Play At Work

Love At Work

February 14, 2018

It’s no longer love itself that will tear us apart, apparently; it’s vlogging. Yes, the couples that vlog together, according to a new documentary from the BBC, are less likely to stay together.

Quelle surprise.

As pretty much any reality TV couple will tell you, when you turn your love affair into a business partnership (which, in the social age, means turning yourselves inside-out for all to see), the odds on longevity are reduced to those of a hashtag.

When ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ become more important than kisses and cuddles, there are just too many people in that marriage to please.

No one is supposed to know what goes on in a relationship behind closed doors. It seems, when you throw those doors open, most proclaimed ‘ride or die’ relationships turn into ‘cash-in and split’ ones under the glare.

Valentine’s Day, for many, tightens their focus on their existing, potential or dreamed of partner.

Romantic gestures are assessed for timeliness, original thought and meaning. Declarations are publicly posted, passive-aggressively demanded or disdainfully dismissed. But, for all the lamentations about this most clichéd, commercialised, and, let’s face it, tacky of feast days, few forget it (whether loved up or not).

In the name of balance, we have created other days in the calendar to remind us there are other forms of love, and most less fraught than the pursuit of heady romance: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, International Friendship Day.

(Okay, so Mother’s Day is only slightly less fraught for many than Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day has never really taken off in a big way and all those International Days are fleeting hashtags few take to heart, but at least there have been some efforts made to steal the thunder away from the Love Monster that is Valentine’s).

But there is a whole other world of love that never gets a look-in, never gets talked about. It’s a love that dare not speak it’s name, for, if it does, it’s seen as sad, or sucking-up, or virtue-signalling.

Yes, I’m talking about our love for, and of, work.

I checked. There isn’t any ‘International I Love My Job Day’ or equivalent. Funny really, as when you talk to a lot of people about their work (as I have done a lot in my own career) love is the word that comes up. A lot.

Considering how many people don’t love their jobs (recent stats suggest nearly half of the population are looking for a new one at any one time) you’d think it’d be good to find out from the people who do love what they do why they love it. It might help inspire the rest of us (as, presumably, those loving couples who want to vlog about their love want to do – all the way to the bank, and all the way to Splitsville).

By no means a definitive list, I’ve thought about the many forms of love I’ve encountered at work that have nothing to do with romance, and yet do a heartening job at romancing the best that work can offer.

Love at work really can be a meaningful romance. Let me count the ways:

Loving the company you keep

A lot of people don’t actually love what they do, per se, but they love the people they do it with. In fact, this is probably the number one context in which love is mentioned by workers – “I love the people I work with.”

Sociable animals, it seems even a ghastly task can be tolerated with the right banter, or understanding, or support offered by others around you. Laughter is the key. The happy workplace laughs a lot. People love that.

For some, loving the company they keep can literally be brand love. These people get their hands on a lot of the company merch. Sometimes it becomes a love for all time, wherever they work: you know the ones, on a constant “When I worked at such-and-such” loop.

Yeah, we get it, you used to work at such-and-such.

It can be easy to fall out of love with these people.

Loving the vibe

From the occasional free donut to daily championing, support and belief, treating people like an asset, rather than a commodity, is a good way to make people love their work.

Being asked, being heard, makes all the difference. Money works for some. Status (the right parking spot, the corner office) works for some. For others, what they can away with is the key to their amour (I’m sure Harvey Weinstein loved what he was able to get away with at Miramax).

But, for most, being treated like a human being is all it takes to make them fall in love with you. It makes for a good vibe (“We’re like a family,” being the most commonly cheered statement I’ve heard in loved-up workplaces).

Loving the role

You might be a terrible homemaker, a sketchy friend, an irritable and cantankerous parent, partner or child, but, when you step into work, you become your best self – “You’re good at this. You’ve got this.”

For some people, they’re just really good at what they do. To all appearances, the truly work-elevated make it look a breeze, effortless, no matter how hard they might be working. With no imposter syndrome to haunt them, they happily are what they do, and can’t imagine being anything else. Their authentic self, their best self, their inspired self, is found at work.

The biggest danger in life for these people is redundancy or retirement.

Loving the mix

It’s one of the biggest recruitment clichés (and sells) of all time: “no two days are the same here!”

But, as with a lot of clichés, this groove is channelled by truth, and, for a lot of people, it’s the fact that no two days are the same that makes them love what they do.

