The second day, I woke up and decided to skip the first session in favor of wandering around in a daze. Not from the sessions, but from the hallway conversations. I’d learnt something. I just wasn’t sure what yet. I checked my email, wrote up my notes. Finally decided to follow Dave Smith’s lead and got Starbucks.

The second session I went to was Reinventing Yourself, presented by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby. I have to throw objectivity out of the window here. I think Johanna is wonderful. She’s about four feet tall, looks perfectly harmless, has a mind like a steel trap. (And Esther is nice too.)

The session started with a very interesting idea: we were asked to go through our careers from the first job we had, and mark our general job satisfaction at each point. This had some interesting repercussions, as we found that being unemployed is generally satisfying and job satisfaction may have little to do with seniority or power. (Johanna also had some interesting anecdotes about the perils of being a QA manager. I used to wonder why it was that so many companies had underpowered QA groups. The answer’s pretty simple. It’s the job of QA to tell management exactly what it doesn’t want to hear.)

Then we were asked to find a partner and talk about patterns that we see repeating in different jobs. I was paired with Sandra, and we talked about daycare centers and undervaluing ourselves. We were asked to develop three options for a career path. Given what we know about ourselves from experience, what would we pick out?

Finally, we were asked to write down what we thought we needed, and what we thought we could provide. This was an interesting exercise in itself, because it forced me to think about what I could actually provide… not from a technical perspective, but from my life experience. I had to think for a bit, and fight the urge to write "It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others."

After the session was over, I had a couple of drinks with Stuart S. and Volker F. and tried to understand what it is they do for a living. Stuart explained it to me as best he could, but the context was still unclear… until I realized that Stuart and Volker are business therapists. Businesses themselves can’t need therapy, but people in a department can share a worldview and nurse grudges against other departments in much the same way as a married couple. So what Stuart does is lock people from different departments in a room together, prepare for a “frank exchange of views” and then get them to realize the other’s context and help them to agree to a better relationship.

Part of the reason this took so long is because Stuart’s language and way of thinking is so different to mine. He likes talking about Satir Training and is very comfortable with symbolism. Satir Training looks like performance art to me. And while I’m comfortable with abstract concepts, the idea of a solid object to represent a concept confuses me, as I “see” them both individually and don’t know which one to focus on.

After that, we went to dinner with Paul B. and another man. All NFs. I had a very confusing conversation that ranged from the concept of heroes to the value of reconstruction (a kind of therapy that involves 30 people, a facilitator and a fairly extensive geneology).

Finally, after we were dropped off back at the hotel, there was a conversation about the conversation. At which point I was informed that some people don’t care why something works, only that it does. Whether it’s magic, psychology or some unstated law of the universe is immaterial. In fact, the question of “why” is considered to be besides the point at best, and at worst impolite. “Why” is restrictive, uncaring, cold. It’s a question only applicable to physics, not the “real world” which consists of people and relationships.

My brain broke. To me, the “real world” is the one expressed through scientific theory. We are the result of billions of years of physics, millions of years of evolution, and the only reason we are able to have a conversation at all is because science is pinning us to the ground and giving us the brains to talk to each other. I expressed this by waving my arms through the air and babbling.

Apparently this is called “The Why Whammy.” I can see why.

Went to bed, very confused.