Hot coals don't work for cynics
Next time someone tells you he will “walk across hot coals” to do this or that, don’t be impressed. It’s not that hard.
Unless — and I am quoting The New York Times here, so we can assume no irony was intended — they are “too hot.”
Which seems to be what happened in Switzerland, where 25 employees of a Swiss ad agency were injured while walking over hot coals in Zurich. The Times reported that “Ten ambulances, two emergency medical teams and police officers from multiple agencies were deployed to help, according to the Zurich police. Thirteen people were briefly hospitalized.”
Yikes. Good luck explaining that one to the insurance company — long pause on the other end of the line followed by, “You did what now?”
Walking on hot coals began as an ancient religious ritual, but in recent times has been grist for the snake-oil world of life coaches and corporate team-builders.
“The purpose of the fire walk,” said motivational speaker Tony Robbins in 2017, “is just a great metaphor for taking things you once thought were difficult or impossible and showing how quickly you can change.”
Like, you never thought it possible to land at the emergency room quite so fast. That will help you write more vivid ad copy, no doubt. “My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-AAIIIEEEE!!”
An ad company. How perfect is that? Nothing against ad companies, but I think of all the times we consumers have been sold a bill of goods — so now the shoe is on the other smoldering foot. I’m trying very, very hard not to be secretly happy about this. I hope they remember it next time they try to tell us that fortune favors the brave.
And forget the coals, I don’t know how much good these team-building exercises do for anyone anyhow. The closest I came to one was back in the ’90s, and if anything it made us despise our co-workers even more than when we started, especially those who were perceived as sucking up to the publisher by enthusiastically participating in their stupid little skits.
It struck me at the time that off-site team-building exercises might work for the dental office, but for journalists it was a patently bad idea. The corporate suits seem to have forgotten that since the beginning of our careers we’d more or less been expressly taught to expose people like team-builders and motivational speakers as money-grubbing fraudsters.
And if any team-builders are reading this, and you happen to see an incoming newsroom on your calendar — ixnay on the antchays. We don’t do chants. We associate chants with Sun Myung Moon and Jim Jones and national political conventions.
So instead of an excited and motivated group of freshly pressed employees excitedly chanting at full throat about breaking productivity records, you will have a surly group in khakis and rumpled blue oxfords mumbling the required stanzas and wondering if they could get out of the whole thing by faking their own death. (The whole show was effectively over when they told us to dress up in costumes reflecting our “actual readers.” One of us came as Carlos the Jackal, another as Little Bo Peep and from that point on they knew they had lost the room.)
They did not try to have us walk on coals, but apparently, walking on coals is no big deal. The Times quoted physicist David Willey, who said “For the vast majority of people, maybe a blister the size of your little fingernail is the worst thing that can happen to you. They’re telling you that it’s all in your mind, and this will give you powers that will continue. It’s not in your mind. Anybody can do it. And I don’t think the confidence you get from it is necessarily going to last that long.”
That’s got to be disillusioning. Even to an employee of an ad agency.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Hot coals can be too hot for team-building
