The Campbell Academy Blog (74)

A long hard look (regularly)

Ethical drift is a phenomenon that was taught to me by my friend, colleague, fellow podcaster, and teacher at the Academy, Shaun Sellars.

It's where our ethics start to slide a little bit and we tell ourselves a story that it's ok, and then over time, it gets worse and worse and then all of a sudden, we're a long way from where we started, and we never noticed, and actually we're a worse person than we thought we were.

It happens all the time to lots of people, almost certainly including me.

It's not just ethics, though. It's everything, isn't it?

You set a course for your life to get to here to be that thing or that person or that job or that husband or that father or whatever it is you want and then you get stuck on the hamster wheel on the day to day and all of a sudden you get pushed off course and you haven't noticed and you carry on, of course, and then realise that your ladder is up against the wrong wall.

It's really difficult then to climb back down and start to climb back up another ladder, isn't it?

And so having the ability, the self-awareness, the humility to take a long, hard look at yourself regularly to see whether you are the person you are supposed to be and whether you are doing the things you said you would is fascinating.

Every so often (but really not very often at all), we should re-examine our vision of who we want to be and where we want to go; this is our guiding light or North Star.

There's no reason to change that every week or every month. I think if you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. But once you've set that, once you've set the vision of who you want to be and where you want to go, then you can get down to the day-to-day of getting there. But you definitely, definitely (or at least I do) need the time to stop regularly to make sure you're in the right direction.

Back in the day (and I hope a little bit going forward), I would be involved in triathlons, now as a relay, because I can't run, but before doing the whole thing; in fact, I did a relay this year, in May, a half Ironman Triathlon 1.9km swim in the lake.

If you get your head down in the swim, front crawl, not looking, breathing to the side, you're almost certainly going to swim in the wrong direction; it's gonna cost you time, effort, embarrassment, all that stuff; it's exactly the same, isn't it?

On Friday, I rode my bike with Alex.

I went to Derbyshire, where some big hills are (I usually ride on the flat in Nottingham)

It was an eye-opener, a staging post to show me I'm not quite who I thought I was or where I thought I could be, not in a bad way but in a way that says I've gone off track here, and it's time to get back on track.

That's what the long, hard look does. That's what self-awareness is, and self-awareness is a huge part of emotional intelligence.