I went on a seminar that did the opposite of what it was for and now I feel rubbish

[Careerhelp]

I did one of these little online seminars that was called Improve Your Confidence While Job Hunting or something. I ended up feeling even less confident than ever. We were told to do things like listing your achievements so everyone except me came up with things. I don't think I've achieved anything recently. Then we were all told to do some exercise and that Couch to 5K would change our lives. I have my own personal reasons for not wanting to go running.

I'm not interested in personal development advice here, I'm just annoyed that I wasted a few hours on this seminar.

Please cheer me up with tales of courses that left you none the wiser or did the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

A friend of mine once said she went on a time management course, and left early because she had better things to do with her time.

I was sent on an awful two day residential course by work. One of the tasks was this Krypton Factor type puzzle where we all had to work as a team to put these bamboo gutters into place to move water from one large tube to another.

Of course all the loudest , most extrovert people in the team totally took over. Only thing was, I'm really quite good at puzzles so I could see they were doing it all wrong. However I couldn't get them to listen to me, so I quietly cornered one of them, told him, and he told the rest (of course they took him seriously). Puzzle sorted.

The training person running it then said that the exercise was to prove that quiet people had a lot to offer. Sometimes nobody would notice or listen to them, but they could be incredibly valuable members of a team.

He then turned to a completely different (also quiet) woman and praised her for solving the problem. ....And totally ignored her trying to tell him that it wasn't her.

I went into the exercise just feeling quiet and introverted and came out feeling totally invisible. Not a success really, although now it makes me laugh.

I once had to do some French training for work. I was told it would be very simple as we were all primary school teachers.
At the beginning we all had to state our latest qualification in french. I was the only one without an a level in it and some people had degrees. I spent the whole day not being able to do any of the work and any partner I had to work with got progressively pissed off at my uselessness. It was like being in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. But it did make me a lot more empathetic to LAPs. Not that I wasn’t before but I hadn’t actually felt those emotions before.

I’ve been on a few teacher training courses mainly for interventions, etc. and have been appalled by the behaviour of some participants - which I bet they wouldn’t tolerate from their students.

I did a two year counselling course (part-time). I took it seriously and did all the work - properly. Loads of the others (the majority) didn't, I got progressively pissed off as time went on. This was before the BACP changed their rules for joining, so at the beginning of the course we could join the BACP upon graduation but by the end we couldn't (which was a relief).

I was so disillusioned that people could put so little work in and pass. They could do so little therapy themselves, to iron out their own stuff, and pass..taking their shit into the therapy room. And it was clear they couldn't park it, because they'd use every opportunity to use the group as their therapy session. There's nothing wrong with a counsellor having their own problems, but they need to know when and how to put them aside. These people didn't.

We also did quite a lot of sessions where we had to present something to teach it to the class. For example, I would write a presentation about depression and that was the only training the class would get on it. Fine..except not when people aren't actually researching and think it doesn't matter. One presentation was two ppt slides with quotes from FB memes on it..that she more or less just read out.

Like I said I got increasingly pissed off and disillusioned.

I decided I didn't want to "qualify" and be registered in the same category as them, so I started a degree in psychology with a view to do a counselling masters that requires a psych undergrad degree. While studying psychology definitely, definitely doesn't make anybody a good counsellor, at least you get taught statistics and about how research is conducted so you can actually understand research in your field!

I could go on and on about all the things wrong with that course. And it's since been taken over by someone interested alone in making money, who did the course herself..and doesn't understand confidentiality! So it's definitely not better now.

I strongly believe that counselling needs to be more regulated. None of my course mates can now work registered under the BACP - GOOD - yet our predecessors can and do.

The counseling psych doctorate is something that should become more widely taught, cheaper to complete and more in demand. And these other courses should disappear. It's not about using what you know, because most people can do basic counselling after short instruction, it's knowing what you don't know and when to refer etc.

*more widely run - it's not taught.

