​Four or five years ago, as I worked on social media postings corporately, I got into an amusing dialogue with one of my coworkers. He picked the images to go with our twice weekly blog. Sometimes he created them himself. Sometimes he selected stock photos.
 
I had never really perused images on the Internet, never really thought much about air brushing, perfect teeth and hair, no blemishes on the models, and everyone looking slightly hip (35-years-old or younger). It just was. You looked at brochures, marketing collateral, web sites, and hmmmmm, “everybody looks pretty darn good.”
 
That’s cuz they were air brushed. Images are selected very carefully. They must fit certain criteria.  Smile. Show your pearly whites. Smooth skin. Shining hair. Trendy clothes. Not an ounce of fat.

That’s America, isn’t it folks?  When you get out of your car at work and step into the office or assembly line, you see all those people perfectly lined up, don’t you?
 
Of course not.  But over and over and over, the continual refining of the perfect image is jammed down our throats.

We don’t know what hits us. We don’t think about it.

Instead, the pictures are just there. Everybody is looking good, smiling. Why don’t I feel that way?

BECAUSE YOU HAVE A LIFE and life has ups and downs and problems and sickness and pain and things that don’t go your way and your hair looks like crap and that zit won’t go away and you better get a grip to deal with it or your emotional well-being isn’t going to last. I think the Air Brushing of America (and the world) is one of the biggest problems we face because what we see and what we come to expect is not the reality of life.
 
All the models are young. That makes you presume there are all these gorgeous young people parading down city streets, looking awesome, when it’s just not the case.

Some are 20 or even dare we day 50 or 100 pounds over-weight.  That’s reality.
 
They might have a slight body odor.  Ewwwww. God forbid.
 
Their teeth may buck in or out.  Gross.
 
That’s one of my pet peeves.  OMG, check out the perfection of teeth in ads, TV shows, talking heads on TV. You would thing the dentists of America have rearranged the rows of incisors of everyone under the age of 30 if you go by what you see on TV, magazines or the Internet.
 
If you put together a pamphlet to promote your company, you’ll be faced with a decision. Reality or fantasy?
 
Quite frankly, I’m coming down on the reality side. Show people as they really are. Show the bad clothes (or funky ones), the weird hairdos, the off-kilter lips, eyes, cheeks, ears, nose, whatever body part you choose. Show the reality.
 
If you do that, you win. If you choose to put in front of your audience a reality test, I think they’ll follow.

People want truth and justice. They want the straight shooter. “Tell me what’s really going on.”
 
What’s not real is “Air Brushed America.” That’s fantasy. If you choose to live in that world, you’ll have nothing but frustration the rest of your life.
 
If you go to stock photos, it doesn’t matter your race or creed. Everyone looks spectacular. The image-creators give you a taste of every ethnicity, just a touch. They think that’s enough.
 
It doesn’t cut it. Our species is a messy one.  We screw up, we look bad, we fail, we fall down, we lose our hair, we trip, we fall. But we get up. And that’s the awesome thing. Remember that.

​Last Sunday, as the greeter at our church, I asked people as they walked in what their one word of the day was. Most were puzzled, so I repeated the question, “If  you had one word to describe today, what would it be?”
 
It’s an intriguing question because it quickly forces you to dig into your mindset. How do you feel? What are you thinking? What has struck you as different, odd, impressive, bad or ugly to start your day?
 
My informal polling revealed four responses, exactly evenly divided between the 12 total quizzed. Three said “cold,” 3 said “chilly,” 3 said “sunny,” and 3 said “early.” All made sense.
 
It was “cold” outside, unseasonably, but not necessarily out of the norm for March in southeastern Wisconsin. “Chilly” was just another descriptive word for cold, so we could lump those together. “Sunny” was descriptive, as a brilliant sun shone on the day.  And finally, those who said “early,” were likely reflecting on the fact that it was daylight savings and the first morning after moving their clocks forward, so they had to get up earlier than usual on their biorhythm clock.
 
What’s striking is how one word defines an attitude. Some people walked in braced for the cold, holding their bodies tightly, letting the weather affect them in a negative sense.
 
Those choosing “sunny” made me pause. They were looking at the brighter side of life, the shine of the day, embracing the brilliance of the light.
 
“Early” word choosers just wanted to go back to bed. The time change broke their routine, and they weren’t ready for it yet. Maybe this week they will be.
 
Choosing one word to describe your day says a lot about us.  We wake up with a choice on how to attack or hide from the day. We can put our best foot forward, smiling, laughing, opening ourselves to others. Or we can snarl, choose vindictiveness, hatred and finger-pointing.
 
Most of us make that choice in a subconscious manner every day. We have our set routines that play into it. If the routine gets broken, that can send us from a good mood to an ugly one or vice versa.
 
Last week, our dogs got skunked within two minutes of me walking with them up our driveway. Two good-sized trees had blown across at the end of our driveway,  blocking the exit for our cars. I’d woken that morning in a normal decent mood, and suddenly I’m heading back to the house to hose down the dogs with vinegar and try to figure out how to navigate around the fallen trees.
 
The incidents didn’t wreck my day, but they changed my one word from a normal motivated positive outlook to one of irritation until I worked the BS out of my system. We all do this daily.
 
How do you see your day when you wake up? Have you ever tried to place a one word description to it? “Excited?” “Determined?” “Bewildered?” “Wide-Eyed?”  “Windy?” “Bored?” “Brooding?”
 
Funny, but it’s the little things that often affect our outlook.  Weather is one. Something unexpected like a dog sniffing a skunk is another. Anything that takes you significantly outside your norm changes that one word outlook on life.
 
Our dad used the word “super” frequently when responding to questions on how he was doing.  I love it. I respond to emails often and to others face-to-face now with “super” when they ask how I’m doing. Try it. See how it makes you feel.
 
