main

STACKS
153.802373
B627y
 U.S. $22.95

An irreverent investigation
into a thriving American phenomenon:
the motivation business.

Each year billions of dollars are spent by people

who seek inspiration to change their lives. From
giants like Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar, to lesser
knowns like Dale Irvin (the professional summa-
rizer) and Russ Stolnack (the executive imposter),
the maestros of motivation come in every stripe
and color. But what drives a man or woman to
stand up and tell others how to lead their lives?
What does it take? And more importantly, does it
really work?
So begins Jonathan Black'sfunny,thought¬
ful, and unpredictable sojourn into the world of
motivational speakers. With equal parts skepti¬
cism and astonishment, he crashes a speakers'
conference, treks the keynote circuit, attends
the Landmark Forum, and tracks down count¬
less speakers, from the money-makers to the
wannabes desperate for a chance to show their
stuff. Along the way he catalogsthe hustling and
the hype, the shameless self-promotion and the
moving tales of personal triumph. Black even
gives it a try himself; he joins Toastmasters, an
amateur public speaking group, to see if he has
what it takes to become a motivational guru.
Addressing questions like why Americans
are so addicted to the idea of change, and
whether the possibility of significant change is
real, or just a ruse, Yes You Can! is a provocative,
entertaining, and utterly unforgettable look into
an American spectacle.
 COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO

3 2711 00114 2565

DATE DUE
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/yesyoucanbehindhOOOOblac
YES YOU CAN!
-
 COLUMBIA COLLEGE LIBRARY
600 S. MICHIGAN AVENUE
CHICAGO, II. 60605

YES YOU CAN!

Behind the Hype and Hustle
of the Motivation Biz

JONATHAN BLACK

BLOOMS BURY
 Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Black

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products

made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing pro¬
cesses conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Black, Jonathan.
Yes you can! : behind the hype and hustle of the motivation biz / Jonathan
Black.—1st U.S.ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-000-3
ISBN-10: 1-59691-000-3
1. Motivation (Psychology) 2. Motivational speakers. 3. Public speaking.
I. Title.

BF503.B55 2006
153.802373—dc22
2006015836

First U.S. Edition 2006

13579 10 8642

Typeset by Westchester Book Group

Printed in the United States by Quebecor World Fairfield
 CONTENTS

Part One: Motivation Nation

Be Invincible 3
Hot, Hot, Hot 13
Speaking of History 30
Anything’s Possible 43

Part Two: Getting Down to Business

The Million Dollar Hustle 55
The Bookers 72
Tales of the Tape 93
The Bottom Line 107

Part Three: The Help-Me Generation

Change, Please 121
The Forum: Get It? 133
Send in the Coach 152
Board Games 172

Part Four: Can We Talk?

Toastmasters 185
Let the Contests Begin 209
The Platform, Finally 221
For Lucian, Adrian, and Kaarina
 PART ONE

MOTIVATION NATION
 BE INVINCIBLE

It’s Albertville —the 1992 Winter Olympic Games. The

final run of that most insane sport, speed skiing. Up at the gate:
Vince Poscente. The hill drops before him like a precipice. In
three seconds he’ll be rocketing down the 42-degree slope at
60 m.p.h., a faster acceleration than a Ferrari. There are no turns
or curves in the run; it’s straight to the bottom. II he slips and goes
into a slide, his ski suit will likely be burned into his flesh from
friction. If he trips and goes end-over-end—don’t ask. At the bot¬
tom of the hill there’s a speed trap one hundred yards long, where
the times are clocked. It should take Vince 1.6 seconds to shoot the
hundred yards. His record is 134 m.p.h., fast enough to make him
the Canadian national champion. Four years ago, when he took
up the sport, he’d never raced in his life. Now he’s vying for gold.
He’s the Cinderella story of the Twenty-third Olympiad.
This is his moment. He’s visualized it for years. Wrapped tight
inside his space suit helmet, he can’t hear a thing, but he knows the
hometown crowds will be screaming. He pictures himself tearing
through the speed trap. He sees himself up on the podium, tri¬
umphant, the huge stadium hushed, head lowered as the gold is
draped around his neck, his dad fighting back tears, his heart
swelling as the orchestra strikes up “O Canada.”
Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . he’s out!
He rockets down the impossibly steep hill. His heart’s racing

3
YES YOU CAN!

two hundred beats a minute. In breathless beats, the sportscaster

ticks off his speed. He’s going seventy . . . eighty . . . ninety ... a
hundred! And then ... a bump. Ever so quickly, a ski slips out. It
takes just a split second to bring it back, but in that moment he’s
lost his tuck position. He’s back now, shooting down like a bullet,
but the game is over, the dream is finished. He hits the speed trap
at 131 m.p.h. and finishes . . . fifteenth.
“Poscente’s crushed as he strips off his helmet,” reports the an¬
nouncer. “You can see the disappointment on his face.”
He looks upset alright. No, not upset—make that destroyed.
Fast-forward fifteen years. In the semidark of the Chesapeake
Ballroom in a Maryland resort hotel sit two hundred and fifty
managers from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. This is the final morning
of their three-day sales confab. It’s the send-off, an adrenaline shot
to return the troops to their offices pumped with can-do enthusi¬
asm. The crowd got its morning hoot when the head sales exec,
dressed in a turquoise blue Elvis suit, came charging out the back
of the auditorium singing, “you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog!”
Now the CEO, tanned and dapper, impeccable in a smooth ivory
shirt, takes over the podium. It’s windup time, and he hits all the
right buttons. “Thank you all for a job well done . . . Thanks to
everyone in the back of the room who made this possible . . . 2003

was tough . . . we’re up against it this year ... If it’s not United, it’s
going to be Aetna, if it’s not Aetna, it’s going to be Cigna .. . but
we can meet the challenges. Our guest speaker today has risen to
some incredible challenges.”

He pauses for dramatic effect. He glances to the wings of the

stage.

“He’s a renowned business strategist and master communicator,”

he continues, “retained by Fortune 500 companies for his insight.
He’s going to help ignite our vision and eclipse the competition.
He’s a man who went from recreational skier to the gold-medal

4
 Be Invincible

round in the Olympic Winter Games—in a remarkable four years.

As we blast down the Olympic mountain of skiing at over a hun¬
dred and thirty-five miles per hour, we’ll learn what winning truly
is. Please give a warm welcome to peak-performance strategist
and recent indoctrinee in the Speakers Hall of Fame . . . Vince
Poscente!”

There's a swell of Olympic music. Lights drop. Out runs

Poscente, a boyish, athletic figure with a head of white hair that
seems to glow in the spotlight. He jumps onto a folding chair. One
arm shoots high, the other is thrust down, vectoring an impossible
angle.

"People often wonder what it’s like to go a hundred and thirty-

five miles per hour on skis. Let’s take a run down the side of the
mountain together. In speed skiing there are no gates, no turns.
You go sixty miles an hour in three seconds. The slope’s forty-two
degrees. There’s a speed trap at the bottom that’s one hundred
yards long. It takes about a second and a half to shoot. You’ve got
sixty seconds to start.”
He drops to his tuck position, crouched low, arms plastered to
his side. His head rises, there’s an impish smile. “Don’t worry, I
won’t fall off the chair . . . I’m a professional.”
The audience erupts in laughter.
“Okay, we’re off!” His voice goes faster, like a speeded-up tape,
“I’m going seventy . . . eighty . . . ninety!” Up on the giant TV
screen there’s a video of Vince dying down the mountain.
“Bouncebouncebounce. Tears streaming. Skin feels like it’s com¬
ing off. Whoooooosh. A hundred, one hundred ten!”
Way in the back of the room, Kathy Newsom rubs her hands
together delightedly. It was Newsom who planned this weekend
retreat at the picturesque Hyatt Regency Resort on Chesapeake
Bay. Like Vince, she’s a professional. Every event, every croissant,
was planned meticulously. For the grand finale she sorted through

5
YES YOU CAN!

dozens and dozens of audition tapes. A few were tempting, most

she tossed as garbage. She’s glad she did; Vince is the go-to guy.
Not that the conference hasn’t gone well. It’s been a great meeting,
plenty of positive feeling, solid strategy sessions, lots of fun. Last
night everyone let down their hair at the final banquet. This
morning, however, is the payoffi
“One hundred twenty . . . one hundred thirty!”
He hops off the chair. The ballroom is hushed. He waits a beat,
stares out over the stage lights with that boyish smile, those twin¬
kling blue eyes. “That’s speed skiing.”
There’s an audible exhalation of breath in the ballroom. Peo¬
ple relax, they shift in their seats. The lights come up. Vince is
parading across the stage now. Suddenly he’s all business. He’s
here to send everyone off with an important message, a mission,
a vision.
You don’t get a more convincing vision than Vince himself.
He’s the avatar of Thinking Big. Never raced before in his life.
Decided—no, determined—it was something he had to do. But
don’t think you need an epiphany, he cautions. The first time
Vince got the bug, he was fourteen. Saw those Olympic athletes
and . . . went back to playing clarinet in the band. (Sympathetic
laughs from the audience.) But a good idea just won’t go away. Es¬
pecially after the funeral of a friend. That was a wake-up call. A
defining moment. He decided to try everything in life at least once.
So he and his buddy Bobby tried luge. Then the Canadian Na¬
tional Team showed up. Was he going to compete? Sure. What
sport? Luge, he said. “Then the coach said, ‘But you suck.’ ”
Big laugh from the audience.

