The paper which describes the experiment I ran with Kai Pata at Tallinn University during the Erasmus joint course about Ecology of Narratives was finally published in Cognitive Philology. The course is detailedly described in  a wikiversity page. The entire experience was monitored in a wordpress weblog intended as an aggregator of individual experiences. Here’s the abstract of the paper mixed with a couple of slideshare files we set up so as to present our work around.

A Design-based research tested a Hybrid Ecosystem emerging from collaborative storytelling supported by geo-locative technologies and Social Networking Services. We assumed that such Hybrid Ecosystem emerges when people experience a given environment through their own sensory-motor system while processing related locative media. We found that individual and collaborative activity in a hybrid ecosystem could be described on the basis of the swarming concept from biology.

Topics and themes seem to emerge, to be narrated and spread on the basis of unplanned, not concerted, polygenetic activity. Interaction basically leads to the emergence of behavioral patterns which immediately develop into mutated forms. As soon as a topic or a theme spread among the community, individual participants start differentiating their unique point of view on it, eventually comparing it with the one of some peers, so as to team up on the basis of affinity.

Literal references emerging from storytelling in hybrid ecosystems outscore metaphorical by far. Rather, comparison is definitely very active as a processing strategy whereas proper metaphors and generalizations emerge on a very limited basis. It looks like individual participants evaluate the collaborative streaming of narrative references as a series of individual, standalone events which are meaningful in themselves, not because the combination of them make it possible to grasp a general meaning.

A more careful assessment of data is very likely needed, but we can already conclude that narratives which emerge in hybrid ecosystems supported by locative technologies and Social Networking Services define the borders of participatory and collaborative story formats which reshape human presence in the environment while redefining the very concept of storytelling. We look forward to develop other design experiments so as to test our claims on embodiment of narratives and hybrid ecologies based on new very intriguing applications such as Layar, Wikitude and other similar ones which implement the very concept of augmented reality.

In just a few days we’ll have a resolution double-whammy. Not just a new year, but a new decade. Seems like a perfect time to be jotting down those resolutions (or publishing them online), right? Making resolutions is one thing…but what about keeping them? What can social psychology tell us that will help increase the odds that this time next year we’ll be proud of ourselves for the changes we’ve made?

In a recent study Lally et al. found that it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a new habit to become automatic. While 254 days of gym trips and healthier eating may seem daunting, there’s small comfort in their finding that missing one day did not seem to influence the habit formation process. Weidemann et al. found that action-planning and coping-planning also affect behavior change, particularly in behaviors related to health. Additionally, developing an action plan early on and preparing mentally for the obstacles you may confront as you try to keep your goal (coping-planning, further explained here) can also help you keep your goal.

So,

• stick with your resolution for the long haul
• don’t beat yourself up too much if you miss a day
• develop a plan to help you reach your goal or keep your resolution
• mentally imagine yourself overcoming any obstacles
• and, while you’re at it, tell your friends, since that seems to help too!

(2009) Lally et al. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world

(2009) Wiedemann et al. How planning facilitates behaviour change: Additive and interactive effects of a randomized controlled trial

(2005) Sniehotta et al. Action planning and coping planning for long-term lifestyle change: theory and assessment

(2009) Burkeman. This column will change your life, The Guardian

I made this entry on my personal blog, so have just placed a link to it from here.  I think it is really relevant to how our learners might behave during our MoLeNET project and quite possibly other projects too.

In the November 15, 2009 NY Times, David Segal quoted famed forecaster, Paul Saffo of Stanford University, “It’s been a tough decade for those of us in the future prediction business.”   He goes on to say “In the 90s we had all the indicators of the problems that were coming and in our complacency we did nothing.  The environment, terrorism, financial markets.”   In a recent interview with NYT reporter John Markoff entitled “embracing uncertainty,” Saffo describes himself as a forecaster who looks at future possibilities in a cone of uncertainty projected out from the present.  He suggests that everyone should be forecasting for themselves – not just depending on some proclaimed experts. 

Saffo’s democratic charge for all of us to “forecast,” or consider a realm of possible shifts, rings true.  So many other parts of reading the Sunday Times reinforce the sense of despondency, overwhelming, almost insurmountable challenges that leave us as individuals and in organizations feeling paralyzed.     In leading or participating in a scenario planning exercises though, leaders and teams seem to find some catharsis through the dialogue about those key uncertainties that might most affect them.  That process allows for healthy debate, and encourages different views of how things may play out.  More importantly, it so often suggests potential actions – protective actions and opportunistic ones – to take some control or at least some advantage of the volatility.  This clarity of action channels the energy of anxiety into a common force forward.