What are the rules for joining the BACP?

daretodenim This was exactly how it was starting to pan out on my course too.
I'm equally disillusioned. Many of the people on it had in no way resolved or worked through their own mh problems either; many admitted to not reading the materials too. You have to ask why are they doing the course- self therapy?
I think I read and contributed the most- but then had to leave as they projected their own stuff onto me.
All of this unchecked by the tutors- probably just a money making scheme.
Please pick a counsellor carefully to anyone considering this!

My first job after graduating was for a multinational manufacturing business in the early 90s. They had a big in-house training programme, the new graduates induction was great as you got together with others from all the sites in the UK and went on a tour of them together, learned a lot about the business and made contacts at the other sites. Then they had a programme of a bout 10 in-house training courses that all new recruits worked their way through in the first couple of years. I'm not sure how much I learned but they were good fun and again a great way of meeting people from other parts of the business. We also did the time-management-with-gigantic-filofax thing.

My worst was in my next job. I moved to a smaller division of that company and we got sold off to another global multinational. They made us all go on an outsourced motivational training course. It was compulsory and we were all bussed off site to a hotel to do it. It was like some weird brainwashing with cultish overtones, I found it a bit scary and quietly refused to engage, just went through the motions. I was a bit alarmed that some of my colleagues seemed to totally embrace it. I got a new job and left pretty soon after that.

BitofFun Yep, I do absolutely have my own baggage- I agree, who doesn't. But as a MH prof I'm realising my own past MH training taught me much more about self awareness, how to respect what I don't know, and maybe more importantly, how not to bring my own stuff into practice. As a pp said, it's about having enough self awareness to put your own stuff aside in the therapy room.

Unfortunately I have been to so many training sessions that seem to do the opposite of what they intended. An activity I loathe that seems to happen in many is when everyone in the group has to share their biggest fear. People offer up crap like, banana stickers, spiders and nails scraping on chalkboards. Nobody says 'Well Dave, my young son being gang raped is my biggest fear in life'. There isn't a human on the planet that would choose rape or murder over holding a spider for fucks sake.

We had an after-school INSET about dunking hobnobs into tea (I don't drink tea). I don't know what it actually was about because to my immeasurable relief I got a message via the school office to pick DS up from nursey

I had been temporarily promoted to a higher grade (due to organisational requirements) and was loving my job, getting great feedback from my line manager and feeling very positive.

They sent me on a residential grade development course for that level, with a view to making my promotion permanent. It completely broke me. I cried in my hotel room in the evening (this is completely unlike me) and returned to my job having lost all my confidence. I quit the organisation not long afterwards.

I went on an assertiveness course recently with such ancient course materials. One example was about a friend asking to borrow your car and standing on the doorstep asking for they keys?! It’s not the 80’s you’d obviously say no for all sorts of boring insurance reasons and not least it sounds like your dodgy friend needs to move a body...

I was going to post about the psychology and mental health courses I attended and see others have had the same experience!

I think I read and contributed the most- but then had to leave as they projected their own stuff onto me.

This, with bells on.... including the teacher.

Just so many people with huge unresolved issues that project it straight into the classroom - it was very bizarre and unprofessional.

daretodenim I completely agree: The counseling psych doctorate is something that should become more widely taught, cheaper to complete and more in demand. And these other courses should disappear.

There are brainwashing and cultish elements to corporate training. (And the social sector training by the sounds of earlier posters. My sympathies to everyone hurt by this.)

Mild in comparison but I found my DH would try out his "influencing" tactics on me. The worst was the broken record crap.

I come from the sort of social / economic background were you do think nothing of telling someone these techniques are crap. So our relationship survived the nonsense!