Vince continues, “Then he pointed to the National Team.

‘There are eight guys, only four spots, the top Canadian guy is
thirty-third in the world. And you guys started luging, what, two
weeks ago?’ Then he said that word, the worst word in the English

6
 Be Invincible

language. 'Do you honestly think that's’his eyes bug, his face
goes into rubbery contortion—“ ‘re-a-lis-tic?’ ”
Vince got the naessage and went home. Bobby gave it a shot.
Vince waves at the giant TV. “That’s him there .. . my friend
Bobby ... at the opening ceremonies!”
Vince never made that mistake again. One day he got intrigued
by speed skiing. Four years later he was up on the winners’ podium.
Or so the audience thinks. Vince is saving the actual videotape for
last. That's when he’ll “pull the rug out from under them,” as he
puts it. That’s when he'll deliver the real message about winning.
It’s a formula that has worked wonders. Vince Poscente, the
racer who failed to get gold, who finished fifteenth, who crushed
his country’s hopes and his own dreams—Vince Poscente is now a
very rich man.
For today’s fifty-minute performance he will be paid $15,000.
All expenses paid, naturally, including hotel, airfare, and limou¬
sine. Two days ago he delivered an almost identical presentation
to a software conference in New Orleans, and will be paid an¬
other $15,000. Right after he’s finished in the Chesapeake Ball¬
room, he’ll jump into a waiting limo that will whisk him to BWI
Airport and a flight to Las Vegas. There he’ll pocket another
$15,000 from the sales reps at an ABC conference. After that he’s
off to Seattle, then Denver. In an average year, Vince does about
eighty conventions and conferences. His fee never varies. You do
the math.
He’s also got books and videotapes and CDs. At the end of to¬
day’s performance, he will stand by a table piled up with the stuff.
He self-published his first book, Be Invinceable, and it sold fifty
thousand copies. “That’s without even trying,” he says. His library
of tapes brings in another small fortune. Vince figures his new
book, The Ant and the Elephant, will go through the roof.
Vince Poscente never came close to a medal in the Calgary

7
YES YOU CAN!

Olympics, but he’s struck a much more lucrative vein of gold. He’s
a successful motivational speaker.

As Vince explains it, he wanted to get into the business in high

school. In tenth grade, he saw a picture of the valedictorian in
the yearbook with the speech he’d made. “1 thought I wanted to
give a speech. I had something to say, I didn’t know what it was,
I just felt compelled. It kept me up at night. Two years later I was
the valedictorian. I got a standing ovation, people just launched
out oi their chairs. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘This is
coo IV”
It planted a seed—a seed that sprouted big-time when Vince
was training for the Olympics and realized ... he might just win.
A gold medal would be his ticket to speaking engagements, con¬
ferences, tens of thousands of people. It was what he terms his
“exit strategy.”
Then he bombed. Not a big surprise in retrospect. He had no
coach, no funding, no preparation. Or maybe it was the quirky
thing that happened ten minutes before his run. A French ski-wax
technician came up and said, “He’s dead.” “Who’s dead?” asked
Vince. Nikola Neviscente, a top competitor. Nobody else knew,
certainly not the media, which only found out five hours later. So
there was Vince, up at the top, trying not to think about this guy
he knew who went freeskiing early that morning and crashed into
a snow compactor, cracking his skull in half.
He doesn’t like to mention this to audiences. He thinks it will
sound like an excuse.

Losing the Olympics was devastating. For a year and a half

Vince did odd jobs, sold real estate. But still—he’d been some¬
body. The Canadian national record holder, he held the fastest
unofficial time before an American, Jeff Hamilton, eclipsed him.

8
 Be Invincible

He was asked to speak at a corporate breakfast. He told his story

for the first time, and the audience loved it.

A man came up afterward and told him, “You should do this

for a living.” Then another stranger came up and said the same
thing. Epiphany time. It was what Vince has tagged the “emo¬
tional buzz.” Describing that thrill to the audience today, Vince
has everyone rub their hands together real fast. Then he has every¬
one stand. Arms in front, hands clasped. Okay, roll your shoulders.
Now swing those hips. Add a bump with the hips. “Shake it!”
Vince exhorts the crowd. “Shake what your mamma gave you!”
Audience participation is standard technique on the motivational
circuit. Vince ends the group shaking with “Great job, everyone!
Give yoursell a hand!" Then he coaxes a bashlul bump-and-grinder
named Mike up onstage and gets him to shimmy his hips. For his
efforts, Vince reaches behind the podium and hands over a copy of
his book Invinceable Principles. Mike gets a tape, too.
But Vince is very serious about this emotional buzz stuff. He
believes there’s a code written into our unconscious mind that is all
about the potential we seek. Our job is to identify the spine chill
and then follow the blueprint. Get a chill? Go for it! In his book,
On Paradise Drive, David Brooks describes the epiphany experi¬
enced by Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, when he realized it
wasn’t the burger that was going to make him billions—it was the
french fry. Follow that fry! says Brooks, is the rallying cry of every

American achiever.
Vince isn’t even an American! “I’m an alien,” he likes to tell
audiences, “from Canada.”
Then he launches into one of the comedic interludes that dot his
speech. This one’s about his coming to the land of plenty seven years
ago. He met a Texan and—voom, his head snaps half off his neck—
thought, Okay! They had three kids in four years—until they real¬
ized what was causing it. Tada-boom. We didn t know how to stop

9
YES YOU CAN!

it. Tada-boom. Then the wife came home with a brochure. Okay,
she said, Now it’s your turn. Tada-boom. “How many guys here
have had a vasectomy? Never mind, that may be too much informa¬
tion. The point is, the mind and body are connected. There are ex¬
ceptions.” Tada-boom. “Bill Clinton.” Tada-boom.
It’s Jay Leno reject stuff but amusing enough to win over an au¬
dience of health insurance agents. Strutting around the stage,
making his funny rubbery faces, doing quick double takes, Vince
has definitely done his entertainment homework. Then he’s got
his real message, the high notes in every fifty-minute presentation,
the “take-aways,” in industry parlance. They’re the Five C’s: Clar¬
ity of Vision, Control, Consistency, Creation, Communication. It
used to be only four C’s; he added the last a year ago. He might
have added a sixth—Cancer. Because that’s how Vince winds up
his talk.
But first it’s audience participation time again. The Olympic
buildup. “Who’s ever been to an Olympics?” Vince asks. He gets
eight volunteers to stand up and come to the front. Imagine you’re
on the National Team, he tells them. Your entire family’s flown in.
Half your friends. TV audiences around the globe. Wave to them.
Smile. Thrust your fist. Yell. Both hands now! Let ’em know how
thrilled you are!
The sales reps parade down an aisle screaming their enthusi¬
asm. Big round of applause for everyone. The “flag bearer,” an ex¬
cited woman named Sarah, gets summoned to the podium and
handed a book and tape. She glows with gratitude.
Good business, these handouts. Mike and Sarah will screen the
intro tape and, like hundreds and thousands, be intrigued by the
sales pitch that follows. There’s Vince, casually dressed in slacks
and black jersey, beside a pile of books and CDs that could rival a
table at Barnes and Noble. The book itself—2,500 hours of re¬
search went into it, Vince explains. It’s a series ol interviews Vince

10
 Be Invincible

did with hotshot achievers like Arthur Vandenburg, founder of

something called Century Management, whose parents were in
Auschwitz. Each of the interview tapes includes a second tape
teaching deep-relaxation technique. Because you need to be open
to change. Then the four-part Invinceable Athlete series—Balance,
Control, Achievement, Harmony—each with a deep-relaxation
tape. Then Vince designing the 5-C program complete with Yel¬
low Dots ... the Invinceability Journal ... a $65 set of CDs with
Vince as your personal coach . . . The Key to Customer Service
series—each with its deep-relaxation tape. “The whole enchilada,”
reads the screen, below a crossed-out $499, “for only $249!”
Sarah is back in her seat now; Vince is back up on his chair.
The footage starts to roll. It’s time for . . . the Olympics! Fans and
family. National pride. He’s holding that precarious tuck. De¬
scribing that incredible final rush down the mountain, in sixth
place, focused on gold, tearing over the snow. Then . . . the bump.
You can see it plain as day up on the TV screen. He cruises
through the speed trap. Fifteenth. A profound hush falls over the
Chesapeake Ballroom. Omigod, he lost. Even Kathy Newsom,
way in the dark at the back, even Kathy, who has seen the tape six
times, even Kathy feels the terrible deflation . . . and briefly won¬
ders if she made a mistake, should have hired that upbeat Texas
woman who started a Tupperware franchise with the insurance
money from her near-fatal car crash.
Standing there in the spotlight, alone, Vince acknowledges the
indescribable disappointment. He was crushed, he admits, for
weeks, months—until the day he happened to hear his dad talking
to a friend on the phone about the Olympics, calling it “the great¬
est day of my life. I was so proud of my kid.”
Then his dad got cancer and died.
You can hear a pin drop in the Chesapeake Ballroom.
“He was proud," says Vince. “And I’m here to celebrate that.

