I’ve never wanted to kiss a man before, and he certainly wasn’t much to look at, but he entered my life at exactly the right time, delivering exactly the right message. They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. What they don’t say is that teacher might just be the last person you would expect him to be
For more than a year I had been working on creating a teaching framework that I wanted to call “The Successful Thinker’s Triangle of INFLUENCE”. I could see in my mind’s eye a key that would unlock the door to the secrets that hold so many of us back in life.
But, there was a problem!
Whenever I tried to draw it out on paper, I was always “coming up short”.
I was missing one outside corner, and one inside corner.
I just could never seem to complete the picture.
I knew from working with my coaching clients that whenever a “piece of the triangle was missing”, the results that they were getting were always inferior to the results that they were capable of getting.
I longed for a way to illustrate what was missing, and why it mattered.
On this day, I had been sitting in the library with my notepad and my incomplete drawing for about 90 minutes when I noticed Pete sitting at an adjacent table looking as though he was carrying the weight of the world on his massive shoulders.
I was overwhelmed by the incredibly sad vibrations I was getting from him, so I asked why he looked so down.
He slowly looked up at me and said kind of matter-of-factly, “It’s the old lady….I think it might be over”.
I noticed that his big round eyes were full of tears, so I couldn’t help but invite him over to my table to talk about it.
As he stood up and lumbered over to my table, and just kind of slumped into the chair across from me, my coffee sloshed and spilled because his large belly had pushed the table about 3 or 4 inches towards me.
We spent the next several minutes reviewing his 20 year relationship with his wife Janet and how over the years, it had just seemed to have lost “it’s magic”.
As it turned out, earlier that morning they had had a massive argument that ended poorly with each of them saying some pretty harsh things; most notably her calling him a pig.
“Was she referring to your appearance, your behavior, or both?” I asked probably more out of curiosity than anything else.
“I don’t know. I try to be a good provider, and this is the thanks I get!” he stated in a hostile tone of frustration.
Trying to think of something brilliant to say, I looked down at my notebook in thought.
I was going to say something, honestly I cannot remember what, so I looked back up at him, and suddenly, it was like a ton of bricks had landed on my head.
Not only was he incredibly overweight, his hair was a mess, and he hadn’t shaved in at least 2 or 3 days.
I looked down at my paper again for a minute or two, and I looked back at him and smiled.
“Do you want it to be over with Janet?” I asked in as concerned of a tone as I could.
“Corey, she is my whole world. I love her so much, it takes my breath away. It’s just that we don’t seem to connect at all anymore.”
Knowing he was in over-the-road sales of some kind, and desperately wanting to help him, I took a deep breath and very directly stated:
“Pete my friend, YOUR MARKETING SUCKS!!”
His mouth popped open, his eyes bulged, and his head kind of flinched.
“Not only that”, I continued with confidence, “YOUR VIBRATIONS ARE AWFUL!!”
His physical reaction was similar to my first comment, yet his face kind of changed.
I could see the wheels churning in his head. He obviously sensed that I was about to tell him something he needed to listen to.
For the next hour or so, we talked about how his wife Janet was his most important CUSTOMER, and how all people who want to have and maintain amazing relationships absolutely must market to the other party that the relationship matters, and about how customers always see the people that they “do business with” as a reflection of themselves.
“Customers want to feel like a genius for choosing to work with you!”
“Janet sees your appearance and your attitude as a statement of how much you care about her, and as an extension of that, she questions her own worthiness!”, and
“Think about how hard you marketed yourself to get her in the first place. Successful relationships require that same kind of effort on an ongoing basis, or they wither and die.” were just some of the concepts that I shared with him.
After we spent several minutes writing out some strategies that he could use to get his marketing and his vibrations “back on track”, he thanked me for my time and excused himself.
Instead of kissing him, I shook his massive hand and reflected on the lessons that he had taught me.
I quickly scratched out my completed triangle and immediately packed up my writing supplies.
I was anxious to get to the gym and work on my own marketing.
I have a wife of my own, and she is pretty AMAZING! 🙂
Photo: Getty Images