How do you treat your waiter?

One of the great things about this job is that I get to meet and work with lots of people – I must have met and trained thousands – and a couple of workshops over the last couple of weeks have reminded me of the best and the worst aspects of working with people.

The measure of someone’s character is how they treat people they don’t “have” to be polite to. Watching the way someone speaks to a waiter or a cleaner can give you quite an insight into the way they think. Those who speak pleasantly to them tend to be good people; those who are rude and dismissive tend to have a fixed hierarchy in their minds and the way they behave will depend on where others fit into that hierarchy – nice to the people above, nasty to the people below. This isn’t a class thing and I don’t mean to be condescending by mentioning waiters and cleaners because I include trainers/facilitators in that group, too.

Most delegates understand I have a job to do and they cheerfully co-operate. A significant minority really throw themselves into the workshop and everyone in the group benefits from their attitude. They’re the people who make my job an absolute pleasure – they ask questions, they contribute examples, they engage with the material. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of groups from one particular organisation who have all been like that – I was genuinely sorry to leave because we’d had so much fun together. They were brilliant and I wish I could name the organisation because they’re clearly doing a wonderful job.

A minority of delegates, however, take a different approach and I had one of those groups recently, too, from a different organisation. They thought it was okay to be rude, arrogant and obnoxious. They didn’t want to be in the room and weren’t shy about showing it; for some reason, they thought I was responsible for forcing them to be on the workshop and so took it out on me, in the same way that some diners take out their frustration with their food on waiters.

I’m not complaining about delegates; that would be like a sailor complaining about the sea. Someone told me, early in my training career, that my two duties were to love my delegates and to serve the course objectives and I’ve tried to stick to that. I love meeting people in this way and, as I said, the vast majority are lovely.

When I was a teenager, I went on a school trip to the local theatre to see a production of King Lear. Being teenagers, we were undisciplined and noisy and at one point, the actors onstage stopped the performance and addressed us directly, basically asking us to shut up or leave. That was thirty years ago and I’ve never forgotten the shock of realising that the theatre wasn’t like TV – the actors were real people who could see and hear me and who had feelings about what I did. It’s the same with some delegates; I’m sure they think that we can’t see them reading newspapers, checking emails or sending texts, yawning, looking out the window or picking their nose at the back of the room (yes, honestly).

So the next time you’re on a course or a workshop, spare a thought for the man or woman at the front. If you don’t want to be there, take some responsibility and do something about it but remember: we’re not the ones forcing you to be there and we have feelings too. You don’t have to be pleasant to us and it says something quite fundamental about you if you’re not.

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?