11
YES YOU CAN!

Celebrate that journey of integrity. Now you tell me, at the Olympic
Games, did 1 win?”
The stunned silence is replaced by a tide of reflective murmur¬
ing. Women wipe tears from their face. Men sit up straighten
Kathy Newsom can’t contain the smile on her face.
“Thank you,” says Vince. “Have a great day.”

12
 HOT, HOT, HOT

I run into Vince several weeks later at a convention of the

National Speakers Association (NSA) in Phoenix. I ask how he
thinks his performance went over. There was no denying his en¬
ergy. The skiing stuff had everyone riveted; so did his dad’s cancer.
But I’d seen some shifting around in seats. People got up and went
to the bathroom. Attention wandered.
What’s his assessment?
“A train wreck,” he says. “The AV guy was a disaster. On a
scale of ten, Pd give it a three. But the client loved it!”
This is the twenty-fourth convention of NSA, the unofficial gov¬
erning body of podium hopefuls and established stars. By most
counts there are upward of five thousand motivational speakers reg¬
istered in the United States, and maybe ten times that figure who
are in some stage of becoming one. five arrived in Phoenix during a
midsummer stretch of i ro-degree days. Here at the Marriott Desert
Ridge Resort and Spa, twenty miles north of the city, it’s not much
cooler. The breeze that blows off the purple ridges of the Sangre
Mountains feels like a gust from a furnace. But nobody seems to
mind. All afternoon they’ve been pouring in, ferried by van and bus
and shuttle to the baking-hot asphalt oval where hotel men in shorts
grab bags and whoosh them into the air conditioning. This morning
it was just a handful. By early afternoon it had topped one thousand.
Then twelve hundred. Then fifteen hundred.

13
YES YOU CAN!

I’ve been to conventions before—but this one is different.

Everyone’s . . . talking! They’re huddled in conversation. They’re
clumped in groups. They shake and clap each other on the back
and hug, and soon, like it or not, you’re part of the noise, a great
hurricane of sound, a typhoon of talk, sweeping along the corri¬
dors, down the escalators, a buzzing hive of chatter at the registra¬
tion booths, where everyone seems to know someone and can’t
wait to speak.
True, you won’t find the likes of Tony Robbins schmoozing in
the halls here. He doesn’t need the good fellowship, he’s above the
hoi polloi. But just about everyone else is represented: the pros, the
stand-up comics, the sales gurus, the fading Miss Americas, the TV
gag writers, the cancer survivors, the millionaire kings of the
toastmaster circuit. A man passes by with a cowboy hat and lariat
looped over his shoulder. A sign around his neck reads, “Will
Rogers.” I ask if that’s his real name, and he gives me a goofy grin.
“I just tell his jokes. My name’s Bernstein.”
A few paces away, two guys in seersucker are catching up.
“There was a run on Olympic people four years ago,” says one.
“There’s going to be another run this year,” warns his friend.
“Hey, isn’t that Kato Kaelin?”
“Where?”
“He was right behind you.”
“Couldn’t be. What’s he doing here?”
“Playing golf maybe.”
“In this heat?”

In the corridors flanking the ballroom, the breakout rooms are

packed. Three and four sessions meet simultaneously. I squeeze
into Sonoran B, where a woman is finishing her introduction:
“The fastest rise in Motivation. He’s a human Christian example
that personifies everything. The Wall Street Journal called him ‘A
Star with Attitude.’ Please welcome . . . Keith Harrell!”

14
 Hot, Hot, Hot

Harrell is a dynamic, good-looking African American—and

tall. Six foot seven, he was a high school basketball star for Seattle’s
fearsome 34-0 “Super Dogs,” captained a poor team at Seattle U,
and was "devastated" when he wasn’t drafted by an NBA team.
He did fourteen years at IBM and was downsized out of a sales
training job. Give up? No way. He badgered Les Brown to cri¬
tique his tape, hired a consultant to ramp up his presentation, and
talked his way into a convention of meeting planners. Now’s he’s
a multimillionaire. He speaks about a hundred and fifty times a
year and has written five books. He’s got lavish homes in Atlanta,
Scottsdale, and Florida. But he is, it we’re to believe him, still eat¬
ing humble pie.
“Every year I come to the conference to meet one of you. In this
room there are truly the best motivational speakers on the planet,
and I’m your student. Give yourself a round of applause!”
But get real, advises Harrell. This is no walk in the park. Right
from the start, it’s tough. “You’re a nobody,” he says. “Your first
challenge is having good press material. Your success is based on a
demo, a DVD, word of mouth. I love my bureau [speakers’
agency], but for the first three or four years, no one returned my
phone calls. Finally a bureau told me the truth: ‘You suck.’ ”
Great hoots of laughter.
It’s tough, says Harrell, but always believe in your message. Your
story’s your story. But keep your perspective. The first time he went
to a local speakers’ bureau, fifteen guys said they made thirty-five
hundred dollars. So Harrell figured he’d charge five thousand.
“That was ego. Go back and develop your message, charge fif¬
teen hundred. When the planet’s overloaded, that’s the time to
change your fee. And you will. There’s no better time to be a mo¬
tivational speaker.”
The emcee reads questions from the audience. Before a confer¬
ence, should you talk to the CEO?

15
YES YOU CAN!

“If you meet the CEO, ask how many kids he has, get the name
of his wife. Build relationships. When you get in an elevator with
a customer, ask about sales, ask what it will take to get to the next

level.”
H ow do you build relationships?
“Everything I do is marketing. Go meet the bureaus. Meet the
company marketing team. They’re dialing for dollars. If you can’t
sell yourself, you shouldn’t be in the game! Package yourself. Self -
publish. I sent out nine proposals and got fifteen rejection letters
back. After the Wall Street Journal article, seven publishers called
who wanted to print my book.”
What’s the hardest thing?
“Coming to a conference like this and getting blown away by
every other speaker on the platform.”
What’s your best advice?
“Be patient. Look at the people who’ve survived. Go to the
edge of your pain and your pain will tell you something. You got
to be hungry. You got to have integrity. After nine-eleven you’ve
got to be real. Did nine-eleven change my business? It changed
everyone’s business. If you come here and ask how many
speeches you booked, how many books you sold, you're asking
the wrong question. I want to know how long it hurt, how long
you suffered. Tell me about the pain and the pain will tell me the
story.”
I slip out and head for a lighter session down the hall—on eti¬
quette. The woman leading it has a luscious Texas drawl and
looks like she stepped out of a Neiman Marcus catalog. She’s
winding up her speech on how to dress.
“The belt’s got to match the shoes, that’s the most important
thing. Black shoes, you wear a black belt. Brown shoes—brown
belt. The socks should continue with the pants and down to the
shoes. You want to keep the flow. You don’t need them up to your

16
 Hot, Hot, Hot

knees—but make sure they don't show when you cross your legs.
Okay, parties.”

Don’t wait to RSVP until the last moment. Change of plans?

You call back. It it’s past the deadline, you say, “My plans have
changed, can I still come?” About guests—it you’re invited to a
wedding and it says Mr. and Mrs., that’s all that’s invited . . . not
Mr. and Mrs. and their six children. Be prompt. It a reception
starts at six-thirty, be there at six-thirty.
“It’s no longer cool to be fashionably late. That’s been gone a
long time.”