Good to see Martyn & Danny today, when they came down to Birkenhead for a working lunch… (quite decent food – we were having an Asian theme today)

We mulled over the finer points of our WiFi cloud installations (due to begin the week of November 30th), our choice of vendor for server hardware, and the VM Ware & provisioning, etc.  We’ve also decided to leave the testing of mobile devices to Danny, who will then bring his recommendations back to the group for final purchase decisions.

I talked the group through what I had learned from the MoLeNET Research days and the implications of changing our research questions (as agreed at the MoLeNET research training days).  We are now going to alter the emphasis away from ‘devices’ and more towards research into the potential large-scale replication of this project.

RQ1. Can learner-owned mobile technology and thin client applications be used effectively to promote learning experiences and achievement?

RQ2. Can the thin.clusion project model provide a platform to support accelerated institutional change?

So, we are off and running with our purchases 

Now I’ve got to organise the learner participation and consent forms.

I’ve just attended 2 days of intense MoLeNET Action Research ‘training’ in Manchester. Both days were really informative and very worthwhile. I guess that most peoples’ view of research is that of collating immense sets of dull data – not at all! I think this MoLeNET project will be very exciting and productive – I really hope that the research and project reports will reflect this.

Our training mainly focused on the LSN definition of Action Research, their preferred methods of researching, and how and when they would like our reports presented to them.  Our training was facilitated by Carol Savill-Smith and Rebecca Douch, with Lesley Dee outlining the fundamental principles of Action Research.

It was a good opportunity to look at and re-design our research questions, etc.

I also feel that it was a great opportunity to meet other researchers and learn a little about their projects.

Here’s a flavor of the areas we touched upon during the 2 days:

• What is research?
• What is is action research?
• Action research in practice
• The role of the Lead Practitioner Researcher
• Ethical principles and learner consent
• LSN’s research activities
• The action research cycle
• action planning format – a basis for negotiation
• review the research questions submitted in the tender documentation.
• classification of the advantages and disadvantages of different research methods

I’ve now got a stack of ‘homework’ to keep me busy, this side of Christmas – before our technogy deployment in January!! Consent Forms, Interviews, questionnaires to design…

Abstract Music performance is characterized by complex cross-modal interactions, offering a remarkable window into training-induced long-term plasticity and multimodal integration processes. Previous research with pianists has shown that playing a musical score is affected by the concurrent presentation of musical tones. We investigated the nature of this audio-motor coupling by evaluating how congruent and incongruent cross-modal auditory cues affect motor performance at different time intervals. We found facilitation if a congruent sound preceded motor planning with a large Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA −300 and −200 ms), whereas we observed interference when an incongruent sound was presented with shorter SOAs (−200, −100 and 0 ms). Interference and facilitation, instead of developing through time as opposite effects of the same mechanism, showed dissociable time-courses suggesting their derivation from distinct processes. It seems that the motor preparation induced by the auditory cue has different consequences on motor performance according to the congruency with the future motor state the system is planning and the degree of asynchrony between the motor act and the sound presentation. The temporal dissociation we found contributes to the understanding of how perception meets action in the context of audio-motor integration.

from Experimental Brain Research

For many years, in manager training sessions which covered how to utilize your employee survey results, I always suggested to managers that they decide on which two or three issues were the most important and take action on that limited number. No more than two or three, not a long list of tasks, a long list that would almost certainly ensure that nothing would actually get done. Keep the list small, keep the list manageable. Everyone’s plate is already full and piling on to-do’s would simply become overwhelming. I am re-evaluating that advice, but my evaluation is not about whether managers should have a longer list of action items, but rather should the short list be even shorter.

While it may sound odd after spending so much time and energy on planning for an employee survey, collecting the data, analyzing it every which way and reporting it back, but I am beginning to feel that the best advice on what to do with it, in today’s environment is to pick “The One Thing” that rises to the top, that the management team feels will make a substantial difference and to go out and make a difference on it.

