Category: Uncategorised

As I did last year, I will attempt to write a blogpost a day for the 12 days of Christmas; except this time I will pick a new topic each day. This is the blogpost for the fourth day of Christmas 20/21.

One of the things I have always struggled with is feeling good enough, and I feel this creeping up on me at the moment. The feeling of not being good enough or not worthy, combined with the need of getting confirmation from others that I am.

I know it would be better for me, if I could give myself the feeling of being good enough and not need others to give it.

I truly deeply believe that a person is worthy just by being. They don’t need to do anything to be worthy. Who we are is always good enough, what we do may not be.

And yet I struggle to see that about myself.

I used to not feel good enough at all and thought that only by doing things would I be worthy. That I needed to be smart and get good grades and help people and go good work and all those things; then maybe I would be worthy, and people would like me if I did things for them. And I needed them to like me to be good enough.

I have come to a point, where sometimes I am grounded, and I know that I am worthy, and I know that I do good things and help people. I know that I am liked and appreciated. Not by all, and that is okay, because I don’t want to change myself to be liked. When I am there, I am confident and have quite a presence.

And then there are all the doubting times, where I swing between feeling confident and grounded and full of doubt and not felling good enough. Swinging might not even be the right word as the states seem to co-exist: I can doubt myself and my worth, and at the same time be confident that I know what I am doing and wanting to be acknowledged for that.

This year I have been very isolated and worked remote like many people I know. This has made me doubt myself even more as I know I am good in a room, in live trainings, in one to one conversations, or being available and approachable, but these spaces do not exist anymore. Many of my good coaching conversations happen when people see me at the coffee machine or my seat and say “do you have a minute?”; not having those spaces have made me seriously doubt all that I do, and if I can even help anyone while being online and remote.

Same with conferences and workshops. Many of the great things about speaking happens after the talk itself, in the corridor, in the bar or anywhere that people meet and talk and listen. Without that, what are my talks worth?

I can see that I can still help people ; not to the same extend and not as often as the serendipity of meeting spontanously have vanished. I can help by being honest and talking about how things are hard for me as well; I can help by listening to people and being kind to them, confirming to them that they are okay as I need to feel that I am okay. I can give that to others and not to myself.

It still means that I have regressed to needing more approval and recognition from the outside. I feel that I need to do something for people so they still like me, so that I am still worthy. Logically I knew that it is enough to just be me also to be liked; that I am liked by many for who I am, without having to do anything.

Emotionally I do not know. I feel a bit like that kid who was dreaming of someone getting a heart attack in the bus, so I could use my first-aid skills, save that person and finally be liked. That girl is still inside. Even as I write these posts, there is a part of me hoping that someone will be helped by them, so that I will be liked.

It is a vicious cycle wanting to be liked, feeling the need to be liked, and getting annoyed at myself for needed to be liked to feel good enough. So I need even more to be liked, because I cannot give myself that worth, and then I thnk less of me for needing it. And the circle goes on and on…

Sometimes I give into it and I ask for good messages for me on twitter; either by directly saying that I need it or more often by saying that I feel down. And I get massive support from amazing people – thank you 🙂

I see these moments of doubts more when I am resting, because I am not good enough, giving enough, doing enough. I need to learn that it is also true for me that I am good enough because I am. That all I need is being. And I need to feel it

Today my friend Lena asked “What can you do to feel that you are valuable just because you are?”. That is a question I still need to answer for myself and that I will pass on to you.

Remember that who you are is always good enough, what you do may not be.

What can you do to feel that you are valuable just because you are?
What helps you feel aware of your selfworth?

Blogpost for the first day of Christmas 20/21: Time for reflection
Blogpost for the second day of Christmas 20/21: Unicorns
Blogpost for the third day of Christmas 20/21: Raining again
Blogpost for the fifth day of Christmas 20/21: Gratefulness
Blogpost for the sixth day of Christmas 20/21: Having people in my space
Blogpost for the seventh day of Christmas 20/21: Family
Blogpost for the eight day of Christmas 20/21: Uninspiration
Blogpost for the ninth day of Christmas 20/21: Fear (and courage?)
Blogpost for the tenth day of Christmas 20/21: Jumping in puddles
Blogpost for the eleventh day of Christmas 20/21: The choice is yours
Blogpost for the twelfth day of Christmas 20/21: Anticipation

As I did last year, I will attempt to write a blogpost a day for the 12 days of Christmas; except this time I will pick a new topic each day. This is the blogpost for the third day of Christmas 20/21.

