Rated R Seminar

     What would it look like if a Challenger ran a business seminar?  If you know anyone who is just a little pushy, a little intense when he’s trying to get his point across, who gets angry at things that don’t anger other people, those are the trademarks of the Challenger.  My husband is attending a how-to-make-your-business-better seminar here in Dallas, and I’m getting a real kick out of it.  I attended the opening session last night and pegged the leader as a Challenger right away.

     I was surprised first by his asking us if we minded his swearing, which I thought was nice, until he told us that if we did mind it we should see him afterward and he would tell us "too bad, heh," and if we thought he was bad we should wait until we heard tomorrow’s speaker,who is from Canada and uses the F-word so much that it's rubbed off on him.  I asked John today if the Canadian did use the F-word, and he said yes. 

            Open-mouthed and Incredulous Me:  How many times?

            Flat and Wry John:  About thirty.

            Me:  In one morning?

            John:  Yes.

            Me:  NO.

            John:  YES.

     The leader, I’ll call him Dave, said he had one rule:  put away our cell phones because it’s rude to other people and if he catches us texting with one he’ll throw us out.  I was holding mine at the time of this announcement, but I sat frozen lest he saw me, and I wondered what to do about the text I was expecting any minute.  What a Nazi.

     The seminar is about Energy, positive energy in the workplace.  The guest speaker was an Enthusiast and as sweet and inspiring as he could be.  I was ready to resist his overtures to happiness but I found that I couldn’t.  He had me waving my arms, saying woo-hoo, and high-fiving my neighbor.  But this Challenger-leader ... he wanted so badly for us to be energetic that he used tactics.  He started off the whole seminar with a guy in a bear suit dancing to Macho Man.  The bear moved among us.  Dave commanded us to stand, to clap, and to dance with the bear if he happened upon us, which he did and I did.

     Here’s the lesson:  be who you were created to be.  The Enthusiast was created to make us happy and he did... the Challenger was not and he did not.  Dave had an incredible work history, and as he gave us his story I realized that he had a lot to offer about how to operate a business.  Dave was not created to energize us, though try he would.  I could tell we were “sucking the life” out of him by our subdued mood, and this peeved him.  “Good grief, give a guy a break,” he said when we didn’t laugh hard enough at a joke.  “You left your grumpy lives back home, remember?”

     I had not planned to attend this morning’s session but did go to get a cup of coffee.  As I got close to the meeting room, I could hear the music.  John met me.  “Look in there,” he said.  I peered into the room and saw, up in the front of the smallish meeting room, three women bobbing half-heartedly and clapping to the music.  One is Dave’s wife, John informed me.  She also wears the bear suit.  How glad I was that I was not attending the meetings today!

     Later, John found me sitting out on the patio reading.  “I have a present for you,” he said, and tossed me a plastic travel mug.  Every so often, at the seminar, they play the Plinko board.  A ping-pong ball is drawn from a batch, put through the pegs on the board, and someone wins a prize.  John had been dreading his name being called, and sure enough, “John McLean!”  He says he doesn’t know what came over him but as he went to draw his Plinko ball, he surprised Dave by giving him a mighty chest-bump and yelling, “I want the mug for my wife!”  The energy level soared in the room when the ball landed on the mug, and when Dave asked if he was excited to be there, John waved his arms and yelled Woo-hoo!  I noticed a bitterness in John as he told me this story.  This is the effect of a Challenger Energizer, I think.

     So, John skipped the evening sessions and we watched a movie in our room that was rated R for language, which means the F-word, and John said it didn't bother him at all, that he'd heard it all day and had become accustomed to it.  Woo hoo!