When you examine norm data and look at who are the top performers on a particular issue, which companies score most strongly for instance on customer focus, innovation, timeliness, cooperation, etc. or more broadly on Message, Performance enablement (against message) and Future related issues you find a somewhat different list of top performing organizations. Meaning that the list of top performers is a changing list, depending on which item you are looking at. It appears that a widely admired company for instance will not be the top performer across the board necessarily, but rather will excel in some areas, and be more average in others.

I would argue that no company has the time, energy or resources to simply come out and say that “we will be the best in the world on everything”, I would further argue that the logic doesn’t make sense. By definition resources are a limited commodity. No one has infinite money, people or time. Further there are relatively few cases where two companies exist in exactly the same market niche. In fact much time, money and people’s effort are spent in figuring out how to differentiate one’s products from the competition (both the products sold to your customers and the employee value proposition sold to your employees). Organizations need to choose which areas will be most critical to success in their niche. Will it be to become the most innovative, having the leading edge product to market before the competition, or to be the most responsive or to be the most value for the money spent etc? Sometimes these choices are somewhat contradictory. For instance if you are going to be the organization that provides the most value, stretching the consumer’s dollar, it can be difficult to be the most innovative, as innovation often carries a price tag as would concepts like being the highest quality or most responsive.

Companies that try to be all things end up having a confused Message that will hurt their performance, with changing directions and priorities the norm internally and customers seeing and experiencing inconsistencies. No one knows what the organization really stands for, including the organization.

Managers who are examining their employee survey results and require themselves to pick “The One Thing” are in essence defining what is important for their organization to stand for. What is the one thing that if done better than anyone else will enable the organization to succeed?

There is another aspect to “The One Thing” that is important and that is you can’t hide from it. When managers have picked 2-3 issues to tackle from their employee survey results they invariably go after “the low hanging fruit”, the easy fixes. While that is all well and good, sometimes after going after the fruit, they never quite get around to tacking the tough issues, the thorns higher up on the branch. Later on they can point to progress made in some areas, after all we got the low hangers, but the real challenges are still the real challenges, those thorns are still as sharp as ever. If managers pick “The One Thing”, when evaluating their progress they either did it or they did not, period.

The challenge is to pick “The One Thing” that has the potential for the greatest across the board impact, and that is where initial effort needs to focus. Which thing is the thread that if pulled will impact all the other threads that make up the organizational tapestry? Where do you concentrate? As you begin to think this through you rapidly come to the realization that picking “The One Thing” does not necessarily lead to any less work or effort to be expended in responding to survey results, it leads to a more focused, a more concentrated effort. In order to successfully accomplish “The One Thing” it is very likely that multiple other things need to be addressed as subtasks as well.  

Should an organization pick one standard thing, driven from the top so that everyone is working the same issue or should local managers pick the one that is critical to them at their level? I believe that Sr. Managers should pick “The One Thing” that is critical at their level and they should champion it. They should be held responsible for getting it done and for driving it through the organization. Other managers within the organization should be picking their one thing, which is in support of the top level one thing, within their control, if the organization is to have a concentrated effort in responding to the survey results and actually make a difference on an identified critical dimension. I believe that there are some nuances that will come into play here depending on where an organization resides across the board on some issues, but in general that is the concept.

“The One Thing” can be scary. It is much easier to pick a whole host of issues, knowing that if you do a bit of everything you will likely touch on the ones that are really important to your organization, but you will touch on them in a lukewarm, less focused way. If you are looking for maximal organizational improvement impact “The One Thing”, while likely the most challenging, has the most potential to deliver.

In working with organizations over the last 25 years, both in the private and public sector, I have discovered that almost all of them have some sort of strategic plan. Maybe it’s a formal plan that is documented, or maybe it’s a plan in the head of the CEO, but in many cases that plan stays out of reach of the people who really need to know what the plan is – the operating managers of the organization. Time and time again I meet the cry from the operational managers that they have no idea what it is that they are meant to be doing other than achieving their short-term targets.

The organizational plans are kept ‘under-wraps’ so that only the boss and a select bunch of senior managers know where the organization is going and what it is supposed to be achieving. Strategic Plans are kept in the boss’s bottom drawer and not brought out until its time to revisit the plan again because of some calamitous occurrence that means that the plan is no longer valid.

All too often, top teams announce the organizational targets, but do not allow the systematic planning process that is needed to achieve these high level plans. Managers below the top team are expected to just ‘get on with it’ and achieve the specified outputs. Activities prevail over the achievement of the specified outcomes and frequent changes in direction and emphasis are the result. In the end very little actually happens, other than managers and staff becoming increasing frustrated with a lack of clear direction.