What’s all this got to do with speaking? It’s hard to say. I’m tak¬
ing notes anyway. More tips. E-mails? Make the subject line inter¬
esting. Don't just say hi or hello. People get hundreds of e-mails a
day. Upper- and lowercase, please. Voice messages? Leave the
number at the beginning and end. Slowly. Make the message short
and sweet.
“And never never never answer on the speakerphone.”
I drop by the first-timers reception. At each convention, up¬
ward of one quarter of the attendees are rookies. It’s a testament to
the big draw of speaking. The large room here is packed, every
table filled. As I’m looking around for a seat, an NSA member sig¬
nals me to come join his table and makes room for an extra chair.
It’s an odd lot. From scraps of conversation I learn that one
man’s a proofreader and “closet speaker.” There’s an ordained
minister. A husband-and-wife team do comedy.
“What’s your niche?” I ask the man seated beside me. Harrell
used that word and encouraged speakers to find one.
“I lost three hundred pounds,” he tells me. “That’s my claim to

fame.”
I glance at him again. He looks enormous. “Really?”
“Three years ago I was in a wheelchair. I weighed six hundred

fifty.”

17
YES YOU CAN!

The lights flicker. Music swells. A man and woman mount the
stage as a voice intones, “NSA President Mark Sanborn and . . .

Lisa Ford!”
Ford takes the microphone first. “This is my twenty-fourth
consecutive convention,” says Ford, a suited middle-aged woman.
“I’ve been coming since 1980. When I was six. But seriously . . .’
Her speech is a fuzzy, warmhearted welcome with scraps of
wisdom thrown in. We’re here to learn and have fun. We can’t have
it all, but we can define our objectives. It’s not the what but the
who. Find people you can learn from and who can learn from you.
And now one of those people—not just the convention chair but a
dear friend—give a big hand to .. . Mark Sanborn!
It falls to Sanborn to narrate the ensuing slide show, which is a
history of NSA and its illustrious founder, Cavett Robert (not
Robert Cavett).
Robert is one of those icons who seem beyond reproach. Every¬
one’s got a kind word, if not a superlative. Halt the “Cavett" hits
in Google are speakers fawning with testimonials (most, no doubt,
so you’ll follow their links and book them). The few dissenters
would be a bunch of 1930s mobsters who got busted when
Robert, an attorney, was on the New York State district attor¬
ney’s staff and led the famous “rackets investigations." Born in
Mississippi, Robert eventually left the law to found his Personal
Development Institute, started an audiovisual company for sales
presentations, cut eighteen inspirational records, and was the win¬
ner of the 1942 International Toastmasters competition. He was
good at capsule advice, too. His fans love to recite “Cavettisms,”
such as: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me,” or “We tell our ideas from our
minds, but we sell our ideas from our hearts,” or “People can re¬
fuse words, but they can’t refuse attitude.”
His syrupy bons mots can make the skin crawl. But here is one
of the salient facts of the speaking business. There’s hardly an

18
 Hot, Hot, Hot

original thought under the sun. It’s all packaging—and timing.

One day words from the podium sound like a Hallmark card, the
next day they change your life. Such a case is Mark Victor
Hansen, who owes his salvation to Robert.
Hansen got of! to a great start. For seven years he was a re¬
search assistant to Buckminster Fuller. He left on good terms to
commercialize Bucky’s geodesic domes. Sales were huge—until
the 1974 OPEC oil embargo. The domes used a petrochemical
product (PVC) that was suddenly unavailable. Hansen went
bankrupt. He hit a serious slide. Dead broke, he lived in a friend’s
hallway. He took a job unloading freight cars. He was despon¬
dent, suicidal. Then he heard a Cavett Robert tape.
Stunned, he listened to the tape another 286 times. “Robert
spoke directly to me,” said Hansen, “when he asked, 'Are you a
creature of circumstance or a creator of circumstance?’ I thought,
Holy Cow! I think he’s telling me I created this!”
He started a company, became a renowned speaker—called the
Master Motivator—and went on to publish Chicken Soup for the
Soul. It sold fifty million copies and spawned a dozen sequels.
Now he’s rich as Croesus. Now he says things like “I want to serve
all six billion people on spaceship earth"—and nobody snickers.
Robert founded NSA in 1973. He died a quarter-century later,
in 1997. In that span, the association experienced huge growth. It
has headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, and chapters in just about
every state. It has chapters abroad. You don’t have to belong to
NSA to be a speaker, but it doesn’t hurt. Maybe a third of all NSA
speakers tag themselves as motivational. What that means can
change with the times. So can your message.
For much of the eighties and nineties, the motivation business
was all about making it, self-propulsion, getting rich quick.
Athletic coaches ruled, because winning wasn’t everything—it
was the only thing. The lecture circuit starred corporate titans

19
YES YOU CAN!

like Malcolm Forbes, Lee lacocca, and Ted Turner. Zig Ziglar,
the dynamo of slick ascension, wrote See You at the Top. But
blind ambition took a serious hit as the twenty-first century
dawned. Recession pulled the rug out from under the limitless
promise of riches. The dotcom bubble burst. Corporate corrup¬
tion shook our faith in the idyll of capitalism. And 9/11 hit the
speaking business hard. For starters, no one was traveling. The
number of meetings plummeted. A new perspective took over
the podium. It was time to get real, to think about values. The
good boss was the sensitive boss. Ziglar’s new book, The View
from the Top, was all about being ethical and praying to God.
Suffering wasn’t a blight on success, it could be a badge of
honor, a common experience to bind humanity. Tales of personal
survival, of triumph over adversity, became big draws. You could
have cancer and still win the Tour de France. Frostbitten toes on
Everest brought crowds. As the country coped, so did the newest
round of speakers. Die-hard machismo didn’t look so smart.
The fees for military generals dropped. The speaker business is a
hydra-headed monster. Lop off one topic, and six new ones ap¬
pear. Globalization, sensitivity to the world—these became the
topics du jour.
It’s not as deadly dull as it sounds. If you worry life is getting
too serious, if feeling pain makes you squirm, well you weren’t in
the Grand Sonora Ballroom this hot August night for the conven¬
tion’s kickoff dinner. No sooner has everyone finished off their
baked chicken, no sooner have the chandeliers dimmed, than a
spotlight sweeps over the crowd. It swings back and forth, finally
settling on a door at the back. The door flies open, and out gallops
a cowboy on a horse.
“Yippie—yi-yi-yay, I’m back in the saddle again!”
The cowboy canters up the aisle, strumming a guitar while he
sings, “I’m a son of a gun from Arizona!”

20
 Hot, Hot, Hot

He pauses only briefly before prodding his mount onstage.

Whereupon a great roar rises from the front of the auditorium.
The horse has raised its tail.

“As speakers, it scares it out of all of us,” improvises the next

speaker, to waves of laughter.

And now it's time for ... the Del Rythmo Latin Dancers! Out
rush a dozen sombreroed men with women in swirling peasant
skirts. The huge screen reads, “Authentic Mexican Art and Enter¬
tainment." They twirl and jump and swing. They’ve no sooner
left than the throttled roar of a motorcycle erupts from the back,
and out rides . . . could it be . . . yes! Mark Sanborn on a chopper!
He circles the ballroom, up and down the aisles, then parks and
climbs onstage.
“Experience, eloquence, and expertise, those are our themes,”
he announces. “Be responsible but just a little bit crazy. It’s
Phoenix, it’s summer, and it’s hot hot hot!”
You might think it hard to top a galloping cowboy and the new
president on his Harley, but the next act is used to tough competi¬
tion; he’s “an author, a humorist, and a perfectionist. A graduate of
the Barnum & Bailey Clown College . . . Rob Peck!”
Rob Peck delivers his entire speech while juggling.
It’s not just any juggling either. Each point, each phrase, is il¬
lustrated by a juggling maneuver. “Long-range strategy”—balls
bounce off his extended arm. “On-the-nose planning”—balls pop
off his nose. He runs off his mantra—“Learn by Imitation, Earn
by Innovation, Yearn for Inebriation”—with flying balls. The au¬
dience jumps to its feet with delight when he’s done.
The next speaker is the CEO of something called Obsidian En¬
terprises. If the name means nothing—or sounds like an enemy of
James Bond—we’re quickly told he also owns the world’s most
priceless antique car collection and the biggest yacht in the world.

He’s Mr. Tim Durham!

21
YES YOU CAN!

But no sooner has Durham started to speak than who should

wander out but Kato Kaelin. It’s him alright. He’s got that dazed,
stoned smile and explains that he’s supposed to meet “Scott.’’ In¬
formed that there’s no Scott around, he says, “Isn’t this the Hawai¬

ian Tropics Contest?”

