03/31/07
Eh Yo,
Yet another week down and back to another letter. Crazy how time flies. This week went really fast. Probably because I’ve been so busy at work this week. I finally moved offices. I’m out of the Printing building and now I have two offices in the Bindery building. I still need to get my stuff out of my working office over there and into the new office over there. I have half of my stuff in my new office now because I moved it from Printing and honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to fit my bindery office in there now too. I’m out of room already. We’ll see. So with the move and all of my regular work, I’ve been super busy, but that’s not even the half of what my week consisted of at work. I jumped right into my interrogations that I learned in Vegas. Holy COW!! This stuff is crazy Mike! You would not believe what it can do. I am amazed at every interrogation that I’ve done so far. I have done 8 of them now and not a single one has slipped something past me. I mean, it’s such a long story that I don’t know how much detail I can go into, but my first one, I was a little nervous because there is so much to remember and do and look for that I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it all, but I went through it with as much confidence as I could muster since confidence is one of the most important things you have to maintain in these. And the guy I was going to interrogate is a very controlling, strong willed, know it all type that would try to control the interview and that is something else that is essential to maintain is control of the interview. You have to cut the subject off as soon as they start into any kind of controlling dialogue and never let them control even 1 second of the interview. This was going to be a tough task with this guy too, since he’s a manager and everything. But as I went through my script I laid out the night before, it was so weird how everything played out exactly as they said it would. Honestly, if I said one thing, he would say almost word for word what they said he would say. I noticed the queues he was giving me subconsciously and I started narrowing in my scope based on my suspicions and what he was telling me through is actions and body language. I knew exactly when he was lying to me and when he was being truthful. I continued to tighten the noose as I noticed certain things based on my questions and suspicions until finally I told him after his 3rd denial and him trying to rush me through my questions that the investigation was very clear at this point. By this time in the interview I had still not used the word YOU or done any kind of accusation of him at all. This is the non-accusatory method I was using. There is an accusatory method too that is much more confrontational and intense, but the non-accusatory is much harder to get a confession because you never even accuse them, but instead, use implied accusations and test for submission through other questions that imply you know everything. This is the method you use when you have no evidence, which we didn’t at this point. I noticed him going into submission (as they call it) in about 12 minutes into this interrogation. I picked up where you go from this sign and moved in for the full confession and had it at 15 minutes in. They say if you are good, it will take an average of 22 minutes for a full confession. I was stoked. I couldn’t believe I nailed it so well on my first one. I got a little bit braggadocios about the whole thing and was pretty pleased with all the attention I was getting from the management team, until the next day when we fired him and I saw the pain in his face and realized just how much this affected him. It sunk in pretty deep when I realized my involvement in this whole thing and had a big time humbling moment. Not that I felt bad for outing him, because I knew it was his decision to make, but for some reason, I couldn’t remove the personal level out of this where I’ve always been able to do that with ever termination. I felt personally responsible for this one for some weird reason. I actually had a weird melt down the following day after his termination when I was debriefing my boss, the VP of HR. I don’t really know why, but I just got emotional and confused as to why. But it was good, he kind of worked me through it since his back ground is in psychology anyway. So I got a free therapy session out of it. Since then I have done 7 more, all this week which led to 2 more terminations and several probations. Only 3 out of 14 were not involved. I was shocked. I may still do a few more next week, but we’ll see. I have felt fine about the others, it’s just the first one, it was really weird. My boss refers to me like I’m his secret weapon that he can use if people won’t talk. Actually at the end of the week, there were two pressmen who came forward to him and asked if they could tell him everything because they didn’t want to talk to Travis. Ha ha. So the word is getting out that you can’t lie to Travis and he’ll extract information from you that you never thought anyone could. It’s such a mind bender. I sort of can’t wait till boys start rolling around here when Brinlee and Aynslee are teenagers. They are in trouble!
Well, I just watched the first session of conference and then went out and changed the oil in both the C-RV and my Truck. I need to go take a shower and get ready for the 2:00 to start. I only have ten minutes before it does. I really liked Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk the best from the first session so far. Good stuff on relationships! I’ll check back in after that.
