Like most people, I confess that I take a fairly dim view towards people who gripe and complain. I do believe it is important to maintain a positive outlook and stay focused on the goal.
However, I have come to believe that gripes and complaints are not without merit and usefulness.
To take a metaphor from aviation, it’s important to construct a plane with an airfoil that creates a lot of lift, and it’s great to have engines that create a lot of thrust. However, that is only half of the equation. It’s also important to reduce weight and drag. Unfortunately, the only way you can really effectively approach the elimination of weight and drag is to talk about… weight and drag. And it’s very hard to talk about weight and drag without being, well,… negative. The idea that you should never say or mention anything negative can be very bad, especially if you are designing an airplane.
Just one quick example, I was a tad frustrated with myself yesterday because I’ve been trying to connect with more human resources people to sell my training services, and I’m way behind in my goal. So instead of being yet again positive and focusing on the goal, I sat down and wrote what was basically a bitch and moan blog post (since deleted), basically saying I have done everything I can do and I can’t understand why this isn’t working.
Out of the negativity and frustration, something kind of cool happened an hour after I wrote the post. It’s almost as if there was some blockage in my brain that went away. While it is of course important to keep one’s eyes on the prize, I think it’s helpful to be honest about one’s momentary failures. Part of picking yourself up off the floor is accepting the fact that you’ve been knocked down on the floor. There is an emotional “hit” that comes from failure, and that has to be grieved out, otherwise that energy just sort of sits there and festers.
So anyway, after writing that post, I had a little brainstorm . . . seems so ridiculous now… I googled “HR.” Guess what, I found the mother lode, at a website (big surprise) called “HR.com.” I’ve already submitted an article.
This should have been obvious, but for some reason I had to sit down and be negative for an hour and just get rid of some accumulated frustration before I could move ahead with being open to a new idea.
Of course, we all know people who are stuck in negativity mode. They never do anything but gripe and complain. Obviously, that’s not a useful approach, but I am starting to think that small doses of negativity can be very useful in the long run. I’m going to play with this…
© Justin Locke
