And since I’m sharing life hacks, here is another one. Sometimes, we depend on the goodwill of others and can’t guarantee that those others will choose to be kind, just, or humane. A mean boss, an uncooperative colleague, or, as in my case, an anti – pregnancy HR department might create a lot of hardship at a moment when one doesn’t have the resources to escape from their influence.
So here’s the life hack. Imagine and learn imaginatively to inhabit a reality where the boss is amazing, the colleague is helpful, and the HR department is competent. I, for instance, started telling myself and everybody else how fantastic our HR department was. It was not true. Our HR is as bad as anybody else’s HR but I desperately needed them to come through for me. So I convinced myself they were great.
And it worked. The HR magically transformed into the HR of my fantasy and went out of its way to be helpful. Colleagues find the whole thing very suspicious because that same HR behaved atrociously to them in identical situations.
In the past, I also used this life hack with a boss everybody feared and detested. The life hack is great because it doesn’t require you to do anything other than exercise your imagination. I imagined the boss as helpful, kind and grandfatherly and, just with me, that’s how he was.
Clarissa's Blog 
Umm, how does this work? Self-fulfilling prophesies?
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Reality is whatever we expect it to be. I know it sounds very weird but it works.
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This reminds me of a piece of advice people in AA give out which is to pray for good things (health, prosperity, happiness, true love, etc.) for anyone you are angry at, who you think has betrayed you, or whatever. I thought the end result was to create compassion in you for the other person, that it changes you. Maybe it is like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane a half world away. You change your thoughts and other, perhaps unpredictable things are set in motion.
I had the complete opposite experience yesterday. I thought my son’s special education team were great allies and advocates for my son but yesterday they ambushed me at a meeting and it’s too long a story but they pushed my son out on a very dangerous limb. Still gobsmacked and uncertain what to do next. My whole reality has changed, I think I have been a chump.
But still have great admiration and affection for one of the teachers (texted that to her earlier today in fact) so perhaps that small bit of goodwill will help lead to a resolution. As the school speech therapist who tried to play a really bad trick today often says, Food for thought.
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The AA suggestion is actually very psychologically dangerous. Especially when given to addicts. I always knew it was a scam.
I’m sorry you had this really nasty experience with your son’s special ed team!
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AA is very weird. I was friends with a couple who were very involved in Al-Anon (they moved far away years ago and we have lost touch). Some of it seemed silly to me, some of it bothered me because it is all focused on the individual and sometimes our circumstances are in part results of larger forces. There is no place for social action in that belief system.
But at the same time, this couple was an extremely centered, self-aware, tolerant, open and generous pair who were intentional in all they did and kind to all they met, and they said it was Al-Anon that made them into the people they were. So I decided there must be something in those twelve steps that can and does help some people. There must be some truth in there.
It is well known (my old friends would say) that AA is not helpful to a great number of people who try it and many people manage to sober up without it.
I don’t understand though why you think that the idea of wishing one’s real and or imagined foes well (which is all prayer is, wishing) is dangerous for addicts.
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Repressing negative feelings is a bad idea for anybody. But for people who already have trouble dealing with their emotions and need to anaesthesize with alcohol, this is even worse.
Unfortunately, the idea that you need to force yourself to forgive as some sort of a therapeutic practice is very wide spread. I know somebody who tries to cure an advanced form of cancer with this method. It’s just sad.
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Did you just imagine it in a “fake it until you make it” scenario or did you actually make yourself believe it?
The first is doable; the second is very difficult which isn’t on the order of a “hack.”
“I know nothing of this HR department. When I call the HR department they will ask me how they can help me in dulcet tones. I will ask them x y z and they will be so moved by my story that they will do everything in their power to help me because they like their job and me. Their faces will soften as they tell me they will get back to me after looking into it further and I will receive an official email in my mailbox in the next two days approving x y z along with an official letter printed on the school letterhead in the mail.”
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If you repeat something enough times, it does begin to feel real. This is why academics who don’t do much all day actually feel exhausted as a result of telling everybody how tired they are. 🙂
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“This is why academics who don’t do much all day actually feel exhausted as a result of telling everybody how tired they are. :-)”
I can confirm observing this phenomena in Australia. This needs a name like Clarissa’s law.
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I very much believe in the idea of subjective realities (and the idea that people use metaphors to organize their perceptions of reality).
The claim has been made that a majority of (middle class white) men in the US view their work a lot like a football game (a team sport in which individuals are expendable and certain deceptive practices are completely legitimate) while most (middle class white) women treat work as a traditional classroom (where a central authority delegates tasks to individuals and groups who perform to the best of their abilities). This was as late as the 1990s, don’t know about now. It explained a lot of daily conflicts between men and women in the workplace at the time.
Having worked in a bureaucracy (and having paid attention to how things actually worked as opposed to how they were supposed to work) my approach is that I:
a) assume they want to help you (they do if they can, but they are usually limited by factors that they can’t necessarily explain)
b) use lots of inclusive language to make your problem their problem too “What can we do now?” (simple but surprisingly effective)
c) remember that within the bureaucracy most people treat a lot of what they do as a game, the rules don’t make much sense and everybody knows it. Neither do the rules of chess which doesnt’ stop people from playing it.
d) an experienced person often enjoys finding creative ways to ‘keep the system happy’ (the entire point of the game is to keep the system happy). give them a chance and they can often find a way to give you what you want while they get to flex their skills
e) a very small minority is not playing a game, they treat it all with deadly seriousness. if you find yourself with one of them try to switch people or give up (knowing when to give up is a valuable skill in dealing with bureaucracies)
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