Progressive organizations have ‘living plans’, plans that are cascaded down through the organization’s management levels so that all the people who need to make the plans happen know what it is that they are accountable for achieving; when they have to produce their outputs; and where they are going in the longer term. They have long-term perspective of their business unit’s place in the organization, not just a 3 or 6 month window that looks at the financial targets that are set for the organization.

Every year an organization and its managers should be reviewing the organization’s strategy in the light of the environmental analysis that is conducted on an on-going basis, and every year managers should be setting their annual goals and objectives based on the new strategic plan that is set by the top team. A systematic process of Goal Cascading, Key Result Area (KRA) or Output Area identification should take place where Divisional Managers identify their accountabilities and how they will be measured through the use of Key Performance Indicators and then ensure that the Business Unit Heads below them take their Strategic Business Unit Outputs and translate them into corresponding and supporting Goals, Objectives, KRAs and KPIs for their level all the way down to the teams that actually perform the work.

For any organization there is a systematic best practice process that should be undertaken to ensure that what is planned at a strategic level actually happens. That process is:

1. Identify the Strategic Goals or Strategic Outputs of the organization to which the Strategic Business Units can contribute and identify the specific outcomes or outputs that it must produce in the shorter term to make that contribution.
2. Set the measures by which its contribution will be measured.
3. Allocate specific output areas and their measurement to the Business Units that form that Strategic Business Unit.
4. Align outputs through cross SBU negotiation across the total organization to ensure no under- or over-lap occurs.
5. Set Action Plans containing clear Performance Objectives for the SBUs and their senior managers against which performance can be assessed
6. Repeat the process for each Business Unit (BU) so that each has its outputs clearly assigned and managers and specialists within that BU also have their outputs and measurements specified with Performance Objectives and Action Plans.
7. Implement the plans and control and monitor performance.

It all sounds so simple, yet very few organizations go through this process and then they wonder why their people are confused and fail to achieve their targets. They miss critical elements – like aligning outputs across SBUs or BUs and formalizing Action Plans and setting ‘way-points’ to measure progress towards the successful achievement of the outcomes. They fail to ensure that the people who have to do the work are aware of the organizational priorities and how what they are doing fits in with what others are doing.

The most important task that a manager can do is planning, yet most managers moan about how inconvenient it is to spend time on it. Don’t fall into that trap. Invest your time in planning from the top to the bottom of the organization and make the rest of your work-life easier as a result.

For further details on Management Planning for the Public and Private sectors follow the link http://www.scsasiapacific.com/en/managementplanning

Contact me at: alanbarker@scsasiapacific.com

Read almost any textbook on Appreciative Inquiry and you will find a frustrating vagueness about what to actually do in the Design stage. This stage, which follows on from the Discovery of what is already working well, and the Dream about how the organisation could be at its best, is generally agreed to be about designing the “organisational architecture” – the new systems, groupings and information flows which will make it possible to have more ‘peak experiences’.

But how to go about it? The advice is generally to keep the Dream in mind, think about what systems etc will be needed, and then devise one or more “Provocative Propositions” – inspirational, stretching, present-tense statements which describe the organisation at its best, and give people something to live up to.

Actually doing this in practice, especially in a whole-organisation “AI summit” where there is limited time and most of the participants are not trained AI practitioners, is challenging. Particularly as if taken literally, the textbooks would have you come down one or two levels of detail from the big-picture vision described in the Dream stage to the nuts and bolts of systems design – and then soar up again to the realms of metaphor to craft your provocative proposition!

Here’s an alternative that we have been playing with – I expect there are other AI practitioners that do something similar already, but you wouldn’t know it from the published books on AI that I’m aware of. I’m talking specifically about how to set up the Design stage in the AI summit format – whether this is for a Positive Engagement event for the whole of an organisation and its stakeholders, or for a small teambuilding away day.

1. Possibility Statements

After the creative expression of the Dream (as a collage, presentation, living sculpture or whatever – people can get very creative), ask the participants to craft a “possibility statement” (an alternative and I think more user-friendly name for “provocative proposition” – you can call it whatever will best convey what it’s for and will best fit the organisational culture). Here are the criteria that we used for a recent event for the fine social enterprise and recruitment consultancy Vedas in Burnley, UK:

To me, it makes sense to craft Provocative Propositions right after the Dream – people are still inspired, and the Propositions are at a similar big-picture level of abstraction to the Dream vision. The Propositions can then act as a bridge into the more detailed work of the Design stage, as participants collaborate in designing what has to be in place to make the various elements of the Dream actually happen.

