‘When I talk to senior leaders, there’s this one trick I tell them to do to improve their resilience and performance. It sounds weird at first, but without fail they all tell me later that its made a difference to them.’ Sitting in the virtual training session I thought to myself that this sounded like the sort of bullshit I come out with when I’m trying to get someone to agree with me so I can end a conversation, however the several pages of notes I’d taken over the previous two hours suggested I ought to at least hear him out. My note taking is pretty dreadful and I tend to scrawl all over the pages in a random order, but when there is something I want to go away and try out, I put an asterisk as a bullet point to make sure I spot it when I look back at them. As my page had several asterisks on it, I thought I should pay attention.
‘I tell them at the end of every day, give yourself a score out of ten for how composed you’ve been that day. Just a number, and to think about why you scored that number. Was there anything that impacted your composure that day, and how did you react to it? Is there anything you could have done differently that would have helped you stay more composed in that situation? All you need to do is consciously take a few minutes each day to think and reflect on this, and I promise you you will begin to notice the difference’
I’ll be honest with you – at that point in time, I don’t think I’d ever really considered what the word ‘composure’ actually meant. I’m still not entirely sure I could give you a decent definition of it. If I had to try, I’d probably say it means being in control of your actions and emotions, and not flying off the handle about things (for reference, googling gives the definition ‘a person who writes music, especially as a professional occupation’ so go figure).
This sounded a little bit like inventing a metric for the sake of it, but I thought I’d give it a try. I added a line to my habit tracker to keep a note of my composure each day. How was it on day one? It had been a pretty good day, I’d got a decent chunk through my to do list, and I’d been in a three hour virtual training course that hadn’t made me want to throw myself in the canal.
Today’s score – 8
I’ll write about it another time, but I’d like to think I’m pretty good at habit stacking. And once taking these five minutes each day had found its place in my habit stack, I found it really easy to do it every day. However, after three weeks of tracking, I found myself questioning the point of doing it. Some days were 9s, some days were 4s. I could tell what was a good day and what was a bad day, but not really feeling at any point that I was having any influence or control over the circumstances that made it happen. There was no consistency and no ‘improvement’, whatever that was supposed to be or look like. Frustrated, I reached out to the course tutor and asked what I was doing wrong. Kindly, they replied quickly…
‘Don’t give up, that’s perfectly normal. Keep at it, and I promise the results will come’
So I’ve kept at it, and I have to say that they were right – whatever I might think of as ‘composure’, it IS improving. I’m now four months into tracking it and now most days my score is an 8. There’s often something I’m not happy with and something I can reflect on that I haven’t reacted to in the way I would want to – swearing at traffic lights for example – but the conscious act of thinking about the way I react to things does make me feel somewhat more in control of difficult or stressful situations. I don’t get quite so angry or stressed about everyday challenges or unexpected problems, as I’ve already thought about why that or a similar situation has affected me and check myself before I wreck myself. I think in the time I’ve been tracking it I’ve only had one perfect ten, but my days and my temperament are generally way more consistent than they were before.
Perhaps this process brings together a couple of well-practiced and understood techniques. The act of measuring something often leads to improvement (the Hawthorne effect) and potentially my composure will become more erratic again if I stopped measuring it. The act of reflecting on my composure and actions each day is in effect a mini-retro on my state of mind, and I’ve always found retrospectives a great way of improving performance over time. Or perhaps it’s the woolly definition I have of the word ‘composure’ that leads me to thinking about lots of different things instead of concentrating on one specific thing every day. Either way, it works, and I thought it would be a story worth sharing.
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