IN THIS FINAL SECTION of the book I want to pull together and summarise the key themes woven through the previous twelve stories. These will then act as a ‘checklist’ for you as you seek to apply these ideas to your own life. I call them the ‘Three Gateways to Creating Space’. That is because without having these three overarching elements in place it will be harder to implement the specific lessons from the stories that you feel apply to you. Prior to embarking on the process of creating space, you need to work on each of these. They are the foundation for everything else you will do. Without them you run the risk that any space you do create will be squandered. They relate to your strategy, your productivity and your mindset:
The Three Gateways are designed to set the psychological and practical conditions which allow you to begin creating space. First, you must set your overarching goal and formulate the strategy that will get you there; second, you need to reach a baseline of efficiency that will speed up and simplify all that you do; lastly you need to get into the right mindset and let go of any false and destructive assumptions.
You need to know where you are going, how and why. This involves setting your personal strategy and sticking to it, unless you have good reason to change it. Your personal strategy is your opportunity to identify and commit to the things that require your focus. Discarding the things that don’t helps you create the space you need to develop. It consists of three elements:
This seems elementary, but if you don’t know where you are going how on earth will you end up there? Nonetheless, it is amazing to me how few people actually have clear, specific, articulated goals. Exactly what are you trying to achieve and by when? You need to be ruthless. Don’t have too many goals, or ones that are ambiguous or shifting. Make a decision and stick with it.
Once you have your goals, you need to draw up a plan of how to get there. What resources are necessary? What are your key stages or mileposts? Even when people do have clear goals, I find that many fall down at this stage. They don’t turn their vision and hope into something tangible – a roadmap of getting from here to there.
The third key element of setting your strategy is reflection. As you make progress, be open to how things are unfolding – what you think about it, and what you feel. Ask yourself, is this what I expected? What I wanted? Do I need to adjust things? Radically think again? Setting aside ring-fenced time to do this reflection is vital, otherwise other things will crowd it out and your goal will slip further and further out of your consciousness.
As well as setting your strategy and goals – and sticking to them – you need to make sure that you are working as productively and efficiently as possible. It doesn’t make sense to apply what you’ve learnt from this book to create more space, if inefficient ways of working then eat up that space. Here are summaries of the four key areas which we have covered in different places throughout the book:
Make sure you are getting enough rest. It is the foundation to having the energy – both physical and mental – to do everything that you want to do in your waking hours.
Sleep is linked to the body’s circadian rhythms, as are our energy cycles throughout the day. Make sure that you are tuned into your own rhythms, and, to the best extent possible, organise your working day around these. Be tough about this and set firm boundaries with your boss and colleagues.
Whenever you can, devote yourself to discrete pieces of work in a disciplined way. Try and minimise switching from one task to another and avoid distractions like social media.
Have a clear plan of what you are doing when and why, and a way of tracking your work and regularly reviewing it. Delegate wherever possible.
If you address these four personal productivity areas – sleep, daily rhythm, multi-tasking and ‘to-do’ organisation – you will work more productively. Without having to do anything else, you will free up more time and space to work on your priorities.
Once you have a sense of your big goal and personal strategy, and are committed to it, it’s time to adopt what I call the ‘space mindset’. The need for this – and how to achieve it – is discussed throughout the book. At the end of this section, I itemise the five central points it is vital to hold in mind as you begin to try and create more space in the ways we have looked at.
First, though, we need to step back and think a little about what ‘mindset’ really is. You will see it is closely linked to the idea of core pathogenic beliefs that features in most of the twelve stories. Another way of describing it is as your ‘psychic space’ or ‘inner world’.
In his talk ‘The Concept of a Healthy Individual’ (1967) the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said:
The life of a healthy individual is characterised by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure … it includes the idea of tingling life and the magic of intimacy. All these things go together and add up to a sense of feeling real and of being, and of the experiences feeding back into the personal psychical reality, enriching it and giving it scope. The consequence is that the healthy person’s inner world is related to the outer or actual world and yet is personal and capable of an aliveness of its own.
By ‘inner world’ Winnicott means the world that exists inside our minds, as opposed to the ‘external world’. It is comprised of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, memories and fantasies, and is sometimes referred to as the internal world or internal reality. Some of it is conscious, some unconscious. In his book Dream-Life (1984) Donald Meltzer wrote of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein that she had: ‘… made a discovery that created a revolutionary addition to the model-of-the-mind, namely that we do not live in one world, but in two – that we live also in an internal world which is as real a place of life as the outside world.’
