Global recession: are people jumping off buildings yet?

Gloom and doom, doom and gloom … Increasingly people around me in China are singing the blues because of the global crisis and resorting to vague generalisations (tautology intended) to explain their impoverished state of affairs.

“A lot of companies are closing down because of the international crisis”, “many people are losing their jobs …” The information is fuzzy. Even before the world’s virtual finance system started to show the inevitable cracks and fissures of the earthquake we are now in, “lots of” companies were closing down and “many people” were losing their jobs all the time.

My friends and colleagues are leaving out vital pieces of information: China is hosting the World Expo in 2010 and is sure to do the same magnificent job as she did with the Olympics. This creates employment and stimulates the economy. The Chinese government is pouring money into various sectors to stimulate employment. I need not bore readers with that information, which can be found on the web pages of the East China Post and the Shanghai Daily.

All around me in Shanghai buildings are being pulled down and new ones erected all the time in a kind of surreal, slow-mo yo-yoing. This inevitably creates an enormous amount of employment.

People can definitely create false pain in their minds through misconstrued information and negative forecasting, living in the bleak desert of what ifs and if onlys. I know. Of course I have been there.

In my somewhat varied career I have been a sales manager and went to great pains to teach sales people to be specific about the information they were using, or rather abusing. “Nobody’s buying my products”, sales people would moan, but when their sales statistics were examined (exactly how many initial contacts with prospective clients to how many actual closed deals) their statements were almost always far from the truth.

Yet, willy nilly, the sales people reacted negatively to the information they had formed in their own minds and thus created the results they were most anxious to avoid because of the blurred, distorted facts they were working with.

We all need to watch our attitudes and filter what we are allowing into our minds. Yeah, I hear you groaning, “another life lesson from Rod”. I am not a Tony Robbins fan by any means. But I do believe the Buddha when he says, to paraphrase different parts of the Dhammapada, the mind creates your reality.

I used to use the following little story when involved in sales training or teaching life skills — the latter mostly to children, but hey, I believe in keeping it simple. Why complicate our lives even further? Please read and take it to heart. I enjoyed reading it again myself. Note the self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Rainbow Burgers Story

There was an older man called Joe who really knew how to cook hamburgers and hot dogs well. In fact, he even had a secret recipe for the relish that he put on the burgers and dogs, which most people really liked. He had inherited the secret recipe from his father who had also sold hamburgers and hot dogs really well. The business was called Rainbow Burgers.

Joe’s father’s business was a very successful takeaway business and it was Joe’s father’s legacy to him.

Joe hoped to pass on this legacy to his son Henry, who was now living in a big city a hundred kilometres away from his hometown. Joe advertised regularly in the local magazines and newspapers of his home town. Rainbow Burgers did not have a sit-down restaurant. People just ordered by phone or queued outside the shop or waited on the few chairs provided. Not having waiters to pay and other overheads like lighting, cleaners’ salaries and crockery and cutlery really kept Joe’s overheads down.

One day his son came back to the hometown from the big city. His son told his father, “Hey Dad, the economy in this country is really doing poorly. A lot of people just can’t afford to buy luxuries such as takeaway food like what you make. I think you had better be very careful with your business. Maybe cut down on your advertising costs.”

Old Joe thought, “Hmmm, my son must be right. He is very bright and he has received a good education in the city where I sent him myself to learn. I had better stop spending so much money on pamphlets and advertising in the local magazines and newspapers. It is a lot of money.”

So Joe stopped spending as much money as he did on advertising his wonderful hotdogs and hamburgers. Sure enough, you guessed it, fewer and fewer people bought his hamburgers and hotdogs. And, inevitably, his business got worse and worse until one day he took out the keys for the Rainbow Burgers takeaway shop and locked the door for the last time. “I am closing my shop forever,” Joe said. “My son was right. People cannot afford to buy my hotdogs and hamburgers anymore, so my business has failed.”