Day 6 & 7: Tripe and Cheeseballs

Is it just me or is motivational speaking a bunch of tripe? The guy who came in on Monday called himself an inspriational speaker, but that's just a question of semantics. All motivational/inspirational speakers are, or worse want to be, Dr. Phil. I was saying in group, in what I hoped was a nicer way, that it was all a bunch of tripe and was immediately shot down. After some thought I'm able to articulate why: motiviational speakers get up on stage and passionately, with much gestures and annecdotes, tell you the things you know to be true. Cliché stuff like: change the things you can, accept the things you can't, and have the wisdom to know the difference. So everyone (particularly old ladies) all flock around them going ALL HAIL THE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER. Come on now. Tripe I tell you.

After lunch we had to make up networking statements. These are the sorts of things you say at parties when someone asks "what do you do" so that you don't have to say "I'm unemployed" or "Give me a job, please, for the love of Spock!" My statement was something like "My education is in art and writing and I've financed that with a variety of retail jobs. Now I'm looking to combine my creative skills, my computer skills and my people skills, by working for a magazine in some capacity." It needs work, I know, but the idea is people will jump out of nowhere and say "my friend Joe is the editor of a fab magazine, you should talk to him, here's his number."

Today, we watched a video about labour market trends. It was talking about how today's workforce is all about contracting, entrepreneurship. They used cheeseball phrases like "careertrepreneurial" and "Me, Inc." Then it hit me, I'm probably no worse off being a freelance writer than anything else, because everyone has to sell themselves nowadays. Which is annoying, because I'm terrible at that.

After lunch we watched another, even cheesier, appropriately called "Who Moved My Cheese?", a heart-warming yet tragic story of two mice and two men who lived in a maze. The mice (Sniff and Scurry) were very good at finding cheese, but the men (Hem and Haw) were too caught up in how their old cheese was gone to go searching for new cheese. Haw eventually bit the bullet and went searching for more cheese, but Hem was too afraid of change. The moral being that one should stop hemming and hawing (tee hee, get it?), accept the changes in our life and seek out new opportunity. Once you grasp the moral, this sort of thing becomes a bit like motivational speaking (though slightly more fun because it has cartoon mice).