Changing the Scale on a Nightmare
by Barry Maher

     "My life is a nightmare," a woman once confided after one of my Filling the Glass workshops. "How do you change the scale on a nightmare?"

      It's not my place to minimize her problems or anyone else's. I'll be the first to admit that the vast majority of the people in this country and on this planet have worse problems than I do. I always thought that was one of the contradictions that those of us who do motivational speaking need to recognize.

      I once stood in the back of the room as a particularly perky motivator addressed an awards dinner for construction workers. A middle-aged man stood stiffly beside me, apparently too uncomfortable to remain seated. As he listened, he massaged his hands. They were misshapen and arthritic. They'd been scrubbed clean, almost raw, yet were permanently stained with imbedded grit.

      "Why shouldn't she be upbeat," he muttered, nodding in the direction of the speaker. On the screen beside her, her PowerPoint presentation morphed into Number 11 of her trademarked 26 Secrets of Success. "Who wouldn't be upbeat, if they could make the kind of money she makes by just flying in here, talking for an hour, scattering a little sunshine then picking up a fat check and flying back home. Let her try working 60 hours a week hot-mopping asphalt on a roof in 98 degree heat. Then she can come back here and preach to me about hard work and persistence and positive attitude. What has she ever done—aside from telling other people how to live? Twenty-six secrets of success? What success has she ever had besides selling people on those 26 secrets?"

      He paused and took a moment to look me over, apparently realizing for the first time that I wasn't a construction worker. Then he asked, "What do you do?"

      "Among other things," I said, "I'm a professional speaker. I'm on next."

      "I can hardly wait," he grumbled. Then he moved off to stand by somebody else.

      Weiler's Law says that nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it himself. It's not my place to minimize the problems you might have to live with or overcome. And it's certainly not my place minimize any nightmares you might have to face. It's not my place. But it might be yours.

      How do you change the scale on a nightmare?

      In 1940, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl and his wife were shipped to a Nazi concentration camp. She was killed almost immediately. Frankl was kept alive as a slave. One night the man in the wooden bunk next to him had the worst nightmare the psychiatrist had ever seen. The man was howling and moaning and rolling about, and Frankl's first thought, as a doctor, was to wake him up and relieve him of his agony. Then, as he reached out towards the man, he remembered what he would be waking him to Auschwitz, and all its brutal horror-something infinitely worse than anything any human nightmare could produce. He let the dream horror continue. To save the man from the horror of reality.

      Life can be brutal. Helen Keller, who should know a lot more about life's difficulties than you or I (at least certainly an infinite amount more than I, and I would be willing to guess a rather large amount more than you as well), said that "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."

Tip: It's not my place to minimize your suffering. It's yours. Particularly if it doesn't quite reach the level that Helen Keller or Viktor Frankl had to overcome.