Today’s topic “Raining again” is inspired by Maiken 🙂

It is raining again today and storming as well, so the day is wet and cold and dark. When I woke up, I was sure that it was quite early, because it was still so dark inside, and yet it was half past nine.

When we have these days, it is easy to get annoyed about the weather and the things that we cannot do because of it. Or maybe rather that we do not feel like doing because of it… Taking run or a nice slow walk..

Or we get annoyed about the darkness and long for the light.

All of this is quite understandable and normally not a problem. Except that sometimes we get caught in that web of only seeing the darkness and the things that it prevents us from doing. Then it becomes a problem because it clouds our minds until we may miss out on the light, when it is there.

So what can we do instead?

We can take the opportunity to go out in it anyway, get cold and wet and feel alive. Go home, get a warm shower and take a nice warm beverage 🙂

We can light candles or lamps creating that light which nature does not provide today. If you have a light therapy lamp, maybe you can sit with it a bit longer. If you don’t have one, I totally recommend getting one.

Cuddle up under a nice blanket with a good book; not because it is cold, but because it is cosy and nice. Or if we have loved ones in our house, we can play boardgames, talk or just be together.

Make the day a slow day and take our time to be in that moment instead of always doing the next thing or looking ahead.

For more than a decade I have practiced finding the silver lining in every situations. The first years it was awfully hard as I did not have the habit, but it got better and better, and now I can do it most days. Though the isolation this year has made it harder again.

What do you do to find the light on a dark day?

Blogpost for the first day of Christmas 20/21: Time for reflection
Blogpost for the second day of Christmas 20/21: Unicorns
Blogpost for the fourth day of Christmas 20/21: Being or doing
Blogpost for the fifth day of Christmas 20/21: Gratefulness
Blogpost for the sixth day of Christmas 20/21: Having people in my space
Blogpost for the seventh day of Christmas 20/21: Family
Blogpost for the eight day of Christmas 20/21: Uninspiration
Blogpost for the ninth day of Christmas 20/21: Fear (and courage?)
Blogpost for the tenth day of Christmas 20/21: Jumping in puddles
Blogpost for the eleventh day of Christmas 20/21: The choice is yours
Blogpost for the twelfth day of Christmas 20/21: Anticipation

Sorry for the post in Danish, but it seemed the most appropiate to do in this case.

Den korte version:
Nej sexuelle krænkelser er ikke bare småting.
Vi har endeligt fået startet metoo-debatten ordentligt i Danmark og vi har muligheden for at lave tingene om.

Den lange version:
Nej sexuelle krænkelser er ikke bare småting.

Jeg var overrasket over, at der ikke skete mere i Danmark 2017, da metoo kom frem. For mig at se kom der små pip her og der, men langt det meste endte med at der kom lidt tøhø over det, der skete, men ikke megen konsekvens. Nå ja Ålen klapper folk bagi og presser folk til nøgenhed a la “du vil jo gerne være med i hulen, Mulle”, men det er da bare lidt værkstedshumor og bare for sjov.

Som jeg husker det, nåede vi ikke engang til at diskutere sexisme, kun chikanen (som er slem nok i sig selv).

Nu begynder sagerne at komme ud – de pibler nærmest ud af alle huller. Lad os få sagerne på bordet om sexchikane og sexisme (både mod mænd og kvinder) og lad os så begynde at gøre noget ved det.