Well, now the Sunday morning session is over. I really liked Pres. Faust’s talk on the healing power of forgiveness. Pretty powerful. Speaking of powerful, how awesome was the closing hymn in last night’s Priesthood’s session? That was my favorite thing of the whole session. The talks were good, but that closing hymn had chills running throughout my body from start to finish. Good stuff.
Let’s get to your letters now. I’m way excited to hear about Janet. How golden and prepared was she? Great job on her. It’s so awesome to take an investigator from finding them, to teaching the, resolving their concerns, committing them and baptizing them. You have such a bond with them when you go from beginning to end with them. Way to go! Sounds like she has a good support system in place with that ward already too. That’s way awesome! Did a bunch of her family show up for the baptism? Anything come from that? Are you going to be teaching or referring any of them for missionaries elsewhere? Your pictures are only taking up like 1 Gig. All the others I have on CDs for you, so it’s no big. When I hit 4 Gig on your new pics, I’ll dump them all to a DVD. That’s what the problem has been is that your pics are taking too many CDs to fit in a standard CD wallet. So I’m going to put the rest on DVDs now before I take them off my computer. Then when you get home, you can put them all on your computer or on your own external hard drive or something. I think you are wise taking on Jesus the Christ later on in your mission. I needed the base from the scriptures myself to get the understanding from Jesus the Christ that I got almost at the end of my mission. As a result, it went from one of the most confusing and hard books to read at the beginning of my mission to probably my favorite book ever when I read it at the end of my mission. But let me know when you get into it and what your thoughts are.
Well, I finished watching the last session of conference. I have to say I liked L. Tom Perry’s testimony. It was about as bold and powerful as I have seen him lay it down. It was sweet. I also liked Henry B. Eyring’s talk about “are we doing all that we can do”. I was starting to sort of tune out and fall asleep about that point, but I don’t know what caught my attention, but I perked up, listened a little more intently and got a ton out of that. In fact, since I’m coming up on my month for teaching in EQ next month, I think I might use that when I get called to teach. The EQ presidency has to teach once or twice during their month they are basically on call. So I think I’m going to prepare something from that talk. I was jazzed about it. After conference, it was time to head over to ma’s and pa’s to visit with your ward missionary guy form Rock Hill. We waited for about an hour and it was time to get going on some food. So we grubbed, watched some funniest home videos and finally decided to call him cuz I had to go. Dad left a message, then we watched a little more TV, then called Don who’s having some kind of surgery up in his Colon or something. Then he called and said that he wasn’t coming because he got hung up at another dinner appointment he was at. So I bailed, Stosh bailed and Grandpa was right on my heels too, so we all split. Oh well. That would have been cool to talk about that in this letter. I guess he might come over tomorrow, but I don’t think any of us can make it. I have to get into my homework that I’m WAY, WAY behind on right now. So I’m going to throw in my quote of the week and get going.
Quote this week is based on my impressions of the way you found Janet:
“The Missionary’s morning prayer: ‘Father lead me this day to a family, that I can fulfill my purpose – I will testify unto them by thy power without hesitancy or fear – and will lead them by the power of the Spirit to baptism into they kingdom.”
-Alvin R. Dyer
I am glad to see your humility saying how the Lord “flopped” someone right in your lap, but then you have to fulfill your purpose, which requires you both to be living righteously and being receptive enough to recognize those opportunities too. Then testifying to them boldly that this is the Lord’s church, just like L. Tom Perry did today. Move their spirits to feeling where they cannot deny feeling the truthfulness of your bold testimony. And then lead them by the power of the spirit as you teach them enough to accept and commit to live the commandments and come into the Lord’s kingdom through baptism.
