This semester I have had the strange experience of teaching two groups of students.  One group have participated, argued and thought well… the other?  Well I would hate to say it have driven me insane.  How can this be?  Am I growing (more) cranky in my old age?

As I was thinking about this it dawned on me… motivation was the answer.  In one course you have people who want to be there, have selected the course and want to know how stuff works.  The others?  Well, it’s a compulsory course mainly for accounting students.  Ever since I can remember the course has been treated like a, “oh geez do I have to?” type of course.  Yet, I have enjoyed teaching it all it’s various forms in the last few years… yet the student cohort never changes.  No matter how much we change the content… they just (for the best part) don’t want to be there.   So here we have apples and oranges.  Not so bad.

Well it is so bad when each week you get people that don’t come, don’t bother reading the handouts and don’t really want to be there.  Nothing dints your confidence more than when something you have sweat your arse off for is spat on by others.   It reminds me of the hundreds of rejection letters I have and the papers I have had come back with a “reject” label.    Anyway all of that is wiped away when someone actually appreciates your hard work.  The nice letters, the happy students and people who say thank you, make up for all the hardship.  These come with the bad and it makes it all worthwhile.

Let me encourage you that if are doing something that nobody appreciates; somebody does.  Why don’t you encourage someone today who has been faithful in a thankless role for years?  Find a way to encourage someone that you think has done a great job.  You might just find like I have that these little things can make a big difference to someone who is having a bad day.  Try it, you will make someone’s day.

I was reading about whining at work a while back now and it hit me.  I am a workplace whiner.  Did you know that most of us at some time or another have to work?  Why do we think that work is such a bad thing?  For me at least being a workplace whiner teaches us a very important lesson.

Work is meant to be fun

The advanced levels of brainwashing available (at hand if you will) in most organisational psychology points us to towards ‘coping’ mechanisms at work.  Personal freedom is more than likely a myth that is couched around this idea of work being fun.  Yet for me it is fun sometimes.  However, most of the time it’s not fun… it’s actually a drag.  I find the repetitious nature of my job sometimes gets me down.  It’s in this propensity that I am apt to whine.  Why?  I thought work was meant to be fun?  Well for the majority of us … it really isn’t fun!

Why isn’t work fun?

The main reason work isn’t fun is because we don’t get the opportunity to express ourselves in the way we would like.  That right there is a spiritual matter… another post for another time. For me, most of the time it isn’t fun because of the amount of red tape I have to cut through on a daily basis.  Recently I went through hell just to get $193.  As of this writing… I still don’t have it.  Then I have the students.  A blessing and a curse.  You want to know more read this.

All of that aside I could make myself have a positive attitude and I could do it… but something inside me shudders at the thought of answering 150 emails in a three day period.  Don’t know what it is… :).  I have thought about this a lot and I would have to say that work isn’t fun because we aren’t serving ourselves but our master employer.

Work is a paid slavery arrangement.  I am sure that someone is likely to read this one day (perhaps) and say that work doesn’t have to be a paid slavery arrangement but in reality most people I have met, this is precisely what work is.  A paid slavery arrangement.   However, at least it isn’t slavery slavery.   I think that we have it a lot better… yet the question remains what makes us so unhappy?

Work… don’t get me started

The problem is that we live in a society where you have to work to eat.  I know, “you don’t work you don’t eat.”  That’s just it isn’t it.  If you don’t work… you don’t eat.  You wind up amongst the fractured of society living on the scraps of the mainstream.  You just can’t get past it.  No matter where you go, you have to work.  In some parts of the world you work, and you still don’t eat!  What a horrible place this world can be.

I would hate to leave you with a downer but I am yet to read a post, magazine article, book or anything else that tells me otherwise.  Having said all that… whining doesn’t make me feel any better does it?  It makes me feel a helluvalot worse.  So should we whinge or seek personal change?  Probably the latter… though unfortunately I spend to much time doing the former!

I was getting extremely annoyed at Firefox 3 this past week for not letting me install the latest flash player.  You might be wondering, “what the hell has that to do with funny childhood memories.”  You’ll see.  I was sent the following video by my sister in law:

After ages of stuffing around I did what I usually do, stumbled upon the folder that held the flash files and forced an automatic update.  It worked!  I then beheld the above and what happened next is largely due to my strange ability to make connections between things that have none.  Yes, I thought of G-Force.  Here’s what I grew up watching:

Ahh the memories came flooding back.  I was taken back to a simpler time when life the most exciting thing in life was a morning cartoon.  But that isn’t the weird part… what amazed me was the fact that I could remember something special.  No, I am not talking about the cartoon either.  I could remember what it felt like to watch it.  I could remember the same excitement I felt every time I switch the cartoon on.  It is the same today when I watch it.  Sure, it’s crap but the same emotions come flooding back. I thought I’d take a look at how old it was… 1985.  That would have made me eight years old.

This got me to thinking (of course).  Courtesy of a recent email conversation I have come to understand the human differently.  I think perhaps information is stored in our minds in whatever format we choose to store it and it never goes away.  How often have you walked through a shopping centre and you catch a whiff of some woman’s perfume and it reminds you of a past lover?  What about when it rains?  Ahh… this is just a Houghton thing isn’t it?  Then again… maybe it isn’t.

Anyway this is just a random thought for you.  I enjoyed watching those videos again… it really took me back!

