I've had good and bad bosses. The best, bar none, was a man named John. He is a compassionate boss, but it's not immediately obvious, because one the of the things that's great about him is he doesn't care whether his employees like him (there's a difference between being compassionate and needing people to like you).

When he wanted you to change your behaviour, he told you his expectations, in actionable and specific language, and he told you why. When you gave him bad news, he listended and considered your viewpoint and why you did what you did before responding. Even on the rare occasions it was clear that he was angry, he didn't yell or scream. He simply asked you if you had done everything your should have (again, in actionable and specific terms), and let you say yourself whether you had met the standard needed.

Conversely, the boss I referrred to in the previous blog was not compassionate. It took me a long time to realise this, but they would often deliverately undermine my skills or personal qualities in conversation. They would ask that I change or improve on KPIs that were outside of my control (often, because those KPIs were determined directly by them). And when something went wrong, even when given clear evidence of their failings, they didn't respond or even acknowledge their problems, they just redoubled in blaming it on me.

When I was a lawyer, I spent a lot of time thinking about waht is good and bad about working in law firms, how I would run them differently given the chance, I what kind of boss I would want to be. The shortest, best answer, is if I get to be someone's boss, I want to be a boss like John.

I enjoyed it. The night immediately before I tried it I had an experience that embarrased and upset me. It wasn't a situation where anyone was in the wrong, but even so, it reminded me of the things that make me feel bad about myself, and I was and am worried that even though I'm doing everything I can to try and resolve it, it might still get worse. Doing the meditation helped to calm my nerves and remind me that I do have good characteristic as well. Reminding myself that everyone else is a good person is probably a good thing too, although I was aware of that consciously already.

In a related topic, I find the instructions quite hard to follow - you need to rest your mind and focus on the breath, but also keep track of timings (do this for two minutes, then do that for two minutes) and keep track of instructions that you haven't necessarily memorized and need to refer back to the book to do, breaking your focus. I ended up finding a youtube video of the multuiplying goodness meditation (this one, which is apparently the only guided meditation of this type on the internet(!?)). Looks as though some (but not all) of the suggested meditations have guided versions at this page, which may be of help to others.

It was a little difficult - I found it harder to focus on the my own and others' suffering than my something neutral like my breathing. But it was good. Part of the reason it was hard is because with the people I was thinking of, I think their suffering is largely caused by attitudes they are grasping on to, rather than anything external, which makes it easy to admonish them in your mind for 'thinking wrong', onstead of extending compassion to them.

The way I found around this was to think about they feelings they were experiencing - discomfort, aversion, etc, breathe those in, and breathe out the opposite - confidence, sense of safety, comfort, etc. I guess that was the point to begin with, but I needed to use my unfeeling robot brain to figure out that my unfeeling robot brain wasn't the right tool for this meditation :-P.

Like a lot of things in this book, it articulates ideas that I feel were nebulously in my mind all along. The description of the model doesn't actually go into how to use it to improve your relationships,apart from saying that various meditation practices will help you to improve unconsciously, althought I do have some ideas about that that were prompted by reading it.

I particularly like the idea that some concept of fairness is built into human brains - even very young children make appeals to fairness to their parents (based on how their siblings or other family are treated), seemingly out of instinct, and parents often respond favorably, even though they're under no obligation to.

It occurs to me that a key aspect of the fairness dimension isn't so much that we should try to be fair to people, since everyone tries to do that anyway. It's that we should probably make more effort to communicate why we feel what we are doing is fair. After working for some years in the justice system, I've seen a lot of people feel unfairly treated by a system that would seem fair to an objective observer, because they don't undeerstand the perspective of the system. This might be because they are understandably preoccupied with the impact the system has on them, or because they are focused on an unfairness they perceive that's outside the control of the people they're blaming for it. A lot of problems can arise from this, and most of them can be cured by making sure the person understands the reason why you think what your doing is fair, even if they don't agree.

One thing that worries me somewhat about bootcamp is the status dimension - that others will think I have an inflated view of my own status, that I'm think arrogant or up myself - I've definitely given people that impression before. The model suggests I can ameliorate this by acknowledging my own shortcomings in skill (which is pretty easy where CSS is concerned) and complimenting others in their skills, particularly ones i don't share (also easy where CSS is concerned, but I've seen some neat ideas even in other people's phase 0 projects that I would never have thought of).

Difficult conversations are not something that you can generate spontaneously, but I have had a couple before I had to read this chapter, and I went through the suggested exercise thinking about one of them. I don't want to go into the specifics of the issue it was about, because it very much raised some identity issues and is related to my biggest insecurities. I realised at the time that the other person had good motivations and that person made clear efforts to consider my reaction, so there was never any doubt of that, but articulating and realising that a) this particular issue is very much an identity one for me and b) more generally, the things you do and say can impact someone on an identity level are very useful things to be able to articulate and have some vocabulary around.