He’s directed offstage to the murmur of awkward laughter.
“And now . . . without further ado,” winds up the good-
humored Durham. “Scott!”
Turns out there is a Scott. He’s Scott McKain, and I may be the
only one here who’s never heard of him. His book, All Business Is
Show Business, hit the number one spot on Amazon’s business best¬
seller list. Like everyone else, he starts with a joke. Scott came from
a tiny place called Cruthersville, “so small, every time a baby was
born, a man left town.”
If you can't tell a joke, I’ve realized, there’s a good chance you
won’t make it big as a speaker. There is a joke every few pages in
my notebook. “In college I had a major in economics,” one guy
started, “and a minor in my room.” Here’s another: “Where there’s
a will, try to get your name into it.” That one’s good because it ties
in, sort of, to the uplift business. A really good joke—or really bad
joke—sets up a speech. One keynoter, a woman, asked if anyone
had heard about the woman who called the hotel desk when the
faucet handle in the bathroom stuck. “ ‘My water broke,’ she re¬
ported. ‘Call nine-one-one? No, sir, I need maintenance!’”
“Doyou need maintenance?” she asked the audience.
If you can’t tell jokes, a gimmick will do. Not everyone can
come up with a gimmick, though. Darren LaCroix polished his
during a series of elimination tournaments sponsored by Toast¬
masters International. Then he won the 2001 World Champi¬
onship of Public Speaking.

Here’s what he does: he runs out onstage and immediately falls

on his face. He proceeds to give the first three minutes of his

22
 Hot, Hot, Hot

speech on the floor! And then he jumps up: “Do you think I
stayed down too long? Do you stay down too long?”

“Dare to Dream” is his message. Think about the moon rocket.

It all seemed pretty impossible, didn’t it? Darren wanted to be¬
come a comedian. When he told his brother, his brother laughed.
Darren plugged away. The only problem was, “I was bombing. 1
was awtul. So I called up my mentor Rich Segal. ‘They hated me,’
I said. ‘So?’ ’’ Darren pauses for dramatic effect. “How do you ar¬
gue with ‘So?’ ”

“You don't,” is the answer. Simple when you think about it. So
Darren launched himself. He took the next step. “What’s your
next step?" he asks the audience. “What are you waiting for?
Take it.”

He takes a step and falls again—but here’s the capper. Up he

pops. “Did you ever notice,” he says, pointing to another twelve
inches on the floor, “that even when you fall, you make progress?
Go ahead and fall—but fall forward!”
Positive thinking is big here. And you don’t get more positive
than Charles “Tremendous” Jones. He’s the insurance salesman
who wrote Life Is Tremendous, which sold a million copies but
never appeared on a single best-seller list. “One of the most dy¬
namic, innovative motivational speakers of all time,” is the modest
introduction. In fact Tremendous is not here to tout his many tri¬
umphs. He’s here to promote one of the superstars of yore, a
woman, as it happens. She was a Miss America. She appeared on
Broadway, on the Groucho Marx show . .. but her love was speak¬
ing. Eden Ryi, alas, is long dead, but her i6mm tape lives on. It’s
called You Pac\ Your Own Chute.
It’s a classic.
Lights dim, and the tape rolls.
For the first few minutes a woman stands on a beach and talks
about fear. She’s fifties attractive in a Harriet Nelson sort of way.

23
YES YOU CAN!

“What’s fear?” she asks. You say you’re afraid? Is it possible you cre¬
ate your own fears? Some fears are rational, of course. Fear of the
unknown, fear of growing old, fear of failure, stress .. . you’re get¬
ting stressed just listening, which is when Eden abruptly announces
she’s going to confront one of her fears. Jumping out of an airplane!
Suddenly we’re in the air. It’s a tiny airplane. Eden’s climbing
out on the wing! She’s jumped. The parachute billows open. She’s
dropping through a turquoise sky. The water’s coming up fast.

She hits and . . .goes under.

A deathly silence falls over the ballroom. There’s nothing but
sea. A flat, terrifying expanse of water. Seconds go by. Nothing.
Then . . . out she bursts! Her head shoots out of the water and
she’s wearing a huge grin!
“Give yourself a shaking up!” she cries.
The audience goes wild.
“This is the most exciting of all sports,” she says. “It’s called
leading your life. This is the beginning . . . because you pack your
own chute!”
Okay, it’s easy to be cynical here. I catch myself rolling my eyes
on numerous occasions. So much is a sideshow—clumsy, hyper¬
bolic entertainment. But then, well, something brings you up
short. Or someone. This one is named W. Mitchell, and he's in a
wheelchair. At first he’s hard to look at. His face is a pink mottled
mask, his nose is jammed half around his head. Instead of hands
he’s got V-shaped stubs. I ask what happened, and he tells me
cheerfully that he had a really bad motorcycle accident and was
burned over 95 percent of his body. About all that didn’t get blis¬
tered were the soles of his feet. It took ten months to recover, six
months in a burn unit. When he got out he took up flying again.
Then he crashed his plane. He broke his back. He’s paralyzed.
In a macabre way it’s almost lunny, these back-to-back calami¬
ties, like a freakish sketch on Saturday Night Live. But what’s

24
 Hot, Hot, Hot

astonishing is how normal he is. Though in truth he’s not normal

at all. He’s a big environmentalist. He was pals with Bucky
Fuller. He was elected mayor of Crested Butte.
“The reality,’’ he tells me, "is there’s a world of people in men¬
tal wheelchairs, a world full of people with internal scars far
worse than mine. A lot of stuff happens in life, hut people don’t
understand how to react. You have to make choices. People want
things to change, they want a lot of things, but they don’t know
how to get them. We hear the adage, garbage in—garbage out.
But some of the garbage stays. Why not replace it with quality.
People need to be encouraged. That’s what I do. That’s why I love
speaking.”

Mitchell gets paid $15,000 a talk. He does about thirty-five

paid speeches a year. He does another thirty-five and gives that
money to charity. He’s spoken everywhere from IBM and MetLife
to the Kansas Livestock Association.
He is far from the only accident victim here. Theo Andross hit
a van head-on while going sixty miles an hour. It took the jaws of
life to free him. He was “code blue”—dead. Somehow they
brought him back. His career as a professional soccer player was
finished. He could only play the game recreationally. That’s what
he was doing when he sustained a freak injury. A goalie got him
with an illegal side tackle and Andross went down the wrong way.
His planted foot twisted 180 degrees. His leg swelled so much it
burst open. Even in the hospital, on morphine, the pain was ex¬
cruciating. He was in the depths of despair. “It was the end of the
line,” he says. “A black hole.”
Then the telephone at his bedside rang. It was Michael Aronin,
who’s here at the convention. He’s the guy with cerebral palsy who
does comedy material in clubs and on television. He’s appeared on
Letterman. He gives seminars on comedy.
“I better not catch you stealing my parking place,” he warned.

25
YES YOU CAN!

Andross couldn’t help himself. “It was the first time I’d smiled

in three days.’’
Smile or not, the prognosis was grim. The doctors predicted a
rough recovery. A permanent limp was the best he could hope for.
If he’d had this accident in the fifties, before they figured out how
to stick a titanium rod in a leg, the surgeon would have ampu¬
tated. Instead, Andross ran a marathon the following year. The
year after that, he competed in his first triathlon. He calls himself

the “Titanium Triathlete.”

He does about eighty speeches a year. He charges between

$6,000 and $8,000.

Did I mention Roger Crawford, born with a rare disease that
affected all four limbs? His hands are flippers, his left leg is fake,
he’s got a partial right foot. He became a nationally ranked tennis
player. You can see a video of him playing tennis on his Web site.
He’s got a full-time staff and office. He wrote a book, How
High Can You Bounce? He gets $7,500 a talk. He’s done close to
four thousand.
Not all the hard-luck stories involve being physically maimed.
There’s a fellow here named Rene Godefroy. During a break be¬
tween sessions we sat on an outside bench under a broiling sun,
which didn’t bother him a bit. Rene grew up dirt-poor in a tiny
village in Haiti. Twenty people lived in a room. He managed to
get a visa to Canada as part of a theater troupe and snuck into the
United States hidden underneath a truck, holding onto the muf¬
fler between the back wheels. He became a doorman at the Re¬
naissance Waverly Hotel in Atlanta. Famous people came to stay
at the Renaissance, the likes of Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar, and he
told them he wanted to become a motivational speaker. Some
didn’t take him seriously, some listened. He saved his money and
went to the NSA convention in Anaheim.
“Speaking chose me, I didn’t choose speaking,” he tells me.

26
 Hot, Hot, Hot

“Many people complain they are not getting much in life, but you
have to ‘be’ before you can ‘have.’ You see what I mean? The rea¬
son I have what I have is I’ve become a person I wasn’t before. I’m
very happy. I can eat a lot of rice and chickens. I’m living the
American Dream.”

