It goes with the territory: Sifting the wheat from the chaff – finding those who are mouth and trousers AND who genuinely welcome what you got as opposed to seeing it – and me - as a threat. I’d learned very quickly to be disarming from the outset especially with some Physical Education teams. My favorite opener:
‘I don’t want to work here and I don’t want your jobs.’
As a wind-out-of-sales / get-yer-attention gambit I’d yet to find anything as effective.
All of which means that when you do get a break from pushing water uphill it feels really REALLY nice.
So it was recently when I visited one of my ‘warm’ prisons again after a gap of about a year. Not that I’d be particularly idle in that time, you understand – just rejected bid after rejected funding bid that meant I was firmly in the ‘Nothing To Report’ file.
So it was a genuine delight to be warmly welcomed back by folks from the PE team I remembered from a year ago.
‘Are we still on?’
‘What do you need?’
‘Look – we’re still up for it and we can make it work!’
Of course I had a plan and a shopping list and an hour later we had a more detailed plan and a shorter shopping list. There was still the small matter of some ££ - but I had a new plan for that too. More importantly I left there feeling somewhat lighter than I arrived AND within touching distance of actually GETTING STARTED.
As long as we could make the ££ work…
