Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Yesterday’s self-imposed task was to relate a high point. Actually, when I re-read the Day Five post, I see I said THE high point. Was that internal-external work harmony really my all-time high? In context with this activity on this blog, I’m going to stick to my guns and say yes. The process of doing my PhD is a mind-game, and I’m only troubled at the moment because I still haven’t found my balance, or equilibrium, between the internal and the external.

Today it’s time to bare all about a low point, a nadir. A, or the? Not sure. Narrative always seems to want to call for “the” lesson/point, rather than simply one of many exemplars. Aside from the reluctance to be very public with life’s darker moments, there’s anyway a finality in the act of naming the lowest point (or highest, for that matter) which it might not deserve.  I was thinking back through the PhD gloomy moments as well as those low points in my life and it occurred to me that what they all had in common was a lack, an absence. Going back to Erikson’s life cycle, the first crisis is between trust and mistrust and therefore the earliest enduring value to emerge is “hope”. What if the nadir moments are all moment in my past where there has been an absence of hope, to some degree?

This is not a heavy example (I have those, too), but in 1987 I went to Hungary and took up a post in a language school. I had enough about me to settle in and enough ideas to get me through my first three or four teaching assignments. Then I was assigned to run a 12 week course for beginners, whose lessons needed to be planned out really carefully. I was about one-third of the way through their course and as I was preparing in my apartment on my own for the following morning’s class I realised with horror that I had used all my lesson ideas and had no idea how to prepare the plan for them. None. My reserves of ideas and experience just dried up. It got really late. I was in a panic. The more the time went by that night, the more desperate I became and the quicker the clock ticked.  The details of the eventual resolution of the impasse don’t matter, except to say that it involved interaction with sympathetic others who restored… hope.

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Short reflections:

I wonder why pathologies, exceptions and absences are so much richer conduits for reflection than triumphs and business-as-usuals? 

I was thinking about possible ways to research and gain data.  I’ve been focusing on one-to-one interviews, which elevates the individual as agent, as author of their own story. Does this reinforce our own ideas of management and leadership?