Stories from the Book – Owning Our Failures – Mary Decker and Jane Saville

September 27, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

With less than three laps remaining in a race the world was watching, hometown favourite Mary Decker and the barefoot South African-turned-Englishwoman Zola Budd, an 18 year old athletics sensation, were running so closely together that their feet and legs were constantly in contact. The women’s 3,000 metres at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics will be forever recalled for what happened next. While Decker shortened her strides in an attempt to stay clear of trouble, nothing could prevent the chaos of arms and legs that resulted in Decker’s fall into the infield. For spectators at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and for TV viewers around the world, time stood still. Despite the fact that both athletes later competed at other Olympics and won World Championships, their careers, in our eyes, ended with Decker’s catastrophic fall. To pause was failure. To stop, or be stopped, was little less than tragedy.

After their race, Zola Budd attempted to apologise to Mary Decker for the accident, despite the reality that she couldn’t have been fully to blame since she was in front of Decker at the time. Decker told Budd, in no uncertain terms, not to bother with an apology. Not only were we left with a bitter taste in our mouths, we were left with the lingering feeling that something was not quite right, that somehow the spirit of the Olympics wavered and diminished at that very moment.

At the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, Jane Saville glowed with anticipation as she prepared to walk the final metres into her hometown stadium as the gold medallist in the 20 kilometre racewalk. Having prepared for this moment all her life, no feeling would compare to the sheer joy that would come when 100,000 spectators inside the stadium announced her entry with rapturous applause and a deafening ovation. Just for a moment, put yourself in Jane Saville’s racewalking shoes. While your feet are in agonising pain and your shoes squelch with sweat, could anything remotely approach this as the closest thing to heaven on earth you could be blessed with? Imagine, then, what went through Saville’s mind as an official raised a red flag to disqualify her from the event for allowing one of her feet to lose contact with the ground for a third time. At the very entrance to the stadium, the gold medal waiting for her, Jane Saville’s dreams unravelled.

Just like Mary Decker, Jane Saville collapsed in tears. Just like Decker, her initial response to this tragedy was couched in angry terms. Asked if she needed anything, Saville requested “a gun to shoot myself”.

There was a critical difference in the response of these two talented women, however. For Decker, blame lay with Zola Budd. For Saville, blame lay with herself. She didn’t blame the racewalking judges whose judgements about what does and does not constitute correct walking technique can often be questioned. She didn’t blame fate. She didn’t blame bad luck. She didn’t blame her coach or her colleagues. She accepted responsibility.

In taking ownership, Saville preceded to quickly move beyond blame and torment by accepting that the vagaries of racewalking make this experience far more common than it might be in other sports. Not only did she do this, she returned to the sport with a new view of herself, deciding to take a more relaxed view of life’s ups and downs than she had until that time. Armed with a healthier outlook, not only did she win a bronze medal at Athens 2004, she expressed a genuine sense of gratitude and joy when she was able to win a medal at the historic home of the Olympics. In this, she had come full circle, since Jane Saville’s life-embracing spirit and energy personify the true spirit of the Games.

Today, Jane Saville is coaching the young and not-so-young to enjoy walking and, if they desire it, to pursue their walking dreams. She is doing it with the same desire to make a contribution and to help others that she had when my wife and I sat with her at an Olympics fundraising dinner a decade ago. While relatively unknown in a sport often thought of as the poor cousin of athletics events, Jane Saville enthused about her ambassadorial role and responsibility to draw the attention of local communities to the 2000 Olympic Games. She was friendly, confident, and without ego.

Jane Saville is a walking demonstration of the importance of taking ownership of our lives and, specifically, of our dreams. When we assume ownership in the same spirit of humility that has given Jane Saville a rich life founded on what is rather than what might have been or what might be, we give ourselves the ability to travel with our dreams over the sandhills and deserts over which they must proceed if they are to have any substance and any staying power.

If we can take true ownership of our dreams, we may just achieve the authenticity of life that is worth far more than an Olympic gold medal. Reflect, for a moment, on the words of Jane Saville’s first school teacher,

Dear Jane

I have watched your career with the greatest pride and joy. I remember you starting school and how you lapped up the daily exercises our class did every morning. Part of me has always hoped that those exercises may have been the start of your stellar career. You were Little Miss Serious in kindergarten and one of the students I have always remembered.

At every major games I have watched you, cried with you, and rejoiced with you. Congratulations on everything you have achieved. You have made this teacher very proud.

Jenny Sinclair[i]

Do you think that Mary Decker receives letters like this?

[i] www.janesaville.com, accessed 12 October, 2009.

