My dog is pretty smart

When I came home last Friday night I made the mistake of leaving my suitcase half packed and open on the floor, because I was leaving again on Monday morning.  Big mistake.  My dog Jave is pretty smart, and he knew that the suitcase meant I wasn’t staying long.  And because he wasn’t sure exactly when I would leave again, he couldn’t seem to enjoy the time we had.  Except for when we went hiking, he followed me anxiously around the house all weekend.

The team building sessions I facilitated this week were full of similarly anxious people.  They were re-organizing for the second time in a little over a year, and because there was a long period of time in which they knew they were moving to new teams but didn’t know exactly where, they remained focused on the negative.  They made up stories about how they would surely be working with people they didn’t like, and reporting to supervisors they wouldn’t get along with.  I think maybe their leadership should have kept the suitcase hidden until they were ready to reveal all the details.