To break unhealthy patterns of thinking and acting, managers need to pay special attention to how they communicate, collaborate and get work done.

Vinita

Published in Code Like A Girl

Mar 20, 2024 (code.likeagirl.io)

All managers make mistakes. However, some mistakes are avoidable, costly to the business, and hinder the team’s development and growth.

Most managers are so busy playing catch-up—handling unexpected issues, filling calendars with meetings, and pacifying unhappy stakeholders—that they ignore harmful practices that harm their team’s productivity and performance.

These repeated mistakes can become habits—they start creeping into everything they say and do. However, unconscious habits like these are hard to detect and even more challenging to break. Once your brain learns how things must be done, it runs on autopilot and makes most of the decisions for you.

To break unhealthy patterns of thinking and acting, managers need to pay special attention to how they communicate, collaborate and get work done. In particular, they must pay attention to these five mistakes that other good managers don’t make:

Mistake 1: Delegate, then Abdicate

“If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.” — John C. Maxwell

Learning to delegate well is the most crucial part of a manager’s job, but doing it right is a big struggle.

When managers delegate work and leave their people struggling to figure out everything independently, lack of support at crucial moments leads to frustration, confusion, and helplessness and can even be demotivating.

“Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.”— Andy Groove

Good managers understand this very well — empowerment is not boundaryless freedom.

The big challenge here is knowing how much to be involved. If you are involved too much, you run the risk of micromanagement. If you are involved too little, you can miss those critical moments where your support or advice could have made a difference. The magic is in the balance.

To avoid making this mistake:

1. Set upfront expectations on the intermediate milestones.
2. Align on the frequency of updates. Discuss how and when you can touch base to keep things moving.
3. When your team faces challenges or setbacks, help them find their own solutions by asking questions instead of spoon-feeding solutions. Coach, don’t solve is the mantra. Ask relevant questions to develop their critical thinking skills.

Don’t be the manager who delegates and forgets. Be around to guide, support and be their force to help them stay resilient when faced with setbacks and challenges.

Mistake 2: Bottleneck decision-making

“Lead with context, not control. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.” — Reed Hastings

Managers who don’t trust their team to make their own decisions get involved in every decision — they think it’s part of their job.

Getting involved in every small detail, in every small problem, is no joke. It takes a lot of energy and often leads to decision fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout.

There’s another problem. Exhaustion from attending to surface-level problems leaves less mental space to think about complex issues. More time spent on small decisions leaves less time for crucial decisions — which is critical for business and organizational growth.

Reliant on their boss to do all the thinking for them, employees fail to think for themselves. Dependent on their boss for every small decision and every small action stagnates their growth — it slows them down, prevents them from developing critical thinking skills, and leaves them feeling uninspired and unmotivated.

“This conscious or unconscious internal response is incredibly expensive both for the organization and for the individual. Trying to build leaders by regularly exposing them to your brilliance guarantees a lack of development. You will not have allowed anyone around you to show up with solutions outside the reach of your own personal headlights. If your employees believe their job is to do what you tell them, you’re sunk.”— Susan Scott

Good managers don’t make this mistake. They build their employees’ confidence by enabling them to make their own decisions, thereby putting their knowledge and experience into practice.

Being empowered to make their own decisions also increases their motivation to do better because they feel accountable for their choices.

To avoid this mistake:

1. Shift from control to context.
2. Give clarity to your team on the decisions they can make independently from the ones that require your attention.

Don’t be the manager who thinks that your team will screw up if you aren’t involved in the decision-making process. Give them a chance to earn your trust.

Mistake 3: Dictate Solutions

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” — General George S. Patton

Yet, most managers do precisely the opposite.

They give their team the right opportunities but refuse to give them the autonomy that goes with it. They want things done and want them done their way, which frustrates their team members, especially the high performers.

Good managers don’t make this mistake.

They empower their team to find their own solutions by focusing on the results without laying down the specific steps needed to achieve them.