Rene gives maybe fifty speeches a year. He comes onstage in a

doorman’s hat and jacket. He strips them off while he talks about
the man inside. We should all be doormen, he says, and open
doors. Don’t go through the revolving door, prop it open, because
others want to follow you. He ends his presentation in the business
suit he wears under his uniform. He’s writing a book called The
Doormans Guide to Life.
Some speakers here barely scratch out a living. As Harrell, the
ex-basketball star, advises, you’ve got to have patience. You’ve got
to be willing to market yourself. There is so much to learn. Should
you sink your savings in a classy three-shot video? Write a book
and pay to get it published? Come up with a gimmick? There’s a
guy here, Russ Stolnack, who bills himself as the “Executive Im¬
poster.” “I have an audience believing I’m a serious speaker,” he
explains, “and when they catch on I’m not, they crack up.”
The company conference organizers are in on the joke. Maybe
they send out a memo or e-mail. When Stolnack addressed the
marketing VPs at an Anheuser-Busch retreat, he announced that
the big thing was shelf space. The new imaging push was con¬
vincing supermarkets that beer was really liquid bread and be¬
longed in the bread aisle. They were all taking notes. He had an
entire sales force at BMW believing Snoop Doggy Dog was the
new spokesperson—and they had to sell the E-class with hand

gestures.
But newcomers can take heart. It’s possible to make a very good
living in this business—just by being smooth and smart. Joe Cal¬
loway is such a person. He gives the keynote at the Saturday

27
YES YOU CAN!

luncheon. He’s a tall, energetic man, pepper-haired, with an easy

Tennessee drawl.
“This is 2004, in Phoenix. I can’t remember the last conven¬
tion ... in July. Was it Orlando? Palm Springs? Death Valley ?”
The crowd hoots. But actually Joe’s got serious stuff to impart.
There’s never a moment, he says, when you can’t alter your own

destiny.
But first, a bit of Eastern wisdom. “A visitor asks the wise man
what consciousness is. The earth, he explains, is resting on a turtle.
‘And what is the turtle resting on?’ she inquires. ‘Another turtle,’
replies the wise man. ‘But what is that turtle resting—’ ‘Madam,’
he interrupts, ‘it’s turtles all the way down.’ ”
A nice segue to his theme, which is Letting Go. To get to the
next level, to truly change, you’ve got to create space—literally.
“Here’s a take-home exercise,” says Calloway. Go to your attic and
throw stuff out. That box of old videos? Toss it! Those books
you’ve never read and never will. Onto the street. That old speech
you loved to give? Let it go. “But I love my speech!” you say. Let it
go. Don’t get stuck doing something you’re good at.
He comes to the front of the stage. “II you’re sitting there
thinking this isn’t a keynote—let it go!”
He’s got an unusual wrap-up. “Never end with a poem,” said
Nelson Mandela. No, Calloway corrects himself, it was Marianne
Williamson. So he won’t. He’ll end with a video.
“Roll it, guys!”

The lights dim, the big screen flashes the first of several quota¬
tions: “Success is like underwear—when it’s too comfortable it’s
time to change.”

“Do we dare to be ourselves? That is the question.” The line

tielow it reads, “Pablo Casals.”
“Don’t fear mistakes. There are none!” Miles Davis.
There follows a screen: “Joe has left the building.”

28
 Hot, Hot, Hot

Laughs and applause.

Then: “Trust me, it’s over.”
Then: “Are you still watching this? Let it go.”
Ripples of uncomfortable laughter. Eventually a few people
push back their chairs. More follow. The ballroom begins to
empty. The words remain on the screen.
I read those words and imagine he’s speaking to me. I’ve come
to Phoenix with an attitude: that speaking is a scam, that compa¬
nies are wasting tons of money pretending one person on a
podium can make a difference. Nobody can change after sitting in
a chair for an hour and listening to a speech.
Let it go, says Joe.

29
 SPEAKING OF HISTORY

Public speaking hit its stride early, in Greece. The Ancient

Greeks considered oratory an art, just like painting, music, or the¬
ater. Athenian democracy was fertile ground for making speeches.
People wanted to know who would make a wise and just leader—
and why. You got the job by persuading the citizens with reason
and eloquence. Many consider this the golden age of public speak¬
ing, exemplified by Pericles and Demosthenes. Plutarch called
Pericles’ funeral oration for the men who died in the Pelopon¬
nesian War “one of the grandest productions of antiquity.”
Demosthenes, famous for his sharp wit and venomous rejoinder
(and for walking around with a mouthful of pebbles to combat a
childhood speech impediment), made his name with the Philippic
Orations, in which he urged Greeks to rise up against Philip of
Macedon. He was also accused of gender impropriety with a
good-looking youth who shared his home.
In speaking, as in most everything else, Rome soon supplanted—
even surpassed—Greece. Funeral orations were popular in Rome,
though more personal and intimate than Greek eulogies. The Ro¬
man Senate was also a great place to rouse the public. If you wanted
to get a dose of Hash and fire, of magnificent emotion, of violent in¬
vective, the man to hear was Cicero. Mabel Platz, in her book The
History of Public Speaking, called him “the genius of the rostrum.”
His greatest triumphs were the speeches he gave that decried the

30
 Speaking of History

conspiracy of Catiline; thanks to Cicero’s denunciations, Catiline

turned tail and the empire was saved. In gratitude, the Senate ac¬
corded him the title “Father of His Country.” His greatest oration,
ironically, was also his last. With pathos and wit, he delivered a
seething attack on Mark Antony, who had him assassinated.

Mark Antony had himself pulled off one of the more cunning
motivational speeches of all time, if we are to believe Shakespeare.
It sent Brutus and Cassius, no slouches at oratory themselves, run¬
ning for the hills. Caesar himself wasn’t much of a public speaker,
but in times of military need he rose to the challenge, famously
persuading his outnumbered Roman legions to face a horde of
wild-haired, spear-carrying Visigoths.
While great orators held forth in the Roman Senate, a very dif¬
ferent kind of speech was making history on the rocky,
windswept plains of fudea. fesus of Nazareth had none of Ci¬
cero’s eloquence and no schooling in rhetoric. His speeches were
deliberately plain and simple. He spoke to the common man in
short, blunt messages. But he was nothing if not effective. He
could talk a rich man out of his jewels, he could shame the philan¬
derers. His own apostles lacked his talent. Even Paul, not officially
an apostle but the architect of Christianity, made a poor impres¬
sion in person and did his best work in letters.
The next thousand years witnessed a bleak period for public
speaking (and for much else). There were occasional men (and
women) whose talent and message singled them out from the
crowd and insured them a modest place in history. But, as Paltz
points out, the style of early medieval oratory, which mostly meant
sermons, was “very short and dry.”
It was a different story during the Crusades, when orators con¬
vinced hordes of people to march a thousand miles to the Holy
Land and wrest Jerusalem from the heathens. Even with the promise
of a future in heaven, the oratorical achievement was impressive.

31
YES YOU CAN!

The most successful pitchmen were not necessarily the best bred or
schooled. Among the notables was Peter the Hermit, who wan¬
dered the countryside by mule and launched what became known
as the Paupers Crusade, ultimately joining another top talker, Wal¬
ter the Penniless, in Constantinople.
Battles continued to be a good test of a speaker’s mettle. One of
the great motivational talks in history—or at least in literature—
took place in the sixteenth century on the soggy soil of Normandy.
The night before the decisive battle of Agincourt, King Henry V
faced an impossible task: persuade his weary, bedraggled men, a
mere five hundred, to take on an overwhelming force of well-
dressed French on their own soil. He did it with a glorious appeal
to their patriotism and by convincing them that as long as men
could talk, they’d envy the “band of brothers” who fought on St.
Crispin’s Day. Ten thousand Frenchmen lost their lives that day—
and only twenty-eight of Henry’s men.
The standout speaker during the Renaissance was clearly
Savonarola. Born to wealth, he gave up a life ot luxury, turned
monastic, and showed up in Florence, where he made life miser¬
able for its ruler, Lorenzo de’Medici. His vivid language and wild
gestures filled the city’s cathedrals. His tirades against the ruling
class nearly toppled the government. Eventually he went too far,
alienated the pope, and was forced to endure agonizing torture
before being burned alive.
Other reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, fared better.
Luther was not the most appealing figure; rude, coarse, and
even grotesque, his sermons were bitter, if effective, tirades.
Calvin won his following with a more palatable clear, direct
style—and his belief that the Eucharist was mostly symbolic
and did not indicate the actual blood and body of Christ.
Public speaking went flamboyant during the French Revolu¬
tion, as might have been expected. People were bursting with new

32
 Speaking of History

ideas, they were locked in fierce struggle, their lives were at stake.
In the National Convention, during the battle between the noble
Girondists and the impassioned Jacobins, oratory reached its peak.
Danton was a huge favorite with the crowd, a wild man on the
podium and just as powerful when defying his death by guillotine.
The malevolent Robespierre, who had Danton’s blood on his
hands, was even more of a firebrand.