Stories from the Book – Taking Time Out and the Steve Jobs Story

September 22, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

When should we take a time out?

Pausing is the right choice if your life has any of the following characteristics. If you hate your job or hate the people you work with, you may need to pause long enough to reflect on what you will do about this. Life is too short to work in a horrible job or amongst power-driven or sociopathic colleagues for longer than you have to. Sure, you might have to put up with things for a while as you work out what to do, but pausing to think about today’s realities is an essential first step before considering future options.

The same is true of many of the other crises that may be afflicting you. You may be in an abusive relationship that is difficult to leave when there are assets and children and shared friendships involved. You may be fighting a degenerative illness that refuses to respond to your aggressive spirit and positive attitude, determined as you are to beat this “thing” that causes constant disruptions to your life and ever-present reminders of your mortality. You may have just lost your job or, like me, watched your business taken from you.

Whatever it is, things won’t change in the long-term unless you stop to recognise that what’s happened has, well, happened. And, paradoxically, by stopping, you will take the first step in coming back, the first move towards the good life, a life richer in meaning and greater in contentment. By stopping, paradoxically, you start.

This is what happened with Steve Jobs who, after pausing, set about creating one of the most amazing comebacks in business history. Jobs’s decade and a half of separation from his own creation, Apple Corp, transformed his attitude, his philosophy, and his life. Formerly arrogant beyond belief,

Fifteen years in the wilderness after being rejected by his own company changed all that: it made him human. This was a new Steve Jobs. Humbled by failure, elevated by the birth of his children, mellowed with age, yet still as headstrong and perhaps even more certain of his own decision making than ever before, Jobs now understood that it really was the many others who did the work: “Apple is a team sport.”[i]

Adopted soon after his birth in 1955, Steve Jobs always sought to create meaning in the void left by the abandonment he felt from his natural mother, despite the fact that his new parents were loving, caring people. A precocious and easily-bored child, Steve was tinkering with electronics by the age of 10. Living in Los Altos, San Francisco the family resided among a huge number of scientists and engineers. Bored at school at 13, Steve fell in with a school colleague of similar age, Bill Fernandez, and Fernandez’s 18 year-old university dropout neighbour, Steve Wozniak, who were working on one of earliest versions of the personal computer. Despite the difference in their ages, the two Steves were both intense and passionate, delighted to be fully absorbed in a project of their own creation.

Within a year or two, they had become great friends, and invented a machine using old electronic components that could confound AT&T’s computers and allow people to make long-distance phone calls without payment. It cost $40 to build and sold locally for up to $300. Leaving ‘Woz’, Steve went to college but soon gave up on attending classes. Nonetheless, he stayed to hang around college and ruminate and think. A dean of the time recalls that Jobs questioned everything as he sought to understand why things were as they were. Such an enquiring mind would stand him in good stead. This period, the first pause, gave him great clarity and depth of thinking.

Hired by Atari, Steve was only allowed to work at night since his hippie gear and associated odours repelled his colleagues and the company’s management. Struggling with the existential questions surrounding his birth, he sojourned to India, living in abandoned village buildings and begging for food as he travelled towards the Himalayas. The journey, while intense, didn’t answer his questions. He did turn, however, to Zen Buddhism for spiritual enlightenment. Arriving back at Atari in robes and shaved head, Steve soon found himself renewing his relationship with Steve Wozniak. Spotting an advertisement for a computer kit in a trade magazine, the two Steves decided to build circuit boards that hobbyists could load directly into their computer kits. When a local computer store owner asked if the young men could build the full machine rather than simply supplying the boards, the Apple I was born. When it didn’t sell well, Woz designed the Apple II, a machine with much greater functionality. Using an operating language that would make the computer quicker and easier to use for hackers seeking to write their own programs, Steve Jobs determined that the machine should be much quieter than the fan-cooled alternatives. His obsession with design, user-friendliness and functionality was born.

While continuing to improve the Apple II, Steve’s imagination was captured by an Intel advertisement that used symbols such as poker chips and sports cars instead of technical jargon. The use of symbolism would become a hallmark of the Jobs approach to marketing. He would also become known for his perfectionism, impatience and single mindedness. He could infuriate his staff yet simultaneously inspire them to walk over hot coals. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t without his flaws. When girlfriend Chris-Ann became pregnant in 1977, Steve abandoned her when she refused an abortion. As a man who set his own rules, he couldn’t countenance that someone else would choose not to follow them. After years of lamenting the loss of his biological parents, Steve left his new daughter without a father and ignored her existence for years. For much of this time, he refused to admit that he had fathered her.

