Right before the start of the pandemic my family and I had what is best called—in the context of work—a “health journey”. It involved keeping areas of our living space sanitized for three or four months.

I bought new white towels that could stand up to being washed on the sanitize cycle, a new inner shower curtain, and I assessed the state of our outer decorative curtain. We’d bought it at a local home goods store and it was covered in inspirational sayings and phrases. It had appeared in the background of at least one selfie my wife had used in the social media promoting her business and it never failed to attract a comment or somebody asking where we had bought it. Seeing and reading these sayings and phrases silently had become very much (pun intended) part of the fabric of our lives.

It was difficult—a couple of months later—when we realized that our inspiration shower curtain wasn’t going to make it. I told my wife I’d have to get a new one and we both agreed that the chances of finding a similar or the same one again were slim—a friend of hers had even been to the local store to try and buy one herself so we knew we’d have to go elsewhere.

At this point in our “journey” we were both feeling burnt out—and all we could muster was me typing “inspirational shower curtain” into Amazon and turning the screen to my wife briefly before hitting buy now. I put it up amongst the (then) regular cycle of shuffling white towels back and forth to the laundry.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I acknowledged how much I absolutely hated this new curtain. It wasn’t until a few weeks after that that I realized why—it wasn’t an inspirational shower curtain at all, it was a collection of bad corporate management phrases.

I had continued to read these phrases to myself in passing every day—as I had with the old curtain—but in this case the voice in my head was every bad manager or leader I’d ever had at work. These aren’t just bad phrases though, they are, in my experience, things that I have been told when a leader felt like they could not be honest.

Every time I walk past this shower curtain now I think of where each of these phrases might be used and what an honest leadership response might look like.

We’ll start with my team’s favorite, which is JUST TRY—we especially like the all caps version.

I have often had this used to end a conversation about a change that clearly wasn’t made by the manager trying to present this change to me. The word “just” minimizes the potential effort required to “try” and implies something easy, or trivial, can be done to handle or deal with this change. It is a way of dismissing a person’s fears or worries about a situation by minimizing them.

A more honest approach might be to tell the person we are guiding that we as a manager or leader were also not in control of this change. To be clear I do not mean “I didn’t get a choice about this either…” but more like a modeling of the behavior we expect the person we are leading to exhibit ie: sometimes at work we have to do things we might not want to do (and that is OK).

JUST TRY, in this case, can easily become—let’s work together to assess this change—execute it to the best of our ability and provide feedback on how we think it works.

Of course I can also hear an old boss saying I need to learn ACCEPT CHANGES in that particular tone of his. Of course, it should be obvious that accepting change is really a process that involves being informed of those changes, asking questions and / or digesting the information then coming to an internal understanding of it.

This requires providing information about those changes, discussing which parts are immutable and which we may have control over and in what form and when that control can be exercised ie: as a leader we help other people come to a place where they can accept changes, it isn’t something that we just tell people to do.

DON’T BE AFRAID—is an issue in the same way. Fear is an emotion and we cannot simply will or wish another person not to have feelings because it may be inconvenient for us.

I have also been on the receiving end of more than one JUST TRY linked with their friend Believe in Yourself. In this case it is often associated with being asked to do something that in my professional experience is either impossible or highly likely to fail.

This may be a (literally) impossible deadline or perhaps another unlikely task, such as a report from data we don’t have, a speed expected from a bandwidth that doesn’t exist, or a piece of code from a language that doesn’t work that way.

This is a little trickier than our first example because as a leader it would be hard to be honest about something like this in the way I have presented it. If we dig a little deeper however—and we ignore the trust issue in not accepting another person’s assessment on face value—we could see that this could be caused by a miscommunication.

In the past I have watched these things be resolved by anything from explaining in a clearer, more straightforward, or just different way, or in some cases completing the work as asked and allowing the results to speak for themselves ie: a failure or a much more obvious illustration of the issues we had detected earlier.

Believe in Yourself on its own is often better replaced with reminding a person we are guiding of previous issues they have overcome and discussing the issue with them until we find out if they are having a possible crisis of confidence (we all have bad days) or if pessimism about a task or process is warranted.

At this point I can hear the ghosts of managers past telling me that things would have worked out fine if I found a way to NEVER GIVE UP.

In the real world we very much should give up sometimes because not everything works out the way that we hoped it would or unfolds as we expect. There are other times however where pushing a little harder or stretching what we thought we were capable of leads to a good outcome. 

Honesty is very important in this case because simply telling somebody to NEVER GIVE UP on something that is never going to work out can be damaging financially and can wreck morale. Knowing what the people we lead have demonstrated they are capable of, what we think they might be capable of, and what is realistically achievable requires honesty in assessment that goes far beyond this simple phrase.

Perhaps if I was just more positive, or at least tried to Think Positive right?

This slogan is often used in a problematic way but isn’t inherently problematic itself. If we use it to not admit, review, look at, or otherwise hide problems we don’t want to deal with (like so many of these other inspirational words) then we can’t and won’t ever address and solve them.

Simply put: we can’t fix problems that we won’t voice out loud.

Remaining optimistic when facing problems requires us to make assessments and judgements about ourselves that might be uncomfortable. Saying what may go wrong can feel like giving energy or attention to the “wrong” part of the problem, after all there is often far more that can go wrong that may go right.

Trusting a person’s abilities—even our own—can be a difficult exercise, especially for very skilled people as their knowledge can often lead to what seem like overly negative assumptions if we don’t understand the nuance of their criteria.

Giving focus to the things that can go right and concentrating on areas of the process or problem that we can currently effect can help us and those we lead. But it should be noted that this is different from the way most people use the phrase Think Positive to effectively mean ignore our problems and hope they go away which can and often does end up leading to the people around us feeling like they are being gaslit (which is a very uncomfortable way to be).

So what about our first two sayings (I have not forgotten about them)—FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS and you can be whatever you want?

I can’t help but think that if you find yourself in a situation where the people leaders around you are using the rest of the phrases in the way I have described; if they eschew honesty, shut down feelings, refuse to acknowledge impossible goals, and then gaslight you that that isn’t happening then perhaps our first two sayings are not such bad advice at all.

Or if like me you have read this and wondered if I’m talking about you (and I wrote it), then the answer is almost certainly no, but if reading these things has made you uncomfortable then it is OK to be honest with yourself—it is after all where real, healthy, sustainable change comes from…
…but if you can’t do that, you can always JUST TRY…seriously…DON’T BE AFRAID, Think Positive, Believe in Yourself and NEVER GIVE UP.