I Decided to
Stop Being Weak

I remember once, not too very long ago, when my invented self was becoming unnecessarily weak. My coach could see it and I couldn't.

My coach and mentor Steve Hardison has a tendency to go nonlinear on me when I'm deliberately picturing myself as weak and limited by who I am.

Many years ago, he had seen 10 percent of me that was most worth saving and he showed me how to make that part all of me. He taught me reinvention.
No one I know of has had Hardison's track record in consulting, and no one I know of brings as much intelligent passion to the coaching as he does. Hardison finds the best in a person, and then treats the person as if he or she is only that best part. Soon the best part grows. The rest falls away, dying of neglect.

In his home, Steve has framed and hanging in clear view a quotation from Nathaniel Branden:

I am convinced that one of the most helpful things we can do for people is to refuse to buy into their inappropriately restricted views of their limitations.

After my first successful two-year tour out on my own as a public speaker, I requested of Steve Hardison that he help me join one of the nation's foremost corporate training organizations. I felt the company would benefit from adding me to the staff of speakers and consultants, and that I'd benefit even more from working closely with their many Fortune 500 clients. But negotiations to join the company were going slowly.

Hardison was not pleased with the way I had approached the company, and believed that I felt a lot more strongly about how good I had become as a public speaker than I had let on. He thought I was being inappropriately restricted in my self-confidence and self-respect.

"Why can't you speak powerfully about who you really are?" he asked. "Why don't you let them know...really know...how powerful your presentations have become and how you really see yourself compared-pared to other so-called motivators? If you're not committed to who you are, who else will be? Put it in writing. Be crisp about it, and be bold. Tell them who you are. Stop fooling around. The reason this job negotiation is going so slowly is you. You are responsible for the life you get, every bit of it."

So I went home to think about it. Why do I have to do this? Don't they already know? They already have my convention speaker's evaluations and testimonials. Do I have to say who I am?

And it was dawning on me that yes, I do have to say who I am. And by having the courage to say who I am, I will simultaneously create who I am. We "sentence" ourselves to the lives we get by who we say we are.

Take a walk on the wild side

So I went home and wrote a letter. I remembered something Red Smith said about how to write powerfully: You just open a vein and write. So I took a deep breath and I wrote a letter to the training company I wanted to work for.

"Here is what I am up to," I wrote. "And what I will do with or without your company:

"I will give the entire world the most easy and entertaining access ever given to the principles of self-motivation and spiritual joy (infinite possibility) through drama and humor.

"For example, my son Bobby's 4th-grade teacher had asked for copies of one of my books to pass around the school and his bus driver saw him with a copy of it and asked if she could read it. The bus driver read the book over spring vacation and then told Bobby she would be willing to pay for a large number of copies to give her friends and family. This struck me as important, because bus drivers do not usually read the literature of our profession.

"Here is what is missing in our field of personal growth and achievement: simplicity and humor. We have secular evangelists teaching the principles instead of real, vulnerable people. The principles are being taught by squeaky clean boy scouts. These guys don't look or sound like they ever took a walk on the wild side or danced with the devil by the light of the moon.

"Bus drivers want this stuff, too, but they can't get into it if it's taught by people who look like morticians and sound like straight-A students who always brought an apple in for the teacher. Their dream was to someday be the teacher so they could lord it over people. Screw the teacher. We need to share this experience, not teach it.

"Who I am for people is someone they can laugh with and identify with. I am the coward they've been waiting to hear from.

"And this exchange of experience I will do through books that are not intellectual justifications of my own authority. The problem with most of what we now see in the personal-growth literature is that it was not written for the reader's sake. It was written as intellectual justification----proof that the writer is some kind of expert.

"My books are for the bus drivers. They are especially for people who don't normally read. I know my books will someday set the country free, just as Napoleon Hill's books set us free in the 1950s.

"Being considered an expert is of no interest to me at all. In fact it works against my commitment to become one with my audience. I just want to testify."

I delivered the letter and got the job the next day.