 OK. Diolch. Diolch. Diolch. Diolch, Jeff. Ond reguwch i'r deall. Diolch. Diolch. Diolch, Jeff. Rhaid i chi'n i'n cael ei gwaith. Ie, nid oedd. Rhaid i chi'n gwaith ar ddiweddol. Dwi'n maen nhw'n gobeithio. Rhyw hoffi'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio? well not so much slack but we did fail in our recording so we did have one due to go out but the quality was not high enough yes didn't meet our definitions done we asked various experts to come in and help us with it post-processing but we couldn't get it to a point where it was releasable so to spare your ears we decided that we wouldn't release it but that meant obviously that you went a fortnight without an episode from us so it's been a month Roeddwn i ddim yn oed. Yna'n gwneud. Mae'n ddim yn ymwneud. Mae'n bwysig o'r Menchynau. Mae'n halloween. Felly, dyna'r bwysig o'r gwir. Rhaid? Mae'n fwy fwy, rhaid. Rhaid? Mae'n bwysig o'r ipa. A mae gennym ni. Mae'n fwy o'r stelt. Mae'n fwy o'r stelt. Mae'n fwy o'r stelt. Mae'n fwy o'r stelt. Mae'n fwy o'r ael, ond. Mae'r taisiwyr wedi cael iawn, rwy'n cael ei dweud bod ymddangos yn ymddangos, Felly yn rhoi, mae'n gofio'r fathach. Ond yn fwy, fel bod yn fwy, ac rwy'n cael ei ddweud, y pwysig yn yw gydag. Felly yn y pwysig. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud. Ond mae'n cael ei ddweud, ond mae'n ymddangos yn y pwysig. those really diluted Christmas wine. But it's a bit of a beer in a suit. Yeah, it's nice. It's not fizzy at all. It's a little bit ribinadd colour actually. Hold it up to the light. Blackcurrant there is for our non UK audience. How about you? I've gone for a pint of Frick Show. Very Halloween themed. But you seem to think I've had this before. Roeddwn ni'n ddych chi i ddigon yn y ddechrau. Roeddwn ni'n ddechrau yn y ddechrau yn unedol. Roeddwn ni, roeddwn ni'n ddweud, roeddwn ni'n ddweud. Roeddwn ni'n ddweud. Yn ymlaen, rydw i, yn rhaid, yn ysgrifennu. Roeddwn ni'n ddweud, fel y cyflawn o'r pubcast yma. Yn ymlaen i'r unrhyw, ynghyd yn eich cyflawn o'r hyn o'r ysgrifennu, yw'r cyflawn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn, They're right. We will send you an agile pubcast t-shirt. There you go. Plastic competition. Cloudy, flat. It's not that strong actually. It doesn't hardly taste strong at all. It's got a bit of... quite an agricultural taste. It's got a bit of a scrumpy. A bit of a dirty taste. Not in a bad way, just a bit more of a rough taste. Do you like that? No, I think I prefer something a bit cleaner. A bit crisper. OK. You like the glass though? Yes, we've got for the benefit of people who can't see the video. It's a Chalmton 2019 Real Ale Festival glass. It's specially printed for their festival. And we are in... This has got the pub on the glass as well. We're in the Sanford Park ale house in Chalmton. So we do like our Real Ale in Chalmton. And they have their festivals. This is a cider. When was the festival? I think I had more than one. So I don't know which one it was. But given the fact that it's got a witch on there, I would say it was the... Must have been a bit recent. It was the half-term Halloweeny festival. Rather than the spring one. Did you get up too much for Halloween? Do you do Halloween? I do, yeah. I like getting dressed up for Halloween. I go all out. Some of you will remember my costume from a couple of years ago. I actually gave a talk at a used group at Dublin. Dressed as the Joker. With costume and makeup and silver teeth. This wasn't Wackin' feelings Joker. This was... Who was it? Who was the guy? Jared Leto. Yes. I haven't seen the new one yet. Still. Yes. No, it was... My wife went as Harley Quinn. So that was our get-up two years ago. This year I went as a werewolf. So I had the eyes, the contact lenses, and the fake teeth stuck on teeth. How long were you making this year? About an hour and a half, two hours. In the seat? On and off. So a bit of costume, bit of makeup, bit of hair. It's good, I like it. And had a good night. Yeah. This was the best inshirt that party you were at was the best costume you saw. There was a very, very good Freddy Kruger. Was that? Very good Freddy Kruger. With the rippled face. I was trying to think... He must be wearing something. It's not like a mask that you put on. It was almost like he'd had it stuck onto his face. It was skin tight. A bit very, very good. I think that's possibly my worst type of party I could ever go to. Really? What was that? I scare very easily. I don't like anything. I don't like darkness too much. I don't like suspense. I don't like that. It was all that in the open. There was no sort of jump scares. Wasn't there? People hardly run corners. There were actors, live actors, but they were out in the open. They weren't. Did you ever go on a ghost train when you were a kid? And there was people actually... I