The Man and the Bracken revisited. If you have not already read it, you might enjoy going to www.bobski.com/technical papers and read "The Man, The Bracken, and the Sport Psychology".
So. It had not been cleared. A year later and when, in early May, the man went to the bracken areas, there it was, healthier than ever. True, in some places where it had previously been there was now either none or much less. But in others, it was flourishing in an abundance greater than previous years. There were even some areas where pulling it up was no longer even an option - it would have to be cut, at least for a while.
So how was he to "handle" this? What sort of things about it would he be likely to say to himself, and his self, about it? Should he call himself all sorts of fool for having even attempted the job; or for having believed he might have cleared it in just one or two seasons? Perhaps it wasn't possible: how would he know?
Clearly the possibility arose for depressing himself about it. It wasn't possible for the bracken to depress him; bracken is just bracken and totally indifferent to him or any one else. But if he were to do this, why would he do it? What would be achieved?
Would it be possible NOT to depress himself about it? And if he did, what would be the PROCESS of doing it? What would need to be in place for him to be able to? The man thought about this, and about what might be different to last year. Perhaps the circumstances had changed? If so, how might they have done so?
Slowly some differences became apparent. Firstly, last year in order to get to places where the bracken was he had had to clear brambles, rosebay willow herb, small areas of blackthorn and so on. This had allowed him access to the bracken but in the process had let in more light so this year's bracken growth was enhanced. So, clearly the graph of his bracken clearance would not be a straight line - it would have accelerative phases and troughs.
Secondly, the weather this year was much better than last year; temperatures are higher, rainfall just right for growth. So he must be careful not compare like with un-like. At this point Sport Psychology came in again. His end goal, his dream, was to clear these two large areas of bracken, and it is important to have a dream and a long term objective. But if that had been ALL he had - if this had been the only kind of goal he knew about - then it could easily have been disappointing and he might have depressed himself.
Fortunately the man knew a little more about goal setting and he knew that he could also choose to create and adopt other kinds of goals. He could if he chose set himself PERFORMANCE goals; say, more yardage of cutting, in fewer minutes of work. But the man had tried these sort of goals in other areas of his life and while they had helped then, the idea didn't seem to fit in well with this job.
He was afraid that he would find that by accepting goals of this sort he would become too intense about it, and miss all the good things going on around him. When he had first set out to do this job, he had made that mistake. He had been so focused, so intense that he found hiself missing the bird song, missing the sound of the river, and missing the opportunity to stop and look at the distant hills.
So, he began considering PROCESS goals as an option. And this is the type he chose. With a process-goal mind-set he could set a goal of "making sure he did at least one area a day". He could even change that if he later wanted to, by making it "at least 12 days out of every 14" or some such. That would still quite likely be a challenge - what about the mornings he didn't feel like getting up, or the days the weather was lousy. Yes, sounded good.
He could break it up and set himself the goal of pulling up half of it, and cutting the other half; then swapping the halves over. He could include in his daily goal "stopping at least four times, to rest and look at the view, listen to the birds and hear the river singing along in the valley" why not? What a beautiful sort of goal. Wouldn't be a bad sort of goal to set yourself when you were skiing in the mountains.
He noticed that one effect of thinking things through like this was that he found he was not falling for goals that made him impatient, or inadequate. It didn't even matter that perhaps the dream goal of total clearance might not even be "realistic" - who knew, perhaps expecting total clearance in one lifetime was just pie in the sky.
It didn't matter, what mattered was sticking to the task, AND ENJOYING THE PROCESS. Maybe the world was a slightly better place if this bit of it had some bracken, who was he to say? What right did he have to dictate what would happen, perhaps it was better if he just stuck to what HE was intending to do, and leave the rest to the fates.
Maybe, if he didn't ever become quite the skier he had once dreamed of, that was a better solution because it meant he would always have the possibility of improvement, and after all it was in working toward that improvement wherein lay the real pleasure.
Bob Valentine Trueman
