Did I say... effective...?

I'm sorry - did I possibly make the gigantic assumption that I would be leaving this course a more effective and well rounded individual? Did I also allude to the thought that my new colleagues are intelligent people...? Well fuck me backwards and call me Tuesday - what a dumb-fuck I was...

The "course" I have spent the day taking is nothing other than a ginormous piece of American, Evangelist, Self Empowering, Motivational, Self Help TRIPE. I've never tasted tripe of such disgusting rancidity. The first section of the day (4 hours and 34 minutes) was devoted to... wait for it... Shifting your paradigms.

Yes - apparently we all suffer under paradigms every day, and we fail in our lives due to the assumptions and actions that these paradigms necessarily inflict upon us. An example was given - joy! - which I shall translate:
I was sitting on a subway in New York and a man boarded, followed by his two children. The children were running up and down the train making a heap of noise and the man just sat and didn't do anything. So I asked him to keep his children under control, as I naturally assumed that he just had no regard for others on the train. He replied to me, 'Oh, I'm sorry, but my wife just died half an hour ago and they don't really know how to cope. Neither do I.' I was overcome with such compassion and guilt, and I realised that my paradigms had just been shifted.

My response to this? No. Your fucking paradigms haven't been shifted - you were just caught with your holier than thou foot in your god damned mouth and you wanted to blame the feeling of stupidity on a quasi-psychological sounding issue. You're trying to massage your ego and now you want us to massage ours by admitting similar 'shifts'.

This bullshit was followed by instructions on how to write a "Personal Mission Statement". We were shown a video as inspiration - the video involved a series of snapshots of families, children, happy people running on the beach, old married couples and a bunch of words rolling across the screen in time to excessively cheesy music, like "happy to be alive", "in love", "satisfied", "commitment", "complete". Then the video stopped and (after vomiting a little in my mouth) we were instructed to 'just write down your feelings'. Mine went a little like this: "Fucking pile of hippy wank - fuck off with your self-righteous mumbo jumbo bullshit and go back to your jesus-loving piece of crap homeland you mother fucking american arse licking cocksuckers.'

The anger I expressed was more than anything I've felt in a while and to start with, I was slightly ashamed. But I did what I always do when I'm faced with an 'am I being emotionally retarded and too cynical or is everybody around me just a dumb bastard' moment, and I went and asked my mum.

She confirmed: Bazza - I'd have told them to go and play with themselves.

I love you mum.