What annoys you? Waiting in line? Slow service in a restaurant? Getting a half-caf non-fat instead of a decaf non-whip at Starbies? Car problems? Traffic. No one likes traffic. Unhelpful store clerks, or just overly helpful store clerks that won’t leave you alone? Kids crying or worse yet screaming in the seat directly behind you on the airplane?!?

I didn’t think I was such a bad person growing up or in school. I had friends, my family was loving, and I was sheltered from the outside world first by my big brother and then by Johnny V., my boyfriend for most of high school and part of college. It wasn’t until I left Minnesota and moved to San Francisco that my eyes saw the world for what it could be, both good and bad.

I think I was a pretty typical selfish insensitive type when I was traveling six to seven days a week doing software consulting. I say typical because when the travel gets that heavy, you either go crazy with false happiness and being overly friendly, or you settle into the groove of having to go through airport security on your flight to wherever you have meetings that day and just get through it. A different city almost every night, constantly in and out of airports, day after day after day,  monotonous and tiring. Anyone who dreams of getting a job with a high travel requirement should make that the dream job under consideration does not include any business meetings, otherwise you’ll have the same opinion I developed during my heavy travel years. Every city is the same, because every city has an airport, an airport hotel, and office buildings. Beyond that the only difference is precipitation. (This is not how I feel now, of course, I love the uniqueness of every single block, but the sameness was my perception at the time.)

The Storm

I was finally going to get home for a whole two-day weekend after several weeks of traveling every day. I was flying home Friday night, and I didn’t have to go back to the airport until Monday morning.

So I’m flying from Chicago to San Francisco via Denver, in January. Any guess as to how that trip went?

Well, believe it or not, I did get out of ORD (sorry, Chicago airport) only two hours late (it wasn’t actually de-icings like you would expect, my plane had an actual mechanical issue that they had some trouble with before we could take off), and the snowstorm had planes circling DIA (Denver) for an hour before they could land. So by the time I got on the ground, I was three hours late for my connection. On the up-side, there was a good chance my connection had been delayed too, right?

Well, no such luck in this case. As soon as the plane touched down I turned on my wireless and checked the text messages. Four alerts from United, the first and second were boarding warnings, the third a missed-flight notification, and the fourth, a seat on a reschedule flight out at 6AM the next morning. Sigh. But because of my frequent flyer miles and the fact that technically my flight delay had been due to mechanical error, United was going to voucher my hotel room for the night. But even though I had the text message from United saying I was getting a voucher, I still had to go to the customer service desk to get the actual voucher and hotel room confirmation.

The Crowd

So I’m heading from my gate towards the customer service desks, and what do you think I see? Eight lines of people at least 50 people deep per line. I quick GPSed for the airport hotel phone #, and called and made a reservation using my credit card. THEN I went to stand in line. And man oh man, the negativity coming off of that group of frustrated travelers was so thick you could actually see it. People red in the face from arguing, babies and children crying, everyone weary and worried about how to get home and the possibility (probability actually) that their family would be spending the night on the floor of the Denver airport. And their frustration and mass negativity was so overwhelming, I could practically see the dark cloud of their negativity hovering above the crowd like smog.

I played a book-on-CD in my headphones and stood in line. About an hour and a quarter later, I got up next in line for the desk. The woman behind the counter looked like she was suffering from battle fatigue. Can you imagine having all that negative energy directed at your for hours when you’re pretty much helpless for being able to provide any “customer service” because of the airline’s regulations of NOT providing rooms when it’s a weather delay to get people stuck over night? You know, now that I think about it, I did get a heavy dose of severe negativity shot directly at me for about thirty minutes last Friday (11/19/10); a woman was gossiping about someone I knew and so full of her own baloney that I gave up trying to talk to her and basically bolted. It took the rest of the afternoon and a serious CGW heart-to-heart to get away from where that negativity had cornered me. Anyway, back to the Denver story. The man before me had been just livid, insisting that United pay for his hotel room and a taxi and his dinner and who knows what else, and she wasn’t authorized to give him anything beyond an apology because his plane was grounded for weather. Finally the guy stormed off. I thought maybe it would have been better for everyone else in the airport if they had maybe let that guy get on a plane in a blizzard instead of keeping him in Denver with the rest of us. Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

So I go up to the girl and smile and wait a moment. She almost started crying. It was a simple deal, United’s system had already printed my voucher and I had gotten one of the last hotel rooms by booking it myself 90 minutes earlier, so I was at the desk all of maybe 60 seconds, said my thank you, and then I was OUTTA there. Man, sooooooo many angry people, directing their frustration at other people helpless to change Mother Nature.

I went to my hotel room and realized I had no clothes, no toothbrush, just my computer bag. And  it didn’t annoy me, I just thought “oh well” and tried to relax. They had kept my checked bag to keep everything simpler both that night and in the morning, since I I would have to recheck it at like 5AM and here it was nearly midnight. So, not that I had a lot of time to sleep at that point anyway, but I couldn’t fall asleep.

The Source of Negative Energy

Where did all that negativity come from? You know the snow can’t inherently hold malcontent, it’s just simple sparkling water crystals full of light, how can that cause anyone to behave so badly? Was it the airport staff? Yeah right, it wasn’t their fault. We are our own source of negativity.