While major change is not something we are wired to accept too readily, people will always thrive thanks to a new audience, task or scene – if something takes their curiosity. We are curious creatures. We are not machines. And we don’t love it when we’re treated as if we are (but, as mentioned above, the camaraderie of colleagues can do much to off-set this).

Freedom is a variant on variety, and, for all the cash flow crises and endless touting of their wares, the giggers, freelancers and independents will tell you they can love a variety of workplace ‘cages’ (as long as the doors remain open).

We all like to keep it moving, within reason. The biggest danger for all of us is creeping inertia at work (focus being the key to productivity, if nothing else).

Loving the job

My final, most fundamental, most sustainable (IMHO) form of work love is a true love of what you do in terms of task (head, hands and heart). People, and company cultures, change; come and go. Status fluctuates. What was once exciting and unfamiliar can become routine (and tarnished as a result).

But, but, everything can be tolerated if you can lose yourself in the task and the hours fly-by.

This is the holy grail. Finding the thing. Like finding ‘the one’, it can take you a lifetime. Many settle, which is a good job in the grand scheme of things.

I always think the happiest couples I know are the ones who, when it comes down to it, would rather spend time with each other than with anyone else. I guess the happiest people at work are those who would rather be there than anywhere else.

Maybe being there is the biggest sign of love of there is after all.
Paper Crowns

December 29, 2017

Paper crowns. In every pub, bar and restaurant I’ve been in, or passed, I’ve seen them.

It’s almost two months now. It only ever appears to be one grouping per venue. It could be a small gathering, clustered together. A large gathering, featuring row upon row of them.

But there they are, an inevitable part of the festive tableaux – people on their work Christmas lunch or dinner. And paper crowns, the kind you pull out of crackers, on every head.

Strangely, I haven’t seen anyone pulling the actual crackers themselves, only the obvious aftermath of this (largely pointless, almost always vaguely disappointing) Christmas tradition.

But even putting aside the hard-to-find crack in pulling the thing, the mood-flattening jokes and the choking-hazard gifts, it’s the obligatory wearing of the infantilising paper hat that begs the question: why do we do it to ourselves? Why keep this tradition alive?

Does anyone actually enjoy wearing the goddamn hat?

I saw a bunch of dudes in a rib place in Shoreditch, uniform in their statement T-s, plaid and denim; I would guess some kind of Tech Kings.

I saw a smart set of toothy people (fairly gender-balanced, everyone suited) in a dimly-lit restaurant in the City, all highly-animated, high-spirited; Kings and Queens of Law or Management Consultancy, I would imagine.

And the group that most fascinated me, a large, glamorous, all-female cast in a cute old pub in Aldgate, not one of them aged above thirty-five (impossible to discern their profession), all sitting in an oppressive near silence, many engrossed in their phones, but, nevertheless, all crowned.

(I couldn’t help wondering if they’d all been laid off, or, worse, half of them had. It would be a fiendish, yet devilishly ingenious way to do it – putting P45s into all, or some, of the crackers).

I wonder what it tells us about a workplace culture, though.

On the one hand, it’s a democratising gesture for all, regardless of ‘rank’, to be wearing their paper hats around the dinner table. All for one and one for all. Everyone looking equally silly (everyone equally uncomfortable as the ghastly things start melting onto the moist foreheads that bear them).

I saw no dissenters.

On the other hand, it’s that very point that could make the act less innocuous.

To refuse the crown would be to anoint oneself as vanity personified, or someone who takes themselves too seriously, or (more dangerously) someone who is not a ‘team player’.

Lament your long-standing allergy to the dyes used in tissue paper all you want: no one’s buying that.

You’re not ‘one of us’.

Worse still, you’re a party pooper.

It’s a test, isn’t it? Given a testing workplace culture, uneasy, indeed, lies the head that wears the crown.

But, at least for the toothy City lawyers and Lumberbot boys from Shoreditch, and even, come to think of it, for the stone-faced women in Aldgate in all their glitter, it was a display of unity.

What could be more festive than that?
Paperchase, Scissors, Stone: Brand Lies & Alignments

November 21, 2017

I never knew that that old adage “You’re defined by the company you keep,” actually comes from the Bible (my knowledge of the Bible being pretty scant at best). Neither did I know it’s actually a contraction of a wider, and starker, statement:

“He that walketh with wise men shall be wise; but a companion of fools will be destroyed.” (Proverbs, 13:20).

