important deadline. It involved some changes to one of our BoKS environments and also involved some programming to change the infrastructure. At the time I was in the lead, but I frequently discussed the matter with R to make sure things would work properly. The project met its deadline "and there was much rejoicing".

Now, there's a follow-up to the project which requires more programming to change the infrastructure. The project team defaulted to contacting me about it, as I'd been in the lead last time. Falling back into my old project-mode I quickly joined up and started discussing the matter. It was only when one of my colleagues remarked that R was also working on the programming that I remembered that this programming officially falls under R's team's responsibilities. And thus I came this -><- close to breaking this target! So many thanks to my colleague Rishi for jogging my memory! ( ^_^)

• If we need to venture outside of our sphere of power, my team will discuss the matter with teams A and B. [...] In some cases I might even go so far as to defer the whole matter to [my colleagues].  

This has gone well! We've had a few problems and incidents that require cross-department cooperation in order to troubleshoot and solve the issue. In each of these cases I've drawn up complete reports of my findings and methods, which I then transfered to one of my team members. I urged them to go over my work, to make sure I didn't make any mistakes and to add to it, so they could then continue working on the project with R's and E's teams. 

• I will be mindful of my written communications, avoiding subjective writing, my usual style, absolutes and vagueries. 

One of the biggest things I did to achieve this goal was to build a filter into my Outlook mailbox: all of my email will be delayed by an hour, for re-reading and adjustment, to prevent foot-in-mouth situations. That is, unless I go out of my way to tick a certain box that says "send this email right now" (which is, in three minutes).

This has gone reasonably well, although I find that it's too easy to make the six clicks required for the "send immediately" option. I need to use this frequently when I'm on a specific shift, but I've also found myself using it with normal emails. That's not good and in one case it led to an illworded email making it to a customer. I discussed the matter with my colleague Tommy, who pointed out a few things to remind me of my own goals: it's better to phone than to email and never send emails when you're agitated. 

And that's the key in this case: it happened when a customer had crossed a number of security guidelines in a rather blatant manner, which I felt needed to be dealt with quickly. My bad: I should've sat on my email a bit, reread it and then phoned the customer to call a meeting. Live and learn.

• When there's any doubt about my message I'll have my colleagues go over my emails. 

I've not confered with my colleagues often enough in this regard. Sure I've asked them a few times, when I was in doubt... but I'm not in doubt often enough! (;^_^)

kilala.nl tags: enryo, work,

View or add comments (curr. 0)

Forcing restraint in email: message delays and reminders

2012-03-01 18:11:00

Last week I made a few resolutions for myself regarding communicating at work. These resolutions were reaffirmed today, in a meeting with my manager and are now stated thusly:

• For every email, stop and decide whether a phone call wouldn't be better.
• If you do need to send a wordy email, follow up with a phone call.
• Be ever-mindful of your CC list. Cull anyone who is not involved with this message.
• Be careful about your wording: avoid vagueries, subjectivism and absolutes.

In order to help myself stick to these resolutions I've made a few configuration changes to my Outlook email client. These are by no means guarantees that I will improve, but they serve as stern reminders that my mindset needs changing. 

Every email I start writing, whether it's a reply or a new message, is filled with a big warning template asking me "Are you really using email? Wouldn't it be better to phone?". It also reminds me to "Watch your phrasing! Are you CCing people?". I couldn't find a way in Outlook to set up a template or standard email to do this, so I've adjusted my email signature to serve the purpose. 

I have also set up two filtering rules to delay my outgoing messages. With many things to How-to Geek's 'Preventing OhNo! after sending emails'.

1. Apply rule to mail I send: assigned to category "CHECKED", delay delivery for 2 minutes and stop processing rules.
2. Apply rule to mail I send: assign mail to category "NEED TO CHECK" and delay delivery for 60 minutes, except if mail is assigned to category "CHECKED", or if message is invitation or update.

The second rule determines that every single email i send will be delayed for an hour. This will prevent many foot-in-mouth situations and will also force me to review my message. Each of these messages gets classified as "NEED TO CHECK", unless I specifically go out of my way to set the message to "CHECKED". All messages marked as "CHECKED" will be delayed for only two minutes, after which they'll go on their way to the addressee.

I will also add an hourly reminder to my agenda to prompt myself to review all pending emails.

My manager indicated upfront that these changes will drastically lower my throughput at the office. Part of the reason why I'm so damn fast with our ticket queue is because my over-reliance on email: fix an issue, inform client through email, BOOM! next ticket! I have to admit that I felt a few pangs of OCD at this realization, because I always worry about our ticket queue. We're already behind on our work, so if I'm going to get slower we'll only get behind further. Luckily my manager takes this for granted, as she feels that fixing my communications issues is more important than our current workload. Wow!

I'm quite hopeful that these measures will aid me in improving my communications at work. Right now I still need external stimuli to practice enryo. 

EDIT:

Sadly there is no way of implementing the second set of precautions in Apple's Mail.app. The software does not support rules on outgoing email without the support of Mail ActOn and even then it only allows such things as filing the sent message. It will not allow delays or forcing messages to be saved as drafts. 

Because of this I tried to give Thunderbird a shot, but I still hate that piece of software. I can't help it. Alternatively I think Sparrow looks great, but I don't think it has the options I'm looking for. Even Entourage 2008 doesn't appear to support the kind of rules I'm using in Outlook 2003 at the office ;_; 

In the end I implemented my 'helpers' in Mail.app by:

1. Adding a default signature, just like the one described above. 
2. Remapping shift-command-d (Send message) to save the message as a draft.

kilala.nl tags: enryo, geeky, work,

View or add comments (curr. 2)

Conquering myself: anxiety and restraint

2012-02-16 07:16:00

Starting this week, my desk at the office has been rearranged somewhat. All of my gear's been moved to the right, thus providing unihibited view of the divider board. This board is now adorned with a piece of A5 paper, bearing the kanji shown left: enryo, 遠慮(picture source).

Enryo is the Japanese concept of (and word for) restraint. The kanji consists of the words for distant and prudence.

I've chosen this word as my mental goal for this year, next to my physical education goal of fumikomi. Why? Because restraint will help me both at work, in kendo and in my anxieties. At work, because I've repeatedly gotten in trouble for being too hasty. In kendo, because I show way too much of what goes on in my head. In my anxieties, because control over mind and body will aid in preventing and fighting panic attacks.

Here are two excellent articles about the concept of enryo in Japanese culture:

• Enryo, at NeoJapanisme
• Understanding Japanese culture: Etiquette for four seasons in traditional Japan

Speaking of my anxiety disorder. I visited my therapist again yesterday and he's quite happy about my progress. He was disappointed that I had not continued with the progressive relaxation exercises, but was glad that I'd replaced them with concepts from kendo and tai chi. From here on I will be setting exposure goals for myself, where I simply go out and expose myself to situations I loathe, of ever-increasing difficulty. We will meet up only once more after this, after which my therapist is confident that I can continue the training on my own.

Finally, just to keep track of stuff: in the middle of the night I had a mild bout of hyperventilation.

kilala.nl tags: anxiety, hyperventilation, kendo, enryo,

View or add comments (curr. 2)