So all these people, hundreds of people, were just plain mad and feeding off of each others’ anger, and it made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t shake it all night, and on my flight home the next morning I decided that if the only thing I ever accomplished in my entire life was to NOT cause any pain or emotional distress for another human being, ever, I would consider that life a resounding success.

Taking the First Step

My little step toward personal growth was tested the very next day, standing in line at Staples. This was before the common man understood the concept of queuing and how everyone can check out more quickly if the queue is NOT separate to each checkout counter, but instead is kept to a single queue and the next person in line getting the next available register. There were customers at every counter, and I was the only one in line so I was a bit back from the registers waiting to see which one opened up. A guy came and stood behind me, and crowded me so I would move up. The guy behind me got upset. “You have to pick a line.”  I started to explain that no, this would actually be faster for all of us, but instead I said something like “you know, I’m not in such a hurry. Why don’t you go ahead of me and pick the line you want and I’ll wait for the next one?” So he went and stood at a register waiting for the previous person’s transactions to process. Meanwhile another register opened up, I paid, and I left. Yes, feeling snooty about understanding the quantitative impact and strategy of queuing, but also feeling a hair of goodness for being nice to the guy and sending him ahead of me in line instead of snapping back at him with a comment in keeping with his own.

That cold January day in Denver was the day I consciously decided to put effort into becoming and being a better person every day for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have called it personal growth then, but that was the day that kick-started my journey. That was in 2000. Ten years later, I can say I have definitely made some progress toward my lifelong goal, and I’ve learned sooooooo much along the way.

Baby Steps

But, that’s how it started, in Denver. I suddenly was painfully conscious how much we all do that all the time, snap at each other. But it was too big, too comprehensive for me to just flip a switch and say, “OK, from now on I’m never going to be rude or short-tempered anyone ever again.” That was too broad. I had to start smaller. I had to start very, very small, in fact. First it was not being annoyed with restaurant servers for being slow or bringing the wrong food or whatever. Since that actually happens a lot, it took me a while to retrain myself not to react negatively when something like that happened. Then it was airport personnel, though that was easier because I’d been practicing on servers and I naturally feel kind of sorry for airline attendants and all the crap they have to put up with so being empathetic to their challenges with passengers isn’t too difficult.

Over the course of a year or so (let’s be honest, this was my very first effort at an actual behavioral change, a real self-improvement, not just a be-better-and-more-successful-in-business kind of thing, so, it was really about two years time), I realized that I never snapped at anyone any more, I never frowned at the woman holding a baby in the seat directly behind mine in the plane or anyone anywhere it seemed. I had managed to curtail the ugliness, at least the ugliness created by my own self.

But that was so small. As I started expanding that attitude in every area of my life including work, it became my natural state, and I was a better person, not creating negative energy in the world. But that was still just the tip of the iceberg. Around this time though, a lot of really hard stuff started happening in my life, and I stopped paying attention to continually becoming a better person and had to focus all my energy on just surviving what life was throwing at me for a while. About a year of that, really, until I had my heart failure.

There’s a whole long story about that (see the survival story My Nine Lives and How I Survived to Life #10, specifically, survivals number 6, 7, and 8), so for now let’s just skip the gory details of my short-timer death experiences and move on to what I learned from the “experience” of having my heart stop beating and freaking out the hospital emergency staff three times. I should have learned this lesson multiple earlier times in my life, but it wasn’t until that event that I started wanting to be a better person in so very many areas.

A Real Personal Growth Goal

The next life objective was kindness. I had started teaching dance, so it was a very easy place to practice kindness. I was great with students, but there was one teacher that I didn’t get along well with, and we just avoided each other pretty much. It turns out that I was teaching my students a lot more than some dance steps. I still have some of the thank you letters they wrote. One said that I ad changed his entire life because I made him feel confident in himself because I was confident in him, and he had gotten comments from everyone at work and in his family, saying that he had changed. And with that new confidence he went out and got a big bid and more business. A good outcome from a few dance lessons, eh?  🙂

Then I got The Cancer Diagnosis. Kinda scary at first. But after I got my head around it, I decided that not only was I going to survive this nasty medical “treatment” process, but I was going to survive with grace and kindness. I was going to be kind to every single creature I encountered regardless of how awful I felt from chemo or anything else they had to do to me.

Overall though, that turned out pretty darn well, the surviving-cancer-with-grace goal, but it never would have been possible without that one awful night with all those angry people in the Denver airport so long ago.

When I think all the way back on it, I was definitely on a journey, but I didn’t think it was journey in personal growth until many years later. And my journey probably actually began back in high school the first time I took a personality test for indicating likely career paths. The output was kind of a joke with some of my friends, but it was interesting to be asked a bunch of questions that are supposed to unveil characteristics that you may not have been aware of in yourself. And whenever I’ve come across something that may help me understand myself better (and thus hopefully be able to recognize and change habits that blocked me from being a good person to others), I’ve always found self-exploration pretty fascinating. It wasn’t until the last few years that I realized it had evolved in a life-long study of self-development, personal growth, spiritual awareness, and all kinds of other labels applied to understanding and bettering yourself.

So, while you could say my pursuit of self-understanding began even before I was an adult, my conscious personal growth journey was initiated by an angry disgruntled mob. How did your journey begin?