I was in conversation today with a colleague from another organisation and we were bantering about the differences in our approach to “change”: I am of the “change is capable of happening in an instant” school and he was is of the “ah but sustainable change takes a long time“.
Luckily, I remembered the Johnny Speight story to reinforce why I belong to the “instant change” theory – its not the most scientific but its one of my favourites: The playwright Johnny Speight, with no formal education, told the story about how he often saw the pithy or profound quotes of George Bernard Shaw in his daily newspaper and thought to himself “this guy is a great comedian, I must catch his show sometime”. Then on a trip to a library, he saw a shelves filled with books by George Bernard Shaw and thought “bloody hell, this guy writes as well!”. Speight then read everything that Shaw ever wrote and from that point on, Speight says “my life changed in an instant and I knew that I wanted to write for a living”. Now some people might say that what happened to Speight was merely “inspiration” rather than “change” and I would agree if Speight had undergone a formal education and discovered Shaw in the normal structure of school, parental influence, university etc but he didn’t – he was the son of a docker in Canning Town but on reading Shaw, he knew that he was going to be a writer in that instant despite the fact that there was nothing in his upbringing that had indicated that he could be. That to me is immediate change – one thing sparks a possibility and the possibility leads to action (Speight bought a typewriter immediately) and from that day forward – Speight was a writer, going on to create Till Death Us Do Part featuring the notorious Alf Garnett character played by Warren Mitchell. Mitchell has referred to Speight as: perhaps the greatest political satirist since Jonathan Swift.
My colleague asked me why I had to personalise everything “never a statistic from you – just bloody stories” he said and it hit home: I am now busy creating a PIE chart of whatever it is you create PIE charts from…………………
Eileen Murphy
www.brief-therapy-uk.com
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