As new applications like spreadsheet programs were added to the Apple II, sales soared. Using an alliance with Xerox to gain access to their ideas, innovations like pop-up windows, the mouse, word processing, art and drawing applications, and the ability to network between machines were developed. His next model, the Lisa, was over-priced and 5 years late to market. Steve’s abrasive approach and obsession with doing things his way began to alienate him from many of the other key Apple employees. As the low-priced, self-contained Macintosh (Mac) was being developed, Steve’s colleagues began to sideline him. While his innovative ideas for the look of the new machine proved invaluable, his manner proved intolerable. In 1985, an under-pressure Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. A former CEO at PepsiCo took his place. Steve was in tears when he left Apple. Close friends feared that he might commit suicide. A colleague found him lying on the floor of his home in the dark, inconsolable. Come the following day, however, Steve was talking comeback.

Taking time out, Steve travelled to Paris, then cycled Italy’s Tuscan hills. He visited Sweden and Russia. Returning to the US, he contemplated a career in politics. During the summer, he wandered the campus of Stanford University, spending time in the library to study research into DNA, biotechnology, and biochemistry. He began a new company, NeXT, and decided to design a computer capable of high-level research functions and those graphics, design, and animation tasks impossible for other machines. During his travels, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell the machine to Disney. While there, however, he obtained valuable insights into the worlds of animation and film-making. Finding experienced engineers he could entice, Steve purchased a special effects studio from George Lucas and attracted brilliant Disney animator John Lasseter to the new team. In the years that followed, the renamed Pixar would develop the technology and associated storylines to create new software applications that would become standards for the industry, as well as a veritable production line of hit movies including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles. While the NeXT computer and its siblings would not prove particularly successful, by the late 1990s Pixar was reporting profits of $2.5 billion, making it the most successful Hollywood studio of all time.

Once again, Steve’s genius appeared to derive from using his time-outs to reflect on where markets were heading, on how fashions were changing, and what he could do to catch the waves before they broke.

Returning to Apple in 2000, Steve could see that the internet would provide the platform for a whole new world of products and applications. Having re-established Apple’s credibility with the radical-looking iMac, he brought to Apple a young genius who had great ideas for improving the relatively new MP3 player software. With the existing products selling poorly, Steve saw a market ripe for the picking. His brilliant idea was that people might download tracks off the internet directly onto a user-friendly, cool-looking device for personal use. The iPod was born. It became Apple’s most successful product ever. In the meantime, Pixar continued to churn out the hits. When Disney would buy Pixar in 2006, Steve would become Disney’s biggest shareholder, owning a slice of the company valued at more than $3.5 billion.

Having conquered two industries, having confronted the ups and downs of his life and having, through dealing with cancer, stared down his demons and his flaws, Steve Jobs could conclude what his most valuable lesson had been,

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.[ii]

Knowing which voice is your own in the clamour and cacophony of life really only comes with deliberately taking the time to stop, to pause, and to quiet your mind sufficiently to hear the still, small voice inside. If Steve Jobs, the hyperactive, always moving, impatient entrepreneur could pause for long enough to listen to his inner voice, so can you.

This is another story from Dr David Poole’s free eBook, Phoenix Rising. Dr Poole is available as a speaker, writer, and trainer.

[i] Jeffrey S Young and William L Simon, (2005) iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

[ii] Steve Jobs, (2005) Commencement Address, Stanford University, 12 June.

Stories from the Book – Dion DiMucci and Having a Little Faith

September 20, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

In another story from his free eBook Phoenix Rising, Dr David Poole recounts the remarkable story of one of the originals of rock ‘n roll, Dion DiMucci. While the “Jersey Boys” were doing their thing, Dion was doing his as frontman of Dion and The Belmonts. Half a century later and after conquering his demons, Dion keeps on keeping on. Enjoy!

If at all possible, have a little faith. If you can, let the little grow into a lot. A faith founded in the superficial will not last. The novelty of the superficial always wears off. A faith founded only in ourselves will not last since there will always come a time when we let ourselves down. Instead, build a faith in something bigger than yourself, and in values that will last forever. It’s okay to build self-belief and confidence, but this should always be founded in those timeless truths that are far stronger and more unshakeable than our fragile selves can ever be.

Because faith is such an important component of the healing process, we’ll consider one more story of how having faith became a critical ingredient in the healing of one man.

Of all the styles of music that I love, the sound that does it for me more than any other apart from the music of Brian Wilson is the doo-wop sound of the early 1960s. It’s most successful exponent and the man still identified more with that style than anyone else is Dion DiMucci. With songs like I Wonder Why and crossover hits into the rock scene like Runaround Sue, The Wanderer, and Ruby Baby, Dion was an early inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Today, he continues to punch out new albums of fresh rock and blues songs as well as new versions of his classics and those of his contemporaries. Five decades are his first hit, Dion continues to perform and make great music. It’s a miracle. The miracle is that Dion, like so many other shooting stars of the rock and roll scene, should be long dead.