didn't like that either. Probably there's a deep rooted childhood memory in all this. That's probably why I'm scared of monsters and jumpiness. It's not the masks. No, I don't think so. It's the threat of being made to feel nervous. It's funny, isn't it? How fear is something that we want to stay away from. But we're also drawn to. We watch horror movies. What do you do? I don't. What do you do? Just with the sound off. That's true. I do watch horror movies with the sound off. We'll go on roller coasters. We'll go to Halloween parties. Is it adrenaline? Is it a hormonal thing? Probably. I don't know enough about it. But I would say it's probably some kind of rush. Yes. Also, I think possibly a challenge thing. That idea of challenging yourself, putting yourself outside of your comfort zone. I think human beings are naturally drawn to that. There is a thrill to it. And it's possibly the forbidden as well. The dangerous. We do shy away from it, but we don't. It's a shock. I went to watch the Blair Witch project. You've seen Blair Witch? This is when I was at university. This must have been 1998-1999. I went to watch it on Halloween. I think it came out of a cat Halloween. I think I sat through it. I was very brave. But my girlfriend and my wife had to walk out. She couldn't sit there. She was too much. That's not a slasher movie. It's just a spin. The camera, the way it's shot, and the home video nature of it makes it a bit more... I suppose it makes it potentially more real. You can put yourself into that position. It's in the first person, isn't it? Seeing it as that person sees it. You take on that emotion that the people in that albeit fictitious movie, you mirror those emotions. That's a different type of horror, isn't it? It's not there to shock you. It's there to create a similar emotion in you. That's why people can't watch it. But they do, but they go knowing that it's going to happen. Knowing that... You don't know how it's going to end. I think it's the relief at the end of it, isn't it? When it's over, you get that sort of different hormonal rush, don't you? That relaxing thing. See what I was going to say there? Fear. Part of it is the cinematic thing. About why would you go into that abandoned warehouse? Why would you do that? But when you are scared, you do make bad decisions. Not rational decisions. I think that's... Just trying to get away from the movies and back to work, I suppose. Teams that are scared, people who are scared at work, will make bad decisions. In my job as a coach, I can't coach somebody if they're scared. If they're in the fear zone, the stress zone, their mind is not open to new possibilities, you have to get them comfortable before they can expand their thinking, before they can take on an alternative perspective. Everything is very laser-focused and black-and-white, right or wrong, safe or dangerous, a little bad. As a coach, that's what I spend a lot of my time... I'm not a lot of my time, that's not true, but I do need to focus on getting and making sure that environment is safe for them to be coached in, whether that's an individual, whether it's a team or what have you. You get scared at work? I still get a fear of, like tonight, I'm doing, so this will probably go out after I've done this, but I'm doing some public speaking tonight. I'm going to a user group in Birmingham to talk about some storytelling stuff. And that's fear of the unknown, fear of being judged, fear of being not good enough. It's scared at me, not in the same way that horror movies do, but my pulse rate will increase. And a lot of those fears, the way I calm myself down, is to say, well, in reality, it's probably not going to be as bad as you think. And this time tomorrow it will be done, it will be over with. In the same way that you have fear before, this is a supposition on intuitiveness. So a horror movie, tension, tension, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, finishes a kind of nice feeling. Do you get a nice feeling after speaking at something like that? Yeah, a sense of relief. And yeah, just knowing that the stressful period has ended, absolutely. And then you've got that kind of... I suppose it's the same time. Musicians and performers experienced this, don't they? They went on a stage. You imagine, I think we've talked about this before, as a performer going on to a stage in front of 10,000 people, and they're not being able to get to sleep because they can't bring that adrenaline level back then. It does take me... There'll be a sense of a high after that. How long have you not lost? Not very long. Half an hour, an hour. But then I've got to drive him afterwards, and again driving will be a way to bring that back down to a level. But then there's performers that go on stage. It does play with your memory as well