Kumbaya?

This is gonna be a weird one. I'm not really sure how to put this in the right perspective.

The kids didn't have school today - our version of Superintendent's Day. So, we're in this training and we start off with this goofy team building exercise. If you've been an any kind of corporate structure you've done a million of these. This is Hawaii so it was a bit more...uh, interactive. It involved a jump rope and 18 people. Let's just say that I'm typing this with ice on my achilles tendon.

We finish our ice breaker and get to some stuff about portfolios. Everything's fine so far. We get to the idea that we don't celebrate our successes enough. I think most places of work (and homes for that matter) are in the same boat. We always focus on what can be improved and we don't recognize the good stuff we're doing. Christ, it sent me to therapy - which I really miss right now, but I digress.

So we're not celebrating our successes. This guy from the high school raises his hand and says something like:

This may seem kinda goofy, but I went to this seminar a few years ago. Has anyone heard of that Tony Robbins guy? (Uh, oh.) Well, there were like 40 or 50 thousand people and he had all of us celebrate for 60 seconds straight. (Oh, shit.) It seems silly, but we yelled and jumped up and down like our team just won the big game for a whole minute. (Lord, help me. I'll go to church. Anything, just save me from this.) Maybe we could do it for 30 seconds?

Well, then the negotiating started. "How about 5?" "10!"

We settled on 20 seconds of celebrating. It was really bizarre. I think I've talked about this on this blog...I know I have on the podcast, but I'm not a Woo-hoo kinda guy. You may get a "Yeah!" out of me, but I just can't seem to make that "Woo" sound. Any time I've won a game, I'll do a mild high five, a gentle knuckle bump and look for the beer. This is my nightmare. You may as well have said that we have to do it naked. It would have been the same for me either way.

So we celebrated. We celebrated so hard and loud that we went way past the 20 second mark because we couldn't hear the timekeeper. And yes, I lived through it. But it was so awkward for me...I tried to think of something to do that was over the top to make it silly-fun, but we all looked so ridiculous that I couldn't think of anything more weird than we were already doing. I really looked like I was one of those people with a brain lesion that effects affect.

But I will say this...

I actually let out a mini-woo. It was an accident, so I don't think I'll be able to make a habit of it.