The Productive Pessimist

  What the heck do you  even know about what I'm  going through?! A very good question - there are a lot of people who get their "understanding of mental health challenges" from pop psychology books, or a two-hour online course, no contact with the real world needed. That's not where my understanding comes from. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia following a serious (and violent) psychotic break in 2007.   I've been on high-dose antipsychotics (Lamotrigine and Quetiapine combo - which followed a Risperidone prescription, which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for me.) I've recently been able to transition to benzodiazepines, which I use alongside naturopathic condition management, which in my case includes real-food vitamin profiling and elemental therapy, with journalling as a mindfulness technique. At the moment, my symptoms are primarily slightly disordered thinking, occasional paranoid psychotic thoughts (mostly around helicopters...which...no idea...

  Liz Kendall  believes that "the problem with young people is too many consider doing a day's work stressful...we can't have that." Can't we? We "can't have" an acknowledgement of a reality - that work often is  stressful. The Productive Pessimist is my own business. It's work I've chosen - but trying to get it to a position of productivity, trying to get clients, coming up with content which offers just enough to be interesting, without giving so much that there's no need for anyone to hire us, is incredibly  stressful. Before starting The Productive Pessimist, I was a project manager in healthcare transformation. The stress of that had me at the end of my ability to cope more than once. Before getting into project management (which, as well as healthcare transformation, included employability support focused on individuals facing systemic barriers, and LGBTQ+ mental health inclusion in the third sector) I worked in marketing for a mult...

  British business spends a lot of time, energy, focus, and yes, money  "developing leaders".  Progression opportunities are secured by "demonstrating leadership skills." Constant calls are made that business, education, government, society at large, "needs more/stronger/better leaders." We need more women in leadership. No, actually, we need a different kind of masculinity  in leadership. Ah, actually, maybe we went too far, and it's time for "traditional masculinity" to be brought back to leadership. What about minority leaders? Maybe we should look at how neurodivergent folks and marginalised communities express leadership differently. The conversations, books, podcasts, and seminars around leadership are endless - and often contradictory.  We spend so many resources trying to give one definitive, always-true answer to the question "What makes a good leader?" The answer is simple: "What makes a good leader is competent, capa...

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...

  The recent controversy around Meta's whole process of moving away from fact-checking has become, understandably, centred on Mark Zuckerberg's statement that "we need more masculine energy in tech." In the UK and USA, "masculine" and "feminine" are loaded words, and heavily shackled to "men" and "women" respectively; people tend to hear "masculine energy" and jump to "men"...and, from there, jump to "That's misogyny!" But masculine and feminine are simply types of energy  that people bring to a space; they do not have to  correlate to expressed genders of "man" and "woman". Masculine Energy Masculine energy is the energy of determined, often single-minded and individualistic, focus.  It's the energy of direct, concise communication. It's the energy that says "Tell me if you have a problem, and I'll stop it being  a problem for you."  It's the energy...

  As leaders, we are often expected to have all the answers. If we don't, we risk dark mutterings about being "overpaid", about being "the reason people actually doing the work are struggling", or "the reason nothing ever gets done around here." Across sectors, people hate  leaders.  The NHS and UK social care, currently at the centre of political focus for reform, is littered with very public derision of "money being wasted on pointless leadership roles, rather than frontline services."  I've worked in a healthcare transformation leadership role, and...I'd be very wary of doing so again, purely because of  the attitudes from clinical staff, including their own operational leads. I was actually well-liked by these colleagues as a person, but even that regard couldn't get past the disdain my team, and what they represented, were held in. People don't like change, and they really  don't like change leaders. The reason why ch...