because if you're constantly in that state and there's a repetition of doing this, you tend to... it numbers your other senses. And I hear stories about these performers that go on stage and forget where they are because they've gone on tour, so many venues, concert venues, different places, that they completely forget which city they're in. They say, good morning, good evening, new castle, when they're in Sheffield or whatever it might be. Didn't you two do that? Somebody did it, somebody famous did it on stage, and they got booed. They got bottles of urine thrown at them or something. A big band did it because they've been touring so much. But that can happen. It can play with your rational decision. You've got a real rational mind. But that's probably a fine line between tiredness and adrenaline. I think there's also monotony in there as well, isn't there? But if you're doing the same thing over and over again, you can't really distinguish one from the other. Whereas you're not doing that monotonously. But I would say that it's on... I also struggle. People really don't believe me when I say this, but I struggle with the whole performance, anxiety, things like that. Still now. You've made big leaps on that. It's my biggest sense of personal achievement that I can do these things. But it still comes at a cost. But what was I saying? The monotony. If I became so comfortable with it, it would be boring. The fact that I know I need to practice a new talk, share some new information, go to a new crowd, that pushes me. Or I'm stressful, but it gives me... I have a different... You can have your burnout with over-stress, but you can also have your rust out. Things are too easy. Run into interesting things. I'm pushing out. This talk that I did is largely new material. So there's an added level of fear with that. I'm saying things that I might not have said in public before. Or in some material exercises, whatever it might be. A lot of speakers, a lot of conferences I've seen will literally roll out the same message. And what I would say, so it sounds like you said monotonous, but there's an element that people go to a Billy Joel concert or a Rolling Stones concert. They don't want to hear new stuff. They don't want to hear the old stuff. Yeah, but we're not performers, people that sing along to our stuff today. Really? I don't know, do they? That's a good question. Do some conferences go to conferences and they'll see... I won't know their names, but they'll see speakers say largely the same thing, because they just want to hear them say it. Maybe, it's not. So I was doing some work with them. I was invited in to give a talk at a large telecoms company recently at the launch of their internal product telecoms. I was talking to them about making decisions and influencing people, learning about yourself as a prototender. And saying that you should be a little bit stressed as a prototender. You should feel under a little bit of pressure, because if you're not, you're not going to make anything great. But what were you saying before that? I wanted to link to what you were saying. Are you going to see the same thing? One of the things I was talking to the prototender about is remember you're not your users, because we all have our own lenses that we see things through. We all have our own biases. And assuming that everybody will use a protot how I would use a protot is a dangerous assumption to make. And it's something that I do a lot. There's an example of it. I assume that people wouldn't go to a conference and want to hear the same thing. I assume that when somebody's seen me once before, they would not want to hear the same thing again. And that might not be true. And I put all that effort into creating something brand new and that might not be what people want. And I also think that we tend, me and you certainly, I know that we do this, is that maybe there's a false level of expectation that people have moved on. I mean, I still regularly go to run courses now where people haven't heard of the Ajahn Manifesto. 18 years in advance of when it was created. So sometimes I have to scale back my own expectations that people don't know that stuff yet or they haven't heard that message or that speech or that metaphor yet. There is a comfort in knowing what to expect. A big comfort. So if somebody's at a stage, yes, you on the stage, and I'm using the stage, perhaps literally, but also metaphorically here, you on the stage there's a pressure to perform and an anxiety, but the people being presented to have anxiety as well. If you ever go to a comedy gig and the comedian on the stage is dying, not literally Tommy Cooper-esque, but the jokes aren't landing, that's an uncomfortable feeling for the crowd. And a musician that forgets their lines or something, that's