To avoid this mistake:

Show them the destination, but let them steer their ship. Share the “what” — the specific outcome that needs to be achieved. Support it with “why” — how it fits into the big picture and define what success looks like; what looks like a job well done. Knowing the “Why” of doing something is both motivating and inspiring. It opens the door to creativity and innovation.

Don’t let your ego or desire for perfectionism obstruct others from getting work done. Accept different approaches. Let your team know that some failure is acceptable, but that doesn’t permit them to be careless or lazy. Talk to them about what’s acceptable and what’s not. You can keep the bar high while leaving room for learning and growth.

“People often want autonomy over the four T’s “their task, their time, their technique, and their team…In an economy that demands nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities — as any artist or designer would agree. Autonomy over task has long been critical to their ability to create. And good leaders (as opposed to competent “managers”) understand this in their bones.” — Daniel Pink

Don’t be the manager who doesn’t let their team determine their own solutions. You aren’t being helpful; you’re simply being annoying.

Mistake 4: Fail to look beyond results

“The best bosses do more than charge up people, and recruit and breed energizers. They eliminate the negative, because even a few bad apples and destructive acts can undermine many good people and constructive acts.” — Robert Sutton

Many managers, though, ignore these bad apples when it comes to eliminating them, especially if these people are high performers who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work.

Tolerating their toxic behaviour—getting agitated when others make mistakes, expecting them to work at their pace, passing sarcastic remarks, challenging their intelligence, belittling their skills, or demeaning them when things don’t work out the way they expected—conveys the message that such behavior is acceptable and anybody can get away with it.

This can happen in two ways:

• Passive enabler: Passively enabling these behaviours by failing to notice them and staying ignorant of their effect on your team.
• Active enabler: You actively contribute to it by delaying action—waiting for more proof, ignoring the conflict, or worrying about losing them. You may also try to rationalize the situation by convincing yourself that things aren’t that bad after all or that they are too minor to be noticed.

“Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted than they are. In other words, these people are jerks. Many may think, “This guy is so brilliant, we can’t afford to lose him.” But it doesn’t matter how brilliant your jerk is. The cost of jerkiness to effective teamwork is too high. Jerks are likely to rip your organization apart from the inside.”— Reed Hastings

Focusing too much on results can also make you ignore poor performers in the team with the attitude that they don’t deserve your attention. But doing nothing about their poor performance is not harmless — it impacts morale in the team as others feel dragged down to make up for their slack and find lack of accountability as a sign that their manager doesn’t care about fairness or building excellence in the team.

Good managers don’t make this mistake. They know the overall damage to the team by tolerating bad behaviour or poor performance, which is highly expensive.

To avoid this mistake:

1. Don’t delay difficult conversations — especially when it involves toxic behaviour or poor performance. It will only get worse and won’t disappear on its own.
2. Be careful about the words you choose. Emotionally charged words can trigger negative emotions and put them on the defensive.
3. Share your observations, discuss the impact and invite them to devise a solution.
4. Leave the feedback with clear expectations on the desired changes, timeline and repercussions of not taking the feedback seriously.

Don’t be the manager who only cares about results. You can build an excellent team without compromising on your team’s well-being.

Mistake 5: Offer too much protection

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.” — Cal Newport

Work environments can be brutal, especially when people lack respect for others’ time and productivity. Too many meetings, conflicting requests, and information overload can damage a team’s productivity. Without an opportunity to focus for long durations without interruptions, employees can’t produce quality work.

Interruptions are destructive to productivity. The more a manager can absorb trivial and unnecessary disruption, the better work their team can produce.

It’s natural for good managers in such environments to act as shields for their people—protecting them from being overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them, and keeping them away from anything that might distract them from doing their work.

However, what starts as healthy protection can often turn into toxic behaviour that destroys a team’s growth. Managers who don’t know where to draw the line tend to go overboard.

By not knowing how to separate healthy interactions from unhealthy ones:

1. They block their people from getting the necessary exposure.
2. Their team may acquire technical excellence but need to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution or delegation.
3. They create strict team boundaries with a “my team” vs “your team” attitude by treating their team’s goals as primary and everything else as secondary. This breaks down the collaboration necessary to achieve common goals.