Meanwhile, overseas, Patrick Henry was eloquently stirring the

American colonies into fury. As a lawyer, this tall, gangly fron¬
tiersman made his first great speech denouncing the avarice of
clergy loyal to the Church of England. The preachers wanted
more money, but the taxpayers balked. A jury awarded the men of
God one penny—henceforth any praise for a lawyer went: “He is
almost equal to Patrick Henry when he pleaded against the par¬
sons." It was another twelve years before Henry gave the speech
that made him famous, delivered on March 23, 1773, at St. John’s
Church in Richmond, Virginia, during a Revolutionary conven¬
tion. "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet,” Henry concluded, “as to
be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it,
Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for
me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Considerably milder in manner, Benjamin Franklin nevertheless
deserves a place in any history of persuasion. Humble and self-
effacing, he summed up his own talents thus: “I was but a bad
speaker, never eloquent, subject to much hesitation in my choice of
words, hardly correct in language, and yet I generally carried my
point.” He did not himself deliver what was arguably his most sig¬
nificant speech. He was eighty-two when the Constitution was up
for adoption and seemed unlikely to win a consensus. Not trusting
his voice, Franklin handed his argument to another delegate. His
conclusion—“Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I
expect no better”—won the day, and the document was ratified.

33
YES YOU CAN!

Britain, the motherland, spawned her own share of great ora¬

tors, who chiefly delivered their finest in Parliament. Edmund
Burke argued mightily against social injustice. He was passionate
about the downtrodden in India and argued that the American
colonies were getting a raw deal with the king. In the nineteenth
century the nod went to the Frick and Frack of Victorian imperi¬
alism: William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli’s career
as a speaker started out inauspiciously; he was jeered with hoots of
laughter on his maiden speech in Parliament. “Though I sit down
now, the time will come when you will hear me,” he said and
made good on his promise, becoming England’s first and only
Jewish prime minister. He and Gladstone, the liberal reformer,
dueled for the better part of fifty years.
America’s three greatest speakers were Daniel Webster, John
Caldwell Calhoun, and Henry Clay. They were united not only by
their gifts on the podium but also by their ambition; no three men
in American history ever wanted more urgently to be president.
For many years all sat in the Senate together. Calhoun, a firebrand
from South Carolina, fought furiously for slavery and cotton, be¬
lieving them the twin pillars of a strong South. History has been
kinder toward his early nationalism and advocacy of war with
Great Britain. Clay, a charmer of ladies, had a fiery temper and
was quick to demand a duel. He was masterful with words, cast¬
ing a spell on his audience. Andrew Jackson called him “the
basest, meanest scoundrel who ever disgraced the image of God.”
Webster was passionate about oratory and rhetoric—he read the
entire dictionary of another Webster three times. He remained a
speaker to the end. On his deathbed he whispered: “Have I—wife,
son, doctor, friends, are you all here?—have I on this occasion said
anything unworthy of Daniel Webster?”

A second triumvirate followed these three giants: William

Henry Seward, Stephen Arnold Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln.

34
 Speaking of History

Seward, a lawyer, was brilliant, urbane, and persuasive. Long be¬

fore Clarence Darrow, he was the prototype of the passionate yet
cunning courtroom advocate for the poor and neglected. His tri¬
umph was the 1846 defense of a feebleminded black man,
William Freeman, who broke into a farmhouse and stabbed four
people to death. Seward claimed that Freeman’s mental deficiency
rendered him unaccountable, arguing, “The executioner cannot
disturb the calmness of this idiot. He will laugh at the agony of
death ... If you are bent on rejecting the testimony of those who
know, by experience and science, the deep affliction of the pris¬
oner, beware how you misinterpret the handwriting of the
Almighty." Freeman died in jail as Seward was appealing his
death sentence to the Supreme Court. Seward went on to become
governor of New York and might well have ascended to the presi¬
dency had not Lincoln snatched the prize during the i860 conven¬
tion. He was even overshadowed in tragedy. Lincoln’s assassins
had also targeted Seward, who was severely stabbed that same
night and nearly died.
Like Seward later, the short, pugnacious Douglas lost the
presidency—to James Buchanan, a man he called a “pompous
non-entity.” Like Seward’s, Douglas’s greatness as a thinker and
orator did not secure him a place in history. He was too jingoistic,
too high-minded. Torn between support for slavery and abolition¬
ism, he was Lincoln’s furious debate opponent in Illinois and died
in 1861 at the start of a tour promoting Lincoln’s war policies. His
self-evaluation was typically melodramatic and harsh: “My life is
a failure, a flat failure.”

For a good three thousand years, most speeches had been aimed at
persuading a group or crowd into action, whether it was to charge
a horde of Huns, unseat a king, or hang a murderer. The nineteenth

35
YES YOU CAN!

century in America was notable for a new phenomenon, however:

the rise of the professional speaker. Suddenly there arose an inter¬
est in mere information, in education, and the professional

speaker satisfied that need.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, libraries were few, maga¬
zines even rarer, and most newspapers highly partisan—yet the era
of Jacksonian democracy would breed a heady appetite for knowl¬
edge. In 1826, an article in the American Journal of Education pro¬
posed what it called a lyceum for educational lectures. Two years
later, there were two hundred lyceums; by 1835, the number had
soared to three thousand. The lyceum movement was a big hit. It
also quickly outgrew the available local talent, mostly lawyers and
preachers, and turned into a traveling circuit of blue-ribbon
speakers that featured the likes of Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Horace Greeley, and Henry
Ward Beecher. Initially, speakers were modestly paid, if at all, and
run-of-the-mill talent rarely charged more than $10 or $20. (It
was a different story for the likes of Beecher, who commanded
$250 an appearance—serious cash in those days). Though travel
between engagements could be challenging, it didn’t stop the more
ambitious podium pounders. Nor did each speech require a lot of
invention. The so-called “King of the Lyceum,” Wendell Phillips,
delivered the same speech, entitled “The Lost Arts,” some two
thousand times in a forty-year span, clearing over $10,000 a year.
Bigger things were yet to come. In 1874, at Lake Chautauqua in
western New York, a fellow named John Vincent converted a
Sunday school summer course into a series of talks on different
topics. So-called “Chautauquas” soon spread all over the country,
but it wasn’t until 1904, thirty years later, that Vincent hit on his
truly big idea: the traveling Chautauquas. Like the circus, they
went from town to town, throwing up tents. When that idea
threatened to tank, Vincent came up with an ingenious scheme:

36
 Speaking of History

get flat guarantees from each town. Soon ten thousand towns had
signed on for Chautauqua programs. Each year, as many as four
million people trooped into the tents.

It meant a nice payday for speakers. William Jennings Bryan, a

“free silver” advocate who famously refused to he crucified on a
cross of gold, made out very nicely in coin, taking in as much as
Sioo,ooo a year. Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister, gave the same
lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” several hundred times a year for
fifty years. It was a lesson on how to get rich, and with the profits
he founded Temple University.
But it was war, not money, that roused so many to eloquence. In
Europe, Otto von Bismarck delivered one of his finest speeches to
the German Reichstag in 1898. “He who breaks against us ruth¬
lessly will learn the warlike love of the Fatherland,” he declared,
in the first ominous rumbling of German imperialism, soon to
reach a yet more horrifying embrace in the person of Adolf Hitler.
It was the Fiihrer’s power of insane oratory that led to the cen¬
tury’s second tragic conflict. On the side of good, Franklin Roose¬
velt could turn a phrase, but it was Winston Churchill who raised
oratory to its finest hour. One of Churchill’s most memorable
speeches will likely remain the shortest speech on record. An old
man, he approached the podium to address a large postwar gath¬
ering. He took off his hat and said, “Never give up!” He repeated
it twice, then put his hat back on and left.
Religion, not surprisingly, has produced more than its share of
giants. In Wheaton, Illinois, an entire museum, the Billy Graham
Center, is devoted to the pulpit power of evangelists, a history that
began in the eighteenth century when a host of English ministers
competed to convert the colonists. George Whitefield, whose
sermons were printed by Ben Franklin, was renowned for his
“trumpet-like voice” and saved twenty thousand in the space of three
months: “I have scarce had time to eat,” was his only complaint.

