OED. an Update to OCD.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

“Oh man, you’re such an OCD…” such phrases are common and it’s usually with a grin and sometimes a little chuckle especially to those who have to align every single stationary on their desk or that magazine on the coffee table at the café.

But I think the phrase is wrongly used and it’s time to update it. OCD is a mental disorder, nothing laugh about.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions). These include unwanted thoughts or images of harming loved ones, persistent doubts that one has not locked doors or switched off electrical appliances, and intrusive thoughts of being contaminated, etc. OCD can significantly interfere with a person’s daily activities and social interactions.

In a recent mental health study (SMHS 2016) shows that one in 28 people suffer from OCD and more than three-quarters don’t seek any professional help. It’s a serious thing and I don’t think we should use the term loosely and it’s surely not a laughing matter.

I’ve for the longest time held to the belief that “if you are not at least a little OCD, then you don’t care enough” so I fully embrace my OCD in the professional sense. However every time after saying it, I feel it’s not absolutely accurate as what I’m trying to say is not actually a disorder or bad and instead it should be encouraged.

It’s inaccurate. It needs an update. Wrong use of OCD needs to be changed to OED.

Obsessive Excellence Desire (OED) is an attitude, virtue and outlook in life in which people have constant, unavoidable observations, irritations (obsessive) that make them feel things that aren’t done well needs, can and should be improved (excellence). This pursuit of intentional care and desire of betterment is done with the desire to improve. OED is not crippling and inefficient, but productive, effective and significantly improves the output quality of everything a person does on a regular basis.

So next time someone tells you “Oh man that’s OED…”, reply “Thanks Babe…”.

ps: yes, i’ve given a fair bit of thought on the acronym to make sure it rolls of the tongue easily.

Put everything you are into everything you do

Katelyn Ohashi is my current favourite Gymnast
Yoojung Lee is my current favourite Dancer
If I Ain’t Got You cover by Scary Pockets featuring Kenton Chen is my current favourite Cover
Remy Kouakou Kouame is my current favourite Lindy Hop Dancer

Oh my oh my… :) we LIVE for things like that. The fun… the FUN so evident that it shows in faces. The smiles, the joy, the laughter lol… all real, all 100% lit, all bringing us to our happy places synonymous with celebration and orgasms.

We all desire to feel this high, this adrenaline, this unspeakable place that we want to always be in. No judgement, no boundaries, no stress, no nothing that we don’t like and every every everything that we love. With the people that we like doing the things that we love!!!

How? How do we sustainability be in this state when the expectation and reality gap is so real. There is work to do, there are expectations to be met, there are responsibilities, there are challenges, there is REAL LIFE. WORK LIFE! BILLS!

At my age, I’ve managed to come across quite a lot of people from many nationalities, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. My conclusion is that we more or less all want the same thing. We want to love what we do with the majority of our time.

  • Some think being rich is the way to get there, so they pour their lives into their career and do what it takes to amass wealth for themselves.
  • Some think doing what they love is a personal indulgence, hence only pursue their passion in their free time or delay their desires to when they retire.
  • Some think their professional self and their personal self needs to be two seperate personas. A constant work life balance. The need to constantly balance the demands of the office and the home, the pay master and the self.

BOY OH BOY. Do I have news for you!

Best summarised by a mantra within our office “Put everything you are into everything you do”. Let me break it down.

“Put everything you are…”

Know who you are. What you like, your passions, your desires, your effortless self. The most comfortable version of yourself loving to do the things you like to do. The song you sing in the shower, the silly faces you do in the mirror, the lame jokes you tell your loved ones, the little funky celebration dance step in your home. WHEN are YOU most YOU? Now hold that thought… that YOU… NOW BRING IT!

“…into everything you do”

We all have the same amount of hours in a day and we all have many things to do. Work, Learn, Contribute, Family, Exercise, Eat, drink good Wine, Rest, Pray, Play, Party, Kiss and Make out and more… Is work the most important? Is family the most important?

That’s where I think most of us get tripped up. We separate our lives into these mutually exclusive bubbles and we try to balance work and life. We have these separate personas, with separate efforts, with different degree of who we truly are, we then try to play this tiring balancing game and we hate life.

Put everything you are into everything you do

Here is the good news buddy! There is only one YOU. There is only one NOW. There is only one HERE. So BRING that ONE YOU to the NOW, to the HERE! Put ALLLLLLL that YOUness of YOU into EVERY EVERY EVERY NOW HERE THING you do.

If you think like that, you will be like that and you will be you always always love every single second of life.

Managers: Nurture or Nature

Photo Credit: Nik MacMillan @ Unsplash

Managers. Where do they come from? Are some born managers? Or do managers just stumble into their roles and start managing people? If you are a manager and have a few people under your wings, when did YOU become a manager? And more importantly, do your staff view you as a good manager?

I personally don’t think we can assume people should automatically know how to be a good manager and yet expect them to be good at it while not providing them the training or indicating what the standard of being a “Good Manager” means. It is a common blind-spot in many organisations that I’ve come to interact with. In all fairness, if there is no expressed expectations of what a good manager means, managers don’t have a clear standard to take reference from and when things go south, we can’t say its “common sense” and that the manager under-performed. So if your organisation don’t have an official “How to be a Manager” type training and yet expects managers to be awesome, I think its time to start asking for such trainings.

Having worked for more than 20 years and interacted in different industries, I’ve seen my fair share of hardworking managers who don’t know basics. No fault of theirs sometimes I feel because they were not taught how to be a manager. It’s a blind spot, we all don’t know what we don’t know.

So let them get the training that they need to excel in their role. If I had to put a training session together, these are the kind of topics that come to my mind:

  1. Being a Good Example: punctuality, respecting other people’s time, having high standards, being a positive individual in the organisation, being a collaborative individual.
  2. Leadership: Nurturing yet being firm, Inspiring and motivating, earning respect, getting the most out of individuals.
  3. Collaboration: Instilling a collaborative environment across teams. How to manage cliques. How to manage rumours.
  4. Delegating: How and when to and not to delegate.
  5. Communicating: Clarity, Effectiveness, Objectivity, Wisdom, when to have face-to-face, when to have email trails.
  6. Counselling: Making time, managing personal issues, career discussions, how to be a friend yet a boss.
  7. Training & Career Planning: Identifying gaps and up-skilling individuals. Knowing where to find resources to make the team better. Knowing how to plan for the team.
  8. Lull Periods: What to do when team is having a lull period? Always-on side pet projects? How to always bring value to clients and the organisation.
  9. Discipline: When and how to scold people, when to give warning letter, when to get HR involved?
  10. Firing: How and when to fire, how to manage exits.

Some people read books to learn stuff like that at a personal level because they desire to be better managers, some others might not even be aware they are not a good manager and are unaware how bad they are.

We all need to make sure we have a strong / dependable / wise / exemplary tier of managers. If they are not, then they should not be a manger and we should not entrust any staff under their care as they would be jeopardising the career of the juniors. Further more, if managers don’t do their roles well, most of the time a mess will be created and the senior management level folks will have to be catapulted into the eye of the storm to sort-things-out when they should be spending their time charting the organisation’s way forward and bringing value to clients.

If you agree that before someone is made a manager and they should have some form of training to be a manager, then here are a few options:

  • Send for external courses – There are many such courses and also online courses.
  • Create an internal course – There is already alot of such materials online, so curate them and create a training module.
  • Compulsory Reading – Insist managers read a specific book and after that discuss with their immediate superior to show understanding of that material.

Its not too expensive or too time consuming for managers to get trained, but I know for sure its alot more expensive and time consuming if we don’t.