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Reid this for resilience...

Feeling slightly rudderless with a thin lid on my boiler of anger, frustration and being broadcast to like the child that I am not like most of us in this Covid cage, I found this nugget of inspiration from 50 years ago from late my mother’s fellow Glaswegian, the late Trade Union leader Jimmy Reid:-


“Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”


This was his inaugural speech as Rector of Glasgow University in 1971 and was noted globally by the old fashioned press in a word long before infantile trivialities have the platform to go ‘viral’.


A significant number of clients I have worked with in the past year have expressed frustration and anxiety during the pandemic at a raised to doubled workload, poor management or changed work practices with inadequate consultation or notice and outdated work practices and they have had enough. Others like myself have felt well supported at work but in a people facing role has its own frustrations in obtaining optimal services for vulnerable people.


If ever there were some inspiration to draw on your self agency and resilience this is it and nothing uttered by the powers that be in this entire pandemic even touches it.

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