My Story, Part 1: The “Bees” and Football

I grew up in the 50s in a small town in rural Georgia. I was different from almost all my classmates. My father was an “refugee” from Nazi Germany and my Mother was a “Yankee” from Massachusetts. They were not Southerners. I was the only boy in my elementary school class who went out for the Pee Wee football team and was not chosen to be on the team—a huge blow to my ego in a town where football was king. I wanted desperately to be liked and to be part of the in-crowd in order to make my parents proud of me. I overcame the humiliation of not being a football player by figuring out another way to achieve stardom.

One of the very helpful things my Mother did for me was teaching me to love reading books. She would save money each week and take me and my brother to a bookstore one day every month to buy us books. I loved reading about the Hardy Boys and about heroes - sports, political, entrepreneurs, doctors and scientists. Books opened up a whole new world for me. They fueled my dreams. Then she bought us a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica which I devoured. 

That set the stage for me figuring how to be perceived as a winner at school. I focused on winning the weekly spelling bee; the weekly bible bee; and being the kid who was first to answer the teacher’s questions correctly in class. I out-memorized my classmates – I became a winner and part of the “in crowd” because I was the fastest person in the class with the right answer most of the time. That meant that I excelled at interrupting people, including my teachers. I never argued with people – I just told them what was right. I excelled at “knowing”. That got me through elementary school. Onto high school. Different game. Football players were the “in crowd”.

Football was king in rural Georgia and when I went to high school, Coach Charles Grisham, who was a legend in western Georgia, reached out to me on my first day and asked me if I wanted to be a Student Athletic Trainer for the football team. I never had met him before that, and to this day I don’t know how he found me or why he made the offer he did. I said “yes” (not knowing how to be an athletic trainer). 

Then he did something that changed my life in that small town. He said. “I want you to come to my house every school day at 730 am and I will take you to school with me”.  So, I rode to school for the next five years sitting shotgun next to the best football coach in Western Georgia. You can’t imagine the positive impact that had in the community for how I and my family were treated. Coach Grisham “adopted” me and that changed my life. He helped me publish my first authored article in “Coach & Athlete” Magazine; made me his First Base Coach on the baseball team and he helped get me a scholarship as a Student Trainer to go to college.

I, to this day, thank him and Mrs. Grisham in my nightly Gratitude Meditation. He validated me and my family’s humanity to the community and he made it possible for me to go to college on an athletic scholarship being a non-athlete. Football ended up being my pathway out to the big world I had read about even though I was not a star player. 

My Story, Part 2: Psychology or Business Law?

College was a big challenge for me. The University of Florida (“UF”) was much bigger than my entire home town. So many pretty girls. So many people smarter than me. So many people from big cities who had very different childhoods. Freshman classes were huge. I signed up to be pre-med and took chemistry and calculus my first semester. I was completely in over my head. I had to get a “A” on both final exams in order to end up with two “Cs”. My counselor said I should change from pre-med. So, I changed into education believing I wanted to be a football coach and I majored in Math and Educational Psychology and became a student leader while continuing to work with the UF Football Team as a statistician. I adapted well enough to graduate Magna Cum Laude, which made my parents so proud. That meant a lot to me.   

I fell in love with humanistic psychology and educational psychology and in my senior year I was accepted into a great Ph.D. program in developmental child psychology at the University of Minnesota. That was in 1968 and I was very involved in campus political movements at the UF and in the Spring of 1968 right before graduation, I was part of a small group that was introduced to United States Senator Bobby Kennedy, who was running to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  He captured my mind and heart and I immediately decided that I had to go into politics and that I wanted to go to Law School at the University of Virginia (“UVA”) where Bobby Kennedy went.  However, there was a problem. I had not applied to law school nor had I taken the pre-law entrance test and the Class for the coming September was chosen months before. Nonetheless, on a Friday afternoon late that Spring, I called the UVA Law School and asked to speak with the Dean. Amazingly, he took my call and after a 45-minute conversation he accepted me on the call into the graduating Class of 1971 starting that September. I was on that legal journey until 1980 when I decided I had made a mistake – my life was meant to be in psychology.

 So, I then got accepted in a world-class Cognitive Psychology Program under the tutelage of Dr. Lyle Bourne, Jr. I had found my true love. Well, that turned out to be even more true than I expected. During my first year at Colorado, I met and fell deeply in love with a classmate. Marriage raised a big issue for me. Should I spend the next five years getting my Doctorate or should I return to the practice of law to be able to support a family? I chose law. I dreaded having that conversation with my mentor Dr. Bourne. Dr. Bourne was very understanding and supportive and has been a dear friend and professional mentor now for over 39 years even editing from a science perspective two of my recent books and being the source of many hours of illuminating making-meaning conversations over many visits to Boulder staying with him and his wife. He, like Coach Grisham opened up new horizons for me. So, time to move on to law practice.

My Story, Part 3: Ego & Wall Street

We moved to Washington, DC and then out of the blue I got a call from my first legal mentor who I had worked for in NYC from 1972-1975. He had left the practice of law and was now the Chairman and CEO of a global investment banking firm headquartered in NYC and London. He asked me to come see him in NYC. I did. 