2. Using “Fishbone Analysis” in the Design stage

Usually, fishbone analysis or “Ishikawa diagrams” are used to find the root cause of problems – as in this illustration from Wikipedia.org:

Please restrain your horror at the use of the word “problem”, because we are going to use it for pretty much the opposite – an inclusive process to find the route to the Dream.

For each table of 4-8 people in the AI summit, we give them a blank fishbone diagram on a sheet of flipchart paper. In the ‘head’ of the diagram, they write the part of the Dream that they want to bring into reality.

In the boxes at the end of each ’spine’ of the fishbone, they write an area for which action needs to be taken to make the Dream happen. You can leave this up to the participants, or you can give them preprinted ‘classic’ Fishbone categories like: Equipment, Process, People, Materials, Environment, and Management.

Along each spine of the fishbone, participants place post-it notes with the actions that have to be taken, or the things that have to be in place, to make that area support the Dream goal. Our tip is to use a different colour post-it for each area, and use small notes so there’s enough room for them on the diagram. The process will go faster if smaller groups of participants take an area or two each – but make sure everyone gets to see the end results for each area, to make sure nothing is missed.

The beauty of this process is that it’s inclusive – everyone gets to contribute – and it’s fast. A team can rough out what’s needed in a very short time.

3. Turning the fishbone into an action plan

At this point the design elements have been identified, but dependencies have not, and the elements will probably not be in time order. To turn the fishbones into plans, we stick several sheets of flipchart paper to a wall, and establish a series of horizontal lines – one for each area on the ’spines’ of the fishbone.

Participants can then transfer the sticky note for each element they have identified onto a timeline, in the order dictated by any dependencies that they identify between the design elements. When the timeline for each Dream component is laid out, it’s easy for participants to see dependencies between the different timelines too, and adjust the placing of the individual actions accordingly.

Timescales and milestones can be added later, probably by a smaller team with responsibility making the goals happen.

I hope that’s given you some ideas – if you use them, or something similar, please share your experiences by leaving a comment.

Wired Wessex sponsored an event by Tony Treacy on Blogging for Business on Thursday 28th May. Social Media is exploding and Tony’s right there, giving us advice via econsultants.it.

It is not too early now make a wish list of what you want this year-end. After all, how often do you make a wish list and later find it never really happened? If your answer is “Yes” then perhaps this time, you can make the change.

• Have you ever wonder what you wished for hardly happen?

• Is there something that you wish to achieve but due to some reasons, you gave up pursuing?

• How far will you go to achieve your life goal or dreams?

“All I want is…” is designed specially to help ordinary individuals to achieve their life goals and dreams. Through multi-sensory approach in goal setting and action planning, participants will learn to gain clarify, new commitment and ownership of their goals. The practical approach of these three workshops will be a life transforming experience for you.

Topics covered:

• Understanding where you are operating from in life
• Discovering where you are currently at in life
• Expanding your goals using D.A.T.E model
• Recognising the support that is around you

Date: 27 – 28 June / 11 – 12 July 2009
Time: 9.00 am – 5.00pm
Venue: Hotel RE!
Fee: S$850
Closing Dates: 12 June / 30 June 2009

For more info, visit http://www.growplanserve.com/

For enquiries, kindly contact KyLynn Teo at 9663 9992

I’m taking a little break in writing about action planning. My goals are more or less staying the same right now and I’m probably more focused on dealing with the stress at home than working on new goals.

Please feel free to post your own action planning or goals post.

Do Not Steal

Just 10 Winchester is into it’s 3rd week already, and again J John put across an uncompromising message in a humourous way! He’s not getting at us, he’s joining us in the daily challenge to live according to God’s laws within a contemporary living space.

J John opened his challenge that stealing tends to smart small (often in the workplace), but tends to get bigger.

Ron Heather: Bus Driver
The interview this week was with Ron Heather, the bus driver from Southampton who risked losing his job in refusing to drive a bus with the Athiest poster “There’s probably no God: Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life”, as he felt it was against his conscience (see what Theos thought). He knew his customers well, many were elderly, he felt this message wasn’t appropriate – and he was more worried about upsetting God than upsetting his bosses! The ensuing fuss gave him many opportunities for conversations with his supportive colleagues!

