During the past week I have seen some funky social experiments done with cadets. Click "Read More" cos it's kinda long.
The first one is when one person pushes their way into the conversation by being loud and shush-ing all the ones that are quieter.
During the course one of the officers said something like "Always listen to the quieter people. They're the smart ones. The ones that are busy being loud aren't the ones that are thinking." Which was food for thought enough... But near the end of the week, we had this "group discussion" thing.
So we split off into 3 groups. The officer gives us a moral dilemma (eg Your best friend is acting like a turd, disgrace to the Cadet Corps. He is actively insulting and offending other members. What do you do?). So each group will discuss among themselves an action plan, and then one person in the group will present to everyone in the room, their action plan.
Now we only had a short short time, and there was hardly time to write stuff down, so the presenter would be going off the top of their head. Now the trippy thing was that this was a test to see how honest to the group the presenter was. Was the presenter relaying ALL the group's ideas, or only the ideas that the presenter agrees with? Did they put more emphasis on their own ideas over other peoples?
And how was this tested? Well before we found out about this second motive of conducting the test, everyone in the room was to vote for their favourite action plan after all groups have presented. Interesting to note, anyone who presented never failed to vote for their own presentation (to a point where they were the only person out of 28 people in the room to vote for that plan). HOW'S THAT FOR TRIPPINESS!
Another is for whiners. This is compiled with another method I learnt on Sergeant's Course last year as well. You know the people that consistently point out where you go wrong? They tell you this sucks, or that's a bad idea. And then they stop. They don't tell you why, or how to improve. They just go as far as to tell you that you suck.
These assholes can be addressed in two ways:
*In a discussion
Make a talking conch system (a la Lord of the Flies) where you have some token, and only the person who is holding the token may speak. Anyone who speaks out of turn will either be hissed at or outright ignored. It is completely beautiful because everyone has a few extra seconds to think about what they're saying, so you lose all the umms and ahhs, you lose all the stupid outbursts, you lose all the whiners (most of them realise that it's not worth asking for the token just to say something sucks), and most people bother to concise-ify what they're trying to say.
*In a conversation
Don't bother arguing with them. They're probably not even wrong. You probably DO suck. But what you want to find out is how to stop sucking. And so you just ask them "How would we fix that?" (remember to use "we" because inclusive language makes idiots think you like them). After enough repetitions this will either make them stop whining, or make them a positive contribution to your conversation.
How do you lose? =D
As I heard on courses and summarising my attitude towards certain people recently: "You are useless if you can find problems. Any idiot can do that. A useful person finds solutions."
On a completely unrelated note, I had an instance of jamais vu - the opposite of deja vu. I was completely wasted on Saturday night, returning from the courses. I found out that my bro joined some Wing Chun acadamey or whatever they call their learning centres. And I asked him what he learnt, he said blocks, punches, kicks. And apparently I asked him to show me a few blocks.
Today (Tuesday) I recalled a dream I had that I asked my brother to block for me. Then I remembered that I probably asked this in real life, but I just couldn't freaking remember it. Like how deja vu is an unfamiliar situation that feels familiar, this was a familiar situation that felt unfamiliar. So in the afternoon I asked him to block again, then I asked him if I asked him before. He said yes. I shat brix.
Before I couldn't comprehend how jamais vu would work. I mean, how can it even happen? It sounds so improbable. But I have proven with a massive week's stockpile of interrupted REM cycles, that jamais vu is quite the possible =D
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