Hands are complicated. If you injure them you may well end up in a hand unit where you’ll find specialist hand surgeons and specialist hand therapists. There were about three dozen hand units in the UK when I was a hand therapist. Most of the patients were male and had workplace injuries. (There was one particular injury which was mostly women: it involved frozen beef burgers and a sharp knife.)  

There’s an old cliche of “health & safety gone mad” which you can probably guess I have issues with. Next time you hear it, think of this blog, maybe. You’ll hear it when someone is up against some rules telling them what to do. There is no objective way to tell if a rule is petty or not, is there? It’s just your judgement against someone else’s judgement. 

There is an external and and internal world of safety. Compliance is following the rules in the external world. It’s following the rule to pull the safety guard down and wear the gloves. No one likes being told what to do, even when someone’s telling you not to chop your fingers off. We all have different thresholds of reactance. Some people have quite low thresholds; you may have met them. Not all safety information orders you to comply: a “High Voltage” sign with a drawing of person getting killed [external world] lets you figure things out for yourself.

The internal world of safety, I want to suggest, is about changing your personal motivations and how you think and feel about safety. I’m guessing we’ve all heard of the offence [external world rule] of “driving without undue care and attention.” Notice how care and attention are internal. They refer to an internal commitment to safety. It describes how each and every driver should have a commitment to care for others, and a commitment to pay attention.  

This gets to the core of why I think “compliance” as a dull topic we may have dragged ourselves through for work connects to how we can live better. Compliance with being ordered to follow rules can easily create reactance; people really don’t like being told what to think or do. But commitment to following a personal value is different, even though the end behaviour looks the same. Commitment is essentially following internal rules; ones you set yourself. If you’ve thought about your values in life, then you can make your commitments align. This one simple thing, (I won’t say “easy thing”), can lead to a lot of inner peace.

I think it’s something to think about next time you wonder why you couldn’t commit to something. There’s no halo here; I struggle with this stuff too. However, it’s something I think about every time I hear someone say “health & safety gone mad” (and I think of all the lives and fingers saved by external rules), or when I hear me or someone else fall short of a commitment [internal rules] with “yeah, but…”

Oli

A Moodscope member