I had a meeting that lasted a good chunk of today. A coworker and I were asked to provide some sort of expertise on a project by one of the local school districts. The invitation was kind of vague — OK, it was extremely vague — so we went out to meet with the folks that had invited us to get a better sense of what they wanted us to do.

We both went into the meeting with not the slightest sense of what we were actually being asked to do — it was sort of like getting a memo at work that says, “We’re going to assemble a car, and we need your help.” I don’t know the first thing about assembling cars — did you need me to hold the wrench? Or am I responsible for printing the little sticker that goes on the seat belt that says, “Warning: Choking Hazard for Children under 3″? That sort of thing.

So, we sit down with the guy heading the project, and he immediately starts talking in circles, using these weird motivational phrases that sound great but don’t actually mean anything. You know the type:

What we really want is to design a rubric that will help our students actualize their goals. I mean, we’re currently down here in the trenches and with a combined effort we could be soaring with the eagles, and it’s my hope that we’ll be able to use some personal assessment to create an entirely new set of goals so that we can get some new perspective and think outside the box a little bit so that …

And then he stops talking and says, “So, how do you think you guys could play into that?”

Mind you, I still didn’t have the foggiest idea what we were actually being asked to do.

The entire meeting went that way, with us eventually getting some … small … idea of what our role might be — but not from him. Eventually, the other people in the meeting started talking around him while he was off changing paradigms and thinking out of the box and soaring with the eagles.

I’m a fan of motivational speaking as much as the next guy (read: not at all), but there comes a point where I’ve noticed that people tend to get so caught up in using the right phrases that they start to leave out the actual point of their talk. I once dealt with a contractor who loved the word “synergy” (which, for the record, is one of my least favorite words ever. It doesn’t actually mean anything.) She went off on tangents about how we were “syngerists” and we needed to “synergize,” bla bla synergetic-bla.

So, at this juncture, I have thought about changing the paradigm, I have imagined life outside the box, and I have seen where the eagles soar.

I’m still not actually sure what I’m supposed to do, though.

Tags: meaningless-phrases, motivational-speaking