The Yorkshire Sketch
Every week this “elderly couple” from “Yorkshire” find interesting ways to break the commandment… this week the reasoning is that if there was a 2-for-1 offer on last week, but not this week, the shop wouldn’t mind if he bought one/pocketed the other!!! Hmmm…

Back to J John
J. John bounced back onto the stage, but opens on a sombre note… many of us have been casualties of theft (J John has had his coat stolen whilst he was preaching in the past!), and financial crime in the UK costs £29 billion per annum (and he wasn’t talking about MPs expenses!), with over a million reported burglaries every year. How many of you still have the Gideon New Testament give to you at school? The Gideons give away 20 million Bibles a year, of which they are pleased to say 22,000 are stolen every year!

Define Stealing: “Taking something which belongs to someone else”… and there are so many different ways to describe this in the English language that it’s clearly a big problem! God is against dishonesty and demands fairness in everyday work:

• Don’t cheat/swindle when buying/selling
• Avoid false advertising (e.g. “Ideal DIY opportunity” = needs complete overhaul)
• Don’t quote for unnecessary jobs (if it’s going to just need a small part, just quote on that!)

The Inland Revenue estimate that £5000million per annum is lost in undeclared taxes/monies, with many justifying it on the basis that the government “takes too much and wastes what they have”, but “if your ship ever comes in, the IR will be there to help unload it!”

Employers/Employees
Employers: Don’t cheat your employees; don’t take advantage; teach people what is right & fair’ don’t manipulate.

Employees: Obey, not only when their eye is upon you, but when they are not looking. Why is it that the majority of sick days are on Friday/Monday?!

A large cause of inflation is these (seemingly minor, but mounting) costs, which are then passed onto the consumer.

What is the 8th commandment?

“You shall not steal” not “You shall not steal more than £1 at a time” (or borrow something without any intention of returning it).

What is the biggest item of theft?

TIME: “How little can I do for how much?”. J John spent a summer trying to cut grass in slow motion whilst taking endless tea breaks for an employer who kept telling him to “slow down”! I guess this is where there needs to be trust between employer (that the employee will do the work) and the employee (who has to trust that the employer won’t take advantage, expecting him/her to work at a high pace all the time if they’ve managed it once!)

Do for others what you would like them to do for you: how do we apply this to life?

1. By working
   Work leads to profit, talk leads to poverty (not necessarily talking about waged work)
   Too many people are keen to move the piano stool when there’s a piano to be moved
   Most people are keen to avoid hard work and would rather ‘pick the lock’
   The only place in which success comes before work is in the dictionary.
   Don’t count the days, make the days count.
2. By saving
   Good planning & hard work lead to prosperity (not that he was peddling the ‘prosperity gospel’ or at least I hope not!); hasty short cuts lead to poverty (Jesus commended the wise investor).
   Each of J John’s children were provided with 3 money tins: “Spend” “Save” “Give”
3. By praying
   God loves to give gifts, even more so when we ask him.

Generosity & Guilt
The Earth and everything in it belond to God, we only have it on loan: God loves us into change, he doesn’t beat us into change!

What do we do with guilt?

• Deny it?
• Deflect it?
• Drown it? (with drink/drugs/experiences)
• NO: Dissolve it in the blood of Jesus.

Tithing
Always a sticky subject, some think the church is only out for our money! Do we cheat God in our offerings? Do we think that God is happy with the occasional 50p that we give him, the Bible clearly states 10% (joyfully given in the expectation that God will provide).

When J John became a Christian aged 17, he decided to take back a couple of books he’d stolen froma book shop. The Director asked him for an explanation and asked if he realised that he could call the Police… and was then surprised when the owner told him he was “free to go”… felt totally liberated!

The Amnesty Bins
Next week, J John is wheeling out the Amnesty Bins. He set a challenge that if we’ve stolen something we return it to its rightful owners in the coming week… and if that is not possible, then what we stole (or its equivalent value) can be placed in the amnesty bins on the way out (what is given is either thrown as rubbish, returned to original owners if accompanied by an ‘anon’ note, given to charity shops, or given to homeless shelters – not a single penny taken in admin!). The first time he did this one man placed £102,000 cash in the bins, another week, a man took his shirt off on the way out!

