A porpoise is a sort of piscatorial bobble-head. It goes up and down in the waves. At times it is flying completely free of the water, keening its way through the salt air, larking about in bright sea light. At other times it is unseen, submerged within an enfolding black cloak of ocean. To my mind, I have been engaged in porpoise like activity. This is my tale of fishy performance improvement.

For the past week, I have experienced mood swings. Episodes of quiet confidence alternate with bleak despair. One minute life is manageable. The next minute I plunge into black depths and life becomes impossible.

In engineering this behaviour is known as porpoising. In humans it is typically associated with manic depression, now better known as bipolar disorder. But I don’t appear to meet the standard criteria for this form of illness. According to Wikipedia, the different moods of bipolar disorder each last for a period of months. I was shifting gears in a matter of days, or hours. What was going on?

I puzzled over this question, trying to find an answer. The porpoising commenced when I located the performance appraisal / letter of reference material described in the post Time Evaporated.

Then came a revelation. My self-assessment was being conducted from two conflicting perspectives. When I contemplated my performance from before the accident, and compared this past performance to my present day performance, a range of deficits became evident. If my past performance scored at 100, my present performance was not worth more than a 6. I became depressed.

If I measure my performance today against performance from a year ago, then I find a significant improvement. If today’s performance scores as a 6 then a year ago would not score much higher than 3. From this perspective there has been a tremendous improvement. I became elated at this positive change.

Depending on my perspective, I would experience either quiet confidence, or enter a depressive tailspin; such is the disparity between my present capabilities and those I enjoyed prior to the MVA.

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There is another aspect to this issue.

As a child, I constantly experienced exclusion from my peer group. In order to gain acceptance, I would try and identify the requirements of the group: what did they prize or value? What characteristics must I demonstrate in order to win acceptance?

This form of analytic query commenced at a very age and has continued up to the present. I would undertake it without being aware I was doing it. While the other members of a work group were simply showing up for work, I was engaged in a complete analysis of the work environment, seeking to define what was critical for success and acceptance, what needed to be done, what standard of performance was required or expected. Once I had established those metrics, I would then seek to meet or exceed them.

One consequence of this behaviour is that in every job I have held I have quickly gained respect in the workplace and been promoted into a supervisory or managerial position. I did not seek out such a role. My actions were not undertaken with promotion in mind; I was not even considering the prospect of promotion. I simply wanted to be accepted as a member of the group.

This behaviour also generated domestic conflict. I remember my wife being very unhappy with me due to the inordinate amount of time I devoted to my job, She complained that I was being grossly underpaid, that the company was taking advantage of me, that there was no reason for me to deliver the level of dedication to the firm that I exhibited. I simply could not understand what she was talking about. Her complaint made no sense to me whatsoever.

In that particular job, I doubled my salary each year of employment. I had no concern for the extra money. My focus was on my expanding area of responsibility and the performance standards required to ensure that I would fit in and be accepted as a member of the new group into which I had been promoted.