The Power Of Your Mind

I’ve been thinking a lot about perspective recently. On this day, exactly one year ago we picked up the keys to our new house. With this we increased the hope of a better life ahead for us. Not that life had been particularly troublesome for us up until that point. It was just closer to the ideal we had been striving for since our marriage in 2016. Well then. Ever since we moved in to our new home, various family members have had mild and semi-serious illnesses. Pretty much on and off for the duration of the year.

I thought we were out of the woods six months or so ago. This was after my son and I had both had Covid. Not so easy. Since then my eldest’s asthma has struck a few times. Then latterly the house has been rife with the Flu, then Chicken Pox and most recently a vomiting bug. So much so that one of the four of us has been out of sorts at least every two weeks. Whilst yours truly has escaped the worst of these maladies, the kids and my other half have borne the brunt of this seemingly random spate of ill health.

The bright side

We have plenty of space, a medium sized garden, quiet neighbours, a pleasant enough town centre within walking distance. It’s not perfection but it’s a decent family home. In the UK it is summer, the days are bright and long and the weather is tolerable, even if not as glorious as we want it to be. I mentioned perspective as I’m trying to work something out. Whether we are unlucky to be hit with so much disease in a short space of time or we have been lucky to get to a nice environment to have all the health misfortunes in.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,”

John Milton

I’ve written before that luck is just a way of describing favourable events as we are witnessing an ever unfolding pattern. The power of our imagination is such that we can be surrounded by fortune and focus on the bad or be surrounded by suffering and use our minds to conjure positivity. It follows that we can influence the future by working hard to be more positive about the present. In general, we power up our good fortune by looking on the bright side.

There were a couple of instances at my current place of work recently that helped me with the underlying question. It has been a long week involving someone doing work experience and a trip to one of our commercial partners’ head office.

Helping give a college student work experience

Last week I was introduced to a young acquaintance of my boss, who was to get to know the ins and outs of what our charity does. It went smoothly. He maintained a smile, and asked appropriate questions. He also kept positive body language. I was impressed. I certainly could not have feigned such interest when I was that age. ‘Very focused’ I wrote for the lad’s work experience sign off chart in the comments section. The upbeat 17-year-old had sat through forty-five minutes of me explaining digital channels, the charity’s website, and Adobe software without showing any signs of boredom or disinterest.

I had explained some difficulties on the technical side such as getting the right type of images from our commercial partners and frustrations I had had resizing website banners. I could tell it wasn’t quite his thing so I respected his attentiveness. But maybe, just maybe, it was because my role is actually quite cool? I had cause to question myself and reasoned that it is a lot more fun than some working jobs I have had in days gone by. It is also more fun than working on say a production line in a factory.

A naive belief that UK factory work was all automated

In the UK, we no longer have a great amount of manufacturing or human-labour intensive industry. Most of the population are working in other things. According to Statista, in 2021, the biggest area of work was the wholesale and retail trade industry, with approximately 4.8 million filled jobs in the United Kingdom. Manufacturing sits at only 2.5 million jobs out of the total workforce of around 32.5 million.

There’s also the rise of the robots to consider. Amidst the machines-taking-our-jobs narrative and wider scale hints of automation that we continuously see on screens we forget things. Like it is easy to forget that many objects we use every day require human hands to make. I’m thinking of specialist skills such as stitching, sewing and deftly cutting. This was all brought home to me recently.

Up north t’ factory

On a work trip to a large industrial-scale company’s UK HQ, I learnt that you can still work a 10 hour shift in a factory environment doing such a repetitive manual job. Part of the second Innovation Day included a distribution centre (aka warehouse) tour. The warehouse turned out to be a colossus of a building. It was more of a hangar. One I imagined would be fit for building battleships, or in this case, storing millions upon millions of medical accessories. At twelve football pitches in ground size it was the grandest internal space I had ever witnessed.

In the middle of the tour we were taken up onto a walkway with a birds eye view of the operation. Below the viewing platform on which the group stood, stretched out aisle after aisle of equipment and accessories produced by the company. A team of over 130 operatives drawn from around the world, navigated deftly between the rows. Some placing items onto shelves from off of delivery trucks, others repacking them into bags and boxes. These were then coordinated to be dispatched to individuals or organisations based on need at a dedicated zone in the corner of the space.

At the very end of the tour we visited what was known as the Cutting Room, where Stoma Bags are cut to a specific shape by people with nimble fingers and sharp scissors. While the majority of the shapes required could be done by machines (although still operated manually), a number required a set of human hands. It was a real hive of activity. There was an intensity with which the workers cut. I could only imagine how they motivated themselves to get through a shift. It made all my frustrations with getting a website banner to resize seem trivial in comparison.

Giving more power to your own luck

Back to health and illness. Everything that my family are going through would be harder if my wife and I were factory workers on production lines. Perhaps living in squalid accommodation in some cramped city centre. On this day, this keyversary, I’d like to give thanks for the house and my extended family who made the move here possible.

I’ve touched on it before but recognizing aspects of life that you are truly grateful for and focusing on them is a sure-fire way of making your own luck. Better still to establish patterns of repeating behaviour that activate the same neural networks. Perhaps that’s what saying one’s daily prayers or a grace before food originated as. The opposite, ignoring opportunities to give thanks is a certain way of letting your subconscious rule you even more than it is inclined to. I can’t put it better than Robin Sharma:

“The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master”