Raise your blue gloved fingers to your forehead

Airport security personnel have one of the worst jobs in the country.

Morale is low, pay is even lower, the uniforms are stiff and ugly, and they spend their days invading people’s personal space and property.

To make matters worse, their department is the butt of jokes and the scorn of travelers everywhere.

How would you like to do that for ten hours a day? Do you think those workplace conditions might negatively affect your attitude too?

Point being, of course those people are going to act grumpy and stressed and uncaring. It would be hard not to.

But here’s something I’ve noticed in my travels.

Airport security personnel almost always treat me with friendliness, warmth and good humor.

It’s the coolest thing, and it changes on a dime. They will take one look at my nametag, perk up and start cracking jokes, introducing themselves and using my name in a playful manner that feels like we’ve been friends for years.

Scott, good to see you! Come on through.

My personal favorite is when security guards will raise their blue gloved fingers to their forehead, close their eyes, act like they have psychic powers, and pretend to guess my first name as I walk through the body scanner.

Scott, right? I knew it!

Doesn’t matter what city I travel to, airport security always give me a smile and usually a laugh.

Not because I’m a hero, but because I’m a human. And that’s how social interaction works.

When you contribute positive and friendly energy to the system, it responds in kind. It’s a generative space, where whatever you put into it multiplies exponentially.

But if you walk up to airport security expecting to be annoyed and violated, then that’s precisely the kind of interaction you will create.

It’s funny, people love to blame all their negative airport interactions on external factors like time of day, holiday seasons, inclement weather, traffic in the terminal, whatever, but the reality is, the whole experience is something every person manifests through their expectation.

Humanity in public is a giant social mirror, that’s all it is. My cheerfulness and calm rubs off on the people around me. Security guards treat me with more friendliness at the airport, not because I perceive reality different than the other travelers, but because wearing a nametag can cause reality itself to become different.

Whoa, that sounds like spiritual pseudoscience.

Are you telling me that a sticker can trigger an emotional reaction in another person on the quantum level?

Does that mean that your beliefs about yourself and what is real are a direct agent of your own reality?

And does that mean that the very consciousness with which a nametag is written and worn can create a subatomic vibration that changes the way people experience you and themselves in relation to you?

Stranger things have happened.

Come to the airport with me sometime and see for yourself. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How does your attitude inform your reality?