It is so empowering to deliver and work in an industry I love, to impart and share my knowledge in a fun and easy to learn way, to shake the hands of participants as they leave with smiles on their faces, knowing in some small way, I may have enriched their world, as well as those they have contact with.
Garibaldi Biscuits in packet sold by ASDA in the UK
Going back in my far and distant past, I remember one of the treats my mother would serve, it was a biscuit called Garibaldi. It was not a treat for me as I was not found of them, but to mother and I suspect other British people, they were from an exotic world, a far off country, a touch of something un-British.
The biscuit was a thin sandwich of biscuit with the dried chewy fruit of currents at the center. A current is similar to a dried red grape.
Garibaldi Biscuits
I would mention this memory to the participants of my courses in Italy, and they would look at me as if I was a visiting Martian, they had no idea of what I was talking about, no clue from the description or name of biscuit.
I was really confused.
Here was an Italian product, and the Italians had no knowledge of it. Was it my pronunciation of the word? Was it called something different in Italy?
Then, just before I was leaving for Bologna, I went into my local supermarket, and after years of not seeing the product, there was the biscuit on the shelves. I had to buy it.
During the NLP Master Practitioner course I reviewed Anchors, and brought out the packet of Garibaldi biscuits as an example of the memories it gave me. The participants looked at me with a blank face, they had never heard of the biscuit or seen them.
At the break, I offer each of them a sample, and their reaction was in the negative, they did not like the taste, texture, and most of the biscuits went untouched.
That evening as Elena and myself walked back to my hotel after a splendid pizza meal, in a small square or piazza bordering the main street running from the railway station to the Piazza Maggiore is a statue of a man on a horse, and in bold letter at its’ base or plinth, is “A GARIBILDI”.
Garibaldi Statue in Bologna
So I was not wrong. The name is Italian. Perhaps I had the wrong “cat on the mat“, the wrong understanding.
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