Turning - into +

So I'm getting a little more management experience under my belt. Sometimes I need to remember it is better to keep my lips zipped and the less I say sometimes the better.

I had to plan a team building activity. I wanted to focus on the fact that there was a bit of negativity coming from one employee that was a little contagious to others. I wanted to do this without calling her out in front of everyone else or making it too obvious that I wanted her to change her attitude. I certainly prayed about it because I knew if this went wrong it could go terribly wrong.

We did a get to know you activity were we answered questions about ourselves, and that was fine. Maybe more of an ice breaker than anything else.

Then I had the 6 of of them pair up and share a negative experience they had with each other. They were told that they were going to have to relate the experience of the other person, so they would probably want to take notes. There was quite the somber feeling in the room. One guy talked about how he had fallen down the stairs and pinched a nerve so he couldn't walk normal and how he had to have surgery to get things to be better. One girl talked about how she found out that her family has been having dinner with all the members of the family and she and her husband have not been invited. I also heard a guy talk about how things went horribly wrong on his flight to Hawaii for his honeymoon.

Then I told them that they needed to tell the stories but they couldn't say anything negative. They could only share the positive things that happened during or came from the experience. The mood instantly changed and we were all laughing so hard.

The guy who told the story about the accident said. "He is alive today, and he walks better than he used to. The story about the girl with the family dinner just said, "She got invited to dinner with her family." Lastly, the guy who had a bad flight, his story changed to just be that he got to go to Hawaii on his honeymoon.

We were just laughing because everyone was being a little obnoxious about it and all the bad feelings just went away. It went way better than I was expecting and I got a lot of good feedback too. I think my boss's boss may be stealing my ideas because he asked for the list of questions I used and he told me in an email how glad he was that I had come to work for them.

Whether or not this will have any lasting impressions, I don't know. Sometimes I think we just need to remember that if there is nothing we can do about a situation, we can always decide what we are going to focus on and how we are going to let it affect us. We also need to remember to take our focus off the past and work to make our futures better. Nothing good comes from dwelling on a bad experience unless we just want to make sure the experience doesn't happen again.