It feels relevant.

Sarah Silverman, in light of the Louis CK revelations, asked the question: can you love someone who does bad things? Lena Dunham has (quite rightly) gotten herself into a whole load of hot water by jumping to the defence of her accused friend (and disgracefully, very foolishly, dismissing the claim of his accuser when she couldn’t possibly know, unless she was in the room at the time, what happened).

And Paperchase have also asked themselves the question this week – if we’re defined by the company we keep (and pay), what does advertising in the Daily Mail say about us?

Despite the outrage, it’s nothing new to lose advertisers. Advertisers pull their ads all the time when they don’t want their message sat alongside something that could be viewed negatively by their customers. Certainly in pretty much every US show or movie set around a TV show, there’s always a drama about the advertisers pulling their ads (so much so, it’s a bit of cliché).

What is new is the intersectionality of it all. Everything is connected. Everything overlaps. A commercial enterprise has a brand, a personality, but that personality is far more multi-faceted than it’s ever been because the brand lives across multiple mediums and presents different messages in each.

Once upon a time, before all these platforms existed, you could exist solely as a consumer brand. “Here we are, come and get it,” was enough. Now brands not only have a consumer story, they have an employer story and a societal story too.

We don’t only care about what we buy. We care about how it’s made, who makes it, and what they do with the profits. Realising there’s no where left to hide, businesses are advised to get ‘ahead of the story’, and to share their purpose and values. Show themselves to be ‘responsible capitalists’.

Many have embraced this approach but, as highlighted by the Paperchase episode, it’s not without risks. All business is risk. And when businesses jump on hashtags centred on social activist causes on the one hand, and advertise alongside editorial directly negating those causes on the other, it’s, well, more than a little problematic.

The frenzied responses on social media to JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING has, understandably, made these forays fraught at every turn. This is a new era. Believe it or not, there was a time (in my lifetime) when you could (naively, perhaps) take some universal ‘Western’ values for granted: everyone’s against racism; everyone believes women are equal to men; everyone knows the holocaust happened; everyone believes in liberty.

Not so anymore (who knew liberty would become a dirty word for so many?).

Everything is polarised. If the spotlight is on someone or something, for even a second, those in the darkness are quick to express dark thoughts. There doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can say without some controversy. If you’re saying black lives matter, you must be implying white lives don’t. If you’re supporting women, you must hate men. It’s hideous. And on and on it goes.

You’d think the answer for most businesses would be to stay away from social media, to stick to the owned and paid rather than earned media. But, as the advertising industry are struggling to measure, or articulate, the true value of any media right now (is the earned actually making you any money; is anyone even looking at the paid anymore; is the owned all a bit of a white elephant?), spread-betting feels the only way to go.

People do still buy newspapers. Four million of them, the Daily Mail, according to the Daily Mail. That’s a lot of eyeballs to ignore. But the toxicity of the British Press is also hard to ignore. Always scenting for blood, it destroys your celebrity endorsers or spokespeople; will happily showcase any negative customer feedback you might receive (however petty it might be); and is always after at least one of your customer or employee groups.

It’s so unregulated they seem to be able to say anything they like, claim anything they like (and, even if proven wrong, the apology you’ll get will be so small and hidden away people are unlikely to notice). And there are your lovely ads, stuck right in the middle of all of it. Sitting alongside God only knows what. Not purporting to endorse the view, but partially paying for its creation nevertheless, so, therefore, aligned.

Defining you by the company you keep.

Hypocrisy is the scourge of the age of transparency – and there’s nothing that gets the Twitterati and co more excited than finding an example of it.

So, when, for example, you make a big play about being an employer that welcomes and embraces LGBT diversity, it then looks mightily hypocritical if your ad sits alongside editorial that infers (or, more likely, directly claims) an LGBT teacher in a school is some kind of danger to society.

As most of us have learned at some point in our lives, it’s not always what you say, but how you say it, that causes conflict. You’d think in these toxic times the Daily Mail might want to dial back the vitriol rather than fuel the fire. It’s one thing to say this (whatever that may be) worries me because of XYZ, based on my beliefs about ABC; quite another to make wild claims saying this will result in XXX when you’ve no idea or any evidence to back it up (whatever happened to evidence in journalism, proportionality, balance?).