Good managers don’t make this mistake. Instead of trying to over-protect their teams from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, they coach them to manage their time well.

To avoid this mistake:

1. Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like.
2. Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.
3. Encourage them to go beyond team boundaries to learn about other teams and functions.
4. Tell them to make decisions aligned with the more significant interest of the organization and not just their teams.

Don’t be the manager who acts as a gatekeeper — spending more and more time shielding people while spending less on doing work that will move your team forward.

Summary

1. Managers can’t do it alone. They need their team to fulfill goals and achieve business targets. Effective delegation helps them achieve that. However, many managers go wrong when they delegate without providing the necessary support to their team to do well in their jobs. Delegate, then follow through. Don’t leave your people struggling by expecting them to figure everything out independently.
2. Managers who like to be involved in every decision don’t help their teams make better decisions; they make them worse. Being involved in every small detail, issue, and problem bottlenecks decision-making and prevents their team from developing the critical thinking skills required to learn, grow, and do well at work.
3. It is critical to provide the team with specific goals and outcomes they need to achieve. However, some managers take this too far by not only defining what must be done but also dictating how to achieve those results. Not letting your team determine their own solutions limits their ability to learn, adapt, and course-correct if necessary.
4. It’s important for a manager to be outcome-oriented, but not at the cost of their team’s mental health and well-being. Toxic high performers and poor performers can have a huge negative impact on the performance and productivity of the entire team. Don’t ignore them and let the problem spiral out of control.
5. Trying to protect your team from unnecessary time-wasting activities or other distractions at work is a good thought process. But it can’t be achieved by acting as a shield for your team. Taken too far, this protection can prevent them from getting the right information and building the right skills. Instead, coach them to manage their own time well.

Follow me here and on LinkedIn for more stories. This story was originally published at https://www.techtello.com.

Written by Vinita

·Writer for Code Like A Girl

Author: Books on Mindset, Imposter Syndrome. Scaling products ￫ Scaling thinking (⊙_⊙) Former AVP Engineering, Swiggy. I write about work, progress and success.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded defeat on Sunday in the country’s local elections, saying the vote was a “turning point” for his party after two decades in power.

Issued on: 31/03/2024 – 07:35Modified: 01/04/2024 – France24.com

By :NEWS WIRES

Partial results from across the nation of 85 million people showed major advances for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) at the expense of Erdogan‘s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Istanbul‘s mayor, the opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu, claimed re-election with nearly all ballot boxes opened, telling a euphoric crowd of supporters: “Tomorrow is a new spring day for our country.”

Final results are expected to be released on Monday by the country’s electoral commission.

Erdogan, 70, had launched an all-out personal campaign to win back Istanbul, the economic powerhouse where he was once mayor. Rampant inflation and an economic crisis have, however, hit confidence in the ruling party.

Large crowds filled the square outside the opposition party’s Istanbul city headquarters waving Turkish flags and lighting torches to celebrate the result.

After casting his vote, Imamoglu emerged to applause and chants of “Everything will be fine”, the slogan he used when he first took the city hall from the AKP in 2019.

The 52-year-old is increasingly seen as the biggest rival to Erdogan’s AKP ahead of the next presidential election in 2028.

In Ankara, mayor Mansur Yavas — also of the CHP — claimed victory in front of large crowds of supporters, declaring “the elections are over, we will continue to serve Ankara”.

“Those who have been ignored have sent a clear message to those who rule this country,” he added.

Yavas led with 58.6 percent of the vote to 33.5 percent for his AKP opponent, with 46.4 percent of ballot boxes opened.

Opposition supporters celebrated victory in Izmir, Turkey‘s third-largest city, as well as in the southern city of Antalya. 

Some AKP stronghold towns were at risk of being lost, results indicated.

“Voters have chosen to change the face of Turkey,” said CHP chairman Ozgur Ozel as the results emerged. 

“They want to open the door to a new political climate in our country.”

‘Respect the decision’ 

Erdogan acknowledged the electoral setback in a speech to supporters at the headquarters of his party.

