Lessons Learned

Abbott Press

Contents

Introduction.......................................ixPrologue...........................................xiii1. Who Am I?.......................................1Tom................................................3Transformations....................................7Self-Esteem Negotiation............................132. Science of Negotiations.........................19How Do It Know?....................................21Just Ease Off the Clutch...........................25The Hurricane......................................293. Everyone Needs a Mentor.........................33The First Time.....................................35School Days........................................40The Mick...........................................454. Faith...........................................49Just Love..........................................51Parachute..........................................56Where Is the Pony?.................................625. Experience......................................65My First Workout...................................67Same Old Way, Same Old Results.....................71Come On Man!.......................................756. Inspiration.....................................79Row, Row, Row Your Boat............................81Football...........................................85Like Attracts Like.................................88Ralph..............................................917. Goals...........................................95Goals..............................................97Epilogue...........................................104

Chapter One

Who Am I?

"Know thyself means this, that you get acquainted with what you know, and what you can do."

Menander Greek Comic Dramatist

Tom

Here was this six-foot tall, 200-pound adolescent walking towards me ready to rip my head off. In my most commanding voice, I told him to: "Sit down!" He did, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He could have squashed me like a grape! Little did I know then that this large person would teach me a large lesson in life.

My first occupation was teacher of biology, chemistry, and general science. Although I was fortunate to teach advanced classes in regents biology, I was also assigned one class in physical science. This class in physical science was reserved for students who just needed a credit in science to get a high-school diploma. These students were a drastic change from the other young adolescents that I had been teaching.

This particular class was a real challenge. The students didn't want to learn and had no interest in the course whatsoever. The most you could hope for was to keep their attention, making it possible for them to learn something. One day, I decided that we would just read aloud from the textbook. Each one of the students took their turn until it came to Tom. He looked at me with his steely gray eyes, and said: "I'm not reading from the book."

I had learned that confrontation was not a good way to motivate someone, but my education and experience were lost in the moment. My retort was: "What do you have for a brain?" He stared me down even more intently, and again said: "I'm not reading from the book." I took this as a challenge (oh, how dumb!) and told him: "If you don't read from the book, there will be consequences!" He stood up, came towards me, and screamed: "I'm going to leave, and I'm never coming back!" To that, I commanded: "Sit down!" He did, and I was very relieved. As I mentioned before, he was a big guy and could have squashed me like a grape!

After the class was over, I talked with him. I apologized for embarrassing him in front of his fellow students. He accepted my apology and proceeded to tell me about himself. Although he appeared to be slow, this adolescent had an IQ in the 140s, which is genius level. However, he was severely dyslexic. In fact, Tom was so bright that he was able to go from kindergarten to sixth grade before anyone realized that he might be dyslexic. Even after the diagnosis had been determined, no real measures were taken in order to combat the condition.

As a result, Tom became extremely disgruntled about school and about life. If it were not for the fact that he loved to work with his hands and that his father had gotten him into carpentry, Tom probably would have wound up in serious trouble or even incarcerated!

Luckily, his superior intellect enabled him to overcome his handicap. He learned to transpose numbers when necessary and became an exceptional carpenter.

I found Tom's story fascinating, and throughout the school year we grew closer. I was moving into a new house and discussed with him what sort of countertops I should use in the kitchen. He came up with some really great ideas.

The end of the year arrived, and it was almost time for Tom to graduate. The high school where I taught was also a vocational school. Tom spent the morning in the academic portion of the high school and then, the afternoon in the vocational portion. Each year, the carpentry school would literally build a house from scratch. This included the walls, the interior, and the electric. The house was complete except for the foundation. As a result of his work on the house, Tom received the Outstanding Senior Award for Carpentry. This couldn't have happened to a nicer kid!

The only thing that would prevent Tom from pursuing his budding carpentry career was the lack of a driver's license. But he was determined. So off to the DMV he went, to get a Learner's Permit. Although he could not read the test because of his dyslexia, Tom was assigned a proctor who would give this "poor dumb boy" the test. Much to everyone's surprise, Tom got 100 percent! No dumb kid here! So, armed with his new Learner's Permit, and soon, his high school diploma, Tom was happy and secure in his future for the first time. What a sight to see! Talk about the importance of self-esteem!

Near the end of the school year, Tom asked me to come around to the back of the vocational school. As I approached the back of the school, I saw Tom holding a very large piece of wood. He told me that this was the chopping block for which I'd been searching. It was three foot by six foot and was four inches thick of solid oak. This chopping block was hand doweled and varnished with fourteen coats. There wasn't even one piece of metal in it! This masterpiece had been made simply by piecing wood together and gluing it. It was indeed the perfect chopping block (about three hundred pounds worth)! He said that this was his gift to me for taking the time to get to know him better. With tears running down my cheeks, I accepted the chopping block with open arms. In fact, this wonderful gift remained part of my home until we sold my first house fifteen years later.