I’m so proud of you Mike for that baptism and the fact that you are training a new missionary right now. This will be such a growth period for you, to be a trainer. You will learn more about yourself and even from yourself as you teach all that you know to this new missionary. You will work harder than you have worked before, because you have so much more to prove, being a senior missionary, a trainer who has been trusted to groom a new missionary with good habits that will last his whole two years. You are being groomed for other things too. Prove your merit through this first real test. This is the most influential leadership calling you will receive. As much as missionaries look up to their DL’s, ZL’s or AP’s, you never have as much influence over another missionary as you have when training them. Teach him everything you know and continue to learn together. This really will be a huge growth and learning time for you. Continue to keep that humble attitude you had in your letter to Mom and Dad. You will learn a ton from this new guy too. I remember when I was training my first greenie Schweitzer. I got a little bit proud with him and thought I had achieved veteran status at my ripe old age of 6 months out. But I had a whole lot more to learn. Sure, I worked the crap out of him, but I was not very teachable. We had the Sylvia Benson experience together. That lady who was possessed and started talking in different evil voices. He knew from the moment we were in there that we should leave. He told me several times that we should leave. I kept telling him to calm down, everything was under control. I didn’t feel very easy in there, but he was feeling the spirit and taking the cues that I should have been way earlier than I finally got the hint. I should have listened to him in that instance. After having him a month, I finally figured out that I was really learning a lot from him too, as hard as it was to believe that. The next month with him was super educational for both of us and we had a lot of great success together. The Lord sends trainers a greenie as a 50/50 growth experience. You have a responsibility to teach him, but you also have a 50% responsibility to learn from him too. You are being thrown a real learning experience here, so keep up that attitude you had. You are always impressing me with the way you learn these lessons so much earlier than I did. Every week I’m more proud of you and I can’t wait to hear what’s next.
I love you and miss you every day. I sometimes wish you were back already, especially now that it’s warm and spring like and I want to play some tennis, but I’d rather have you out there soaking up knowledge like a sponge and growing even closer to the Savior and Heavenly Father than you ever will be able to again. What a thing, missions. I get trunky for mine every so often. I’m feeling it now that conference is just over and I think about your ward mission leader being out here and writing you a letter and that you just got called to train. What awesome memories. Keep up on your journal. Stay obedient. Love your Greeny as you teach him every good habit and bit of knowledge you have. Enjoy this stage of your mission and your life.
Love,
Trav
Yet another week down and back to another letter. Crazy how time flies. This week went really fast. Probably because I’ve been so busy at work this week. I finally moved offices. I’m out of the Printing building and now I have two offices in the Bindery building. I still need to get my stuff out of my working office over there and into the new office over there. I have half of my stuff in my new office now because I moved it from Printing and honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to fit my bindery office in there now too. I’m out of room already. We’ll see. So with the move and all of my regular work, I’ve been super busy, but that’s not even the half of what my week consisted of at work. I jumped right into my interrogations that I learned in Vegas. Holy COW!! This stuff is crazy Mike! You would not believe what it can do. I am amazed at every interrogation that I’ve done so far. I have done 8 of them now and not a single one has slipped something past me. I mean, it’s such a long story that I don’t know how much detail I can go into, but my first one, I was a little nervous because there is so much to remember and do and look for that I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it all, but I went through it with as much confidence as I could muster since confidence is one of the most important things you have to maintain in these. And the guy I was going to interrogate is a very controlling, strong willed, know it all type that would try to control the interview and that is something else that is essential to maintain is control of the interview. You have to cut the subject off as soon as they start into any kind of controlling dialogue and never let them control even 1 second of the interview. This was going to be a tough task with this guy too, since he’s a manager and everything. But as I went through my script I laid out the night before, it was so weird how everything played out exactly as they said it would. Honestly, if I said one thing, he would say almost word for word what they said he would say. I noticed the queues he was giving me subconsciously and I started narrowing in my scope based