The last day of an outgoing Safety Manager was underway and he was taking me through the final pieces of his handover.
He asked me at the end, where do you go to give you some space and time to yourself? I looked at him weirdly and said what for? He looked at me and laughed. Follow me he said.
He took me down to an area I didn’t know existed, a little kitchenette attached to a rec room at a different camp than we were staying at. The instant coffee had effect but lacked taste, yet the Milo was overflowing (a guilty pleasure of mine). He sat down on the couch and closed his eyes, and started talking about everything but work. It was largely baseball as we were both avid fans of the major leagues. He opened up that this was his decompression space.
The first reflection was that this is unnecessary, and is the main reason why you have an office in the first place. Yet as I looked closer I could see the shift in his posture, the change in language and pace, being more present and open. Maybe there was something to this…
The first time I needed to get away from it and find some perspective was two months later after he left. I fought it for a while yet my internal stream of consciousness was all over the shop. I just couldn’t see the trees from the wood. As I drove the 5 minutes down to the room my voice of judgement had swung rapidly to the other pole, ‘this won’t work, you don’t need this, this is trying to escape the problem, you are running away… etc’. Couple that with the voice of concern ‘what happens if an emergency occurs, what would other people think if I’m caught, what if someone needs me… etc’ and it was a little full in my head.
As I got there and entered the door the past experience of the room came back to me and silenced my voice of judgement of concern. I replayed the conversation over in my head which was enough to centre me and let my mind be still enough to let an idea come (rather than force), to address the current predicament. It was then I realised the power an environment can have over your thought process, especially when coupled with a guided reframe of your own thoughts towards a memorable and meaningful event.
For those of you interested the strategy I came up with in the room came to me thinking about a sack fly. Baseball term for a hit to the outfield which causes you to be caught out yet advances or lets another runner score. I needed the reflection to identify that I needed to burn some personal capital for a person and idea and this strategy was the only way, by leading from the front that this was the most optimised course of action even when an outcome wasn’t assured.
Reframe my Safety Brain 