– title: “Towards Training in Second circle Up Talk” layout: post —
I read somewhere an explanation of the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt is feeling bad about what you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad about what you are.
When “Up” talk goes badly. Maybe what you should feel is guilt, but in fact what you end up feeling a lot of the time is shame.
But maybe one way out of this is to understand that you’re not a bad person. You’re a person who’s lacking the necessary skills and practice.
A long time ago I did Nigel Baker’s Certified Scrum Master course. One of the exercises was to pretend to be of Santa’s elves - the one responsible for building Santa’s website. What I rememer vividly was talking to someone in a Santa hat who was very keen to get everything on his list (no doubt Santa had checked this twice). And being very firm with Santa that he could not have everything on his list.
There’s no need to be ashamed about how bad you are at saying no to Santa. Once you’ve realised that saying no to Santa is a very difficult thing to do and that it can be improved with practice. You could I suppose feel guilty about not having spent more time training and practicing saying no to Santa in all the sturctured training courses that you can sign up for that teach you how to say no to Santa in a safe environment. Oh wait. THERE AREN’T ANY. There are improv courses, there are even improv courses targeted at business rather than comedy, but improv course targeted at verbal self-defence and talking to power? I don’t know of any of those.
Of course, if you know of any, please tell me about them - mark.stringer@mumbly.co.uk.
But in the meantime I’m going to start one. If you’re interested in attending this course, or helping me author it or run it please contact me.