Teaching is a wonderful profession because you can influence young people in a positive direction. Sometimes, the role is reversed. Although I taught Tom many things, he taught me so much more! He taught me how to be tolerant of other people. In situations where people might use their fists, Tom taught me to turn the other cheek and laugh. He made me understand what it was like to be handicapped, when few people other than the handicapped understood. Basically, he taught me how to be a better human being!

As you think about this story, keep in mind all of the prejudices that people exhibit every day, ranging from prejudice regarding the color of people's skin to the way people talk. What is prejudice? The answer to that is simply ignorance. When I embarrassed him, Tom knew that it was smarter for him to sit down than it was to confront me. At seventeen-and-a-half years old, this adolescent realized that it was prejudice (my ignorance of his condition)—not any maliciousness on my part—that caused me to say what I did. How enlightened Tom is!

Things to Think About

Think of something that you might have a prejudice against.

• What is the basis of that prejudice?

• What factors would cause you to change your perception?

• Would these changes be beneficial to you?

A great example of this concept would be for you to try a food that you don't like.

• Why don't you like it? (Was it the smell or the consistency?)

• What would it take for you to change your opinion?

• If you tried it and you liked it, would you then eat it on a consistent basis?

In order for you to make changes, have fun in the process. If you make it a game, the task seems lighter, can be more appealing, and therefore easier for you to execute.

Transformations

It was a brisk autumn day, as I walked from the science building to the athletic center. The sun was shining, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I felt good about myself and what I had done over the past six months to transform my body. As I passed several classmates, one girl told me how good I looked. This put a spring in my step because that idea had never been part of my internal representation to that point. It was truly a defining moment in my life!

Let me take you back a few years. As an only child, I was the love of my parents' life and could do no wrong. I could get anything that I wanted, included anything and everything to eat that I wanted! Apparently, my mother knew little about nutrition or good eating habits. Over my childhood years, I became quite overweight. Regardless, my mother had always told me that I was "a beautiful boy!" However, I was receiving mixed messages: my parents said I was beautiful, but my peers said I was a fat kid. The more the kids baited me and called me fat, the more miserable I felt. So, I tried to relieve that misery by turning to food. Nonetheless, I still seemed to have the approval of my parents regarding my physical form. I became really conflicted: Was I a fat kid or was I a beautiful boy?

I am sure you can understand the battle that was going on inside my head during my childhood and adolescent years. There was a constant struggle within my brain over whether I was fat, which meant I was unworthy of my peers' friendship, or whether I was beautiful and a person that attracted others. To compensate for the lack of friendship, companionship, and socialization with my peers, I became very comfortable hanging around people my parents' age. I found they were less judgmental and accepted me for what I was: a fat kid who always hung around his parents! Quite honestly, I just found it much easier to socialize with older people than with people my own age.

I vividly remember my seventh and eighth grade years, especially my first day of class in seventh grade. I had gotten a belt, which did not secure in the usual way. It was one of those belts where one piece fits into the other. When it was closed, the belt had a slight raised button on the belt buckle. As I walked into the building, one of my classmates touched the button on top of my belt. He said: "If I touch your pressure gauge, will all the gas come out?" As the rumor of this incident circulated, the ridicule just did not stop. All of the other kids climbed on the bandwagon. It upset me so much that I told my parents about it. They took it seriously enough to send me to a psychologist for fear that I would do something drastic!

The psychologist was a brilliant man. His advised me to ignore the kids that were teasing me and eventually they would give up. I can remember distinctly going back to science class and looking at all of those kids. I realized I should ignore all of them, but I simply couldn't do it. However, as time passed, the uniqueness of teasing me got old, and they finally stopped. You can imagine how my self-esteem and self-image were affected by all of this!

As I neared the completion of my high-school experience, I found it most gratifying that I could literally start anew at college. When I arrived at college, I was five-foot seven-inches tall, but I weighed two hundred pounds. Despite my average height, I was a big boy! Soon it was apparent that I was not going to fare any better there because I had also arrived equipped with the same brain. My brain had stored all of the bad information and experience that I had gathered during my earlier childhood and adolescence. My frame of reference was that of a fat kid who usually began to cry when confronted. After all, I had been teased unmercifully. I had physically changed my environment, but mentally I retained the same frame of reference.

At college, things took a turn for the worse. After the first semester, I was the only one who had a single room because nobody wanted to room with me. Don't get me wrong: I was meticulous in my personal hygiene and was pretty neat—for a guy! However, I wanted friends so desperately that I smothered them and as a result most of my classmates stayed away. Have you heard that when God closes a door, he leaves a window open? My window was my singing voice. I had received scholarship offers, and now, as a freshman, I got into the concert college choir. For the first time, I was a member of a group and really enjoyed it. However, after a short period of time, the same things began to happen with the choir that had happened to me all my life before. Something needed to change!