Jeg har forsøgt at holde min mund på trods af mange post, som jeg har været uenige med.
Som at kvinderne bare er curlingbørn og skal tage sig sammen – det er jo ikke en rigtig krænkelse at blive taget på låret, når man ikke ønsker det.
Eller at det er synd for mændene, at ting kommer frem i offentligheden.
Eller at kvinder skal sige navnet for ellers mistænkes alle, eller at de ikke skal sige navnet for så dømmes folk uden sag.
Eller generelt have fokus på hvad kvinderne skulle have gjort eller ikke gjort.
Eller som Pia Kjærsgård, der taler om tilgivelse. Faktisk blev Frank Jensen jo tilgivet for sin slikken på halsen under fest i 2011 – men det stoppede ham ikke!
Eller, at det ikke handler om kultur, men er enkeltsager.

Ja, der er værre sager og værre overgreb end klap på låret og slik på halsen, og dem skal vi også gøre noget ved. Vi skal gøre noget ved det hele for det hele er overgreb især når den, der gør det har magt over den, som det sker for. Hvis nogen rører ved dig uden, at du ønsker det, så er det et overgreb.

Ja det ville være rart, hvis alle bare sagde fra. Det ville være endnu bedre, hvis de ikke behøvede at sige fra. Eller hvis omgivelserne også sagde fra.
Ja det er irriterende, at der er så meget fokus på krænkelserne – men det er bare fordi vi ikke har talt om dem før!!

Ja enkeltindivider er ansvarlige for deres handlinger. Og den kultur, der har hersket og stadigt hersker mange steder gør, at de har syntes, at de her handlinger har været okay. Som Frank Jensen siger “jeg er jo et varmt menneske”.

Det kan godt være, at de sager vi ser i offentligheden nu skulle være bragt frem tidligere, men det blev de ikke. Vi ved ikke hvorfor, men en grund kan være frygten for konsekvensen for den, der anmelder tingene såsom at blive fyret.

Det er bemærkelsesværdigt, at når en sag kommer frem om en person, så kommer der flere til fordi der nu er flere, der tør stå frem. Jeg har set det samme ske i internt i virksomheder, hvor folk nu står frem fordi de finder ud af, at de ikke er den eneste. Fordi de nu kan se, at de ikke selv har gjort noget galt.

Jeg har selv haft en stalker, og det tog meget arbejde for mig at se, at det ikke var mig, der var skyld i, at han stalkede mig, overvågede min lejlighed og satte hjerter i opgangen. Det krævede både psykologbehandling, og en leder, der sagde “Der er 800 mænd på denne arbejdsplads, og 1, der ikke kan finde ud af, at du bare er venlig. Du er ikke problemet“.

…Og ti år efter, da jeg så ham i biografen, dukkede angsten op igen. Jeg var endda heldig, at der ikke skete noget fysisk.

Da jeg blev gramset på brysterne af en fremmed på et diskotek pandede jeg ham en, men det er ikke alle der reagerer sådan.

Det triste er, at for hver af de her sager er der masser af sager, vi ikke hører. Masser af folk, der ikke tør stå frem, fordi de frygter konsekvensen. Vi ser bare toppen af isbjerget og der er rigtigt meget under overfladen. Hvis man får opbygget tilliden og lytter, så kommer historierne, men det er svært at vide hvem man kan stole på.

Vi har brug for en ordentlig kultur på vores arbejdspladser, vores foreninger, vores liv.
Kultur er ikke bare de fine ord vi taler om og de ting vi siger højt. Kultur er summen af vores handlinger – og de handlinger vi accepterer, som når vi ikke griber ind, når vi ser noget er galt. Det er jo bare værkstedshumør, for sjov, en flirt…. Nej det er det ikke altid. Nogle gange er det truende.

Kultur er også det der accepteres, som i dette tilfælde at mænd truer og bruger magt og ikke kan styre sine hænder – og at det dysses ned eller ikke kommer frem.
Jeg er enig i at folk er personligt ansvarlige, men hvis ingen siger fra i omgivelserne, så bliver de ikke nødt til at tage det her ansvar.

Jeg er sjældent enig med Reimer Bo, men jeg er meget enig i denne artikel: Det er ikke kun ofrene, der skal sige fra. Det er alle os andre. Og tør vi det?

