But what does it all mean?

A couple of times recently, we were about to move into a new phases of challenging restrictions, after an intense period of planning, community communications and logistics (buses and food alone are significant in a College of 5500 students) - only to find the regulations change again, late at night on a Friday, or the day before a bank holiday. It was frustrating, and somewhat demoralizing.

Now a week or two on I can write about this with some distance; I recognise I am privileged to be in a country where the authorities are taking a highly responsive, and highly data-informed approach to the pandemic; the alternatives are far worse; it's why we've seen only 34 deaths from only 62,000 cases nationally (source).  But the last minute changes were still frustrating and it's interesting to reflect on why that was, and what broader lessons there are from the experience.

I recall a psychological experiment (I cannot find the source now) where subjects were paid to do meaningless tasks over the course of a few hours - trivial arithmetic, or colouring in some shapes.  The work is on paper, and from time to time, the psychologists take the completed work out of the room.  The subjects are interviewed about how they feel about the work, and the feedback is fairly neutral - with typical comments such as 'fine', 'dull', 'a bit boring' and 'easy money'.  A second round of the experiment was almost identical, but instead of just removing the sheets of completed work, the experimenters took them to the front of the room, tore them up within view of the subjects and discarded them into a wastepaper basket.  The difference in feedback from the subjects is, I think, highly predictable; irritation and outrage from many, with some refusing to continue and even walking out of the experiment.

This finding is consistent with what historian and author Studs Turkel found after interviewing hundreds of people in a striking array of jobs: that work is a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.   I think this tells us something very important indeed about what's important in our work and indeed in our lives.  That is, it's not just the work itself that counts (in the experiment, the work was exactly the same) but how meaningful we perceive it to be.  And it's hard to find meaning in work that is ripped up in front of you!  And I guess, metaphorically, that's rather how I felt when the regulations changed, before we had even had a chance implement the previous set.

As you can see from my second paragraph above, I have well and truly recovered; the meaning in schools, of course, is that adapting practices to best protect children is very, very meaningful work to pursue.  Taking the big picture like this is a classic way to find the meaning -  though not always easy to do in the heat of any particular moment.  So I was interested to read psychologist Ethan Kross' Chatter in which he described several (similar) techniques that may help us to stand back from a situation, and to avoid being caught in intense negative emotions.

1 Be a distancer, not an immerser.  When we look at situations, we have the interesting capacity to either view them from the first-person view through our eyes, or to imagine seeing from the outside, third person point of view, from the fly-in-the walls perspective.  In an ingenious experiment, Kross asked a group to replay an upsetting memory in their minds through their own eyes (as an immerser) or as a fly on the wall (as a distancer).   In describing their experiences the immersers said things like: Adrenaline infused... Betrayed... Angry... Victimized... Hurt... Shamed... Humiliated... Abandoned... Unappreciated...  Distancers, by contrast said things like:  I was able to see the argument more clearly... I initially emphasized better with myself but then I begin to understand how my friend felt...  I understood his motivation...  It seems that stepping back to see how our situation looks from the outside allows us to make sense of our experiences, and changes the tone of our inner voice, very much for the better.  This seems to be a very easily adopted strategy, in a whole range of situations.

2 Give yourself some advice.  Here, the technique is to imagine someone has vented to you exactly the issue you are now facing.  It seems that thinking about what advice you would give them allows you to 'get out of you own head' and see an issue more objectively.  We simply asked our participants to use their own name and other non-first-person pronouns such as 'you' when thinking about themselves Kross said. Instead of saying, ‘Why am I feeling this way?’ you adopt a distanced perspective by asking yourself, ‘Why are you feeling this way, Nick?'  If you watch for it, you can often hear athletes or actors talking about themselves this way, when they describe in interview how they managed to stay focussed and not be overwhelmed at a critical time; it's another way of getting distance from an issue.

source

3 Play it back from the future: A similar tactic is to ask how would you feel about this in 10 days / months / years time?  The changed temporal perspective here plays the same role as the spatial perspective in the first point.  

These three strategies are all about making it easier to find greater meaning by taking some distance from our own perspectives (interestingly aligning with what Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, wrote in the 1970s).  Kross writes when people self-distance, they are capable of reasoning as wisely about their own... problems as about the problems of others.  That's probably as good as it gets.

These ideas have been replicated in the business press, particularly in relation to leadership.  Writing in the Sloan Management Review, Catherine Bailey and Adrian Maddan looked at what makes work meaningful, and argue that leaders have the capacity to make or destroy meaning for their organisations. One way of describing the role of a leader, therefore, is to constantly remind people of the meaning of their work. Reminding themselves is an important first step! As well as the right thing to do for the individuals, it also gets the best from people, because meaningless work is absurd work, and as management writer Herzberg said Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work.  We can only be our best selves at work when it is profoundly meaningful. 


References

• Kross, E (2021) Chatter. Ebury Digital Books.
• Nailey, C. and Madden A. (2016) What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless Sloane 
  Management Review.
• Swanbrow, D. (2014) How to give ourselves advice as good as we give others Institute for Social Research.
• Terkel, S. (1997) Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The New Press
• Yeager D.S. et al (2014) Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107