As part of the choir, we toured the entire Northeast. By my sophomore year, I was the tenor soloist. We would usually perform an average of two concerts per day for fourteen days. All we did was eat, sleep, and sing! You can imagine how grueling those fourteen days were! My parents had bought me a new suit for the choir tour. The waist on the pants was 44 inches. Unfortunately, by the end of choir tour, I must have gained a lot of weight because I was unable to button my pants. To be exact, I had added sixteen pounds, ballooning my weight to a whopping 216 pounds! I had a forty-four-inch chest and a forty-four-inch waist, so I look like a large barber pole. I was so unhappy: I had reached bottom.

I decided to go home for the remainder of Spring Break. I would be in a safe place, with my parents at our house, confident that nobody could tease me there. While at home and rummaging through my old clothes, I found my old Boy Scout shorts. During my Boy Scout days (age eleven), I had a thirty-four-inch waist. My mother told me to put them on, just to see how much I'd grown. After attempting to put the shorts on, I found that the waistband was approximately ten inches too small. As I showed my mother this humongous gap between the clasp and the button on the shorts, my father (who was my idol) walked in. He looked at me and said that I had the fattest damn ass he had ever seen in his life! Talk about being crushed! The man I admired most in all of the world, the smartest man I had ever met, just told me that I had a really fat ass. Something needed to be done!

Back at school, I made up my mind to change. Changing is difficult because you must literally negotiate with your prior experiences and frame them in a way that will serve you more positively in the future. I immediately focused on my weight. I decided to go on a zero-carbohydrate diet. I tried this for approximately two weeks and discovered that when my brain was deprived of carbohydrates for such a period, I became a raging lunatic! This obviously was not the route to take to accomplish my weight loss and physical change. Then, I decided to try eating one meal a day. (At the time, this was considered okay, but we know now that this is not the best choice for weight-loss.) I did that for sixteen weeks. In addition, I embarked on a jogging program, and discovered that I enjoyed physical exercise a lot. At the end of the sixteen weeks, I had lost sixty pounds and had reduced my waist from forty-four inches to thirty-two inches!

By the way, most college students don't go clothes shopping during the middle of the semester. After I started to lose weight, my pants became too large for me. But, instead of buying new pants, I folded the pants over and then wore a belt to hold everything in place. Unfortunately, at a glance, this arrangement made my pants look as if my fly were constantly open! To be honest, I was totally unaware of that.

My parents came up to college to take me back home for the summer. There, I was going to be a lifeguard for the first time. My mother hadn't seen me in sixteen weeks and didn't recognize me! On the other hand, my father just looked at me and smiled (talk about elation on my part—Daddy's approval). After we arrived home, the first thing my parents did was take me down to the local clothing shop to pick up some pants so I didn't look like I had my fly open all the time!

Talk about a life changing experience! I had the best time of my life that summer. I was a lifeguard: thin, in good shape, and for the first time, truly happy. What enabled me to make this transformation? Was it physical or was it mental? The correct answer to that question: It was both!

When you change your internal representation, you change yourself. Most people who lose weight gain it back within five years. On the other hand, I have kept the weight off for forty-two years and counting! This is certainly a testament to my internal ability to change and my acceptance of that change.

At this point in my life, I am calm and content as well as truly happy. I am able to make choices now based on my knowledge, experience, and faith in myself. I have learned to listen to my inner voice. I make a choice—not out of emotion or what other people say or want—but based on what I think is in my best interest at the time. Remember, you are in a constant state of change, so listening to your inner voice is very important.

I know you've heard this before, but I really believe if I can do it, you can do it! Go for it.

Be the person you truly want to be. The power to change is all between your two ears!

Things to Think About

Think of something that you would like to change about yourself.

• What would this change look like, sound like, taste like, feel like, and smell like?

• Make a detailed list of the steps you would need to make this change possible.

• Now think of how you will feel when this change has occurred. Use all of your senses to make this internal picture as real as possible.

• Keep these feelings in mind for as long as you can and repeat these procedures constantly. The repetition of envisioning what you want speeds the change process along.

Good luck in changing!

Self-Esteem Negotiation

It's important to find commonality between you and the patient, according to the doctor that spoke at a seminar that I had attended. He advised that we look for a way to compliment our patients. It made sense to me to find some common ground between the patient and the doctor. After all, a sincere compliment would break the ice, relax the patient, and make the patient feel like the doctor was interested not only in the patient's condition, but also the patient as a whole person.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lessons Learnedby Harris R. Cohen Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Harris R. Cohen. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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