“Unfortunately, we have not obtained the results that we wanted,” he told a subdued crowd.

“We will of course respect the decision of the nation. We will avoid being stubborn, acting against the national will and questioning the power of the nation,” he added.

Erdogan has been president since 2014 and won a new term in May last year. He had called Istanbul the national “treasure” when launching his campaign to retake the city.

But while he dominated the campaign, his personal role did not help overcome the widespread concerns over the country’s economy.

“Everyone is worried about the day-to-day,” said 43-year-old Istanbul resident Guler Kaya as she voted.

“The crisis is swallowing up the middle class. We have had to change all our habits,” she said. “If Erdogan wins, it will get even worse”.

Although opposition parties had been fractured ahead of the poll, analysts predicted a stormy political future for the AKP and its allies.

Berk Esen, an academic at Sabanci University, said that the CHP had pulled off “the biggest election defeat of Erdogan’s career”.

“Despite an uneven playing field, government candidates have lost even in conservative strongholds. This is the CHP’s best results since the 1977 elections,” Esen said on his social media account.

Unrest in southeast 

“Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” Erman Bakirci, a pollster from Konda Research and Consultancy, recalled Erdogan once saying.

The election was held with the country reeling from an inflation rate of 67 percent and having seen the lira currency slide from 19 to a dollar to 32 to a dollar in one year.

Clashes were reported in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, leaving one dead and 12 wounded, a local official told AFP. 

The pro-Kurdish DEM party said it had identified irregularities “in almost all the Kurdish provinces”, in particular through suspicious cases of proxy voting.

Observers from France were refused access to a polling station in the region, according to the lawyers’ association MLSA.

About 61 million people were eligible to vote for mayors across Turkey’s 81 provinces, as well as provincial council members and other local officials. 

(AFP)

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to presence and complexes are composted into candid relation.

In his slender and splendid book Twice Alive (public library), poet, geologist, and translator Forrest Gander draws from the natural world a poetic “ecology of intimacies,” reverencing lichens’ “supreme parsimony in drought” and the “long soft sarongs of moss” as a way “to recover the play of life itself.”

An epoch after Beatrix Potter uncovered how lichens reproduce — asexually, scattering living matter from both partners to colonize a new habitat — Gander considers the “theoretical immortality” of such propagation and reflects:

The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?

I think of Einstein, who considered “combinatory play” the essence of creativity; I think of how love may be the supreme creative act, the way it remakes the self and the world between selves.

Art from The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein

In one of the love poems anchoring the books, Gander considers how in such combinatorics of intimacy the partners are “not fused, not bonded, but nested.” Echoing the defiant question Mary McCarthy posed to Hannah Arendt — What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were? — he writes:

The reconfiguration is instantaneous
experience. It is being
itself. But whose being now? Was I
endowed with some special pliability so
that becoming part of you I didn’t pass
through my own nihilation? And what
does the death of who-you-were mean to me
except that now you are present, constantly.

[…]

Without you I survived and with you
I live again in a radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other. In you,
I cast my life beyond itself.

This radical augmentation of the self is indeed the great recompense of intimacy, not only interpersonal but ecological — how organisms entwine with one another to become a system of interdependence greater and more fully alive than its parts, how grasping this new way of being requires a new way of seeing. Gander writes in another poem:

To see what’s there and not already
patterned by familiarity — for an unpredicted
whole is there, casting a pair of shadows, manipulating
its material, advancing, assembling enough
kinship that we call it life, our life, what
is already many lives, the dimensions of
its magnitude veiled to us as we live it —

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem “Kinship” and Shel Silverstein’s timeless illustrated parable about the secret to nurturing relationships, then revisit this meditation on lichens and the meaning of life.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances… that’s what life is all about, that’s its task,” the young Dostoyevsky exulted in a letter to his brother just after his death sentence was repealed — death, that great clarifying force for what it means to be alive, what the stakes and sanctities of living are.

