The Campbell Academy Blog (51)

No Battle Plan……

They say no battle plan ever stands in contact with the enemy, and that is a phrase and a metaphor that I use all the time.

You can also use the phrase 'ready fire aim' (again, something we often use when we launch projects within the business here).

To expect things to be exactly as you would like them to be is totally unreasonable because you are subject to external events and forces that you can never control or even see in advance of starting out on a journey or a project.

And so, today, I 'return to work' after Sab 6.0.

I finished more or less on the 21st of December and haven't had any patient contact since then.

I had made plans and lists of things to do while I would be away, but in the end, none of it came to pass, and I ended up either coming to work or working almost every day.

The exceptions to that were a trip to Madrid with my great friends Colin Burns, Tom Reason and my son Callum.

But the rest of the time, I just bumbled along, deciding to do what I wanted to do, which in the end was work on the future of The Campbell Clinic Group and the projects that get pushed to the side as my nose is to the Grindstone and I can't see the bigger picture.

I ended up reaching the end of last week in quite good shape, not the shape I expected to be in and not as fit as I wanted to be, but off the back of two weeks of really good training and looking forward to a brilliant weekend of considerable cycling before I returned back to work.

I had worked on projects to do with our teaching business, to do with the ITI and to do with recruiting three people at the high end of the business to push things forward on to our next plans for building unit four, for extension of the teaching business and for instigating new products into the clinical side of our business.

I felt pretty good about things and was very contented, and then I fell off my bike.

So this is not the time to go. "Are you okay? Or "Have you hurt yourself badly?" because I am okay, and I haven't hurt myself badly.

I did that thing that cyclists do when they hit something greasy or wet and lose both wheels on your bike, first landing on your hip and then landing on your head.

This is what my hip looks like here, but it's embedded in a link, so you don't have to see it if you don't want to.

The overriding sense of things on Saturday and Sunday after I'd fallen off about nine o'clock on Saturday morning was, for 'f*ck's sake, why me? This is rubbish' etc etc etc.

And then, as things settled down, you realise that by rights, I should have fractured my hip, and I didn't.

So as I write this now, I should probably be sitting in Queen's medical centre, probably still waiting for a hip screw that I'm not going to need because I'm back at work and everything is fine.

The point of this is not to gain sympathy for falling off my bike; people fall off their bikes all the time, and if you ride a bike, as often as I ride a bike, you must expect to fall off; it's about perspective and understanding that the plans that you make will never ever go the way you think.

You will never get as much done as you think in the short term, but you will get much more done than you think in the longer term and all along the way, you will 'fall off the bike' or whatever you want to use that metaphor for.

It's not about falling off the bike, is it? Like Rocky said, it's about what you do when you fall off the bike.

For those of you who have ever looked at this sabbatical nonsense and wondered whether it is worthwhile or whether it is something you should do, I have already booked the dates for Sab 7.0, and I encourage you to look at the possibility of doing something similar.

You will probably think that it's okay for me and that it's not possible for you, but that's exactly what I thought before I did the first one, and then I did it, and then I did it all the time.

It gives you an amazing ability to look at your life from a different perspective and to decide whether you are going in the right direction or whether there's anything you would like to change.