Mind Pump

Today I met a psychologist as we spent a day in an interesting improvisational plastic space together.

She wasn't an animal. She was a nice articulate normal person. Scandinavian yes. But nobody is perfect.

The line between medicine and care and improv and psychology is a line that I have walked for more years than I care to revisit.

So during a couple of drinks after sharing a seven hour workshop, I proffered an easy, interested and unchallenging question related to her work. Work in which she uses a fusion of various kinds of  therapies (don't we all?). 

The question was basically this.

Had you know you're doing good?

How do you know you're getting results?

How do you know you're making a difference?

I was expecting a gentle reply from a similarly minded individual that I'd share the day with.

What I got was a despairing, unexpected and quite rapid... Fuck off. 

(Women as aren't as polite as you read about in the Austin books).

I have to say I wasn't expecting it.

I wasn't looking to push her buttons.

I wasn't looking to score points. That's not my thing.

This was a quite despairing retort, despairing from her and despairing to me, from somebody who has a lot more time to spend on these things. I was looking to learn from her but she didn't even have an answer to the simplest of questions. 

She didn't really mean me as an individual to fuck off. (Although she didn't soften it as much as I would have liked).

What I think she was referring to was that she seemed to have been charged with giving some over-managers the sort of results I'd inadvertently been asking for.

So, spotting this,  I reassured her.

I'm not looking for checklists.

I'm just looking for a certainty inside. In your heart. So you know you've made a difference to someone'e life over whatever time frame you have say six months or a year.

But of course, I qualified, I don't mean the sort of faux-certainty that everybody gets when they think they're brilliant at their job. I softened it further by referring to myself and how I might pat myself on the back for an intervention which I thought changed everything but in the medium term may have changed nothing.

I went on and expanded but I won't bore you with that.

I was just asking her about an answer to a question that troubled me.

But the fact is it clearly didn't trouble her as much as it troubled me.

That's the problem with being paid regardless of whether you get anybody better or not.

Keep your gob shut. Get annoyed at the parameters. Criticise the checklists. 

And don't work them out for themselves so that when a friendly person comes along and asks you about your internal answers, well... you ain't got game.

Over the next seven or so minutes, 2 words appeared repeatedly. They didn't sound so much like an answer as an excuse.

"It's difficult".

I know it's difficult but I accept the concept of "it's difficult" as a challenge, as a question.

Not as an answer.

And certainly not as a solution.