Being ‘sensational’ can definitely bring you eyeballs, but it can also come at a cost.

If we want business, if we want our employers, to be socially responsible (and I think we do, right?), then they’ve really got to mean what they say. And, if they mean what they say, they are quite right to pull their ads from a publication where their message directly opposes that of the publication (particularly if that publication has been legally chastised for their behaviour, as the Daily Mail has).

That’s not the death of free speech. If you want to keep spewing your hate, get other, more ‘aligned’ advertisers. If they won’t come, you’ll have to find other means (if you improve your shoddy journalism you might save a few quid in legal fees). Put your money where your mouth is and put your cover price up if you believe people want to hear what you have to say so much.

Or, take the hint that possibly you’re taking too much too far, understand you’re a toxic brand yourself and start your own process of rehabilitation.

Playing the media game is a little bit like playing Paper, Scissors, Stone: there’s a big chance whatever you do, there will be opposition to it.

Advertisers in this mashed up world have to be painfully careful their cut-through doesn’t end up blunting their image when they find themselves appearing alongside child porn on YouTube or bilious attacks on sections of their paying or paid communities in the press.

And there’s no point getting hysterical about Stop The Hate. Businesses should be, and often are, able to decide these things themselves. If they choose to follow the prompt, that’s their prerogative. Personally, in the age of transparency and blatant hypocrisy, I think anyone saying “Look, the emperor has no clothes on!” is worth listening to.

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST:

I think I can guess where the next real battlefield is going to be. I was thinking this looking at MailOnline. All those features on female celebrities. The insidious hate that’s ever present. I almost admire it, as a writer. It’s quite a stroke of genius to be able to say one thing and mean something else altogether; to seem to be celebrating somebody when you’re really tearing them apart.

For “Super-slim model so-and-so shows off her figure while partying at the Something Awards,” read “Emaciated, likely drug addict had it all on display at obscure award ceremony that no one cares about.”

For “Brave actress so-and-so goes make up free on a local shopping trip,” read “Haggard-looking middle-aged woman whose been out of work for sometime seen slumming it at local supermarket.”

For “So-and-so actress shows off her curves on exotic beach holiday,” read “Woman unaware she’s being photographed on holiday has really put on weight – look how much weight she’s put on, look at her, look at it, what a loser, what a lazy cow…”

The schadenfreude, the misogyny, oozes through every sentence. Like I say, it’s cleverly done. And, if you sell female fashion, lifestyle or beauty products, it’s not a bad strategy to be advertising alongside these stories. Next to the skinny model piece is your skinny food product. Next to the ageing actress (we’re all ageing by the way, people, that’s how time works) your anti-wrinkle cream. Next to the woman on the beach, your anti-cellulite cream.

Let the media point out the flaws and you provide the solution. Genius. And it’s worked like this for decades, centuries in fact. But something is changing. If, for example, you’re a beauty brand purporting to celebrate ‘real’ women, doesn’t all this vicious scrutiny do the very opposite? Doesn’t it make you look a bit, dare I say it, hypocritical?

I see many more risks ahead.
Friends At Work

October 26, 2017

Can you ever really be friends with your co-workers?

I don’t blame Kim Cattrall for deciding she doesn’t want to do another Sex and the City movie – and I applaud her for stating, without apology, that she was never friends with her co-stars.

SATC2 was, well, thin (did the whole thing just revolve around a shopping trip to Dubai, I can’t quite remember?), and, while there’s no doubt in the potential of a reboot to allow us to forget that rather forgettable episode, how many of us want to go back to a company we worked at many years ago, even when it’s a channel to happy working memories?

We move on. Why shouldn’t Kim?

And why do we expect people who portray friends at work to be friends at work? We don’t expect people who play lovers to be lovers (though, of course, are thrilled when this transpires to be the case). We know the casts of reality shows are usually no friends at all, most barely maintaining a vestige of frenemy at best.

We’re thrown together at work because of other people’s choices, not ours. Friendship is, fundamentally, all about choice.

Not that we don’t choose to become friends with people we meet at work. For a lot of people, their only friends are those they’ve met through work. Work friendships often have a shelf-life, though.

Driven by circumstance, changes in circumstance (like one of you leaving) can result in a diminishing common ground – those meet-ups where after the ‘how’s it all going then’ and ‘seen anyone from the old days then’ strands of conversation dry up there isn’t much else to be said and everyone drinks up and leaves.