on my suspicions and what he was telling me through is actions and body language. I knew exactly when he was lying to me and when he was being truthful. I continued to tighten the noose as I noticed certain things based on my questions and suspicions until finally I told him after his 3rd denial and him trying to rush me through my questions that the investigation was very clear at this point. By this time in the interview I had still not used the word YOU or done any kind of accusation of him at all. This is the non-accusatory method I was using. There is an accusatory method too that is much more confrontational and intense, but the non-accusatory is much harder to get a confession because you never even accuse them, but instead, use implied accusations and test for submission through other questions that imply you know everything. This is the method you use when you have no evidence, which we didn’t at this point. I noticed him going into submission (as they call it) in about 12 minutes into this interrogation. I picked up where you go from this sign and moved in for the full confession and had it at 15 minutes in. They say if you are good, it will take an average of 22 minutes for a full confession. I was stoked. I couldn’t believe I nailed it so well on my first one. I got a little bit braggadocios about the whole thing and was pretty pleased with all the attention I was getting from the management team, until the next day when we fired him and I saw the pain in his face and realized just how much this affected him. It sunk in pretty deep when I realized my involvement in this whole thing and had a big time humbling moment. Not that I felt bad for outing him, because I knew it was his decision to make, but for some reason, I couldn’t remove the personal level out of this where I’ve always been able to do that with ever termination. I felt personally responsible for this one for some weird reason. I actually had a weird melt down the following day after his termination when I was debriefing my boss, the VP of HR. I don’t really know why, but I just got emotional and confused as to why. But it was good, he kind of worked me through it since his back ground is in psychology anyway. So I got a free therapy session out of it. Since then I have done 7 more, all this week which led to 2 more terminations and several probations. Only 3 out of 14 were not involved. I was shocked. I may still do a few more next week, but we’ll see. I have felt fine about the others, it’s just the first one, it was really weird. My boss refers to me like I’m his secret weapon that he can use if people won’t talk. Actually at the end of the week, there were two pressmen who came forward to him and asked if they could tell him everything because they didn’t want to talk to Travis. Ha ha. So the word is getting out that you can’t lie to Travis and he’ll extract information from you that you never thought anyone could. It’s such a mind bender. I sort of can’t wait till boys start rolling around here when Brinlee and Aynslee are teenagers. They are in trouble!
Well, I just watched the first session of conference and then went out and changed the oil in both the C-RV and my Truck. I need to go take a shower and get ready for the 2:00 to start. I only have ten minutes before it does. I really liked Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk the best from the first session so far. Good stuff on relationships! I’ll check back in after that.
Well, now the Sunday morning session is over. I really liked Pres. Faust’s talk on the healing power of forgiveness. Pretty powerful. Speaking of powerful, how awesome was the closing hymn in last night’s Priesthood’s session? That was my favorite thing of the whole session. The talks were good, but that closing hymn had chills running throughout my body from start to finish. Good stuff.
Let’s get to your letters now. I’m way excited to hear about Janet. How golden and prepared was she? Great job on her. It’s so awesome to take an investigator from finding them, to teaching the, resolving their concerns, committing them and baptizing them. You have such a bond with them when you go from beginning to end with them. Way to go! Sounds like she has a good support system in place with that ward already too. That’s way awesome! Did a bunch of her family show up for the baptism? Anything come from that? Are you going to be teaching or referring any of them for missionaries elsewhere? Your pictures are only taking up like 1 Gig. All the others I have on CDs for you, so it’s no big. When I hit 4 Gig on your new pics, I’ll dump them all to a DVD. That’s what the problem has been is that your pics are taking too many CDs to fit in a standard CD wallet. So I’m going to put the rest on DVDs now before I take them off my computer. Then when you get home, you can put them all on your computer or on your own external hard drive or something. I think you are wise taking on Jesus the Christ later on in your mission. I needed the base from the scriptures myself to get the understanding from Jesus the Christ that I got almost at the end of my mission. As a result, it went from one of the most confusing and hard books to read at the beginning of my mission to probably my favorite book ever when I read it at the end of my mission. But let me know when you get into it and what your thoughts are.