I used to work for Boots. I went to head office for training and we were given a tour of the site - lovely building with interesting history and some nice feature like a camera in the (subsidised) canteen so that you could check how busy it was before going to lunch (this was years ago, no idea what it is like now). I was so depressed afterwards - I worked in shops with staff toilet doors missing, staff canteens were mainly a thing of the past, well-trained pharmacy assistants were being asked to take their turns in cleaning rotas as cleaners’ hours were being cut etc. It was just so demotivating to realise that they had no idea how the shops were run.
And my first antenatal appointment was mainly someone talking us through our hand held maternity notes and explaining how to fill them in. Which would be fine if we weren’t all about 32 weeks pregnant and using them for ages already.

@deaddreams I used to enrol HE students onto health courses, including nursing. My institution offered several nursing pathways (ordinary, paediatric, gerontology, mental health).
We never had to ask the MH nursing students which pathway they were enrolling for

I have done so many that I have come to realise that most are just team building - no matter how shit your work relations are you can all bond in the office next day while you pick it apart - shared experiences and all that

Probably the most memorable was diversity training where we were lectured for the first hour or so about how everyone without exception has personal bias and then instructed to open up about our biases to the group. An awkward 5 minutes of people mumbling stuff about accents / political affiliations / education pretty much ensured that everyone offended someone else in the room and that was the end (absolutely no exploration or resolution) we moved on to the next part ensuring the rest of the day was spent in resentment and awkward silence.

Tbf a few years later I attended a fantastic diversity training course. The trainer had cut pictures of people out of a magazine (eg Obama, family of refugees, pop singer, random non famous people) and we had to order them on a ladder of power. It opened up a dialogue about power = money, fame, education, connections - a pretty enjoyable morning where we worked together to agree and order our people.

Once we were happy with our ladder we looked at some of the random non famous people and she showed us the articles she had taken their photos from.

A young black teen (we had put near the bottom) was taken from the photo with Obama and his community group after they had successfully campaigned and raised money for their neighbourhood youth services / centre.

The middle class woman (nearer the middle) was in fact homeless but was dressed up for her court appearance.

I think we were all left pretty shocked by our obvious subjective decisions and personal bias. But it was easy, relaxed, a completely safe and non judgemental way to explore it. Interesting, hugely enjoyable and most importantly I have never forgotten the lessons I learned that day

The 2 experiences really couldn't have been further apart and if you want to buy in diversity training there is no way of regulating what you are getting. It really irks me that anyone can sell training and it can be pretty damaging when it's done badly.

My boss ran a team building day for the whole company. She started by asking each manager to mention someone on their team who especially deserved praise. When people said 'well I couldn't pick just 1 person...' she jumped in with 'but you MUST that's the rules'. One manager only had 2 people in their team and was forced to choose 1 for praise while the other one sat stony faced! It was so uncomfortable. By 10am half the room hated their colleagues and /or their line manager. Great team building!

I was given a stage 1 disciplinary (note on personnel file for 6 months) for refusing to go on an assertiveness course.

CBT made me more depressed.

@JovialNickname

I was given a stage 1 disciplinary (note on personnel file for 6 months) for refusing to go on an assertiveness course.

That would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing.

I did a zoom meet for volunteer training for the local community. It was aimed at 5 year olds and very patronising. I pretended to have technical difficulties and zoomed out after 20 minutes. 😂. I won’t be completing the course of 10 sessions.

@deaddreams

BitofFun Yep, I do absolutely have my own baggage- I agree, who doesn't. But as a MH prof I'm realising my own past MH training taught me much more about self awareness, how to respect what I don't know, and maybe more importantly, how not to bring my own stuff into practice. As a pp said, it's about having enough self awareness to put your own stuff aside in the therapy room.

Absolutely, I am in 100% agreement with you. Interestingly, in my case it was one of those pre-2002 courses mentioned!

I went to a seminar about respecting Indigenous people and culture (I'm in Australia). I thought it was fine but unfortunately some of my colleagues came out of it more racist than they went in. 95% of them are from ethnic minority backgrounds and there were comments like "why do they get a special seminar, when's the one for my nationality" "why do they think they're so great"