Så et interessant interview med Ritt Bjerregård, der sagde, at sådan har det altid været. At man hurtigt lærte hvem man skulle holde afstand til, men at de til gengæld ikke overvejede at det var noget, der kunne ændres.
Vi gamle har levet med, at sådan var det, og sådan gjorde mænd. Det gjaldt om at vide, hvem der var ude på noget, og hvornår man skulle holde sig for sig selv. Men vi anså det ikke for muligt, at det var noget, vi kunne lave om på, siger hun.“

Det er noget, der kan ændres, men det kræver mere end at kvinder siger fra.
Det handler om magt og at vi har tilladt den magt at blive brugt forkert (og ikke kun i politik). At det er magt kan man også se på at omkring halvdelen af sexchikanesager i HK anmeldes af mænd.

Vi har nu muligheden for at lave det om!!!!

Vi kan starte med at få tingene frem i lyset og behandle enkeltsager, men vi bliver nødt til at tage næste skridt.

Vi bliver nødt til at tage diskussion om hvad det er i vores kultur, der gør, at vi har accepteret de her ting. Der gør, at folk tror, at det er okay at begå de her overgreb, og at ofrene tror, at det ikke er okay at tale om. Det, der gør, at ofrene ikke siger fra, men i stedet tænker “hvad har jeg gjort forkert?”. Det, der gør, at teenagepiger taler om hvornår de fik deres første dickpic og ikke om de har fået et.

Der er mange mange flere ting der er en del af puslespillet

Og det kommer til at gøre ondt at lave om på tingene. Vi bliver nødt til at se indad, vi bliver nødt til at erkende vores ansvar, og vi bliver nødt til at ændre ting. Men det er den eneste mulighed vi har.

Hvis vi ikke gør noget, hvem gør så?

On the 13th of May I did a talk online. This post is about the talk, some questions, and resources that came out of it. If you want to read about the thougths and emotions before and after the talk, there will be another post later.

You can see the talk here.

The forum was Agile Testing Days US, the topic was “Psychological safety and mental health in times of crisis” and the idea was to start out with a talk and leave plenty of time for questions.

Despite having a lot of time for questions, I did not make it through all, so the first thing I will do in this post is to answer the remaining ones:

Answers to remaining questions

What is the first step to bring the topic of Psychological safety to the team that is never heard of this?
I find that a good first step is to start talking about it. Maybe say “I heard about something called psychological safety in a webinar and found it really interesting, let’s have a talk about it?”.
In general, I think this is a good way of introducing many things. Sometimes people tend to come home with fresh ideas and want to change a lot of things and the rest of the team can feel defensive. A way to mitigate that is just talk about it, and why you found this interesting. The why is essential no matter what we do.
If they then show interest, you can consider showing them Amy Edmonson’s TEDx talk; I find that is a good introduction.

Any suggestions on ways to support colleges that you know are struggling during this time? 
Show people that you care; tell them that if they need to talk, you are willing to listen. If it feels aqward to have tell them that, you can choose to just invite them for a remote coffee 1-1. A lot of the things we can see and do in the office are hard to do remote, but I find that it still works to have small conversations over coffee.
Maybe introduce a “how are you?” question in the dailies so you start discussing things like that in the team. Maybe share if you are not feeling well; take that first step to vulnerability that helps other feel safer in showing theirs.
Genuinely care for people and ask how they are, what you can do to help.

So, if it’s okay to not say something or to not feel safe enough to say something, how do we deal with others trying to engage us when we choose not to speak up?
When I work with the right to pass or not to speak up in teams, it is an agreement. When I do it in workshop, these are rules that I state in the beginning.
The way I use it, people say “pass” if they have nothing they want to share. As a facilitator I remind people “it is okay to pass”. This works because we have an agreement.
If your team does not already have this agreement, you can do one of two things: you can have a proactive approach and bring it up with the team, so that you can add it to the team agreements. Or the reactive approach is to say “I prefer not to share”.

The hard part can be if you don’t have a place that is psychologically safe, then people might not respect this. So sadly, you cannot assume that this is the case. If your environment is unsafe it takes work to get to a point where not sharing is okay, and there may be a lot of other things that need to be in order first.

