One of the most challenging aspects of being a trainer, I find, is avoiding cliché. Clichés are horrible: phrases so overused that any real meaning was leached out of them billions of years ago. They're used daily, both in real life and in business. Honestly, if I hear another sales manager saying to me 'need to get our ducks in a row and make sure we're all singing from the same hymn-book, Paul' I will probably resort to lamping that sales manager with a whoopee-cushion-slap across the chops. Again.
But the blummin things are everywhere. Clichés crop up in newspapers, in books, in conversation, in business meetings, sales pitches and presentations. Many times have I dotted the i's and crossed the t's on a beautifully-constructed training module or business proposal only to realise that it's ... uh oh! ... whoopee cushion slap time for me again!
So why are they so difficult to avoid and can we avoid them? Should we avoid them?
The problem with clichéd phrases is that they actually pin deep universal truths about our everyday lives onto the wotsits of our thingummy: they are pearls of wisdom gleaned from millennia of combined human experience, wise observations about behaviour, love and emotions which you fail to heed at your peril. I was at a networking event yesterday and I heard them everywhere. "What goes around comes around" a wise old fellow was saying to a trendily-bespectacled youth fresh out of nappies munching pastries at the coffee table. "But every cloud has a silver lining" said someone else, reflecting on the rollercoaster ride of his full year’s trading. "And what goes on in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse", whispered two ladies in tartan stockings conspiring in a corner next to a long-forgotten overhead projector that was quietly having an existential moment to itself.
I wondered whether these lovely folk (and all potential clients) were aware that they had allowed cliché to dominate and drive their conversations like some sort of language-parasite. And if they were aware, why weren’t they as stressed about it as I was?
I pondered this on the train home, and then, when I got home and found my eldest daughter steadfastly refusing to even look at her homework, I heard myself saying things like, "it's your life you’re throwing away, you know" and "there's no such word as can't".
Bang! The cliché parasite had taken hold once again! My daughter stormed off to her room, switched on her music and probably started texting: H8 my Dad hes a nob Lool
Or something.
It would seem that, despite best efforts, cliché is unavoidable. Why, I suspect one or two might even have slipped into this blog. But here’s The Thing: Despite the dictionary definition of cliché as being a well-worn phrase devoid of meaning, I’ve decided that actually, it isn’t true. To hell with The Dictionary and its discombobulated contrafibularities!
Clichés, I think, are actually full of meaning, and even though they are overused we wouldn’t use them unless we all fully understood the meaning behind them, whether in real life or at the coffee-and-pastry-fuelled hallucinogenic milieu of networking events. Simple right? If a cliché has no meaning then it would not exist. Ergo sum etc etc…
My scientific conclusion to this train of thought is that a well-used cliché is actually a semantic short-cut that we can call upon to quickly communicate meaning, intention and emotion because we know with some confidence that the person we’re talking to will immediately ‘get it’. Fact is that a well-used cliché will describe something so close to us that parting from it would be like parting from our clothes and walking nude to the supermarket - not something I’ll try again in a hurry but it wasn’t my fault, copper. Honest.
But it still stresses me out. I hate to use cliché because I know I can avoid it. Particularly in a training session where I can’t always assume that the assembled mass of bodies around me will ‘get it’. Never make assumptions, right?
Grrr….!
It’s all been made more stressful because, suddenly, I've been asked to do something I've never done before. Having spent years in the company of business owners, directors, managers and competitive sales people I've accepted a commission to ‘give a talk’ in a couple of weeks’ time to a bunch of college leavers. Yes, it’s now going to be down to me to deliver to a roomful of 17-18 year old kids a heads-up-reality-check pep-talk on the horrors of the real world that eagerly awaits their contribution to modern society. Kids!! That strange breed of humanity who wear slack trousers designed to rise only as high as their crackers, who have hair like one of those watercress pots Blue Peter used to grow in the studio and who, by a devious quirk of evolution, have developed additional thumb joints of incredible elasticity that enable them to flick text and icons around the screens of their phones at near-relativistic speeds.
Give me the boardroom any day…
You can assume a cliché may work if you know the common language of experience between you and the group you’re working with, but kids will spot a cliché a mile off and they will pounce and savage and rip it to shreds, and you in the process. Or they might just start texting again and then I'm way beyond rescue or redemption or any hope of getting paid.
Sleepless nights…
The revelation came to me when I was in the supermarket; it arrived like a flabby whoopee-cushion to the eye as if wielded by a bruised and angry sales manager swearing revenge. Slap! Prrp! “Of course that's it!” I bellowed, clicking my fingers in a dramatic way, then checking to make sure I was fully dressed this time.
The trick, I decided, was not to avoid cliché. Instead, what I had to do was find creative ways to lift out the meanings behind whichever of those universal truths might be relevant to the group in a manner that would bring the thing to life. As a trainer it's what I do all the time. As a parent, it’s what I singularly fail to do every time. Elements of a good training often include the imparting of universal truths and the dangers of ignoring them. New fads may rise and fall but there is always a core of wisdom – common sense if you like – which Trainers find themselves sharing with their groups like Yoda amongst young Jedi. And why not? We know stuff. In such an environment it’s inevitable we’re going to run into the odd cliché. That’s just life, Jim. But in any good training – and as all great trainers know – it is essential that such things are brought to life with dynamism, vitality and understanding, awakening the skills of the group and motivating them to action, to develop in order to Be Better. So that, I thought to myself as I grabbed a couple of large melons out of their basket in the produce aisle (prompting a sudden, unexpected scream in the process), is how I need to approach the thing with these kids.
Phew! Stress over, now I can get on with the prep for it.
See? Every cloud really does have a silver lining.