Month: August 2007

Jill read my post about why constant complaining is so toxic in the workplace and then experienced a moment of synchronicity:

I broadly agree with your post, except that, well, right after reading it, my feed reader served up a post from another blogger I enjoy reading called “The Right to Complain“. She and I are both academics, and there’s certainly a culture among many academics to complain about the system we’re in. I’ve found your blog, among others, helpful in trying to figure out what it is that I’m not happy about in my job, and what I am happy about, and which things, if any, I want to change.

Anyway, coming just after each other like that, two posts on complaining that argue very differently. Dr. Crazy argues that academic jobs are extremely difficult, because of the large investment in time and money you’ve put into getting there (thank you Norway for better funding), the large amount of “invisible” work that goes into research, publishing, administration etc, and your lack of choice in where you live, among other things (I’m lucky, I work where I want to live). Yet people tend to think it’s a cushy job, “you only work 12 hours a week”! (that’s the classroom hours).

If you have time, I’d love to hear your opinion after reading her post. Could there be a kind of complaining that’s not directed to someone like the boss, but – well, with an idea that perhaps one should complain to the people who can change things, and those people are sometimes yourself and your colleagues?

Thanks for the link, Jill. That is indeed two very different views on complaining – at least at first glance.

I agree with Dr. Crazy that we all have the right to complain. It’s not like I can tell anyone else that their problems are not worthy of complaining about because what seems a molehill to me might well be a mountain to them – and vice versa.

In fact, if you want to increase workplace complaining, all you need to do is to tell people not to complain because their problems are so trivial they have no right to complain. That‘ll get them complaining for sure :o)

So it’s not really about whether or not we have a right to complain (if somethings’s wrong, you have the right) it’s about how we choose to complain. As I wrote in my post, I believe that there are two fundamentally ways to go about expressing your dissatisfaction: Constructive and destructive.

Broadly speaking, constructive complaining leads to change and destructive complaining leads to more complaining (more here).

I also disagree with her assertion that “if nobody complained, then nothing would ever change, then none of those sucky things would ever be eradicated. ”

Dissatisfaction and complaining is one way to go about changing things – a deep appreciation of what is and a positive desire for the future is another, and in my experience, more effective way of bringing about change. I often refer to this quote by Patch Adams which points to this dilemma:

Change that is deeply effective and positive presents a paradoxical challenge.

On the one hand, there needs to be an appreciation and acceptance of how things are in the here and now. On the other hand, there needs to be an active intention to make things better.

Nothing needs to change, and everything can improve. This is the way to avoid the two extremist traps of activist’s frustration or pessimistic complacency.

– Patch Adams

However I agree totally with Dr. Crazy’s final statement that “if one can’t bitch on a blog, where exactly can one bitch?” :o) It’s like blogs were made for it.

Russell Quinn asks a very interesting question in a comment:

I’ve been reading your blog for a while and your career in “being happy” got me thinking.

Can an occupation in promoting an emotion like your own happiness be compared to something like an athlete? and what happens when it’s over?

For example, you can train yourself to be happier and work at improving your own happiness, in the same way as you can train your muscles to be a better runner. You can eventually become known as a “happiness officer” or an “athlete”.

But, in the same way that something unforeseen and out of your control, like a broken leg, can happen end your athletic career, a major trauma could send you into a spiral of depression and end your career in happiness.

I guess my point of this.. is that i was considering these two statements and how the public would react to them:

“I used to be an athlete, but a broken leg meant I had to give it up 5 years ago”, and

“I used to promote happiness, but a period of depression meant i gave it up”

They are both really the same thing after all.

Sorry for going off at a tangent ;)

That’s a great tangent! And I really like the mental image of the Chief Happiness Officer who’s sprained his happy muscle and is now depressed :o)

To me, happiness is not a fixed state – it’s a constantly fluctuating emotion. It’s not like I can make myself happy, and then be happy every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

No matter how happy a person is right this second, something could happen to make that person desperately unhappy. Depression is a great example – as it is a chemical imbalance in the brain resulting in a severely bad mood that may not have been triggered by any external events in your life.

But here’s the crucial point: As Russell writes, you can train happiness. This won’t mean that you’ll always be happy – but that you’ll be as happy as you can be, given your circumstances. And when something bad happens you will be unhappy, but you will be less unhappy and be so for a shorter time.

Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology admits that he is not a particularly happy person and that his efforts have taken him from depressive to moderately happy. Which kinda explains why the planet’s foremost proponent of happiness always looks so grumpy :o)

So it could absolutely happen: I could lose my happiness because something bad happened to me – or for no reason at all. And I probably would be forced to quit as the Chief Happiness Officer if that happened because there’s no way you can make other people happy if you’re unhappy yourself.

A large part of what I present in my presentations and workshops is me being happy and full of energy and customers constantly remark on this. They like what I say – and they like the way I say it just as much.

Another important point is that happiness is no less nice, desirable or beautiful for being fragile. Yes, you can build up amazing levels of happiness and lose it all in a moment when some terrifying, unstoppable event takes it all away. But that’s no reason not to be as happy as you can.

Does that make sense at all?