How to do you deal with psychological safety with people with mental issues? Not everybody has a good mental health.
I believe that psychological safety is just as relevant if you have a mental problem as if you don’t.
Those two are not connected. People with poor mental health will have some things they need to feel safe, just as people in good mental health will have some things they need. They may be the same or they may not. It is very individual.
Whenever you start working on psychological safety in an organization or a team, one of the things that needs to be found out is what makes that group feel safe. There are some general things that you can work on, and then the rest is individual. It requires building of trust and having those difficult and open conversations.

So many good questions and these were just then ones I did not have time for.

Tips and tricks from the audience

As I was focused on speaking and I knew that people from ATD was keeping an eye on it, I did not look at the chat during my talk. Afterwards I started reading it and was pleasantly surprised to see how many tips and tricks people shared with each other, so I decided to share some of them here as well:

Entertainment
* Jackbox Games
* Some Good News SGN

Make headspace
* Limit intake of news.
* Work in the garden and talk to frogs

Work tips
*Schedule meetings to 45 minutes instead of an hour. That gives everyone a breathing space in between meetings.
* Talk in the team and with team leader about personal limits
* Video or no video; limit number of meetings a day.
* Try apologising for working in people’s homes to help them get around the feeling of needing to apologise for their kids or pets being “noisy” etc.
* Allocate time for water cooler chats and everyone can join that meeting.
*Use happiness Histogram which helps turn the mood/feeling into data and you can watch the trend over time to see where things triggered feelings or when you need to support people.

Misc
*To those interested in public speaking: read “Confessions of a public speaker” by Scott Berkun
* modernagile.org has good stuff  related to how psychological safety is a prerequisite to team success.

As you can see there were many good tips and tricks 🙂

Another thing that I noticed from the chat was how many people recognized what I was talking about and thereby felt less alone. Even if that is all that comes out of my talk, I consider it a success.

You are not alone; others feel this way too. Some feel different, and that is also okay.

Be kind to yourself and to others, and stay safe.

Way to often I hear people saying that retrospectives are useless, boring, take to long; ”Why spend an hour sitting in a circle and discussing, when we can do some coding instead?” ” It doesn’t make any difference anyway”, ”We take about the same stuff time after time after time” etc. etc.

My experience is that if this is your experience, your retrospective is not done right – do it right and get some value from it 🙂

It is very easy to have a meeting with no result; well maybe the team complain, they vent, or talk a bit and then back to work. Next week they come back and nothing changes.

If this is how your retrospective is, no wonder you don’t see the value of retrospectives. And that makes me sad.

You see: I love retrospectives 🙂

It is my favourite tool, no matter if we do agile, waterfall, or anything else. It is even valuable to use in our private lives.

Where else do we have the opportunity to take the step back and look at what we have done? The retrospective is where the team have the opportunity to dive into the process and look at things that work, and things that need to change. And not least: do something actively about it.

Abraham Lincoln said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”  and that is what a retrospective is about. Our axes in the IT world are our brains and our process. We need to stop up, so we can reflect and improve; sharpen our “axes”.

My experience is that if we don’t have a meeting to sharpen our axes, it rarely or never happens. We have really good intentions, but then everyday work happens.

The purpose of the retrospective is just that: to take the time to reflect. We look at what worked, what didn’t work for us, and which kind of experiments we want to try.

There are some bare minimums for a retro to be effective:

• There needs to be a structure
• You need to have focus on the process
• You need to leave with action points that you follow up on next retrospective.

It is not a meeting where you:

• Complain
  • Though venting can be helpful sometimes.
• Focus on who is to blame

So “how do I structure a good retrospective?” you may ask.

I am so glad you asked; just keep reading 🙂

How to run a good retrospective?

As I already say: I love retrospectives 🙂

And especially when working in an agile way.

A lot of people have heard me ask “What is the single most important thing in agile?” either in my talks or when I coach them.

The answer is of course: ”Inspect and adapt”.