In the two centuries since, our understanding of what it means to be human, to be mortal and imperfect and ablaze with feeling, has altered dramatically as we have entrusted the cold logic of computation with answering the soul’s cry for connection, for creativity, for meaning — something Dostoyevsky’s contemporary Samuel Butler anticipated in his far-seeing admonition against the dehumanization of humanity in the hands of our machines, something that has metastasized in today’s technocratic cult of posthumanism.

In Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age, Glen Slater bridges ecology, depth psychology, systems theory, and various post-Cartesian philosophies to explore how this civilizational cult has effected “a widening divide between fabrication and authenticity, a loss of more self-aware and soulful modes of living, and an increase in anxiety and depression,” and what we can do to rewild the psyche and reclaim the soul.

He begins by drawing an analogy between the catalytic impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on awakening the modern ecological conscience and the need for a conscious awakening from the dangerous dream of posthumanism into which Silicon Valley has lulled us. Just as the industrial capitalism of Carson’s era commodified our planet’s ecosystems and elemental resources, Slater observes that digital capitalism has “turned our habits of mind into the earth’s most valuable commodity”; just as Carson pioneered the holistic view of ecology that may be our only path to saving Earth, her contemporary Carl Jung pioneered the holistic view of psychology that might, just might, save the human soul from death by commodification.

Carl Jung

Slater writes:

Whether or not we have turned the ecological corner, there is more consciousness about the way we relate to the world around us and the actions required to avert a climate catastrophe.

However, the world within us, the inner life of thought and emotion, is another matter. Here integrative understanding has been resisted. The human psyche, the ecosystem of the mind, with its own structures and dynamics, our relation to which is surely as significant as our relation to the outer world, now faces its own significant disruption, one that essentially parallels the syndrome Carson described… The depths of human nature are becoming harder to recognize and protect. Abundant information has furthered scientific knowledge but not human understanding. It has instead left us dazed, confused, and disoriented. Attention, motivation, identity, self-image, and the capacity to reason clearly and imagine deeply are all impacted… While the advantages of digital technologies are impressed upon us at every turn, the rapid entry of these technologies into every aspect of life is evidently impacting our ecology of mind.

With an eye to the urgency of “moving beyond objectification of the earth and of the bodies and minds that inhabit it,” he adds:

The technosphere now overlays the ecosphere and we cannot help but inhale its post-industrial gases. Virtuality has begun to displace reality, making the ground of human existence hard to discern… The human psyche and the nature of the whole person are not only suffering in this technospheric environment, the suffering has itself been given over to technological solutions, resulting in a vicious cycle.

[…]

The penchant for digital ways of relating, expanding faith in AI, and the one-sided education designed to service these things are combining to generate reductive conceptions of psychological life. We are, in particular, discounting the deeply human… the essential qualities of human experience, which extend from the instinctual patterns that shape basic behavior to the timeless values that mold the cultural imagination. The deeply human anchors the vertical axis of inner understanding; it grounds the ecology of mind. It is also what connects us to the more-than-human. In our era, however, an almost exclusive dedication to a horizontal axis of data gathering threatens this verticality and grounding. This is leading to a world drowning in information and thirsting for understanding.

Primordial Chaos by Hilma af Klint, 1906-1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

At the heart of this civilizational crisis is the systemic compartmentalization of our experience, evident in the core polarities and dichotomies of Western culture — past and future, inner and outer, matter and spirit. Pulsating beneath it all is our dissociation from the life of the body, which connects us to the life of the Earth and the life of the universe. Everything beautiful that we touch and see and hear — birdsong, a sunrise, a kiss — is a bittersweet reminder that we have a body and are therefore mortal. Dissociation thrives on the denial of death that began with our ancestors’ mythologies of immortality and is culminating in Silicon Valley’s lurid and lucrative dreams of redesigning human nature, of downloading the mind onto disembodied machines and reducing the soul to a datum.