Matters of hierarchy can be problematic in any friendship. For friendships at work, hierarchy, and particularly changes in hierarchical status, can also reduce the friendship’s shelf-life considerably. Having to give your once working equal an appraisal, or instructions, or directions, or orders, or a telling off, is bound to put a strain on all but the most open and deep-rooted friendships.

Even when we’re workplace equals, most workplaces operate on a warped Darwinian philosophy of ‘survival of the fittest’, meaning we’re all in direct competition with each other at all times. When it comes to which line gets the strikethrough on the spreadsheet, popularity, as well as productivity, counts.

Would you sacrifice your job for a friend at work, if it came down to it? I’d love to hear from anyone who has. Call me cynical, but I feel it could be a long wait.

You can’t blame people. We’ve all got to eat. Maybe that’s why ‘the others’ are rather piqued with Kim Cattrall. They’ve got bills to pay. Another blockbuster SATC movie would certainly help. But Kim’s not responsible for them (for what it’s worth, I would centre the movie around the death of Samantha Jones, I think they could do something really compelling and interesting with that, the ‘girls’ as fifty-somethings facing their mortality – “you can’t take those shoes with you, Carrie…”).

The great friendships that come about through work are usually down to one of two things: luck, or a great workplace culture. In those rare environments where everyone feels valued, respected, listened to, able to be themselves, able to speak up, equal as human beings first and foremost, meaningful and lasting friendships can flourish (because everything flourishes in an environment like that).

But it also worth remembering, for some people, they like the separation, work-life and home-life, private and public, social and professional, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

There’s no policy that says you have to be friends with your colleagues. Civil and respectful, yes, that should be the policy, but there’s no reason you should necessarily have anything in common beyond or outside of work, and that shouldn’t be an obstacle either, should it?

It can be though. When recruiters are selecting against ‘cultural fit’, are they assessing whether they think you’ll operate effectively within the team or be ‘one of the team’?

Probably, in most cases, they’re doing both, but this is hugely problematic too – after all, being seen as likely to easily become ‘one of the team’ may mean that any ‘differences’ you have will be seen as a barrier to this.

It’s not just SMEs that be can be prone to this; ‘matey’, ‘cliquey’ or ‘partisan’ monocultures appear in all kinds of workplaces, in massive corporates as well as ‘three chairs and a french bulldog’ start-ups. People get in the door because they’re “one of us.”

I think the bottom line, as Kim Cattrall and Sex and the City illustrates so perfectly, is that it doesn’t matter. Sex and the City was a great show, a great product, a great enterprise. The cast not hanging out and supping Cosmopolitans together out of hours wasn’t detrimental to it, was it?

We don’t need to be friends at work. It’s wise to be mindful, and alert to, changes in circumstance at work that could test any friendships; it’s wise to be mindful people at work are more likely to be your friend on the way up than down. And, if at that interview you get a sense that the culture feels matey, cliquey or partisan (or you look around and everybody looks the same), if you can, you might want to keep looking.

It’s a cruel world. We would all benefit from being a little friendlier to one another, wherever we find ourselves. But we’re also our best selves when we’re true to ourselves, and I for one think it’s far healthier to be friendly yet clearly not ‘friends’ with people at work if that’s your inclination, rather than fake it. Nothing is more hurtful, or toxic, than a false friendship.

Good for Kim Cattrall that she didn’t feel the need to keep acting once the cameras stopped rolling. I’ve always liked her. I like her even more now. Samantha Jones, as we knew her, is dead. Long live Samantha Jones!
The Critical Friend

September 20, 2017

Silencing our inner critic is said to pave the way to success, but where does that leave our critical friends?

You can’t move for them on Twitter. Positive affirmations. Aphorisms that advise you to put aside the ‘negative’ people in your life, the negative influences, the negative thoughts. Only this way will you find success – that holy grail; that ephemera.

It’s true. We beat ourselves up even when the world doesn’t bother us. We unpick threads of doubt, unravel mysteries that didn’t seek to be answered. We worry, and worry at ourselves, filled with a future anxiety that clouds the present, darkens the past.

I can be better than this. I will be better than this. At this. The inner critic can be as much about drive as doubt, but either signal discontentment in the present tense. Drive turns it into action; doubt, so often, to inertia.

Or trolling, the strategy of many a self-doubter in this irksome present, silencing their inner critics by turning them out on the world. So much easier to take down someone else than dismantle yourself to see what’s lurking there.