Let’s jump right into it:

Make sure you book room and time in your calendars to have retrospectives, or it won’t happen. People have lots of good intentions about stopping and think about improvements in their daily life. Sadly my experience is that it almost never happens.

There are many other things that can help you make good retrospectives and many different aspects of having one. In this post, I will focus on process and structure.

There are some things that need to be there for a retrospective to be effective:

• Have focus on the process
• Structure the meeting
• End up with action points (and follow up next time you meet)

The Process

It is important that a retrospective focuses on the process. The purpose is to improve your process and learn from what happened from good things and problems.

It is very easy to forget this and to start discussing who is at fault. It is not about the person, it is about the process that you use.

I personally use the Prime Directive to set the stage from the beginning. It has been around for a long time and continues to provide value.

”Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” Norm Kerth

It is also important to focus on process when looking at action points at the end of the retrospective.

Structure and Action Points

No matter how I facilitate the retrospective, I almost always use a structure from the book “Agile Retrospectives” by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby

It is a really good structure:

1. Set the stage
2. Gather data
3. Generate insight
4. Decide what to do
5. Close the retrospective

Or put in other terms:

1. Getting ready to go.
   The most important is to ensure that everyone knows
   • What the topic of today is
   • What the time frame is that will be discussed
   • Any particular focus if it exists
   • Who is participating
   • What the status of the actions points from last time are
2. Looking at the information at hand.
   What happened since last time? It is important to be as objective as possible. Use whatever artefact that have been created, (in scrum it could be the burn down chart, in kanban a picture of the board every day, etc.); remember the good stuff as well 🙂
3. Learn from it.
   This stage is about finding the significance of the data, you have gathered. Do you see any patterns? Are some things connected? Are the things within your sphere of influence?
4. Choosing what to do until next time.
   Which experiments can you do to solve a problem, to make sure you keep doing good stuff, or just to try something new?
   Choose maximum 2-3 action points for next time. It is important that each action point is very concrete, and that there is an anchor-person for each point (this person is either the one doing the action, or the one reminding the team what they agreed on).
5. Last point is about getting ready to leave.
   Look at the retrospective;
   • Did it work?
   • Do you need to do something different next time?
   • Does everyone know what they agreed on?
   • Does everyone know what they need to do?

The picture below shows the structure. Perform the five steps, incorporate the new experiments, and after the iteration, you have a new retrospective.

And then what?

Other stuff that can add value:

• Have an external facilitator; it can be someone from the outside or someone from another team
• Make sure there is room for everyone to reflect and to speak
• Create safety for people to speak up
• Have different kinds of retrospectives
• Having different people in the retrospectives like other teams that  you work with.

If you follow the structure, have focus on the process, and create action points every time, you are well on your way.

There are plenty of tools out there that can be helpful in each step, and a lot of them are even available for free.

I also have really good experience with asking for help; many experienced facilitators, including myself, are willing to answer questions on twitter and email.

Good luck on improving your retrospectives – you can do it 🙂

I first wrote this blog post for QED in 2014 in Danish and then in English for Skills Matter in 2019

So it is the twelfth day of Christmas and time for my last post on hope.

It has been an interesting challenge and I am surprised that I was able to write 12 posts on hope as this is not a topic that I think about or talk about where often. Thanks Ed for the challenge.

So what are my hopes? That is a good question.

I hope that this will be the year, where I finally move properly to Stockholm.  I hope that I can find enough work here to live of it, so I don’t have to travel as much. I will still travel for conferences 🙂
I hope I will get better at selling my workshops. I hope that I will get better at having a balanced life and put resting into my daily routines. I hope I will find ways to gain energy.

I hope that my work and my conference talks will help people. I hope that leadership will start changing in more companies as we move towards leading people and not managing resources. I hope that more people will feel comfortable in their skin and know that they are okay just because of who they are. I hope that our workplaces will be more human and allow us to be humans. I hope that more people think about ethics in their work

I hope that the world will become a place of love, acceptance, respect, and tolerance. Where you can love who you want (provided there is consent and it is adults) – love is damn hard to find, so lets celebrate it. Where race and ethnicity are just another aspect of who we are, and not something that decides how we are treated. Where religion is people’s own business and we respect that.