He was driven by the need to keep control, to feel loved and respected through the adulation of the masses. It was all a put-on, but a put-on demanded that evolved from a very ordinary upbringing. Raised in the Italian neighbourhoods of The Bronx, Dion DiMucci was the son of Pasquale DiMucci, an artistic dreamer who rarely held down a job. Pasquale’s bohemian approach to life drew the ire of Dion’s mother, Frances, who would scream at her husband to settle down and assume a normal life. Watching his dad humiliated in front of his uncles, Dion vowed that he would never face the same dishonour as his father. Worse, he felt that he needed to fill the vacuum that his father left, a vacuum that his mother thought Dion could fix in her desperate need to maintain some semblance of control over her life.

So Dion strutted the streets of The Bronx, joining gangs and finding that he could hold people in the palm of his hand when he sang and played guitar. At 15, he fell in love with a girl from Vermont, Susan, who he would marry in 1963. Signed to a new record label, Dion formed a band with a few local mates. They would become Dion and The Belmonts and begin charting in 1958 and would start touring with some of the biggest names in the business. Playing the Winter Dance Party in February, 1959, Dion would huddle under a blanket with Buddy Holly as they tried to stay warm in a converted school bus whose heating had long since packed it in. Sick and tired of the cold, Buddy offered Dion a seat on the plane he had chartered to get to the next gig in Fargo, North Dakota. Always careful with his money, Dion decided against spending the $35 that Buddy was charging. After all, it was the same as the rent that his parents paid each month for their apartment. It was the night the music died, for Buddy, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper would crash to their death in the plane that Dion had forsaken. For some reason, Dion had been spared.

With “Teenager in Love” the group’s next hit in 1959, Dion also found a new love to match Susan. It was heroin, and he would soon become addicted. It filled the vacuum that his parents had left for him. A week trying to drying out in a hospital for celebrities made no difference. Picking up on music’s rapid evolution, Dion left doo-wop and The Belmonts behind to try rock ‘n roll, yet was turned into a Bobby Darin-style crooner by his record company. While some minor hits came, it wasn’t until he hit his stride with Runaround Sue and The Wanderer in 1961 that he became an international star. 1962 brought three more Top 10 singles. The adulation and adoration became another drug. It was sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. He had the unholy trinity.

But it still didn’t fill the empty space, a heart that continued to search for answers and for meaning. Hitting rock bottom in a lonely hotel room in Uruguay during a tour of South America, the only voice he heard was that of his mother, demanding that he do even better and create still bigger hits. Turning to the folk scene of Greenwich Village in 1963, Dion, like so many other early rockers, was drowned by the new sounds coming from The Beatles and their Merseyside counterparts. By 1964, he was doing grass, amphetamines and alcohol to supplement his coke addiction.

With a new lucrative contract from Columbia, he started on the right foot with another hit, Ruby Baby, calling it the happiest two minutes he’d ever sung. When his new label tried to turn him into a Sinatra-style nightclub act with a 25-piece orchestra, Dion rejected the whole thing, setting fire to the scripts and arrangements. He began not to care, instead only worrying about where he would find his next hit.

Finding himself alone at the Swiss chateau along the Hudson River that he and Susan had purchased in 1965, Dion decided that there was no way out of the grave he’d dug for himself. Intent on suicide, he found that the car he intended to drive off a bridge was gone. In desperation, he called, “God help me.” Feeling a presence that told him to let go of his anger and hurt, Dion allowed himself to fall into “Someone’s arms.” Over the years that followed, he would move back and forth between his addictions and his newfound faith. It wasn’t until he moved to Susan’s parents home in Miami in late 1967 in an attempt to get away from his demons that he finally overcame them. He did so through a quietly spoken former alcoholic whose life mirrored a deep faith and peace in trusting fully in God, his father-in-law Jack. On 1 April 1968, as he watched Jack cry tears of grief after losing his son to alcohol, he saw strength in Jack’s expression of weakness. This time, Dion gave his life, fully and completely, to his Lord. He would never do drugs or alcohol again. He would repair his marriage to Susan and become a real father to his daughters. And, symbolised by his final hit, “Abraham, Martin, and John,” the moving tribute to men whose principles he had come to respect but whose lives were ended by the bullet, Dion came full circle.