Well, I finished watching the last session of conference. I have to say I liked L. Tom Perry’s testimony. It was about as bold and powerful as I have seen him lay it down. It was sweet. I also liked Henry B. Eyring’s talk about “are we doing all that we can do”. I was starting to sort of tune out and fall asleep about that point, but I don’t know what caught my attention, but I perked up, listened a little more intently and got a ton out of that. In fact, since I’m coming up on my month for teaching in EQ next month, I think I might use that when I get called to teach. The EQ presidency has to teach once or twice during their month they are basically on call. So I think I’m going to prepare something from that talk. I was jazzed about it. After conference, it was time to head over to ma’s and pa’s to visit with your ward missionary guy form Rock Hill. We waited for about an hour and it was time to get going on some food. So we grubbed, watched some funniest home videos and finally decided to call him cuz I had to go. Dad left a message, then we watched a little more TV, then called Don who’s having some kind of surgery up in his Colon or something. Then he called and said that he wasn’t coming because he got hung up at another dinner appointment he was at. So I bailed, Stosh bailed and Grandpa was right on my heels too, so we all split. Oh well. That would have been cool to talk about that in this letter. I guess he might come over tomorrow, but I don’t think any of us can make it. I have to get into my homework that I’m WAY, WAY behind on right now. So I’m going to throw in my quote of the week and get going.
Quote this week is based on my impressions of the way you found Janet:
“The Missionary’s morning prayer: ‘Father lead me this day to a family, that I can fulfill my purpose – I will testify unto them by thy power without hesitancy or fear – and will lead them by the power of the Spirit to baptism into they kingdom.”
-Alvin R. Dyer
I am glad to see your humility saying how the Lord “flopped” someone right in your lap, but then you have to fulfill your purpose, which requires you both to be living righteously and being receptive enough to recognize those opportunities too. Then testifying to them boldly that this is the Lord’s church, just like L. Tom Perry did today. Move their spirits to feeling where they cannot deny feeling the truthfulness of your bold testimony. And then lead them by the power of the spirit as you teach them enough to accept and commit to live the commandments and come into the Lord’s kingdom through baptism.
I’m so proud of you Mike for that baptism and the fact that you are training a new missionary right now. This will be such a growth period for you, to be a trainer. You will learn more about yourself and even from yourself as you teach all that you know to this new missionary. You will work harder than you have worked before, because you have so much more to prove, being a senior missionary, a trainer who has been trusted to groom a new missionary with good habits that will last his whole two years. You are being groomed for other things too. Prove your merit through this first real test. This is the most influential leadership calling you will receive. As much as missionaries look up to their DL’s, ZL’s or AP’s, you never have as much influence over another missionary as you have when training them. Teach him everything you know and continue to learn together. This really will be a huge growth and learning time for you. Continue to keep that humble attitude you had in your letter to Mom and Dad. You will learn a ton from this new guy too. I remember when I was training my first greenie Schweitzer. I got a little bit proud with him and thought I had achieved veteran status at my ripe old age of 6 months out. But I had a whole lot more to learn. Sure, I worked the crap out of him, but I was not very teachable. We had the Sylvia Benson experience together. That lady who was possessed and started talking in different evil voices. He knew from the moment we were in there that we should leave. He told me several times that we should leave. I kept telling him to calm down, everything was under control. I didn’t feel very easy in there, but he was feeling the spirit and taking the cues that I should have been way earlier than I finally got the hint. I should have listened to him in that instance. After having him a month, I finally figured out that I was really learning a lot from him too, as hard as it was to believe that. The next month with him was super educational for both of us and we had a lot of great success together. The Lord sends trainers a greenie as a 50/50 growth experience. You have a responsibility to teach him, but you also have a 50% responsibility to learn from him too. You are being thrown a real learning experience here, so keep up that attitude you had. You are always impressing me with the way you learn these lessons so much earlier than I did. Every week I’m more proud of you and I can’t wait to hear what’s next.
I love you and miss you every day. I sometimes wish you were back already, especially now that it’s warm and spring like and I want to play some tennis, but I’d rather have you out there soaking up knowledge like a sponge and growing even closer to the Savior and Heavenly Father than you ever will be able to again. What a thing, missions. I get trunky for mine every so often. I’m feeling it now that conference is just over and I think about your ward mission leader being out here and writing you a letter and that you just got called to train. What awesome memories. Keep up on your journal. Stay obedient. Love your Greeny as you teach him every good habit and bit of knowledge you have. Enjoy this stage of your mission and your life.
Love,
Trav
posted by Travis at 10:28 PM
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