Fabrice Muamba is showing small signs of recovery. This is brilliant news. Maybe its even more proof that prayer works. I have been interested to note the number of folks who I would not previously have labelled religious in any way, who have been coming out and saying that they are praying for him. Or they are exhorting us to join them in praying for him.

Don't get me wrong, I think its great when people pray. And I also think its super that people have surprised me by saying they are praying. A lot of hard-nosed footballers who I would have expected not to believe in a god are now wearing t-shorts saying Pray 4 Muamba. Brilliant.

Do they really believe that prayer works? Are they seriously expecting people to get to their knees? Who are they wanting us pray to? I find it strange sometimes that people proclaim loudly that God doesn't exist when things are going well but yet instinctively resort to prayer when the chips are down. Remember how full the US churches were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?

I'd like to think that if prayer is an important part of our makeup then we will pray all the time. If its not then why do we do it at all? Are we guilty of borrowing other people's values when it suits us because our own don't fit the current situation? Does it lead us to question our own values and possibly change them after the event?

Maybe people simply have never stopped to consider what is really important to them and it is only times like these that make them look at their own lives. Bill Shankly was quoted as saying that football was not a matter of life and death, it was more important. Powerful rhetoric that falls apart during events like Sunday. When it comes to actual life or death, everything else pales into insignificance and we do well to remember that more often.

So yes, please continue to pray for Fabrice Muamba. And anyone else you know that needs help, comfort or healing. Not to mention the people of Syria and other strife-blasted regions. And after you pray, take five minutes to consider what is really important in your own life. Then live it with this at the front of your mind. Always.

Sportsmen and women, like leaders need to be competent at what they do if they want to have an effect on the world around them; their competition or their organisation.If they are not capable of the technical requirements of their job then they won't last long. Compare someone like Jessica Ennis who today is competing in the World Indoors pentathlon and setting records. She is obviously very good at what she does. Likewise, we want to be proficient at what we do, whether it is for a job or for leisure, so we can develop and grow.

That's not all there is to it though. In sport and in life, we need to be people of good character if we want to cope with the power that comes with being competent. Steven Naismith and Steven Whittaker of Ranger FC have been in the news today because they are willing to take a 75% cut in their wages. Contrary to popular belief, top footballers are not motivated to play by huge sums of money. These two, and by the sound of it most of the other playing staff, are keen to see their team survive and succeed again and their loyalty has over-ruled their bank manager. Too often recently we have witnessed footballers being dishonest, unprofessional, petulant or downright  illegal in the way they have conducted themselves. Politicians have made the news for similar reasons. How heartening it is then to hear of these Rangers players leading the way in a good sense.

Lets have more of that, in the news and in our own lives. 

Could you work with Vladimir Putin? Reports this morning say he has announced that he has won the election and is back in power but there are questions around the legality of the elections.

Do you have people that announce things that benefit themselves, without consideration of any consequence for others? Are there people in your work place who take things that may or not be theirs to take? How do you react and how do you let it affect you?

Some of us get angry and annoyed. It's easy to do. It feels justified - the other person was obviously wrong and the more we tell ourselves that, the more convinced we become. Before you go too far down that route though, stop and check. It could be they are entitled to make the announcement and that it is not their responsibility to check how you will feel first. Deal with it - in this case you are the one causing yourself the problems by choosing to feel aggrieved or annoyed. You also have the choice not to feel that way but . accept the situation and move on instead. Likewise, if they have taken something, it could be that actually it does by rights belong to them. Again, deal with it.

If however they have taken something that you believe they have no right to, then something maybe needs to be done. First, check whether your perception is indeed the correct one. It could be they have simply borrowed it and neglected to ask first. Alternatively the question of ownership may not have crossed their mind since they assumed it to be company property available to anyone. Before you shoot your mouth off, making life more difficult for you and others, get the facts and try to understand other people's viewpoints. If it is just that you got the wrong end of the stick then the situation can be dealt with quite easily - you accept that you are the difficult person to work with and, assuming that's not what you want, you can make some changes.