really uncomfortable for the crowd. They pay them money, they want to enjoy it, they want to see what they want to see. So there's an element of pressure there as well. And so knowing what you're going to get and getting what you know you're going to get is an experience. And we do a lot of work in helping people and teams and organisations change. I said to this producer in the community, whether you like it or not now, whether your job title tells you this or not, you are now a leader. You are a leader in new ways of working, you are a leader in how to build products and how to work and how to work with people. People are going to be paying attention to everything that you do and everything that you say. And if you can provide a certain level of comfort and a certain level of security by being predictable, I know what I'm going to get. I know the kind of Paul, generally speaking, I know what I'm going to get with you. But every now and again you will need to act differently. And that's okay and it's needed. But being that continuity and change at the same time, meeting people where they are one foot in point A and another foot in point B, that's a way of helping people come along with you, not expecting them to make the leap, something brand new. Don't make it a bit waffly that makes sense. That doesn't make sense to me, absolutely. But I was going to say something else about monoptony. You hear it a lot, don't you, about there's a complacency, or cockiness, what do you want to call it? Expecting that things will always be as you've done them before. Or developers expecting that users will always use their system in the same way. But actually how they designed it is different to the user experience that's evolved. You hear it, but there's some stories at the court conference a few years back. I think I saw that about airline pilots that don't see because they're in that rhythm of how to land a plane. I think there was a situation where they just came into land and they didn't realise there was another plane beneath them because they're not looking for it. Because you get so used to doing things in a certain way, to practising things in a certain way, to singing the songs in the same way that you actually get worse at doing the things that you should be proficient at. The other thing I was going to say is that you say about musicians on stage. Freddie Mercury famously said that some of the songs that the crowd loved the most were the songs that he hated the most. Imagine again you're trying to put on a good show and you're trying to please the crowd with something that doesn't please you. Here's something, we've come full circle, back to masks. Literally Freddie Mercury didn't wear a mask, but he did. He was a very different person. Well, that's not true. The media, he was out of the media spotlight when he wasn't on stage largely, didn't enjoy the media attention. But yeah, and the same thing, Charlie Chaplin was very similar in terms of he became the character when, by putting on the hat or the mustache, he couldn't, I think he didn't quote it, he couldn't think like Charlie Chaplin until he put that mask on. Keith Lemon, with the bandage, he's alternative person. What's the name for that? Is it a crutch? I don't know. It's a metaphorical mask isn't it? It's a physical symbol. It allows you to, it gives you permission or some kind of anchor I suppose to wear that character. I used to do that to a degree when I used to wear it from home at BT. It would get me into a completely different mindset. If I got it up and I was just threw a t-shirt and shorts on or something, I'd still be kind of slack, which in some cases is a good thing because I could be more creative perhaps. More relaxed and free flowing, but if I wanted to be more formal, more disciplined, and actually put clothes that I wore would have an impact. So will you be, when you're talking tonight, will you be wearing a metaphorical mask? I'll be wearing this. Or will you be putting on a show for the audience? Interesting, so if you asked Sabrina, my wife, she would say she can instinctively spot it when I'm in work mode. I personally, maybe I don't spot it as much or consciously do it as much. Maybe because I'm doing it more often, I don't know, but those closest to me would probably say they can tell when I'm... I do have a different persona I suppose. That is, we've talked about this before, that's exhausting, to maintain two different personas be it in work or be it even in person. People we know, friends of ours, that we feel operate in a different fashion in front of their friends compared to how they do at home. It is exhausting. I think that's relevant in many ways, but one in particular is when you're bringing together a team that have to work directly, consciously collaborate with people. I