Of course, Twitter doesn’t lie. One of the best ways you can silence your inner critic – the one that tells you not to be so stupid, not to believe you can, not to even bother trying – is to have people who are positive about you in your life.

They needn’t necessarily be particularly positive people in themselves – not everyone responds to a sunbeam – but they do need to believe in you and express that belief.

Friends are followers, after a fashion (though I don’t think it can be said followers are necessarily friends). The role of leader in the friendship may oscillate, or constantly remain clearly designated Alpha-Beta, but, nevertheless, friends follow each other throughout their lives.

The follower makes the lone nut a leader. Leaders take action, whatever their doubts. If we are to lead our way in life, if only by managing to tread our own path, friends are surely the best cure for possible inertia. Supporting us. Spurring us on.

But this is where it starts getting thorny. What makes a good friend? Could it be that surrounding yourself with only cheerleaders might be a great way to silence your inner critic, but could lead you to taking stupid actions?

What if you are being stupid, believe you can when you can’t, shouldn’t bother trying – wouldn’t a good friend tell you?

Every tyrant learns, eventually, the loneliness of sycophancy.

What a good or not so good friend would, could or should tell you is the burning issue at the heart of almost all reality TV, most of morning TV and the majority of soap opera storylines. We spend a great deal of time judging what makes a good friend.

According to studies, integrity and reliability are right up there. Even more important than being ‘fun times’, in fact. A good friend does tell you. In a caring, sensitive way. In a non-judgmental way. Because they still believe in you. And they’ll support you in whatever you decide to do with this new information either way.

This is the point, and it’s just as true for the ‘critical friend’ in business. You’ve got to be on their side, even if they’re flawed, or maybe because of it. You’ve got to share the same goal, however much work it might be to achieve it.

We’re back to belief. Not blind faith. Not cheerleading on the sidelines as someone collapses. Good friends know you’re a flawed human being, because they’re one, because they know we all are. They choose you knowing this. In good faith, they might want to help you avoid the excesses of your worst flaws, and hope you’ll do the same for them in return.

There is currency in all friendships. The critical friend in business, in good faith, will want you to avoid any pitfalls (in bad faith they may avoid pointing out certain ones in the hope of more work, and you want to avoid those ones). A good, productive, constructive job, and payment, is enough in return.

What we expect from our friends in return for our choosing them – well, that’s thornier still.

Tabs and tallies of drinks rounds and children’s presents, hosted events and attended events, returned and unreturned calls and texts, invitations accepted or declined, things said, jokes made, points not taken too kindly – scratch most friendships and there’s a secret list of something being created.

There’s good reason for this too (in most cases). It’s the currency thing. A friendship, however loving, is conditional. A good relationship, however conditional, is balanced. An imbalanced friendship is never a good thing. Never a good choice.

But, joyously, as Twitter will frequently remind you, you have licence to step away from those negative people (for some people, whatever you do, the list never balances out).

Before you do though (and even with the best will in the world, it can be easier said than done to divest yourself of a toxic friendship), ask yourself one thing: is it the balance that’s out of sync, or the critique that’s out of order?

If someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, or points out a blind spot, that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in you. But if your friend can dish it out but not take it back, or never counters their critique with ‘evidence-based’ praise, that’s a big imbalance right there. Step away.

The critical friend in business works best when it’s the choice of the business to engage them, when the ‘friend’ already has a really good understanding of them and what’s important to them, knows ‘the deal’, and sensitively approaches how they give their advice.

The critical friend in life does pretty much the same thing, they just don’t expect to get paid for doing it. But they don’t want to be out of pocket either (which is why a surefire way to lose a friendship is to borrow money – just watch any episode of Judge Judy).

So often the inspiration for the voice of the inner critic is one that doesn’t stem from choice, it’s one foisted upon us – it’s the voice of the family, authority, society. It’s the voice of restriction.

To counter it, we do need voices of expansion – people who tell us to think big, who always want more for us, better for us, love to see us on top form. But a really good friend can also help us to see ourselves better, the good, the bad and the downright deluded or ugly lurking in the corners.

A really good friend won’t duck the really difficult conversation. They’ll try to find the right time. The right words. They’ll already have tried to see it from your point of view. That’s real love, right there. Real friendship. Expanding. Enriching. Vital. Critical.