On the occasion that you are right, you may need to actually involve other people if the individual has contravened one of the written or assumed company policies. In that case, clear up the matter as quickly and tidily as you can, retrieve the article and then forgive them. Move on. Metaphorically or possibly to a new job if you've just blown the whistle on a senior manager.

Alternatively, hold a grudge against that person for ages into the future, adding it to the other misdemeanours that stick to your jaundiced and stereotypical view of them thereby making it even harder to work alongside them in the future. Your call.

So people think the government's work placement scheme is unfair and consequently businesses are pulling out. Am I alone as a youth worker in thinking that there is lots of merit in it? At the xpand Life College, we see placements as being an integral part of young people learning what it is like to be at work, even when that work is not what they ultimately want to spend their whole career doing. They learn the essence of professionalism, workplace etiquette, social competence and they get practice of getting up every morning and showing up. They don't get paid for it but recognise that there is merit in it for them and so they carry on going. Some of them enjoy it too but they all learn from it.
Now I'll admit I haven't delved deep into the detail of the scheme and am merely shooting my mouth off based on what I have heard on the radio today, and Radio 1 at that but my thoughts are:
1) It sounds like some of the people who are receiving money from the government because they are seeking a job, are complaining that they have to do work while they wait for their job to appear. Surely if they just want to sit around and do nothing then they technically aren't seeking very hard and merely sponging.
2) Can people not see that in the current climate a job of any description, voluntary, placement, low-paid or whatever is a better stepping stone to the next job than doing nothing? A hole on your CV never looks impressive.
3) There seems to be a complaint that if they choose to leave their placement then they get their benefit cut off. Is that not good practice for the way it is in proper work? I'm guessing the rules are the same as when I last signed on that if you leave a job voluntarily you can't claim benefit immediately. Making the rules similar for these placements would provide another source of learning from experience that if you can't stand the heat and decide to get out of the kitchen then you shouldn't expect Nanny State to come and bail you out immediately.
It seems many employers are crying out for workers with more resilience, who are willing to work hard and possibly even get their hands dirty but who above all are able to conform to the ways of working that our society requires. They want people who are willing to be part of a team who all pull together rather than individuals who are merely out for personal gain; rights without responsibilities. Surely these are things that people will gain from work placements.
I certainly wouldn't condone employers taking advantage of these job seekers, which I can imagine does happen occasionally, but I also don't want to see society lapsing into a state where everyone is happy to shirk any responsibility that might come their way in the hope that someone else will provide financially for them.
I will end now and prepare for teaching the Life College students about resilience - it'll be hard but I expect them to thank me for it later.

_The signals along the track turn to red and the trains stop. When the road vehicles slow to a stop, their brake lights glow. Milimetrically small advertising hoardings having changing electronic pictures on them, fans in the Hamburg football stadium have flags that tey wave periodically. On top of al that there are the mini-scenes within the different worlds; the frogmen diving a river to find the corpse; Pippi Longstocking lifting a horse in a village; gnomes working in a mountain cave; a couple making love in the middle of a field of sunflowers.
Watching some of the workers bent over their desks painting the tiny figures, you wonder what drives them. They are investing time to provide details that most of the visitors might never spot. Presumably they enjoy what they do - given some of their unergonomic desk positions, I hope they aren't being forced to work their. I'm guessing they even love what they do and get a kick out of including the little details into their worlds. Maybe people spotting the scuba-diving cows makes the workers smile as well. Yes, you could argue that they must simply be detail-focussed people and I would agree in part - they could never cope with the job otherwise. However, the level of intricacy goes beyond mere attention, moving into a passionate love of detail.
Which bits of your job do you love doing? What is there in your normal day or week or month that gets you interested more than the rest of the drudgery? Yes, the MW people need to make sure that the trains all run to the schedule and don't crash, that lights come on when 'night time' happens so that the basics of the wonderland work. They could stop there, but actually its all the exciting little extras that make the place so fascinating for everyone from 3 to 83, judging by the rapt attention of the visitors I saw.
Lots has been written about finding meaning in our work and maybe at the start of the year we need to re-examine what we do. Can we find an analogy to painting today's person faster than yesterday's, making it a neater job, with more colourful clothes? Maybe there are little scenarios we can include that make people smile or big thigs we can create that make people gasp. How can we relate differently to our boss, our colleagues or our visitors in order to make them feel better or for us to enjoy our days more? Its true what people say that the more you put in the more you get out; it might mean we have to give a little extra but isn't that worth it? Iif we enjoy our work more, how much more will that contribute to our happiness and mental well-being?