This internal world is not just our private thoughts and daydreams. It is a very powerful construct that is influenced by the external world, but also, in many ways, influences how we see it. This is summed up by the recurring line in Lars Saabye Christensen’s 2004 novel The Half Brother: ‘It doesn’t matter what you see, but what you think you see.’ We all know someone who thinks the world is out to get them, or someone else who believes that things always work out for the best. Behind such differences of outlook lies a whole mindset, which sets the stage for our intra-psychic and interpersonal relations. In the same way that a set provides the backdrop for a movie’s action, transforming the blank soundstage into a frightening gothic cityscape or a sun-filled village square. The same characters could walk into each scene, but we will experience them very differently within each, even before they say or do anything. For most of us, thankfully, the architecture of our inner world lies somewhere in between dark foreboding or naive optimism.
An image from the famous Rorschach or ‘ink-blot’ test
It is an insight into our inner worlds that psychological tests like the famous ‘ink-blot’ or Rorschach test are designed to discover. When you gaze at the mysterious shape and say what comes to mind, you are projecting your inner world onto something which is actually open to an infinite number of descriptions.
When I was being trained to administer this test I gave it to two women. One saw a series of horrific images: witches with machine guns, gushing blood, dead animals and monsters. The other, looking at exactly the same image, saw clowns throwing flowers, butterflies and playful children. Both were high functioning, successful and intelligent women. Later, when I was walking with the first woman, we saw a cardboard box lying on the pavement beside an empty car with its passenger door swung open. ‘Look, someone is stealing everything out of that car,’ she exclaimed. To me and to most people, and certainly to the second woman, that’s not how it would have appeared – it looked like someone was loading or unloading the car. The first woman’s inner world coloured her perception of events fundamentally, in a way that I am sure is echoed throughout all her experiences and personal relationships.
These are simple examples to illustrate my point. Our internal worlds are full of complexity and contradiction. Indeed, psychoanalysis believes that the most influential parts of our inner worlds are not even known to us, except by derivatives e.g. the consequences they wreak on our lives. It is the unconscious aspects of our psychic structure that compel us to do things we don’t understand, such as attempt relationships with the wrong people, engage in self-destructive behaviour, fail to live up to our best intentions. We think that some of the things we do don’t make sense, given what we know of ourselves; but to our internal, unconscious world there is method to the madness.
By increasing our self-awareness, either through coaching or therapy, or by following some of the ideas set out in books like this, some of that miasma may dissipate. In the words of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (2004), ‘we might be better able to know what we think about what we think.’
Philosophers and psychologists have debated endlessly how these internal worlds come to be. Are they genetically determined; formed in the first few months of interaction between mother and child; or the result of the more drawn-out experiences of childhood, adolescence and adult development? Common sense suggests that our characters, and the ‘internal worlds’ that underpin them, are a result of a complex interaction of all three, and, although there are still purists and evangelicals for each of the three theories, that is the consensus that holds today.
The importance of the concept of the ‘inner world’ is that it elevates what we might mistakenly think of as ‘mere’ thoughts and beliefs into a sort of permanent, solid psychic structure, which, like the external world, will be resistant to change.
D. W. Winnicott describes ‘potential space’ as a place where inner and external realities mix, and where one can explore new ways of seeing and being. This place, on the fringe of our imagination, is where great artists roam, but it is also where the simplest of children’s games reside. ‘Grown-ups’ in ‘grown-up’ jobs are rarely able to let themselves float away from ‘reality’ into that nether world. But it is where truly great breakthroughs come from. Thus our task becomes one of ridding ourselves of the everyday and the prosaic (for a while at least) and practising being in that ‘potential space’ of ambiguity, wonder and creativity.
Take the example of thinking more strategically or innovatively. If your mind is full of insistent bits of tactical detail, how will you have the clear space to come up with anything truly transformative or profound? That requires a broad, initially empty canvas, which you begin filling after reading, thinking, conversation, but that might require a long time of apparently fruitless pondering before you suddenly have your Eureka moment. If you are endlessly consumed by smaller thoughts and tasks, you will never create the space to have your big idea – and then make it happen.
So how can we break this down and start to build a psychic space or inner world for ourselves that frees us up to reach our potential? I believe that such a mindset comprises five interlocking assumptions or beliefs, which I present below, alongside their opposing assumption/belief. It is important to note that these beliefs are not necessarily fully conscious, you may not have really considered them before, or at least with such clarity.
| SPACE MINDSET | CREATING SPACE vs DEVOURING SPACE | OPPOSITE OF SPACE MINDSET |
| Yes, I’m sticking to my ruthless goals |  |
No, I have to do this instead or as well |
| Yes, this can be ‘good enough’ | |
No, it has to be perfect |
| Yes, that can wait | |
No, it must be done now |
| Yes, it’s OK to get things wrong | |
No, I cannot make any mistakes |
| Yes, I have faith in myself | |
No, I am crippled by self-doubt |
Getting into the ‘Space Mindset’ means consciously dragging yourself to the left-hand side of these polarities. There will always be occasional exceptions – sometimes things do have to be perfect and sometimes they have to be done right now. But the demands of the modern workplace and our own ingrained habits all too often make these ‘exceptional’ demands the norm.