Pointing to Jung’s timeless cosmogony of the unconscious as the antidote to this damaging delusion, Slater writes:

Jung’s comprehension of the depths of human nature constitutes an incisive counterpoint to the assumptions of posthumanism and to the dissociative bubble that presently fosters these assumptions… Jung sheds light on the self-regulating nature of the psyche and the archetypal forms behind this — forms we may choose to overlook but cannot ultimately dismiss. These forms pertain to brain structure, anatomy, and evolved patterns of perception and behavior. But they also reflect the larger rhythms of the cosmos and are seemingly woven into the fabric of life itself. Jung pointedly demonstrates that even as we have embraced reason and science, the archetypal world of non-rational impulses and religious ideas have continued to unconsciously influence our thoughts and actions.

Jung’s crowning contribution was to invite an understanding of the psyche as the foundation of all perception, experience, thought, feeling, and action — the wellspring of our humanity. In exploring the psychology of the unconscious with all of its interlaced convolutions — archetypes and complexes, projections and introjections — Jung illuminated the way our dreams and fantasies unconsciously shape the course of our lives, the way our arts and sciences cohere into a vast collective unconscious that shapes the course of our civilization. With an eye to Jung’s legacy, Slater writes:

It is the psyche that contains the pursuit of the angelic, the claims of the animal body, and the structures and dynamics that join the two. It is the psyche that generates and insists upon the symbolic expressions of culture, which are often based on the transformative and aspirational power of ordinary, even elemental, things — mountains and rivers, suns and moons, fire and rain — thereby reminding us of the inextricable bond between mind and world. If cosmic matter has given rise to consciousness, and we are now called to grasp the nature of consciousness, realizing that thinking about our thinking is the necessary companion of any exploration and understanding of the universe that surrounds us, our grasp of the inner world becomes just as vital as our grasp on the outer world — perhaps even more so.

Art by Francisco de Holanda, 1573. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Nearly a century after the Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser made his exquisite case for the evolution of consciousness, Slater reflects on Jung’s legacy and writes:

Godlike power necessitates godlike responsibility. This begins with self-awareness, which is rooted in a sober consideration of the human psyche, the most critical part of which is shedding light on the shadow side of our willful pursuits… Will and reason alone cannot form a seat of wise agency — a far more expansive consciousness is required.

[…]

An expansion of consciousness is imperative if we are to make responsible use of the transformative power in our hands… With divine guidance largely beyond our secular vision, we are left to look within for something deeper than our controlling inclinations and to look without to perceive the guidance of nature’s intelligence. Guidance must ultimately come from dialogue with these marginalized sources of knowledge and from the cultural imagination, which shapes this dialogue. The result will be a “co-creation” — a partnership between innovation, self-knowledge, and a cosmology befitting this age. Such a co-creative process will mitigate and shape our technologies as well as generate opportunities for spiritual renewal.

Such co-creation, Slater argues, demands a reanimated view of existence — one that “counters the commodification of all things that is currently consuming us,” one that “conveys a confluence of spirit and matter — the very means by which a sense of soul is generated.” He writes:

A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent. The great task of this late modern era is thus to bring together what the spiritual preoccupations of the old world and the material focus of the new world have torn apart. The psyche shows us this dependency whenever a person or group attempts to embrace one without the other, in the way the neglected side begins to rule the unconscious… But the earth process itself suggests we rediscover nature as spirit as well as understand it as matter — nature as presence, intelligence, and root source of inspiration and imagination… Both mind and earth are calling for perspectives capable of marrying these dimensions of reality.

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

Countering this fragmentation of reality requires, above all, learning to resist our dissociative tendencies and trust our emotions — for, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum observes in her masterwork on the intelligence of the emotions, “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.” Slater considers the building blocks of this self-trust:

Such trust begins with a natural appreciation of emotional intelligence and the guiding potential of this intelligence, which can feel like it emanates from a will of its own. This trust may grow over a long time or it may come as a sudden life-lesson. But few things beyond the contemplation of emotional responses open the door to the deeply human and the awareness of having an inner partner [that] operates apart from conscious, rational direction. To be full of emotion is to be animated by something in spite of ourselves; perhaps this is why we end up regularly conversing with the sadness or anger that grips us. Emotions like these stand in need of negotiation, mollification or perhaps just more attention. Often, when we want to keep moving on, the emotions will not allow it. And sometimes when we would choose to hold back, emotions charge ahead.