I was having dinner with some friends the other night and it being Christmas, we had crackers. Someone at the table found a short measuring tape inside theirs and amidst the ongoing cracks (and non-crackery pffts of the failures), it had to be played with, particularly due to its shortness. Would it go round their waists, the ladies wondered, as in fact did some of the men.

At only 25 inches long, I wasn't entirely surprised when it barely reached round both sides of my torso! For me it was better emplyed for examining neck, biceps and such like, but it did provoke a discussion about what was important. In the midst of this we started to wonder about the value of a stretchy measuring tape. If we want to be a 25 inch waist, how brilliant would it be if we had a device that would unfailingly peg us to that standard, particularly in the post-Christmas expansion phase that we are about to embark on. One of my friends posted a status that said, "stomach now waiting to be filled repeatedly to well past its normal 'full' limit over the next few days" and I'm sure he's not alone in thinking like that. I very much doubt though that he will be joining the ranks of those concerned about the consequences.

I started to wonder how often we try to fool ourselves into thinking we have met the standard by simply changing the measurement to match where we have got to - stretching the tape to fit round us no matter how many mince pies it needs to girdle.

Whilst it would be great to know we will meet our targets, if we can only do it by cheating then it devalues our efforts entirely. A stretchy measuring tape might sell well to the self-deluded of our nation but I would far rather help folks to really get where they want to be.

So I trust that as you sit down over the Christmas period and recognise your achievements for the past year, both large and small, that you will do so with an air of celebration for something measurable and that you will set realistic goals for 2012. Enjoy what time you have to pause and reflect and I wish you all a very happy Christmas!

If you hadn't noticed already, the rugby world cup is taking place in New Zealand right now. England and Scotland are both taking part although that might change at the weekend. For New Zealand though, their participation in the latter stages is now assured, which means that Richie McCaw may get to lift the trophy as the All Blacks captain. On Saturday, he won his 100th cap and was presented with a special silver cap to mark the occasion. The Times had this to say about it today:

"For all the plaudits that were heaped upon McCaw before winning his 100th cap on Saturday, it was the humility of the manner in which he accepted the presentation that stood out. McCaw thanked his team-mates for being great team-mates and he thanked the crowd for being a great crowd. And there was plenty that was moving about the occasion, which was partly because of the emotion crackling in his voice, but also because he refused to recognise his own greatness. The All Blacks are certainly captained by a man who has his values right."

On the field he comes across as hugely competitive and combative yet he combines those values with a humility of spirit that is generally agreed to be admirable. What a combination for a top sportsman in an era of prima-donna footballers thinking that immorally high salaries are their right. It was heartening to see him in action against France but even more encouraging to read about Richie McCaw, the real man, in the paper today.

I was in London yesterday and felt a little on edge. I think I have been watching Hustle too much recently. I like it, but it starts to make me think that every other person is a conman out to fleece me or nick my stuff. If you haven't seen it, Hustle is a TV show  where grifters in London make money by conning dishonest people. I love it but it has made me come back to the idea that I have made mention of elsewhere. Namely that everyone has values - they might be different from mine but they do have them. In a grifters case they hold to the ideas that they are not thieves and that you should never con an honest man, instead focussing on tempting the greedy to part with their cash.