Each and every time you consider a task, step back (create space) and ask yourself is this really an exception? Do I have to step out of the space mindset? Doing so requires a really compelling reason and should happen rarely. Very rarely.
1. Yes, I’m sticking to my ruthless goals
This is the first element of the space mindset and it underpins all the others. The importance of creating the right goals, and sticking to them was explained in Chapter 7. Obviously a major part of this is learning the ability to say no. Some people are more temperamentally disposed to do this than others, but we must all, politely yet firmly, be able to say no if saying yes would take us out of the space mindset. I find that explaining your reasons can work wonders, even to bosses. ‘I’m sorry, I can see you want me to do that but right now I have set a firm priority of X and I really need to stick to that.’
2. Yes, this can be ‘good enough’
The opposite of this mindset is being a perfectionist. Sometimes, of course, perfection is vital. You might be a brain surgeon, or a jeweller cutting a diamond for the Queen’s crown. But for most of us in most situations good enough should be just that – good enough. D.W. Winnicott coined the phrase in the context of the ‘good enough’ mother in an attempt to allay the anxieties of mothers who think they have to be perfect. On the contrary, he argued, trying to be perfect (or even being so) would be bad for the baby. The developing child needs a mother who is good enough and who will make mistakes. The child learns to tolerate these mistakes and will eventually come to rely on and fend for itself.
In business, this mindset was best summed up by a Steve Jobs quote, ‘real artists ship’. This was a dig at certain artistic types who spend so long tinkering with their work that they rarely finish it. He was also claiming that, despite being a very pragmatic, commercial guy, he too was an artist. In other words, he was saying don’t wait for it to be perfect – beautiful, yes, but not perfect. Get it out of the door and deliver (or ship) it into the shops. What today’s tech world calls an MPV, or Minimum Viable Product.
3. Yes, that can wait
A close cousin to the need to say no, this is about putting off things that you can’t say no to until the time is right for you. Again, some people find this easier than others but we all have to practise it. Sometimes, when my PA tells me that a client needs something ‘right now’, I respond ‘Tell them I can get it to them the day after tomorrow, and if that’s a problem they can call me on my mobile.’ Nine times out of ten they never call, because it wasn’t really that urgent.
4. Yes, it’s OK to get things wrong
The close cousin to the mistaken belief ‘I must do it perfectly’ is the belief that ‘I’m not allowed to make mistakes’, which is just as limiting. The fact is everyone makes mistakes, and it is in the crucible of making mistakes that we can develop best, as in the Samuel Beckett line ‘fail better’. On joining one company I was told that the culture was one where it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. Again, within obvious constraints, that’s a great corporate culture to have. From my experience, the great cost of resisting anything that might end up being a mistake is that you grievously constrain what you might attempt, and therefore the learning that flows from success – and failure. To draw from Steve Jobs once more – anyone remember the Apple Lisa? Thought not. One of his many ‘mistakes’, which included the belief that people would never want phones bigger than the original iPhone, ‘no one’s going to buy … a phone you can’t get your hand around,’ he declared. A mistake of his that Apple has corrected, I am glad to say (as an avid user of an iPhone plus). None of that makes Steve Jobs a failure, and neither does making mistakes make you one.
5. Yes, I have faith in myself
This underlies the other beliefs, but is also important in other contexts too. In order to make the call that ‘this is good enough’ and to tolerate making mistakes, you need to have an underlying faith in yourself. This is one of the clearest dividing lines between the people I see in psychotherapy and the people I see in executive coaching. In the former people’s self-confidence and self-esteem is often shot to pieces, usually by something that’s happened to them recently but more often by a difficult childhood, the traumatic consequences of which are triggered by something happening to them as an adult. The business people I see generally wouldn’t get to the levels they are at without a strong sense of self-confidence. It may wax and wane, it may be enshrined in quite a lot of reflection and self-doubt but, at their core, it will be there. If you feel that you don’t have enough faith in yourself to make the calls that this book is constantly urging you to make, then take a look at your underlying levels of self-esteem. Seeing a therapist could help, or you could try working through Patrick Fanning and Matthew McKay’s book Self-Esteem. You can also find a short e-book, Break Free From Your Past, at www.derekdraper.net, which lots of people have used to great effect.
These, then, are the five rules of the ‘Space Mindset’. Every day, until it’s sunk in, go back to the chart and remind yourself to stay on the left-hand side. That way you help create the space you need. If you find yourself on the right-hand side, be brutal about asking yourself why – and do your utmost to move back.