He would leave behind his hits for decades, instead recording several excellent albums of thoughtful gospel pop and rock, before returning to the music he loved with a renewed energy. Now 70, the man who should have died with Buddy Holly, who almost took his own life, whose demons almost brought him down, remains the same man who fell to his knees in 1968. Humbled, still married to Susan, and still pumping out the music he helped to create when rock was born, Dion remains a testament to the power of healing.

I spent too many years trying to fix things – my career, my family, my destiny – and when I couldn’t make it right, I got mad. And when that happened, I started tearing things down, hurting others, but mostly looking for ways to hurt myself. When I finally learned to accept the way things are, the good with the bad, it was one lesson that really stuck. If that can happen to me, it can happen to anybody. When it comes down to it, this is a story about learning how to accept. About losing everything and finding yourself. Sometimes all we really need is a second chance.[i]

Dr David Poole is available to speak about the inspirational stories from Phoenix Rising and about the need to create and recreate better dreams for our own lives, dreams that reflect the realities of life and of all of its ups and downs.

[i] Dion DiMucci (with Davin Seay), (1988) The Wanderer: Dion’s Story, Beech Tree Books, New York, pp.15-16.

Stories from the Book – Oprah and Having Faith in Ourselves

September 13, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

Born into poverty in rural Mississippi, Oprah’s difficult start to life is illustrated by the fact that she didn’t even receive the biblical name her mother had intended, Orpah, since it was so often mispronounced that it soon became Oprah! While initially raised in intense poverty on a small form, Oprah was blessed with a loving grandmother who encouraged her to develop her precociousness into, to lend a lyric, a love of reading, writing, and poetry reciting. Without friends, her imagination and creativity grew far beyond her life’s obvious constraints of race and class.

At 6, Oprah’s mother sent for her. In Milwaukee, she lived in the foyer of a tiny apartment with her two half-siblings. At 9, she was raped by a 19 year old cousin and, at 14, sexually molested by an uncle with whom, in a cruel twist, she had to share a bed each night. Unloved, she learnt to accept affection wherever it could be found, becoming sexually promiscuous as a teen. As a poor, pregnant 14 year old Afro-American in 1968, the future looked bleak.

Just as the scales began their descent towards a life of hopelessness, however, Oprah moved to Nashville to live with her father and stepmother. She had lived with Vernon and Zelma once before, when she was 8, and at that time had flourished under their love and discipline, as well as the belief and guidance of her 4^th grade teacher, Mrs Duncan. Returning at 14, Oprah gave birth to a son who, tragically, died at the age of 2 weeks. The upside of this tragedy was that it gave Oprah the freedom to flourish academically and socially. Winning a scholarship to a newly-integrated school in a wealthy part of town, and as a positive response to her father’s demand that she achieve A grades, Oprah excelled. In later winning the local Miss Fire Prevention competition, Oprah became Miss Black Tennessee, noted as much for her quick witted and genuine responses to the judges’ questions as she was for her beauty. With a scholarship to Tennessee State, she began a degree in speech and language arts before being offered a job reading the news on a local radio station. Onwards and upwards, Oprah moved to a larger station before becoming a TV reporter and anchor on WLAC-TV. Despite not quite completing her degree, an offer to move to the much larger city of Baltimore was irresistible. Here, disaster struck, since Oprah’s reporting style turned off her superiors and many of her viewers. Naturally emotional and empathetic, Oprah became too involved in her stories, giving them a degree of “feeling” that made them less like news stories and more like a TV drama.

Not only did her bosses hate her style, they hated her looks. Sent to New York for a makeover, Oprah’s hair treatment was a disaster. Her scalp had been burnt to such an extent that her hair fell out. Bald and unloved as a news reporter, Oprah was demoted, becoming co-host of a low-rating talkshow. The rest, as they say, is history. Making it a success, Oprah moved on to a still bigger market, Chicago, conquering talkshow king Phil Donahue on her way to global success.

The picture is not all perfect, however. At some time in the future, Oprah would need to deal with her past, a past that not only included the regular and systematic sexual abuse inflicted on her by those whom she should have most been able to trust, she endured a further abusive relationship while in Baltimore, resulting in a (thankfully) temporary decision to take her own life, as well as the scorn of those who have regarded her challenges with weight, or her success, as matters for ridicule and envy. In addition, despite being a billionaire, like all entrepreneurs she has experienced her share of business failures and disasters.