Let’s Get Practical: Have you ever:

• Made an over-inflated/false insurance claim?
• Called in sick when you weren’t?
• Taken office supplies?
• Used expenses for personal use?
• Defrauded on your income tax
• Left a debt unpaid
• Borrowed books without returning
• Taken hotel bathrobes (he’s always surprised by how many of these he gets!)
• Copies of software?
• Have you stolen from God?

Have you felt violated by theft?
You need to forgive those who have stolen from you:

Forgive & Forget, not Remember and Regret!

Be Transformed, Not Informed
The purpose of Just 10 is not to listen/be informed, but to subject yourself “to the Lord’s searchlight”, and reach out for forgiveness, and so be transformed! Will you?

J John says “tell your story“.

Greetings and Salutations. How is everyone this week?

I find myself at kind of a crossroads. My eating and exercise goals, while not perfect, are at a sort of background place. It doesn’t mean they can’t be improved upon or there’s nothing to work on, particularly that ol’ mindful eating thing (as I type and eat dinner), but it does mean that I’m not feeling really focused on new changes at the moment.

Maintaining change is important too, I suppose. Also, fine tuning changes such as I still am kind of lazy on non-rehab days. I am dealing with extra stress with Mom right now and probably I need to just stay with keeping up with the changes I’ve made for a little while.

Diabetes goals – well, I’m off insulin well before my predicted date of the end of May. I started having hard to deal with lows, particularly after exercise. So, I stopped insulin last week and my fasting and postprandial numbers have stayed nicely steady – in fact I don’t see much of a difference at all, including those pesky lows after exercise.

When “low” is in the low-70s, I have never particularly worried about fast acting sugars. Generally, anything I eat will bring my sugar back up to a more reasonable for me range. That strategy no longer works. It takes extra time for the food to get through the pouch so I can continue falling for some time after eating. I’ve bought some hard candy to keep in the car and am trying that for the time being. I suppose if I continue to have issues I’ll buy some juice boxes. Does anyone know how those fair in a hot car in the summer? They won’t do me a lot of good if they go rancid out there.

So how are you guys in your goals? I know Eve was feeling pretty down and frustrated last week. What can we do to give you a lift? How is TDW? You’ve been making good progress. Are you still getting out more? How’s the new exercise machine working out?

Good morning! How is everyone today? Ready for working hard on goals?

Me either.

It’s been fairly chaotic around here, or at least it feels that way. With increased stress comes increased desire to eat and decreased ability to resist impulses. So, my additional goal for this week is to implement different coping mechanisms when I feel the impulse to overeat. I have some good success with that until late night, as usual, so that is where most of my energy will be focused.

Rehab and my diet in general are going well. Interestingly, I need to add more fat back into my food plan and that’s hard to do now that I’m accustomed to the plan. Turns out I’m getting around half the fat that the program recommends (which is just fascinating!) and that could be part of some digestive issues. Fats can help you feel full longer so that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.

I’m making progress in rehab and am being active at least two other days most weeks. I want to be more consistent in activity on non-rehab days.

Oh, and of course there’s still the mindful eating issue. I think it’s important but apparently it’s not something I’m willing to focus on right now. I’m still trying to pay more attention to sensations when I’m eating certain things but not doing the mindful eating thing overall. That’s okay for now. One step at a time.

And an update on my diabetes goals, my fasting sugars are in the 90s and I’m taking 6u of levemir at night. I think I’ll be through with the insulin by the end of May at the latest. I’m taking so little probably I could stop right now but I’d rather keep stepping it down.

And I was doing so well!

This weekend was really chaotic here at Chez Zaz. Mom has been having a lot of problems including hallucinating on the medication they gave her for pain. So, it’s been high stress around here. My eating goal exploded on Saturday – I really need some new coping skills. It’s curious, too, that I was seriously physically hungry. I suppose the mind finds a way to get what it wants.

Otherwise, exercise and eating are going pretty well. I lost 3 pounds this week after having been stuck for several weeks. My blood sugar is going down further with my diet being a little more strict and I’m continuing to reduce the insulin. I’d like to get off of it entirely as it can lead to weight gain or, apparently, less weight loss. Besides, I got up at 65 the other morning. So, with Dr. Endo’s permission I’m continuing to step it down. Now only on 8 units at night, surely that will disappear soon.

How have you two been doing? It was good to see Eve back but sorry there is so much stress going on at your house. I haven’t had a chance to talk with TDW much lately. How are you doing?