* Image Credit: http://www.gastlichkeit.at/stress2.JPG

I could spend a lot of time talking about stress.  I have been through the ringer more than once with sick animals, job loss, sickness and a lot more trouble.  Rather than bore you with the countless details of my troubles (waaaaaaaah) let me give you the lesson.  Stress does not help you to solve problems.

Stress creates a lens to look through

One thing stress does better than anything else is create a lens for you to look through… it gives you a way of seeing.  In this sense it creates plans for, determines your future for you, makes the day worse and creates templates for you to believe in.  Life’s funny.  You don’t know what you are capable of until you are put under pressure.   When the pressure comes it makes you think and see things a certain way.  It gives you a lens to see through.  This results in you seeing only ‘doom and gloom’.

What I have learned from stress is that it gives you this way of thinking while you are under pressure.  That is, it creates a template for you to think through while you are under the hammer.  How about this:

1. There is a housing crisis on:  you think, “I won’t get a house”.

2. My husband is home late: you think, “that he is having an affair.”

3. The financial crisis: you think, “that all you have done is gone.”

4. My boss is firing people: you think, “that you are next”.

I could go on for hours.  The point is when pressure comes we are prone to think and act in ways that provoke wrong thinking habits in us.  Just because there is talk of layoffs at work doesn’t mean you are going to be fired.  Sure it could, but why paint the worst picture?

Don’t let yourself make major decisions when stressed

I have made a million poor choices when the heat is on.  I have felt the sting of stress and acted under the belief that I had to act at that point in time because the pressure demanded it.  The result of that was a disaster! I have learned just recently that most of the stress we create is because of personal insecurity.  We expect bad things to happen to us because our self-image is so poor that we have come to think there is no other alternative.  We blame others for own problems, we create ‘hidden secret agendas’ where there are none and worst of all we tell other people that the same thing is going to happen to them!

Scholar Karl Weick once noted in his work on sense-making that in high times of stress people will often create default belief patterns in order to make something up for themselves to hang on to.  That is, we will believe something because we think we have to in order to survive.  Other times I believe the opposite is also true.  We create ‘false realities’ for ourselves because we simply must believe that bad things are going to happen.  Stress causes you to think this way.  When pressure comes, and it does to all of us, the temptation is to believe the worst.  In reality, the situation is probably not that bad.  And if it is that bad, you can get through it with the right support.

If you have to make decisions when stressed take advice from cool headed people

One of the temptations for stressed people is to find validation of beliefs through others who share the same views.  Let me ask you this, would you ask a disgruntled employee for advice on how good a company is performing?  Go outside the box.  Speak to someone who has a cool head and no emotional investment in the situation.  They will give you clear guidance and show you often that the stress you feel is something that you have created through your own engagement with the problem at hand.  Quite often because they are ‘out of the box’ they will give you advice that makes sense, is in context and helps somewhat.  Then again they may not.  But I guarantee you this: find a cool head and you will find a cool answer.

In finishing this post I want to remind you that life is fairly stressful at times.  So much so, that pressure destroys lives and marriages.  Stress is a killer.  However, what we need to recognise is that stress creates patterns in our mind.  It gives us templates to think through.  Don’t give in to the ’stress’ way of thinking.  There are situations that demand our attention like: paying the rent, paying bills, keeping up with our jobs and so on.  Life is tough.  However, we make it so much worse when we begin to let that stress take over our lives and invade our personal thinking patterns.   I have been in situations where I couldn’t pay my rent… it was stressful.  It wasn’t at all helpful to allow that pressure to steal my hopes for the future or ruin my life.  I had to believe that something good was going to happen even when it looked utterly hopeless.  It was this expectation of something better that helped me in those low times.  It still helps, while I look towards the hope of owning a home.

I want to encourage you to think about the areas of stress in your life and to recognise what is the real pressure and what it is that you have made up because of fear.  Think about it… it will help you to do so!

This post is an entry into the Middle Zone Musings What I learned from Stress group writing project.

I am watching something on sixty minutes about Generation Y spending money on the credit card.  They showed a young lady going on how she is a victim of the sleight of hand from the banks.  This got me thinking about the way we frame our problems in the modern world and I have to say I am appalled.  It would be easy to blame the banks (who probably shoulder some responsibility) but there is something in this report that irks me.

I make many mistakes but at the end of the day you have to take responsibility.  You have to say to yourself that if you racked up the debt there wasn’t a little man who swiped the card out of your hand and forced you to rack up the debt.  There are genuine mistakes.  Then, there are stupid ones.  In any case, you can read from a victim script, blam others or whatever.  My thing is this: your happiness in the present moment isn’t worth the years of having to pay off tons of debt.  There is no merit in that.  Absolutely none.

I have spent years paying back loans.  So far at least six of them and I am not even close to clearing what I owe.  Most of them were stupid decisions.  Yet, there is no one I can blame at the end of the day, I have to blame myself.  So should you.  Take responsibility.   You racked it up you have to pay it.  Whatever you put away today you pay for tomorrow… don’t be a jackass!

The thing that I want to see people do is to think.  Going without is one of those things you have to do sometimes in order to improve your overall position later… it’s a cornerstone of strategic thinking.  I see none of this with people (and I put myself in this category) who rack up a ton of debt and then blame others or claim bankruptcy.   You made the decision… now pay for it!