Is today chilly, sunny or early? Choose your word wisely.

​Ladder THIS up, fellas! Are you baked in? We need to get some heavy lifting done in quarter three or investors will throw the big rock at us.
 
Corporate buzzwords abound. They say nothing. The people who use them think value is attached. They kid themselves.
 
A good friend recently told me about the newly appointed CEO of his company. During a 30-minute speech to the masses, he used the phrase “heavy lifting” four times at a minimum, according to my friend.

Now, “heavy lifting” may seem to make sense. Broadly, yeah, it means we all need to work hard, get things done, navigate the landscape. But even those phrases mean nothing.

What, for example, does “navigate the landscape” tell employees or investors about the next step a company is taking? What does “get things done” mean? Are there specific projects on deadline? If so, which ones? And, of those, which are number one, number two and number three?

We’ll never know because no one specifies that information. So employees and investors grow bored and listless, then stop paying attention. Nothing means anything, so why listen?
 
Who creates business buzzwords? Is there some college or university that people attend to get this remarkable command of nothingness statements? It’s an art form. When practiced well, the masses nod their heads in the audience, acting like every word is a message from god.
 
It’s the cynic, the investigator, the person who uses his or her brain that dissects these types of statements, trying to find meaning and sense. When none is to be found, the speaker loses those people.
 
Oddly, if the leader was smart, s/he would know that those are the employees most important to the future of the organization. Motivate them, and you win. Set a clear direction that folks understand and respect, and they follow your lead. Explain explicitly what you mean, and they share your message with others (and typically support it).
 
There must be a committee somewhere that comes up with this stuff. How else could these buzz words/phrases be created and spread thoroughly through the business community and become part of the vernacular? The pointy heads in the back room spend weeks pushing paper across the table.
 
“Drink the Koolaid.”
 
“Break down the silos.”
 
“Tee it up.”

“Move the needle.”
 
Yeah, well MOVE THIS, fellas. Move the mush language aside and say something for a change.
 
The Board of Business Buzzwords Development, Enhancement and Revision Committee levels up every year in Silicon Valley to generate new business vernacular. They try new phrases and words on each other and see if the listeners understand what they mean. If not, they save it, add it to the list and use it. If, instead, the phrase makes sense and is useful, it is discarded.
 
Bradley: “Hey, have we captured ‘run it up the flagpole’ yet?”
 
Trevor: “Dude, that is so 80s.”
 
Bradley: “Well, we could use it to leverage our core competencies.”
 
Trevor: “Now you’re talking.”
 
If you want to get buy-in to the swim lane and empower your employees to find and categorize all the moving parts, keep talking without making any sense. You’ll baffle your staff, drive the company to a standstill and puzzle investors.

The ship will be dead in the water without a sail. Blow some fresh words in. Think through what’s really going on, then express the specifics.
 
You might find a lot more people paying attention, listening with their eyes and ears, instead of nodding off and looking out the window. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?

​Last year, my older brother showed me a trick. Not really. It was actually a time-saving and productivity improvement so simple that it’s hard to believe I’d never seen or heard about it before. But that’s what happens when you typically ignore technology improvements and mosey about your day using antique tools.
 
I noticed him talking into his phone one day. “What the heck are you doing?,” I asked.
 
“Texting,” he replied.
 
“No you’re not. You need to type to do that.”
 
“No, you can speak into your phone and it prints the words into a text. Here, check it out.” And he spoke a message and I watched as the words materialized one by one.
 
It wasn’t perfect. “To” could be “too” or “two.” You had to check words like that at the end of a message or “except” could become “accept” or “effect” could come out as “affect.” And so on.
 
There were (are) many ways for the voice activation function to mess up. I found this out more and more after beginning to utilize it, and watching my productivity soar. This is one of the unsung negatives about smart phones: Men, and men with big hands in particular, are at a titanic disadvantage when it comes to tapping anything on their phones. Our sausage-like fingers often hit two keys at once since the phone screens are designed for 11-year-olds, causing you to go back over and over to correct your message and ensure it makes sense.
 
But, beyond the productivity improvement experienced from using voice activation, there is another massively important improvement it provides in your life: Making you laugh. This does not seem evident.
 
You need to start speaking into your phone quickly. Add commas and periods and question marks and exclamation points to your verbal commands to ensure proper punctuation. If you jabber fast enough, the message will get convoluted and what prints on the screen will bare only a small facsimile to what you said. This gets funny.
 
For example, if you rapidly stated, “Where’s the window that you said you were delivering to me yesterday question mark You said it would be here by Tuesday morning and I took the day off work to be here and no one has shown up and it’s 2 in the afternoon period.”
 
It could come out as, “Where’s the window you said you were deal liver to me yes sir? You said it would be Tuesday moor ring and I took the day off work to be here and no one has show upland it’s too bad laughter room.”
 
If you don’t check your texts after speaking, things like that would go out over the airwaves, and you’d get a response, “What the heck did you mean?”
 
You’d look at your message, crack up, then reply, “I meant Tuesday something else.” Which would translate to “I meant to say something else.”
 
This can go on forever. If you’re bored, it can your silly thing to do, sending texts to friends to confuse and amuse them. It works in getting responses, so if someone is ignoring you, go for the voice activation function to baffle them and get them to tap back.
 
You shouldn’t put too much effort into it though because you’re going to have to return to what popped up on the screen and make sure what you said was what you meant.
 
When that sentence above comes out as the following, you’ll know you’ve got voice activation down: “You should knit too much fort into the dough bee cause you’re go hinge  to have to real turn what pooped up on the screen and make shore what you said was men tent.”
 
Now, stop laughing. It happens.