There is a certain attraction for me about the programme (even though Jaime Murray has now left the series), possibly because I admire their bottle, their ingenuity and their precise and clever planning. However, if I was to work alongside them, I would quickly become stressed because actually we are very different people with a wide variance in our value-systems.

Often we can recognise that there is a lack of rapport between us and others but not quite put our finger on what is the cause of it. Is it that our value system is not-aligned with the other person's. We put our importances on different things and assign priorities in other places.

If this is the case, what should we do? We can turn our backs on what we base our actions and motivation on - hard for many of the values we hold to and nigh on impossible for many of the deeper rooted ideas. Or we can try to convince the other person to turn to our way of thinking - hard, a cause of arguments and probably not a good way to win friends in the short term. Finally we can be accepting that their way and ours are different and work round the issue. Is this conflict avoidance? Maybe yes, but if the issue is not something central to the reason why we relate (i.e. if it does not impact on our work with a colleague or similar) then maybe it is simply one of the differences that we deal with as constructively as possible to make our team strong, knowing it will never disappear.

Going back to Hustle, Danny and Mickey share some values as above, but yet Mickey is far more eager to prove himself clever and reach the pinnacle of his 'profession' with carefully thought out plans whilst Danny is happy to play the old short cons for sheer romantic enjoyment and a quick buck. Different reasons for doing things but yet a team is bonded through mutual respect of skills and strengths.

Contemplation would make a good life, keep it strict, only
The eyes of a desert skull drinking the sun,
Too intense for flesh, lonely
Exultations of white bone;
Pure action would make a good life; let it be sharp-
Set between the throat and the knife.
A man who knows death by heart
Is the man for that life
In pleasant peace and security
How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die.
He shall look up above the stalled oxen
Envying the cruel falcon,
And dig under the straw for a stone
To bruise himself on.

Robinson Jeffers

Famous as an outdoors man, you can easily see how Robinson Jeffers' writing matched the values of someone like Yvon Chouinard. He quotes this poem in his book 'Let My People Go Surfing' which focusses on values.

What books or films do you particularly relate to because the values espoused in them match your own? For me I would list Gladiator (strength and leadership), Dead Poet's Society (difference) and Take the Lead (grace and flow) as well as the book of My Family and Other Animals (learning and enjoying being outdoors) which I re-read many times as a kid. What about you?

Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of patagonia believes his staff should be allowed to go surfing whenever they want. Even in work time.

Reading his book, "Let My People Go Surfing", gives an account of his history and the story of the founding of his company but is also a discussion of the philosophies of the company - the values as it were.

Chouinard has always been an outdoor person, into all manner of adventurous pursuits and he wants his people to be able to enjoy them too. He feels that people should be free to take an afternoon off if the surf is up or there's powder snow on the mountains, partly because he enjoys that too but also because he wants people to be happy in their work, that his company should be somewhere that it is easy to come to work.

Increasingly this is a way forward for companies who want to give their employees flexibility. Get your work done but do it wherever and whenever you please. It doesn't happen by accident though - it is so counter-cultural that it must be a deliberate choice by the management. Although when Chouinard says, "Why on earth would anyone run a company that was hard to work for?", you do think he has a valid point that makes business sense.

Others don't see it that way though, because they have different values. Chouinard's personal values and attitudes have stuck with the company, ever since he founded it, and so the values of the corporate body, which employees are expected to buy into, are mainly around the concepts of looking after people and the environment, being nice people to do business with.

Hard not to agree with them and so many people want to work for him and he has the pick of potential workers who will fit in well.

When you think about your own organisation, can you clearly identify the corporate  values? If you can, how well do they match your own personal ideals? If they don't match very well, how well do you cope with the stress that this produces and what are you doing to make things better?

Contact me if you want some coaching help to improve things, or download the values pack to help determine what is important for you.