always used to joke about I'd rather have someone who can play nicely with others than the most talented person in the playground. But playing nicely with others takes effort. So are we asking people to use this metaphor of wearing a mask to be part of a team? Are we asking them to be themselves? I think you probably have to be mindful of wearing it at different times and almost giving people, I think, permission to wear it. So it's the introvert, extravert. So you're expecting people to speak up or to be creative in a planning session, for instance. You might want to give people permission to wear a mask metaphorically to be someone else, to speak as someone else, to be more confident or more comfortable than they perhaps would ordinarily be. But then they'd need to be able to retreat into that space afterwards. That's a safety thing, pushing people outside of the safety, but then being able to retreat back into it. So I've asked my team of peer reviewers for my team last week that I'm writing at the moment. I've also volunteered to be peer reviewers. And I've asked them to take on different personas when reviewing the work. So there are five different personas that I've asked them to adopt to make and choose which ones they want to do. So the first one I've called the Tube Inspector, which is where they have to go through and mine the gap. So constantly looking for gaps either in the narrative or there's a bit of a jump from here to here to finding some theory or some evidence or something. So there's the professor, there's the researcher, there's the connector, finding links and things. And then there's the one which people have jumped on the most, which is the destroyer. So I said, you know, when you're in this persona, I want you to find all the reasons why somebody who wouldn't like this book would use to shoot it down and say this is why this book is terrible. And people have looked at it and they've apologised for it at times. So I'm really sorry I got carried away with this one. That's interesting. But they've also been talking about it in the third person. So when they've been adding some comments to the Trello card or in the Slack channel they've been saying the destroyer said this. And the destroyer was in a bit of a bitchy mood today. So they've been distancing it from themselves, which gives them permission to be nasty. But I think that's a safety amongst, there's probably a lack of safety amongst other reviews. So can all the other reviews see those comments? And obviously you can see that. So there's probably, instead of saying I think, that persona gives them that permission to say perhaps what they wouldn't want you to know that they'd said, even though you do know that you said that. And you can read between the lines. That's what they really think. And they probably know that you think that. That's the bizarre thing is that that persona kind of gives you a level of abstraction. Yeah, but that's enough. I was arguing stronger teams that I've seen, more mature teams, they own that level of feedback. And they know that that personality, almost we expect that. There's people we've worked with in the same teams that we know and they're happy to admit that they play that role. That's their natural default. They defer to that they've got that destructive attitude. It's cynical. Yeah, if it's constant, you can become labeled as the cynical one. But it can be very useful. And sometimes it's, like we've said before, it's very easy. And it's an easy introduction to it rather than thinking creatively to think. Destructively. Destructively first. Yeah. So I was quite, I tried to position it really as safely as I could. I said to them, I've done this before. I've had people rip my books to shreds in the past. It brings me to tears, but I know it's needed. So rest assured that I will be looking at this with my big boy pants on. And I'd much rather have that than release something that hasn't gone through that level of scrutiny so they're providing me a really valuable service. And I would rather receive that feedback from a safe audience than the wider world. And I can't change it. So, yeah. Of all the five percenters, that's the one that people have jumped to. The easiest one. The most popular one, maybe not the easiest, but certainly... I mean, we do. I think there's also an engineering element to this as well is that we do like to see the problems in things. Well, it's easier to, isn't it? It's easier to see why something won't work and to come up with a viable solution that will work. To chip away at, a list all the things that could be wrong rather than what could be right. Yeah. Is there any other mix between Halloween and that genre? I think, let's say, I talk about my wife, I always talk about my wife. Sabrina doesn't want to... there's