So is this what Leadership looks like?

How can a training go wrong? Oh, let me count the ways.

Ignore power dynamics and context? Check. Ignore your audience and their qualifications? Check, check. Ignore diversity, basic decency, and the small detail that the world outside is on fire? You get the drift.

Let me tell you the story of when an American company decided to school a room full of human behavior professionals on human behavior in six 5-hour virtual sessions. They even randomly paired us in breakout rooms to discuss personal trauma, share workplace conflicts, role play conflict resolution — so you get to talk about all these things with colleagues you may or may not know, who may or may not be besties with your manager, or even may be your actual manager. FUN, right? Not awkward at all.

Setting the scene: a professional workplace with highly diverse workers from around the globe. A globe that was — is — on fire. Geopolitical conflicts everywhere. Actual wars happening in real time, with real consequences for real people.

And then the tanks rolled in.

Cute illustrated tanks. On the decks. In the booklets — printed, designed, reviewed, approved, mailed, yes mailed, just for us. Someone, somewhere in the approval chain, looked at cute illustrated tanks as the visual language for this training and thought — yup, that's the one.

Nobody paused.

The facilitator shared where their combative attitude stemmed from before embarking on this training and how this training truly transformed their "No holds barred… Win at all costs… Take no prisoners…" attitude while working with other people in a professional setting.

Then it was our turn. We got to share our 'traumas'. In a virtual breakout room. With colleagues. No professional present.

I'll spare you what my therapist said about that.

I won't go into each session (so so many meaningful moments), but I'll dive right into the one that broke me. They called it Beyond Being Right, and explicitly told a room full of human behavior professionals that objective reality might not be what they perceive it to be.

Here's how it worked.

First: list your frustrations, put them out there. Make them visible in a virtual room with people who know your org chart and can see your name on their screen.

Then: explore how same trigger event can lead to different experiences. Your reaction is not the only reaction. Therefore your reaction is not necessarily the correct one.

Then: facts vs beliefs or more accurately emotions vs beliefs. Your emotional response lives in the beliefs column. Not the facts column. That's subjective, and only yours. It's not the situation itself. How much can you really trust that you are right?

And finally — the destination the whole framework was always heading toward:
Objective reality is not what I believe it is.

Yes. You have just been walked, step by step, through a professional development exercise that began with your frustration and ended with you doubting what frustrated you.

To be fair, the framework is real. It's called the ABC model, developed in the 1950s by psychologist Albert Ellis. For therapy. Let me repeat that: in therapy. Between a licensed professional and a patient. You know, with stuff like confidentiality, patient-practitioner privilege, to work through genuinely irrational thought patterns.

Not for a virtual breakout room at work.

The framework wasn't just bastardized. It got redeployed in a different power dynamic for a completely different function.

In therapy it helps you examine irrational beliefs. Here it helps the organization suggest that your accurate perceptions are just beliefs — worth examining, possibly worth discarding.

Want to know what it looks like when you apply it, all the way through?

Take a lie. An actual lie. Told by an actual person in a professional context. The lie is the activating event. Your belief that you were lied to is not a fact — it's a belief. Your anger is a consequent emotion arising from your belief, not from the lie itself. A different person with different beliefs might not feel lied to. Therefore your experience of being lied to is not objective reality.

It's your perception. The person who lied to you isn't wrong. It's how you perceived their lie.

Telling that to a room full of people trained to distinguish fact from interpretation, evidence from assumption, what happened from what someone wants you to think happened …

That's not leadership development. That's doctrine. Or inoculation to gaslighting.

I sat through the sessions with tanks, shared an inane sanitized trauma in the breakout room — despite tanks and trauma being one and the same for me. But that framework asking me to suspend my own perception. That was the last straw.
I boycotted the rest of the sessions.

I stopped enduring what I shouldn't have ever had to.

If you want to save your time, your money, perhaps your sanity — message me. I'll send you the name of the company for you to boycott.