When Life Gets Bad, Lower Your Expections Until It Gets Better

Not long ago the leadership team at TerryTelco.Com was instructed to go to an HR-sponsored "leadership training". During this training we were instructed on the virtues of repositioning our thoughts and feelings about different situations and how this could be done in such a way as to be to our advantage. At first this seemed to make sense until it turned into an L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics seminar. The instructor told us that in essence, it was our minds getting in the way of our happiness at work, as well as perhaps a lack of progress. What we needed to do is one of three things:

1) Accept the situation.
2) Think more positively about the situation until it made us happy.
3) Leave.

Since the first option was counter to what the seminar was on, we skipped that one. We also conspicuously skipped the third one: no one ever leaves TerryTelco.Com, right? Finally, we dug into what the second point -- the brunt of his thesis -- was. So he gave us this example where we had to think of a situation that was seemingly impossible, and to think more positively about it. Magically, those of us that have not been brainwashed through 30 years of employment at TerryTelco were amazingly unconvinced. This is rediculous, right? It gets better. One of our more outspoken colegues decided to give an example of how this was complete and utter bullshit. He explained why one of the systems we were made to use was well, I will not use the actual term he used, so for lack of a better term let say he called it "a sham." When he explained that there was no way in hell that thinking better about this system could make it better, the HR representatives blinked in utter puzzlement. Then they looked at each other, much like two deer might in the woods, smiled then completely ignored his point and re-explained his original point as if our colegue was daft and just didn't get the point. When I looked around the room, I noticed that the other Terries in the room were too shocked. Afterall, whatever HR feeds us is good -- don't resist, is apparently the mantra for Terry.

When our colegue re-explained his point -- using a much louder tone this time as he is known to do -- the HR people looked at each other with even more confused and then frightened looks. At this point I really thought they would call security and have him taken away to the HR centre to have his brain 'fixed'. Fortunately that didn't happen. We left it at that and continued on to the next section of rediculous training.