Listening to the Radio in Prague

As we celebrated the recent long weekends, I was reminded of yet another story from my time living in London and some of the beautiful people I met whilst travelling around Europe. Many of these people’s lives were so different to mine, and my sheltered background growing up in suburban West Australia. Much of what they talked about seemed to be stories from a different world. Today’s story is one such tale from Easter in Prague…

The sun was setting and it was getting colder as the night was closing in.?The old tram I was on rattled along making noises and sounds very unfamiliar to me. I’d expected the Prague mini break to be different but perhaps not quite this different, down to all these new sounds. Thankfully we reached the end of the line where my stop was, and I was able to disembark. With the last of the sun’s daylight, I found the hostel where I was staying that night.

I arrived at a big old house that had a warm cosy feeling. ?It was simple but clean and the owner, Mary, very welcoming.?She spoke fairly good English and I was very relieved that I didn't need to worry about trying to translate. I settled in and met some of the other travellers there to see the majestic sights of Prague.

Good King Wenceslas

The next day a group of us went sightseeing amongst the old town square, the castle and many of the old sites.?Walking the cobblestones that Kings, troubadours, and tourists had walked since the 13th century.?The statue of King Wenceslas IV was quite moving.?Murdered by his younger brother, elevated to king and sainthood after his death, the popular Christmas Carol went round and round in my head as I looked at it. Trying to imagine what life had been like back in those days.?Always watching your back, waiting for the day when you would get knocked off by your family members.

One thing I didn’t need to imagine was what good Bohemian crystal looked like.?Everywhere we went there were people selling this most famous of Czechoslovakia's exports.?My next decision was the hardest of this holiday, what type of crystal tiara to buy??I selected the most elegant one I could find and stayed away from the oversized garish ones.

Time flew by, in that special way of timelessness when you are walking around in a Grimms Brother’s fairy tale, so far removed from my busy everyday London life. All too soon though, the fun day of sightseeing and shopping were over, and we left the city centre and headed back to the hostel.?Our heads full of stories of the Astronomical clock, Kafka statues and lover’s padlocks on the Charles Bridge.

Living under Communism

At the hostel I started talking to Mary about her life in Prague.?She had grown up in Communist Czechoslovakia and shared stories of raising her children during that time.?How she’d tried to protect them from many of the hardships, like food shortages.?Mary described waiting in lines for hours to get food at the supermarkets. Where, if the food was available, it would be one choice of food like spaghetti- if they were lucky.?What she was saying was a stark contrast, to seeing the seemingly innocent KGB badges for sale to tourists all over the city.

A loud radio had been on the whole time I’d been inside, and I asked Mary about this.?(It reminded me of when I had been working in Chile and they similarly always had loud radios on inside- another story for another day). ?Mary explained that whilst living under communism neighbours had turned on neighbours, and reported them for what they had said to the KGB. So, people had learnt to put the radio on to block anyone else from being able to hear what you were saying.

I was struck by how even after all these years, with KGB badges for sale and an abundance of spaghetti in the shops, Mary still played a loud radio inside her house. Her learnt habit, to stay safe, hadn’t changed even though state control had been removed for many years, and she now even had foreigners staying in her place.

The world had moved on, Czechoslovakia had moved on, even Mary in many ways had moved on. Yet, this learnt behaviour had not moved on.

What Loud Music Are You Playing?

Working and living around the globe has given me many blessings and insights, into how fundamentally the same human beings are at our essence, and how greatly different we can be in our habits and patterns.

I believe that one of the greatest calls to action, for every leader, is to understand your own habits and patterns, and where some of these may originate from.?And, if like the loud radio, they are still serving us or the people we lead.

For example, there is much discussion at the moment about working from home versus working in the office.?For leaders this change in where people are working from can present some new challenges in how to lead and motivate hybrid teams.?With not always easy or straight forward solutions.

Some of us are still programmed into thinking that leading is somehow based on being able to physically see people at their desks working. As for many years a physical bum on a physical seat somehow equalled productivity.?That is the way it was always done, and Covid was just an interruption, to how working and workplaces should be.

Leading and working with people remotely can be both challenging and rewarding.?You might see more of the ‘human’ side of your co-workers, but then you may also struggle to manage productivity issues. Your team may now be in multiple locations across different time zones, cultures, and expectations.

I get it, there’s a lot we have to juggle…

A good starting point can be to look at your habits that, like the loud radio, you may have ‘inherited’ from working in a physical office. What assumptions have you made and then incorporated into your work style and leadership style that you might not be aware of??Is there a part of you that still somehow thinks, that productivity is linked to a physical bum on a seat?

There may also be an abundance of spaghetti (in this sense technology) that can liberate and help you and your team, to work more efficiently. Then the one type of spaghetti, that you had access to before (think Microsoft Project of old vs Monday, Asana, Trello etc. -there are a lot more options now). The old radio itself, has evolved into online tools like Spotify, iTunes, etc. as ways of listening to music. Because the ways of using and interacting with technology, keep updating at an increasingly faster and faster pace.

Understanding how to work out what your ‘habits’ are, is increasingly important, as you need to keep changing and updating them, to match this increased speed of change and options of technology available. We are in a time of great transition where more and more of life, leadership and learning is online.?Understanding what your old habits and patterns from physical office-based ways of working and living were, will help you to begin your journey of deconstructing old habits, to being empowered in constructing new ones…

I hope you have enjoyed this newsletter and that it has inspired, motivated and led you to think more about your own mindset. It’s our mission to empower you to thrive and grow.?

(Maria, myself, Lisa and Karen in Prague)

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