Some of these hopes will be hard to fulfil, but not impossible. When I asked the people in my friend’s house “what do you think of when I say hope?”, the young man from day 3 said “hope creates opportunities” and that is so true.

When we have the hope, we also create opportunities for that hope to happen. We start looking for things that will help us, for signs that things are already happening, and we start taking steps towards these hopes. Maybe we even speak our hopes out loud. My friend Lena said yesterday that some of her good stuff only happened because she said her hopes out loud.

So with this last post on hope, I wish you well and that your hopes come true.

You are perfect with all your imperfections and you can do so much more than you think ❤️

• Blog post for the first day of Christmas: There is still hope
• Blog post for the second day of Christmas: Who is hope for?
• Blog post for the third day of Christmas: Sharing hope
• Blog post for the fourth day of Christmas: Is there room for hope?
• Blog post for the fifth day of Christmas: Removing hope
• Blog post for the sixth day of Christmas: Sacrifice and hope
• Blog post for the seventh day of Christmas: Helping hope along
• Blog post for the eight day of Christmas: A new hope
• Blog post for the ninth day of Christmas: The sound of hope
• Blog post for the tenth day of Christmas: Running out of hope
• Blog post for the eleventh day of Christmas: Creating a space for hope

Eleventh day of Christmas and second to last blog on hope.
I felt really frustrated yesterday as I was pulling a blank on topics. I have struggled a bit the other days, but as soon as I found a headline, the words would just flow out of my hands…

The topic of today was suggested by my friend Arlene; we are both in a slack group, where one of our most important channels is called “Brag and appreciate”, so we can practice speaking up about the things that we do. Another is “Whining and ranting” where we can vent and get support, when we feel down. Each serves it’s own purpose 🙂

Yesterday when I was frustrated about my lack of inspiration, Arlene said, “…you holding a safe space gives hope.” and referred to one of the times, where I shared a story in the brag channel a while ago.

The story was about one of my 1-1 conversations. When I start up with a new team, I always start out with a 1-1 conversation with each team member; the main purpose is to create connection, so they feel comfortable with me – that enables me to help them better. I ask them about their background and what they think I can do for them and for the team – and that is the basically it. They can ask me whatever they want, and then we see where it goes. These conversations have lasted between 10 minutes and three hours over the course of the 4-5 years I have been doing them. The majority are short, and then sometimes there is much to be said… Or maybe the thing is that there is much to be heard. Some continue with 1-1s while I work with the team, and other just have the one. And both is good.

The brag was about how baffled I still become, when people, I have just met, show immense trust and tell me quite personal and sensitive stuff. This was after a quite emotional and sensitive talk.

The thing is that I listen and care. That is mainly what I do. It does not sound like much, but it is to some people. They may rarely have someone, who gives them their full attention and just listen to them. At least my experience is that when I listen, people speak. I hold a space, where the person can safely talk even about things that are uncomfortable.

I had to ponder a bit about how that gives hope; I guess it is because people find that space, where they are okay, where they can talk about anything, where they can be.  And when they are listened to, they see hope. Hope that they can be helped, that they can help themselves – or just hope that everything will be okay. I am actually not sure, and I never considered that I created hope; in retrospect I do see the hope in people, when I create a space. Then it does not matter what kind of hope it is.

You may also create hope for people without knowing it.

• Blog post for the first day of Christmas: There is still hope
• Blog post for the second day of Christmas: Who is hope for?
• Blog post for the third day of Christmas: Sharing hope
• Blog post for the fourth day of Christmas: Is there room for hope?
• Blog post for the fifth day of Christmas: Removing hope
• Blog post for the sixth day of Christmas: Sacrifice and hope
• Blog post for the seventh day of Christmas: Helping hope along
• Blog post for the eight day of Christmas: A new hope
• Blog post for the ninth day of Christmas: The sound of hope
• Blog post for the tenth day of Christmas: Running out of hope
• Blog post for the twelfth day of Christmas: What are my hopes?