In our meeting, he offered me a senior partnership to work for him overseeing IPOs, raising Private Equity for clients, and Tax Shelters. I told him I knew nothing about those areas and that I did not even know how to do an Internal Rate of Return computation. He looked at me and said: “I know all of that but I know you and you know how to learn”. His knowing that was based on my work with him on tax litigation cases where I had to go to Puerto Rico and work in factories in the mountains for days as a laborer being taught by the women employees how to make girdles and false teeth so that I could write detailed legal briefs describing each step of the value added in the manufacturing process.

So, I learned how to be an Investment Banker and spent 12 years in Investment Banking. That took me to Europe and Asia where I learned about different societal systems, cultures and history and ways of working.

My success was built upon my ability to continuously learn. I was good at “not knowing” and figuring out how to know. My work was alI about business results.  I took care of the people who worked for me but I had no time for personal chit chat with them. It was all about the numbers – I made no time to get to know them as human beings. All I cared about was their performance and helping them succeed professionally. I was driven to be the best and I was still a thinking machine. My ego was all wrapped up in being the best. How far could I go? Boy was I good. I was smart. As far as I knew, this is what success looked and felt like—I was on my way! Then, I “hit the wall”.

My Story, Part 4: “Hitting the Wall”

Well, that is an understatement. In the same week in the fall of 1987, two things happened. My wife came down for breakfast one morning and said, “We need to talk.” I said “Ok.”

She then said, “You are not the person I married —you are never here emotionally. When you are physically here, you are not really here with me. You are with your work. I have tried hard to pierce through your walls to no avail. I need a break. I would like to separate for a little while.” To show you how far gone I was, I responded, “I am sorry about that. We do need to talk. But, I need to rush to an important meeting now, can we talk about this tonight?”

It is so embarrassing to write that, but that is how out of it I was. I left for my meeting. I came home that night and was surprised to find a note on the table saying she had moved out and needed some time to think through all of this. I was floored. I loved her.

A few days later, my brother, who was a very successful cardiologist, called. We had jointly built a luxury used car dealership in Jacksonville Florida. He said, “Bro, I have bad news. There has been an embezzlement of over $1M dollars from the dealership and we have to come up with the money by the end of the week.” After I hung up, I collapsed on the floor crying. I had never cried before. Mr. Success (me) had in one week “lost” his wife and had his first big financial loss. Well, the “wake-up” calls weren’t over.

Then a week later, I had lunch with a senior recruiter about the CEO position of a very successful real estate development company where I was one of the two finalists. He said: “You are the most qualified person for this job.  You have all the skills; but, I am not going to recommend you for the job. I asked him “why?” He said “because you are the type of person that will never be satisfied. You will always be looking for that bigger mountain to climb. I do not think you will stay more than two years with this Company. Your life is solely defined by your work. You need to work on being more than just being a success at work.”

Within a short time period, my life of success and invincibility was destroyed. I had to rebound. I could not fail.  I trusted that I could find someone to help me, and I made inquiries with people in search of a really good executive coach-counselor. I found a wonderful, very experienced person who worked with me for over a year. She took me on a new journey of learning about emotions—transitioning me from being a human work machine to being more of a human being. Naturally, this affected all aspects of my life, in an immediate sense and ever since. It’s hard to underscore how this enhanced my way of being and the rest of my journey. Before these events, I didn’t know there could be a better version of myself. My definition of my best self was so limited. She helped me redefine what my ego identified with. No longer would I define myself by my “smartness.” I wanted to have more than meaningful work. I also wanted to have meaningful relationships with loved ones, dear friends, and people I worked with, too. 

My wife and I reconciled during that process and we will celebrate our 39th year of marriage this fall. She is a great JOY in my life but she does remind me every once in a while that “I am still a work in progress”, which I embrace because I want to stay on my journey to Best Self.

My Story, Part 5: Psychology and Business- Finally My Answer

The years 1999-2002 were wonderful work years for me because I found joy not just in being a high performer but in helping others develop and be all they could be. I had many deep rich friendships with clients and members of my team some of which continue today. I also knew it was time to give back and I started teaching part-time in a major business school because most of my success was enabled by teachers and mentors. It was more than time to give back.  

In 2002, I moved full-time into academia. That gave me the opportunity to bring my love of humanistic psychology (which I developed in 1966-1968) into the big work world through my teaching, research and writing. The last 18 years have been the most meaningful work I have done personally and professionally. I have been on a personal journey to Inner Peace for years and over those 18 years, my professional focus has evolved through these themes: “Organizational Excellence”; “Values-Based Leadership”: “Human Excellence: Cognitively, Emotionally & Behaviorally”; “Humanizing the Workplace”; “Modernizing Capitalism: Saving the American Dream”; “Humility Is the New Smart”;  and “Hyper-Learning”.

I started out in academia focusing on high performance organizations and that led to leadership excellence and that led to human excellence – cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally. Humanistic Psychology became integral to my academic work and my consulting work 35 years after it ignited a passion in my heart in undergraduate school.

My work, life and academic experiences underlie both the Humility and the Hyper-Learning book. It is a book that invites you to join the “Journey to Your Best Self” through the development of “Inner Peace”, which will enable a “New Way of Being” and a “New Way of Working”: Hyper-Learning, which I believe will help you live a meaning life with meaningful work and meaningful relationships in the transformative Digital Age. 

Wishing you all the best—