Feeling like you’re not good enough for a task is crushing, debilitating, and one of the fastest ways to become inept at most activities. Some people feel (or are made to feel) like this every day. One can find them in every organisation and many a family.

Empowering someone is one of the most significant actions any of us can ever make. We shouldn’t forget that we remember people by how they make us feel.

Feelings and words of power

“This is why men kill women,” a would-be uxoricide told his teenage daughter months before her mother’s murder, “because they [women] leave us [men]”.

Fortunately (for me and, more importantly, for the women I have been lucky to cross paths with all these years), that thought has never crossed my mind. When I introspect, I must admit to the sole reason being the circle I grew up in. My parents never alluded to this blood-chilling concept that men should have any say on how women live their lives; that is, gender should not give one being power over another. Indeed, this modest tenet was so ingrained that I struggled, as a teenager, to understand why some men (many men, far too many men) did not understand it.

A culture that fails to address that a significant number of its men believe they can exert a high degree of control of its women is a culture doomed to have men kill women. While we are what our actions demonstrate, we may still be what we tell ourselves we can be.

Men kill women here

Templates are powerful. When I was a kid, we used this thickly lined template, which we would clip behind our rather diaphanous A4 on which we’d write. The result was significant: no more slanting lines of slipping words edging ever closer to the page’s precipice; instead, balanced, more or less well-spaced lines of legible text the teachers could attempt to mark. Templates are equally useful for adults: emails and forms benefit from a few guidelines and prompts.

However, our lives are so much more than the devising and use of templates. Indeed, most of what makes us human is precisely what templates cannot encapsulate. When businesses use templates for onboarding and exit interviews, professional development one-to-ones or budget reviews, they are missing the point: a to-do list is a fine tool to ensure we tick boxes and avoid missing requirements, but useless at soul-searching, authentic connections or breakthroughs.

The advent of AI is seen by many as a threat to humanity. I see it as the opposite: once machines beat us at our own templated games, we may finally realise we have the time to be us again – that is, to be human.

Life in templates

I have lived abroad for most of my adult life. Ever since, I’ve always made time to watch my football team, which I’ve supported for longer than I can remember. This almost pathological commitment becomes even more peculiar when further scrutinised: I will watch the game while listening to its local radio broadcast. This innocuous exercise requires a hack: one must sync the audio to the video or risk being spoiled seconds before an action takes place or suffer the commentary dragging behind, disconnected from the thrill of the match.

As one may imagine, having synced audio and video regularly for so many years, the process is second nature: a few stops here, a few stops there, and it’s sorted: action and narrator work together as though I were witnessing the event in real-time.

Two conclusions are inevitable. First, that syncing seemingly disparate processes is not only possible but rather straightforward. Second, it will always demand we take the time.

Sync issues

The obvious choice is obvious for a reason. It may be detrimental, but it still needs to be addressed, not ignored.

The obvious choice

Loops are exceedingly powerful. Some professionals, especially in marketing, have learned to utilise them: by breaking them, the vulnerable prospect rushes in to fix them, their attention grabbed and primed to receive the offer.

Stories rely on loops: a problem that needs solving, a question that needs answering, or a villain that must be defeated. Break the loop, and you have a cliffhanger.

It is no surprise, then, that negative loops are insidious traps: every cell in our brains urges us to keep them closed and functional. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for struggling to get out of them. We should still get out, though.

Martian Thoughts

Feelings and words of power

Men kill women here

Life in templates

Sync issues

The obvious choice

Loops that need breaking