“I don’t suppose you remember the Beatles…”

Suppose you are in a strange town you need a bit of work done on your teeth, and you pop into the local dental business. While there you browse the magazines; “Punch” for 1964, the “Country Life” special issue on the Coronation, “Rave” magazine, featuring the Pretty Things. You then are called to the surgery – they don’t have an hygienist and the dentist greets you beside his chair, a creamy enamel contraption, leather seat, assorted brass fitments, and over it all, a collection of pulleys and drive belts that look as if they last saw action in Salts Mill. How’s your confidence quotient?

Do you have just the tiniest suspicion that this dentist may not be quite up to date? Do you also begin to have doubts about what he really knows about modern dentistry?

This last month I have been working on a stress reduction seminar. Touching on the matter of “Life Events”, and their contribution to the stressors we all carry around with us, I was using the fable of the camel and the final straw. You know? You do, don’t you? Surely? “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back”. Yes, you knew it. I knew you would.

The thing is, many of the people I was casting my pearls before this month didn’t know it. Now, you can buzz away in the back of the pub all you like about, “School today eh? They don’t teach them like they used to!” But grumbling, although infinitely satisfying, does not address the real problem. Which is us.

The fact is often we are failing to get the message across because we are using a metaphor that is unknown to many of the audience. We are erecting a barrier for ourselves to overcome.

Several times a year I come across the enquiry about “a good video to use for Leadership Training”. And several times a year someone will recommend “In Which We Serve”. This movie, no this “film”, was made in 1942. It starred Noël Coward, Celia Johnson, John Mills, and Bernard Miles. All Dead. The story is loosely based on the exploits of Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten (dead). And over sixty years later, someone out there is seriously proposing that we use this to help us teach leadership to today’s team leaders? Good grief, the first challenge is to explain what World War two was, and who was on each side.

As trainers, our stories, our anecdotes, our references, have to be up-to-date to be credible. I heard someone the other day recommending “Chicken Run” for Leadership and Team building. That movie was released in 2000, so in ten years it’ll be about as current as “Spice World” is today. My dread is that in 2030, when I am well into my dotage, I’ll read on some internet message board that it is still being used as support material for Leadership and Team working. By then the trainer will have to explain what an aeroplane was, and possibly why people might want to eat chicken.

So I was thrashing around to find a modern metaphor for the stress in our lives, and that annoying thing happened to the computer that happens to computers, and that a computer user has to address by doing the thing that a computer user has to do – it froze. I hit the two buttons that bring up the list of processes and applications, and saw them, and realised, “This is my metaphor!” For down at the bottom was the “CPU Usage” bar, and gosh-oh-golly, it was bouncing around at 92% to 95%. Just like our resistance to stress when living this modern life – we simply have no spare capacity. Our CPU freezes and it has to be restored to functionality by a break, rest, holiday, and by closing down applications. We need to stop all the processes that are using up the capacity. “She just can’t take it, Captain!” (Another reference that is well past its use-by date).

I guess I’m saying this. If your training story, metaphor, example, begins with, “You might remember”; “There used to be”; “Some years ago”; or any variations on these, just stop right there. Go out, get some new stories. Or pretty soon you’ll be showing them “The Italian Job” and explaining what a bank was, or that Minis weren’t always German cars.