Because our emotions are a fundament of our human nature, which is itself a fractal of Nature, they are the raw material for the co-creative process that offers an antidote to the dehumanization of humanity. Slater writes:

We are affected by desire for more satisfying ways of being, outrage about all that is regularly exploited and destroyed, fear of what stresses and overwhelms, and shame about participating in the machinations of it all. To consider the way emotion comes upon us, from a nature we call “ours,” all the while being a branch of Nature itself, calls into question whether these emotions even belong to us or to the sufferings of the world, and we are being directed to feel and respond on its behalf. In other words, our animation may be the world’s way of speaking to us, and thus be an indispensable dimension of the co-creative process. Recognition of the autonomous intelligence of these deep emotional responses may be an invitation to attune ourselves to the presence of the earth’s own intelligence — or intelligences.

It is the psyche that bridges these regions of intelligence, the inner and the outer, the human and the cosmic, death and life. Slater writes:

The psyche, which is obviously grounded in nature, also leads us beyond this ground, into a concern with destiny and leaving some trace of ourselves in service to humanity… We neither have to lean on notions of a spirit that literally departs the body, nor on fantasies of downloading our minds. Rather, we accept that the substance of psychic experience, accumulated over a lifetime, marks everything we do and everyone around us. And such a marking can be dreamed on. Life and death thus intertwine to produce defining qualities of being.

Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

In a passage evocative of James Baldwin’s soulful insistence that “it is necessary… to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light,” and that “everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” Slater adds:

The wonder of psychological life is that this dimming of the ego-light allows the perception of another light, one that has been in the background all along… Posthumanism brightens the ego-light, the light of the intellect and will that blankets the light of natural consciousness the wise ape presents to us. It fails to reconcile our spiritual reach and our instinctual ground. It cracks cultural vessels that have always incubated this reconciliation and truncates rather than extends the human experiment.

Lensing Jung’s legacy through the light of thinkers as varied as Hannah Arendt, William James, Yuval Harari, and Oliver Sacks, Slater goes on to explore and celebrate the countercultural movement in the margins of this techno-trance — ways of seeing and of being that, unlike posthumanism, refuse to exclude beauty, eros, and transcendence from the human story, a story told in the language of the soul, irreducible to data. Complement Jung vs Borg with Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality, James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on bridging the scientific and the sacred, then revisit Jung himself on the most important paradigm for living.

APRIL

Attention

Because essence is inborn while personality forms during childhood, we can understand the state of essence more clearly by observing little children. To a child, everything appears fresh and curious. Everything they see and experience penetrates them deeply and leaves a lasting impression. Their intellectual ability to name what they are experiencing is as yet undeveloped, so when they see a blade of grass they do not know to call it ‘grass’. For them, it may just as well be a miniature skyscraper perfectly placed in an endless green metropolis. A tree is not yet a ‘tree’; it is a jungle-gym, an apartment complex for birds, or an infinite array of other possibilities. A bird is a miracle of iridescent feathers, spectacular in motion and song. As the child progresses towards adulthood, seeing is gradually replaced by knowing, and essence becomes covered with an ever-thickening coat of personality. What they experience no longer penetrates directly as it did before, but is filtered through association, comparison, and criticism—if it is noticed at all. Comparing the state of children to adults we see that essence absorbs and personality deflects. Understanding this in turn instructs the direction of our farming. To weaken personality and strengthen essence, we will have to absorb more and deflect less—and we absorb through paying attention.

Attention functions mysteriously. It captures, in a fixed field, matter or energy, which without attention would diffuse indefinitely. When we sit on a bench in a park, the objects in our surroundings are there all the time—the grass, the trees, the chirping birds—but as long as we are not paying attention to them, then for us they do not exist. Once we do pay them attention, they not only come to life for us, but also influence us with new perceptions and emotions. Our essence feeds on these impressions, just as our body feeds on physical food. To demonstrate this, our April farmer holds up two seedlings, one wilted and the other healthy. A healthy leaf feeds on sunlight just like essence feeds on impressions. It fixes electrical energy into cellular matter just as essence absorbs impressions and is influenced by them. The sunlight is always there; it is up to the leaf to make use of it. Impressions are always there; it is up to us to absorb them by paying attention. This means that it is within our power to influence our essence through directing our attention.