Still, one constant in Oprah’s life has been an extraordinary faith in herself, first expressed when as a child she told others that she would one day become famous, as well as a faith in the possibilities of life and our personal ability to pursue them, wherever we happen to sit right now. Underlying this philosophy is her faith in God, at least as an underlying, benevolent force in the universe on whom we can rely and with whom we should communicate. In her own word, immense power can be derived from these different expressions of faith,

My main concern about myself is whether I will live up to my potential. I still sense that the best is yet to be…The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate. The more you complain, the more you find fault, the more misery and fault you will have to find…Divine reciprocity, reaping what you sow, is the absolute truth.[i]

For Oprah Winfrey, the path to better dreams has been paved with an unshakeable faith which evolves logically into a commitment to self-responsibility. It has also been paved with a focus on forgiveness.

[i] Bill Adler (ed) (1997) The Uncommon Wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, Birch Lane Press, New Jersey, p.226; other material from section taken from Helen S Carson, (2004) Oprah Winfrey – A Biography, Greenwood Press, Westport.

Stories from the Book – The Lance Armstrong Story

September 8, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

What Happens When We Don’t Heal

If you don’t do the hard work of healing, you are destined to make the same mistakes again. If not the same mistakes, you’ll make different kinds of mistakes. Let me illustrate. Lance Armstrong may be the best cyclist who has ever lived. A record seven victories in the Tour de France and an amazing third in his 2009 comeback year make Armstrong a remarkable athlete. His recovery from cancer was even more remarkable. Given a 20 percent chance of survival, Armstrong displayed an amazing will to live. Yet, despite his cycling record and the inspirational nature of his comeback from cancer, I’m not sure that he has really learnt anything. Despite his commitment to raising money for cancer research, I’m even less sure that Armstrong has matured as a man.

Brought up by a single mother, it was always Lance and his thrice-married mum against the world. What Armstrong refers to as “the old wounds and long-ago slights” was channelled into an intense competitive energy, a self-righteous anger that stirred him to achieve beyond the levels of mere mortals. Given his father’s absence and then, for a few years, the presence in his home of a temperamental stepfather, Armstrong became the husband-substitute for his mother. He earned money for the family, demonstated dependability, and gave her emotional support. Always the non-conformist, Armstrong’s world consisted primarily of his mother and long, isolated training rides into the surrounding countryside outside his home in Plano, a suburb of Dallas.

We can learn a lot from Lance Armstrong. Always in a hurry, he learnt the patience required to win road cycling races. Armstrong simply refused to be out-trained by anyone else. He embraced the pain of agonising, oxygen-starved mountain climbs, just as he embraced the pain of his cancer diagnosis. His level of self-belief has long been astounding. When the cancer spread to his brain, Armstrong’s response was clear. “I’m ready to crush this thing,” he said. Following a six-hour operation on his brain, he briefly felt gratitude for having survived before an overwhelming wave of anger swept over him.

You know what? I like it like this. I like the odds stacked against me. They always have been, and I don’t know any other way. It’s such bullshit, but it’s just one more thing I’m going to overcome. This is the only way I want it.[i]

Armstrong was dropped by his cycling team, Cofidis, and he showed them what a mistake they’d made. He rode through worries that his cancer would relapse, ghost pains in his chest, and the scepticism of cycling commentators that he’d never come back. When his riding legs refused to return and sponsors deserted him during 1998, he actually quit and decided to retire. With encouragement from his mother and new wife Kristin, he gave it one last chance. As his fitness and form returned, he made sports history.

But here’s the rub, the bitter taste in the mouth. First, Armstrong claimed that his victory over cancer was of greater significance than any of his Tour victories. His 2009 comeback belies this statement. Rather, Armstrong has such a high need for achievement that he can’t help himself. His identity is deeply embedded in his cycling victories. It is about the bike. Second, Lance Armstrong has written that his ability to overcome cancer made him a better husband and father. Tell that to Kristin, from whom he divorced in 2003, as well as the son and two daughters who came from this partnership. Is this the same Lance Armstrong who wrote,

Since the illness I just care a lot less if people like me or not. I still care a little, but with the birth of my son, it’s diminished even more. My wife likes me, and I hope my son will like me. It’s their good opinion that I desire now.[ii]

To cite a word that Armstrong uses himself, that’s just so much bullshit. He had to be a hero. He had to be the dutiful husband that his mother never had. That’s not psycho-babble. That’s reality. By all means be inspired by Lance Armstrong’s victory over cancer and his unmatched record on the bike. Don’t be taken by his life as a man, however, since his life also reveals the downsides of an obsessive-compulsive personality, an unhealthy level of ego, and a commitment to winning over all else. Don’t become an angry man or woman in the Armstrong mould. Instead, recognise that true healing includes healing our darker sides, normally driven by a glitch in our personalities or by the wounds we’ve carried from other times in our lives.

Lance Armstrong is an amazing guy. He is an incredible achiever. His success at fundraising for cancer research is breathtaking.

