Travel experiences: New Zealand – Part 3

My sister Michelle and I booked an impromptu 4 day holiday to Christchurch, New Zealand to see our aunt for her 60th birthday. We booked the flight and little else. Our Aunty Janet lived in Rangiora, north of Christchurch. She would pick us up from the airport and we would stay with her in her 3 bedroom unit. That was all we knew when we took seats 22A and 22B on that Air New Zealand flight from Melbourne.

Michelle’s fiance had decided the night before to take Michelle out to a restaurant in the city, which is a 2 hour drive from where they lived. As her fiance with eager to keep the night going, they squeezed in some roulette time at Crown Casino before Michelle begged him to take her home. She landed on top of her mattress a few minutes passed midnight.

As day hadn’t even broken yet that Thursday morning, Michelle picked me up at 5.45am to catch our 9am flight (as I live 45 minutes from the airport, and she 90 minutes from me). As expected, Michelle decided to catch some ‘z’s’ before we landed in Christchurch. However she still had enough cheekiness to suggest that we should have some sort of adventure while we are in New Zealand – after all, it is the adventure capital of the world! With a few ideas flying around, the possibility of sky-diving excited us both. So sky-diving, here we come!

As we approached Christchurch International Airport (international because only Australia seems to fly there!), we ogled at the beautiful snow cap mountains in the Southern Alps as they glisten in the sun, not thinking that this picturesque landscape may interfere with our one and only plan.

Enter Christchurch Airport. Hugs and kisses all round for Aunty Janet and she bought her adorable 10 year old grand-daughter, Courtnay. Adorable, but naughty, shall we say! We sat down in a cafe and toldAunty Janet about our plans as Courtnay made her way to the games arcade. Janet became practical on us and said, “Okay, we’ll need to hire you a car and we need to book the skydiving. I have to work tomorrow, so that will be the best day for you to do the skydiving.”

We drove 30 minute to Rangiora and wiped the dust off the trusty White Pages to find firstly the sky-diving place and secondly a place to hire a car. It was 4.30pm, places close at 5pm in New Zealand. So we called up the sky-diving place and they said to be there by 10am, but we couldn’t quite understand them with their thick Kiwi accent, except they said something about calling them about 9am when we were on our way.

How to deal with bullying at work

People who suffer at the hands of a workplace bully bring everything on themselves.

That’s the view of psychologist Keith McGregor who says in most cases of bullying the power comes from the victim and that victims just need to re-program their brain to think differently.

“There are two types of power; physical and psychological. And while physical power clearly exists, psychological power doesn’t so how can one person affect another with their mind?”

McGregor runs Personnel Psychology NZ in New Zealand and says if you feel intimidated by somebody then that is your gift to the bully.

“People are not making other people feel intimidated, you are making yourself feel intimidated in their honour. And if you love them that much then far be it for anyone to stop you.”

His advice to people who feel victimized or bullied at work is to first understand the normal human stress response of fight or flight.

“The stress response is the body getting ready to fight or flight end of story,” says McGregor. “People pay money to get the stress responses going they go white water rafting, bungee jumping or sky diving.

“As crazy as it sounds, people who feel they are victims at work need to ask themselves if they enjoy being intimidated.”

And if the answer is no’, then he advises them to take control of their lives.

McGregor, whose background includes 12 years as an occupational psychologist in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and more than 15 years in the private and public sector, says no one is making the point that for the stress response to occur there must be a perception of threat.

“Thousands of years ago there were animals with sharp teeth that could trigger that response,” he says. “But because we have run out of Sabre Toothed Tigers, we have had to discover a new predator. And the new predator is not the bully, it is our ability to talk to ourselves.”

He says it is the internal conversations people have that create the perception of threat, which triggers the stress response, and feelings of being bullied.

“If you change the internal conversation from I am frightened of that person’ to “I love that person’, then you can change your reaction when you see them,” he says.

McGregor admits it sounds ridiculous. But says the brain can be reprogrammed like any other computer.

“Computers do not need to believe the software they run,” he says. “If a computer gets a virus it will run it. And the thought of I can’t stand so and so’ is the equivalent to a computer virus.”

McGregor has an exercise he says helps most people.

“I ask the victim’ to close their eyes and imagine the bully approaching them. Then as they get closer, I ask them to visualize the bully wearing a big red clown nose. And almost without fail there is this outburst of laughter. And people report that they feel great. All they have done is change the picture in their mind and that changes the subconscious programming.”

McGregor says decisions made about the people we meet stick in the mind and that all we need to do is rewire that part of the brain to have a different reaction to them in future.

“Most people accused of bullying are shocked to be told they have that affect on colleagues,” says McGregor. “They think they are just acting normally and often have no idea about the issues they are causing other people.”

In essence, McGregor says that while changing the behaviour of other people is near impossible, changing the way people react to them is possibly the quickest way to solve workplace bullying.