One effective method we use for putting this into practice is the Looking Exercise. For the duration of a minute, we take in one visual element after another in our immediate environment. By ‘taking in’, we mean perceiving what we are looking at without attaching a verbal association to it. The challenge here is to stay with each impression long enough to absorb it, but not so long as to allow our thinking function to generate associations to what we are seeing. For example, while sitting in the park, look at the bench, then the grass, then a tree, then birds in flight—aiming to actually see them, rather than merely register they are there. The aim is to force ourselves to favor the impressions around us over our habitual associations or daydreaming. One big advantage of this method is that it can be exercised anywhere. This in itself is a lesson that helps dissolve the illusion that our internal efforts require favorable conditions.

If, indeed, we do observe that taking in impressions brings about a tangible shift in our internal landscape, with a crescendo of emotions, this in itself is no small revelation. We have found a way to weaken personality and feed essence that is almost always applicable. Very few situations in everyday life favor essence over personality. We have found a way to begin reversing this. At any time we can make an effort to absorb—to see what is before us, to feel our body pressing against our chair, to favor listening to others over the urge to speak—and in so doing, we revitalize the wilted leaves of our essence.

This is the labor of April.

(asaf@ggurdjieff.com)

BY: HISTORY.COM EDITORS

UPDATED: MARCH 18, 2024 | ORIGINAL: MARCH 30, 2017 (history.com)

Table of Contents

1. Origins of April Fools’ Day
2. Hilaria in Ancient Rome
3. History of April Fools’ Day
4. April Fools’ Day Pranks
5. Sources

April Fools’ Day—occurring on April 1 each year—has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, though its exact origins remain a mystery. April Fools’ Day traditions include playing hoaxes or practical jokes on others, often yelling “April Fools!” at the end to clue in the subject of the April Fools’ Day prank. While its exact history is shrouded in mystery, the embrace of April Fools’ Day jokes by the media and major brands has ensured the unofficial holiday’s long life.

Origins of April Fools’ Day

Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. In the Julian Calendar, as in the Hindu calendar, the new year began with the spring equinox around April 1. 

People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called “April fools.” These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.

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Hilaria in Ancient Rome

Historians have also linked April Fools’ Day to festivals such as Hilaria (Latin for joyful), which was celebrated in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers of the cult of Cybele. It involved people dressing up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates and was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris and Seth.

There’s also speculation that April Fools’ Day was tied to the vernal equinox, or first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, when Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.

History of April Fools’ Day

April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.

April Fools’ Day Pranks

In modern times, people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio and TV stations and websites have participated in the April 1 tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences.

In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees. In 1985, Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked many readers when he ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour.

In 1992, National Public Radio ran a spot with former President Richard Nixon saying he was running for president again… only it was an actor, not Nixon, and the segment was all an April Fools’ Day prank that caught the country by surprise.

In 1996, Taco Bell, the fast-food restaurant chain, duped people when it announced it had agreed to purchase Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King advertised a “Left-Handed Whopper,” scores of clueless customers requested the fake sandwich. Google notoriously hosts an annual April Fools’ Day prank that has included everything from “telepathic search” to the ability to play Pac Man on Google Maps.

For the average trickster, there is always the classic April Fools’ Day prank of covering the toilet with plastic wrap or swapping the contents of sugar and salt containers.

Sources

A Brief, Totally Sincere History of April Fools’ Day. Washington Post.
History’s Greatest April Fools Jokes. National Geographic.
Some of the greatest April Fools’ pranks of all time. CNN.
15 Best April Fools’ Day Hoaxes. CBS.

BY: HISTORY.COM EDITORS

HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate and informative content. All articles are regularly reviewed and updated by the HISTORY.com team. Articles with the “HISTORY.com Editors” byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen and Christian Zapata.