a mixture of conversations around her. She doesn't want to do it. She doesn't want to be associated with her. Because of its pagan, largely because of its history. And some of the friends who spoke to you said didn't agree with it, again, because they described it as pretty much begging. You're walking the streets begging people for sweets so they don't agree with it from that point of view, not from a historical point of view. But again, it reminds me of this whole thing around the agility, the snake or the ball thing. I'm pretty sure. I mean, I speak to one of my good friends who did some training last week. He said he was accused in not so many words of being a snake or a cell. Saying this can't be right. You're pushing us down here. There's something evangelising about something that I don't believe in, fundamentally I don't believe in. And I still think, even though 18 years on, that is still out there. The perception that me and you as a salesman and in the US, in the USA, Halloween is big money, isn't it? Halloween is massive. The commercial element of it is as big as Thanksgiving, in terms of its popularity. It's enormous. But there's a lot of money in it. People could say the same thing about our job. I'm focusing on a little bit of the positives here. One of the interesting things, I'm not a particularly strong community where I live. We don't really know each other that well. We don't spend a lot of time. It's quite a transient neighbourhood, so people stay there for a couple of years and then leave. So we don't really know our neighbours that well. I think most people think it's not really much point because people aren't going to be there for it. We've been there for 11 years and we found an opportunity to get to talk to some of these people as they were coming around, bringing their kids round. It was a nice social aspect, even though our kids are different ages and things. It was kind of a leveler in many ways because everyone likes sweets or fruit. I've heard the begging thing before. I don't get it because people are expecting it and it's part of the fun. People are expecting it. I took my kids out trick-or-treating because we wouldn't do it. You say about acceptance and agreement up front. I didn't realise this was a thing because I haven't been trick-or-treating for a while, but pumpkins outside the door basically is acceptance. That's kind of this kind of... around our neighbourhood. We're saying we're happy to accept trick-or-treaters if we've got these out of the door. That wasn't written down anywhere. On the Facebook page for us to check. We worked out as we went. I remember about five or six years ago there was an introduction of a sign that you could print off. Distributed throughout the country. If you don't want trick-or-treaters, print this off and stick it out of the door. Before that, people would just try and leave their lights off in the curtains. So there were no ones in. I think the whole trick thing has fallen by the wayside. Years ago we did have a house act. I don't know why, because we were still giving out treats. Just because they'd run out of people. Maybe they'd run out of people through acts or it was an opportunity to throw some acts. My kids weren't prepared. If anyone had said trick, my kids wouldn't know. How does that work? We are running out of time. So I went trick-or-treating with the kids and just to show you the level of commitment that some of the people in my neighborhood went to. We went to walk down one street and there was a toddler just in front of us who was doing a few houses ahead. So we were following them to a degree. They woke up to a door and all we heard all of a sudden was BOOM! We were loud. It was quite a tunnel here. There was the owner of the house, the dad of the child who lives in the house dressed up as a bush. No joke. He had positioned a chair just right by his front door where the kids would come right up next to him. He had completely covered himself in greenery and foliage. Immersed and kind of got into a small ball. As soon as the child, and this poor kid who's been four or five years old, was me about the whole thing about being scared by how horror movies. I would have probably punched him in the face. Absolutely scared the bejesus out of this toddler. I said to him, why are you doing this? He said, I'm going to get to do it once a year. He had genuinely enjoyed the whole spooky, jumpy suspense. The thrill. He loved that, the scary element of it. He was probably scared as a youngster. Now he's taken it out. The deep-rooted childhood story behind that. Brilliant dedication to the fancy dress. Dressed as a bush. Scared the bejesus out of me, honestly. All right, well, I think that brings it to a close. Happy Halloween everybody. Until next time. Please tell me that recorded.