A Bloom response to the credit crunch: love

One of the best ways not to get caught in the trap of negative equity is not to buy at the top of the market. Given that no one - admit it - has any idea about markets, a more realistic way is to so love the place you live that you don't want to move any time soon. Buying for love is also a pretty good guarantee that someone else will love it too, a good insurance against falling markets.

There is a parallel here with jobs. Dominic Lawson points out that the demographic timebomb - the fact that there won't be enough people to earn the money to pay all our pensions - will dwarf the impact of the credit crunch by about 10 to 1.

There is a solution to this one too. Find a job that so absorbs you and that so enhances your life that you don't need to retire. Working beyond retirement age is going to be a reality for most of us and in any case, it keeps us healthier and happier. And despite the recession, the opportunities for reinvention continue to abound.

The fact is both the opportunities and the need to find meaningful work have never been greater, so what are you waiting for?

Remarkable

Seth Godin talks about the desirability of being 'remarkable'. That is, remarkable in its most literal sense.

Bloom's objective is to be remarkable, which itself feels a remarkable thing to say. But what will make us remarkable is:

1. An ability to understand the evidence - using psychology as a tool and an approach not just a prop

2. An ability to make the evidence engaging, using psychology evidence

Now, number 1 without number 2 we'd be doing pretty well. This is the baseline standard for professional occupational psychologists, and this ties them to a series of interventions which have evidence behind them. Good, but not remarkable.

Number 2 without number 1 is very good. After all, not everyone can engage. To engage you need charisma, you need connection and you need to understand people. With number 2 you'll take people with you, but the destination is less certain.

But number 2 with number 1 - that is remarkable.

And that's what we must aim to be.

The science of decision making and the art of possibility

Dan Gilbert argues that one of the reasons we aren't great at making decisions is because we tend to compare against our past experience, not against what's possible. We have a a rich understanding of choices taken, but only an abstract idea of the choice not taken.

Usually, our future possibilities are not that well defined in our minds, so it's our experience of the past which dictate the decisions we make for the future. We're bad at estimating the odds of our future gains and the value of our present pleasures.

Conservatism - and consumerism - is usually the result.

The conductor and teacher Ben Zander deals with this cognitive bias by giving all of his students an ‘A’ for their report for the year, in the first two weeks of the course.

In return for this exceptional grade, Zander asks his students to write a letter dated the following year, in which they describe the person they have become to justify this grade. He then asks them to fall passionately in love with this person.

This is a perfect example of how articulating a future, and imagining it more vividly, allows us to live in possibility rather than being defined by the patterns of the past.

Was it worth it?

I was reading the paper today and there was a short column on Yasmina Siadatan, this years Apprentice winner.

I remember watching her ‘six-figure job’ being revealed on the 'Your hired' program which followed the final on Sunday night. Sir Alan unveiling to the audience and public that Yasmina would be selling screens to NHS doctors surgeries, which was followed by a deadly silence in the audience and the same old expressionless face from Yasmina. 

As much as I loved the Apprentice, this seemed to worry me a bit. I understand that a majority of the shows candidates are fueled my money and status, but going through 12 weeks of Hell, giving up working for your own start-up, and then being told what job your going to do for a year seems like a worse alternative to getting the Sir Alan finger. More importantly, this goes against pretty much everything that the Bloom Career change process stands for in that there was very little scope for fitting Yasmina to the right job.

Not is all lost though. If you know me, then you'll know that I wanted Kate to win and I honestly think that she has come out of this better. (Apart perhaps from having pants-man on her arm). 

Lessons from my Grandfather

In Bloom's career sessions we explore the nature of someone’s values. Values can often be revealed by who we admire. And one of the people I admire most is my Grandfather.

I remember he was very stern and strict when I was young. Always made me eat my bloody sprouts. I once even asked my Granny why she continued to stay with him, but he still stuck around, providing me with a rock when I needed one most. So whilst I didn’t always like him, I always loved him.

When I got older I came to admire him too. I came to learn how he fought and was injured in the war. How he raised a great family and wrote funny letters. How he never boasted. How he'd laugh until his teeth fell out at Christmas, and sang made-up songs in the kitchen when he was doing the washing up.

But the kitchen is silent now. Instead, his mind is filled with anxious, confused thoughts. He’s convinced there is a conspiracy against him and he won’t let Granny have a moment’s peace in his paranoia. He is sad, and lost.

This is the moment I’ve long dreaded, for it's hard to lose a hero.

But in his place he has left me many things, and the most precious of these is freedom. Pa fought for my freedom - and everyone in this country - to live as they please. He fought for a set of values that he must have thought have been shamefully abused since. But also his discipline gave me the ballast to make my own way in life. As Barry Schwartz argues, parameters create freedom. And finally, his sense of humour gave me freedom by reminding me not to take myself so damn seriously.

Pa doesn’t really hear me when I speak any more. But if there is one thing that I could say to him, it is thank you for my freedom. It is the value I cherish most.

I hope I always use it in a way that will make you proud, Pa.

Perspective

I was in London a few weeks ago for an exhibition in Euston called 'Modernity and Madness'. 

The exhibition was split into several sections, ranging from an eery video tour of the 'Tower of Fools' in Vienna; a roundhouse like psychiatric institution, to artwork inspired and produced by psychiatric patients. The highlight for me however was a range of objects imported from Psychiatric asylums, and one which was particularly startling was an 'Electrotherapeutic cage'; an octagonal bird-box like cage, which would upon becoming electrically charged, 'treat' its incapsulated patients for hysteria. 
 
Incredible to think of the power of psychiatrists and psychologists in those days, especially thinking of their then perspective of what constituted 'mad' and 'sane' before or after treatment. Without the 'talking cures' and psychotherapeutic treatment suggested by Freud, we may have perhaps never been able to challenge the brutal psychiatric approaches mentioned above. 

Interestingly, research has found that perspective can influence your interpretation of events. Gilovich (2007) found that observing yourself as a third person -- looking at yourself from an outside observer's perspective -- helps clarify the changes you need to make far made more than using a first-person perspective. This shows the difficulty of making objective decisions; without a clear understanding of our values, we're prone to following the crowd, doing what looks best to others, or even just doing what you've always done. And that is a recipe to repeat the mistakes of the past which as this exhibition shows, can be catastrophic and absurd in hindsight.

'Madness and Modernity' is at the Wellcome Collection until the 28th June. 

Tom

A visit to the Freud Museum

I went to visit the Freud Museum in Hampstead last week. I thought it was something that had to be done before I leave London in just over a week, and leave this fantastic city and year of experiences behind.

I was the first visitor of the day to the museum which for some reason made my visit seem all the more eery.

Wandering around Freud's house in silence made Freud's life come alive to me like never before. All his possessions and artefacts were still there in place, much as they were when he practised. I could have been a visiting patient and the visit fuelled my desire to learn more about his life and work.

As a psychology student, I feel its important to know something about the history of a subject I'm passionate about and to know something of the thinking and what now seems bizarre experiments of psychology's founders. I think this is a crucial part of developing my own identity as a psychologist. By understanding the past, we can build on it. Isaac Newton called this 'standing on the shoulders of giants' and that morning it felt like I truly was.

Tom