Be strong, though, not Arm-strong.

[i] Lance Armstrong (with Sally Jenkins), (2000) It’s Not About the Bike, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p.119.

[ii] Armstrong, p.288.

Stories from the book – Gerald Ratner and the Need to Pause

September 6, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

When you’ve been through trauma – whether that’s bereavement or divorce or public humiliation – there’s something to be said for just taking the time to cool down.[i] (Gerald Ratner)

Gerald Ratner writes that cooling down and taking time out was foreign to his nature. He was an action man. In the years after April 1991, however, he had no choice.

Gerald Ratner had taken a relatively small family jewellery business and, by dint of passion and incredibly hard work, turned it into the United Kingdom’s leading jewellery retailer. Annual profits for 1990 were £130 million and among Ratner’s 2,000 stores were 500 recently acquired on the west coast of the United States. Gerald Ratner was in the only job he had ever wanted, a millionaire master of the universe. Yet, for all of his business acumen, experience, and smarts, Ratner made a single mistake that would cost him almost everything.

On 23 April, 1991, Ratner stepped onto the stage to give a speech to 4,000 of the UK’s most influential businesspeople at the conference of the Institute of Company Directors. He was at the top of his game, and was scheduled to share the stage with future British Prime Minister John Major and former South African President FW de Klerk. Ratner was a confident speaker, known for adding humour and pithy pieces of advice to make his speeches more memorable. On this occasion, however, Ratner delivered one joke too many. A tabloid journalist scribbled down Ratner’s comment that the reason his stores could sell a sherry decanter with six glasses in a presentation box for £9.95 was because “it was crap”.[ii] The newspapers had a field day. Ratner’s comment became national news, even shifting Princess Diana from her traditional spot on the front page. Ratner’s was rechristened as “Rotners” and Gerald Ratner quoted as telling his customers that, “I’m selling total crap.”

Already facing the start of an economic recession, Ratner’s was forced to close stores. Soon after, his board forced him to resign. Despite having spent 18 months working like crazy to save the business, the name Ratner had become an embarrassment, both to Gerald Ratner and his organisation. At the age of 43, having watched the value of his personal shareholdings shrink from £8 million to £100,000, Ratner was washed up.

The phone didn’t ring for Gerald Ratner. For years, there were no opportunities to recover and begin to regain his self-confidence. To pass the time, his wife sent him out on family errands. While new business possibilities began to emerge several years later, Ratner faced a long period of self-questioning and torment before anything like career recovery began.

During these years, he learnt for the first time what it truly meant to develop relationships with his (second) wife and children. He started to get fit, riding a bicycle through the English countryside, rebuilding his physical and mental fitness. On reflection, these tough years were years well spent,

“What I now call my ‘wilderness years’ gave me a chance to recuperate. I really believe now that if you’ve been through a terrible experience, you have to get your head straight before you can do anything else…You can’t recover from a failed business – and all the pain that places on every part of your life – overnight.”[iii]

Gerald Ratner paused in order to progress. He’d lost his fortune, his business, his job, and his reputation. He’d become known as Mr Crapner. He, more than most, would agree that “sh** happens”. In coming back, however, he got through a critical period that the vast majority of people would prefer to avoid, namely pausing long enough to understand what had really happened.

Our keep-moving culture strongly discourages stopping. After all, no one who stops can win a race, can they? While we know that the roses might indeed smell nice, pausing to smell them while the world moves on without us is unacceptable, isn’t it? By definition, pausing or stopping mean that we will lose “the big mo’”, momentum.

To stop means to die, doesn’t it?

I don’t think so. To pause is to progress.

[i] Gerald Ratner, 2007. Gerald Ratner – The Rise and Fall…and Rise Again, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, p.184.

[ii] Ratner, p.148.

[iii] Ratner, p.242.

Stories from the Book – Our Need to Heal and the Case of Dave Dravecky

September 1, 2010 by Dave · Leave a Comment

Good dreams need faith. They need the faith we must build in ourselves, the faith we must create in something bigger than ourselves so that we can continue during those inevitable times when we let ourselves down, and we need faith in a better today and an even better tomorrow.

Disappointments and setbacks test our faith. As long as we are to the potential for new life, a weakened faith can be turned around. It can become a faith more authentically grounded in reality and in that which will never let us down. Let’s look at a story of a man who found just that.

Have you ever found yourself saying, “I’d give an arm and a leg” for something? I know I have. It’s just a saying, but actually imagine what it would feel to lose, say, an arm. Worse, imagine that your entire career had depended on that arm. Imagine further if, from childhood to adulthood, your very self, your identity, revolved around the talent within that arm. It is an arm that had brought fame and fortune. Imagine, then, waking up one day to find the arm gone. That’s the story of Dave Dravecky.

