A pompous partner in a large consulting firm was sent to me for executive coaching in the area of employee relations. I started the meeting by asking him what he thought the problem was. He said, “Well, it’s obvious my intellect intimidates people.” I asked him, “Are you sure it isn’t just your ego turning them off?”
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In the early 70s I travelled coast to coast in Canada and to major US cities explaining to business audiences a major reform of the Canadian income tax system. The first few presentations were fine; I enjoyed giving them and they were well received by the audiences. Then I became bored giving the same talk over and over. Soon I noticed the audiences weren’t enjoying the talks either. It was only after I remembered two things about enthusiasm that both I and the audiences began to enjoy the presentations again. The two things are: act enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic; and, enthusiasm is as contagious as the measles.
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I don’t recall exactly when this happened, but it was clearly the day that I realized I’d become an executive. We had a very serious employee problem. Money had been stolen. The chairman of the firm called me in and told me to deal with it. That’s all he said, “Deal with it.” I knew that I had become an executive when it sunk in that I, and no one else, was going to have decide what had to be done, and that I also had to do it.
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Because of my lack of formal education, I was a provisional student in the course leading to the designation Chartered Accountant (the Canadian equivalent of Certified Public Accountant in the United States). The provision was that if I failed an exam I was out, whereas other students could fail three times before losing their chance at becoming a C.A. Walking into the room to write my first exam, I was almost trembling with fear. Then I remembered Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s admonition that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Did I know enough to pass the exam? Probably. Was anyone trying to prevent me from passing? Definitely not. Was I writing the same examination as everybody else in the room? Yes. So, what was there to be afraid of other than fear itself? Nothing. (Yes, I passed.)
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When I started to work full-time at the age of 14, there was no such thing as job security. Feeling that I could probably find another job of some kind in a week, I set a target of saving enough money to cover my expenses for seven days. When I reached that, I then set one of being able to live for two weeks, then three weeks, a month, and so on until I had a nest egg sufficient to last me six months. I figured that in six months I could learn new skills which would help me find secure work. Had I started out with the goal of saving enough money to live on for half a year, I likely would have become discouraged and abandoned the process very early on. But by setting a realistic target, and then setting another realistic target when the previous one was reached, I discovered the right way to set goals.
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It’s interesting how habits are formed and what’s sometimes read into them. Athletes are notorious creatures of habit, usually based on superstition and coaches are sometimes even worse. When I started to play junior hockey in Toronto, the coach noticed that I always put a towel inside the knee of my right goalie pad. Even after getting new pads, without even thinking about it I put the towel inside the pad for a couple of games. Just when I stopped using the towel the team hit a bit of a slump, the main cause of which the coach figured was me; so he told me to put the towel back in my pad. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the reason I did it in the first place was because my landlady’s cat had urinated on the inside of the old pad.
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Back in the 60s, during a lull in a poker game at the Morell Legion, when everyone else had gone either to the washroom or the bar, I turned to my friend Al Baker, a perfectly happy lifelong bachelor then in his late 30s, and asked him why he never got married. “Well,” he said with uncommon candour, “anybody I ever wanted didn’t want me. And I always figured I’d be happier wanting something I didn’t have than having something I didn’t want.”
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I worked one summer in Saskatchewan. One of the people I befriended lived on a ranch. One Saturday we accompanied his father to a livestock sale. I watched him, seemingly just by glancing at them, buy about a dozen cattle. At the end of the auction the animals were grouped according to buyer. It was clear that my friend’s father had selected the best, although that wasn’t obvious when he chose them from the original, larger herds. When I asked him on what he based his selections he said, “I just use my intelligence.” I asked him if he could explain that in a little more detail. “No,” he replied.
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Of the thousands of radio commercials I heard as a kid (I was, and am, an inveterate radio listener) there is one that still stands out loud and clear in my memory. It was for a product called Carter’s Little Liver Pills. I’m pretty sure the adjective little was intended to modify pills rather than liver. Anyway, the reason I remember the commercial so well is the line, if life’s not worth living it may be the liver.