He’d done his time, Dave Dravecky. He’d played the A league, Double A, and Triple A leagues before entering the Major Leagues. He’d also endured two miserable spells in Colombia, living in a roach-infested apartment under the constant threat of illness. Dravecky was never going to be a legend. He was a guy who worked hard, pursued his dream of the major leagues, and turned adversity to his advantage by channelling tough calls into a desire to prove his doubters wrong. As he notes, however, this philosophy only carries you so far,

Growing up, I had always been the centre of attention. My performance had been for me, and no one else. I had to be the star. That kind of motivation can keep you going strong, so long as you succeed. But it’s not so good for dealing with failure,or with forces beyond your control.[i]

Between 1982 and 1989, Dravecky played 121 games for the Padres and Giants, highlighted by being selected as a National League All-Star in 1983. Along the way, he faced constant shoulder and elbow soreness which resulted in extended periods on the sideline. He also faced the loss of his fortune when a real estate development in which he’d invested went bust. Diagnosed with cancer in his pitching arm in 1988, Dravecky made a stunning comeback in 1989. Having lost the three most powerful muscles in his arm, he had been told that a miracle would be required if he was ever to pitch again. On August 10, 1989, almost 35,000 fans gave Dravecky a standing ovation in honour of his amazing return, a return preceded by day after day of painstaking rehabilitation. During the following game in Montreal, Dravecky’s bone literally separated from his shoulder as he pitched. The snap was heard around the stadium. Still, Dravecky thought that he could come back once more. Fate would decide differently, however.

After his team won the playoffs on their way to the World Series, Dravecky joined the scrum of players and officials celebrating the victory in the middle of pitch. Hit from behind by another celebrant, his arm was hurt again, this time beyond repair. His career was finished.

This time, Dave Dravecky accepted reality. He had changed as a man, viewing life’s highs and lows as a Christian who’d learnt to put his faith in things unseen. With this faith, Dravecky understood that some problems cannot be solved through surgery, through rehabilitation, or even through the power of a positive attitude,

Not all obstacles can be overcome. Each of us needs grace to handle troubles that remain even after we have done everything we can. Some barriers cannot be broken down just by human effort and faith in yourself.[ii]

Life’s challenges did not end upon his retirement. A further operation took place in 1990 to remove much of the remaining muscle in Dravecky’s throwing arm following the return of cancerous growth. The strains of this insidious illness began to take their toll on Dravecky’s spirit and on the strength of his marriage to Jan. The loss of the power in his arm was a metaphor for the powerlessness that Dave Dravecky felt as his life spiralled out of control. God seemed distant. Worse was to come. After the deaths of her father and a close friend, Jan too faced the consequences of life when events take us beyond our capacity to cope, namely anxiety and depression.

Things couldn’t get any worse, right? Wrong. An ulcerated hole appeared on Dave’s arm. With Jan trying to keep her own life afloat, Dravecky lacked the support on which he’d relied so heavily thus far. With the radiation treatments came infection. His arm constantly leaked blood and other fluids. One hole became three. On 18 June, 1991, it was time to amputate. Dave Dravecky had lost the pitching arm that had taken him to the majors. He had lost part of his body and, perhaps, part of his very soul, forever.

Dave and Jan Dravecky didn’t wake up one morning to find that life had returned to being a bed of roses. One part of their healing came with the realisation that it never was and never would be. Another part came from the tears and expressions of anger and questioning that the grieving process demands. The support of true friends and the recreation of a new Christian faith grounded in the realities of God rather than a belief in a fairytale faith that can never lasts also helped, as did the support that can come from good counselling. In the end, the Draveckys learnt to trust in the messiness and chaos of their lives, lives that raise just as many questions as answers. They learnt that some questions may never be answered, at least in this world.

The journey of faith is not an easy-to-follow map. It is a one-step-at-a-time kind of experience…God doesn’t promise us a life full of mountaintop experiences. There’ll be valleys to go through too. Dark valleys. Disorienting valleys. Valleys of depression and despair. What He promises is not a road map that will give us a detour around those valleys, but that he will walk through those valleys with us. When we emerge from those experiences, we look back and realise that that is where the growth is. It isn’t on the mountaintops, above the timberline; it’s in the valleys.[iii]

[i] Dave Dravecky (with Tim Stafford), (1990) Comeback, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, p.89.

[ii] Dravecky (1990), p.212.

[iii] Dave & Jan Dravecky, (with Ken Gire) (1992) When You Can’t Come Back, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, p.71.