37
YES YOU CAN!

Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, known as the “itinerant evan¬

gelist,” saw his Hock shoot from three hundred to two hundred
thousand. The most damboyant of all came along at the end of the
nineteenth century. He was the man who played second base for
the Chicago White Stockings, Billy Sunday.
Converted at the Pacidc Garden Mission in Chicago in 1886,
Sunday gave up ball to rail against Baal, and he did it like no one
else. The museum has a famous engraving of Sunday literally atop
the pulpit, arm thrust out, a furious expression on his face. A 1926
News of the Weef newsreel shows him in peak form, “even without
one of the new microphones,” fulminating against repeal of the
Eighteenth Amendment. “We don’t need rum,” he cries, “we need
righteousness! We don’t need jags, we need Jesus!”
The second half of the museum is devoted to Billy Graham
himself. Fists like hammers, eyes raised to heaven, the iron-jawed
man of God drew unheard-of crowds. Wall Street was packed
with thirty thousand during his 1957 New York crusade; in the
space of weeks, more than two million took seats at Madison
Square Garden. Babe Ruth could not have competed with him at
Yankee Stadium, where Graham declaimed, “No man could have
brought this crowd! This is your night with Almighty God.” The
very day I visited the museum, Graham was taking a second (and
likely last) bite of the Big Apple. Infirm, suffering from half the
ailments known to man, he packed them in at Flushing Meadow.
The pulpit seems to be good for longevity. Another preacher,
Norman Vincent Peale, was ninety-five when he died on Christ¬
mas Eve, 1993. A fiery Methodist minister, he is best known for a
book that was rejected by virtually every New York publisher in
the early fifties. Dejected, he threw the manuscript into the garbage
and ordered his wife to leave it there. She did—and carried the
wastebasket to yet another publisher, who had it printed—but not
before a wily editor changed the words “power of faith” to “power

38
 Speaking of History

of positive thinking” every time they appeared. The Power of Posi¬

tive Thinking went on to sell twenty million copies.
Positive thinking got a secular twist from another lively
speaker, W. Clement Stone. Born poor, he founded the Combined
Insurance Company (now part of the Aon Corporation) and
teamed up with Napoleon Hill to publish Success Through a Posi¬
tive Mental Attitude in i960. He loved to rouse crowds, however
small. The financial columnist Terry Savage (a serious speaker in
her own right) once sat a row in front of Stone on a transatlantic
flight. “As the flight attendants were trying to rouse sleepy passen¬
gers for an early morning landing in London,” she recalled, “I
suddenly heard a loud voice behind me: ‘Stand Up. Raise your
arms. Repeat after me: I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel terrific!’ ”
So which came first, the book or the speaker? Not all speakers
had reputations based on books, and not all authors of landmark
uplift books were good speakers. Stone’s coauthor, Hill, had made
his name with the classic How to Get Rich, a detailed study of the
habits of successful men, but he was no standout onstage. On the
other hand, his book was modeled on a giant of self-help publish¬
ing, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie,
who was a terrific speaker. Carnegie (no relation to the steel baron)
grew up dirt-poor on a farm in Missouri and got up at 3 am to
milk cows even while attending college. He sold bacon, soap, and
lard for Armour and Company, headed to New York to become
an actor, and got the YMCA to let him run public speaking
courses for businessmen. The Dale Carnegie Course—twelve eve¬
ning sessions of three hours each—remains a hugely popular re¬
source for shy businesspeople who want to develop self-confidence
and speaking smarts.
A successor to Carnegie in the sales world was another smooth¬
tongued persuader named, appropriately, Earl Nightingale, whose
fame grew out of not a book but a recording, The Strangest Secret.

39
YES YOU CAN!

The secret was strange because it was so obvious: you become

what you think. (We’ll meet Nightingale in more detail later). The
recording was released in the mid-fifties, which was a pivotal de¬
cade for the speaking business. The mood in the country had
turned optimistic. Fears of a return of a postwar depression had
faded; material progress boomed. Everyone was feeling positive
(the majority, at least, who weren’t rebelling against blandness and
conformity). Even more important, the age of air travel meant
speakers could come to specific events. Previously, almost all en¬
gagements were based on tours and limited to the club and college
market—since few big companies would arrange an event for a
date they couldn’t control.
The fifties also set the stage for a new generation of speakers
with a new kind of message, that of personal transformation. In
previous eras, the majority of speakers had tied change to example
and imposition; we acquired new values inspired by the action of
others. Now we were encouraged to turn inward, to examine our¬
selves and discover new modes of belief and behavior. The notion
that all we can accomplish, our highest potential, lies within us,
got its first boost from the psychologist Abraham Maslow and his
breakthrough 1954 book, Motivation and Personality. It reached its
apotheosis in the person of Tony Robbins, who wrote Awaken the
Giant Within in 1991.
Robbins practiced what he preached: he bestrode the latter half
of the century like a colossus. Tossed from home by his mother at
age seventeen for being “too intense,” he discovered neurolinguis¬
tic programming (NLP) and went from a fat, lonely janitor to a
multimillionaire. He consulted with the world’s top corporations,
coached Olympic athletes, and advised presidents. His recipe for
unlimited power held wide appeal, but it also came at a price: you
had to work at it. “Change happens in an instant,” he declared—
but you had to learn the recipe. It helped to read the five hundred

40
 Speaking of History

dense pages of Awaken the Giant Within. It helped to sign up for

his weekend seminars and mastery programs. The motivator had
met the marketer.

Marketing is what led to the bulging “self-help” sections in

bookstores, because the “self” was merely a sop to our pride. Just
as therapy, an internal examination, gave way to coaching, an ex¬
ternal strategy (a phenomenon we’ll look at later), so did change
require a guide, an ally. Stephen Covey’s The j Habits of Highly
Effective People was basically old-fashioned horse sense, but the
message was in the details. You needed to buy the program. The
happy hedonists of the Me Decade had become the Help Me Gen¬
eration. We had become reliant on others to help lead our lives.
Experts were good, but the speaker could also get by with mere
conviction, with sheer enthusiasm. In his personal qualities—his
get-up-and-go, his vision—he was a model for all we hoped to
become. He became more accessible. He was no longer a fiery
preacher, the corporate titan, a man of intimidating erudition. He
was more likely a person like those in his audience—a salesman,
an entrepreneur, a frustrated performer. Leo Buscaglia typified
the warm helping hand of the common man. This shrinking in
stature had an interesting side effect. It encouraged the listener to
get up on the podium, too. Who hasn’t sat through a talk and
thought, “I could do that”? From a certain perspective it didn’t
take more than a clear voice, decent posture, and the chutzpah to
hand out advice in a big auditorium.
The impulse, ironically, looks particularly attractive to those
whose lives have stalled. Speaking is a way to get back on track. It’s
a way to put the past behind us. And what’s more American than
that? Is it coincidence that Richard Hatch, the first winner of TV’s
Survivor, hopped on the podium even as he was dodging the IRS?
A criminal record is no disqualification. Victor Woods, whom I
met at a Chicago book fair hawking his book, A Breed Apart: A

41
YES YOU CAN!

Journey to Redemption, decided to become a motivational speaker

while he was doing six years in federal prison for credit card fraud.
Wilbert Rideau, a triple killer who bills himself as “The Most Re¬
habilitated Prisoner in America,” actually gives speeches while in
prison. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “There are no second acts
in American lives.”
He’d never heard of motivational speaking.
He’d never been to Houston.

42
 ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE

Houston is the capital of Motivation Nation, the city

where all is possible. It’s the can-do city, founded on swamp with
no access to water. Not a problem. When Galveston was blown
off the map in the 1825 hurricane, the city fathers dug a canal forty
miles north. Now Houston is the largest port container city in the
country. More bulk cargo goes through here than through New
York, New Jersey, and Boston combined. Surprised? You
shouldn't be. This is the land of enterprise gone wild. It’s the only
major U.S. city with no zoning laws. Anything goes here, and big¬
ger is always better. The mansions in River Oaks begin at 25,000
square feet. The medical facility sprawls over twenty-five acres
and is bigger than the top three medical schools combined. The
Galleria may have abdicated its Largest Mall in America crown to
the Mall of America in Minneapolis, but the Galleria was first—
and it keeps on growing. The city’s downtown is a forest of sky¬
scrapers built on the fortunes of oil and gas. It’s no accident that
this is where Enron hoodwinked the world and built its empire.
Folks here think if it’s big, it’s got to be good—no questions asked.
We’ll come back to Houston shortly. But first, let’s visit one of
its suburbs. There’s little better example of mind over matter, of
the power of will, than twenty miles south in the sleepy, aptly
named town of Friendswood. It’s here that I spent the better part
of an afternoon in the company of John Maisel.

43
YES YOU CAN!

Maisel is unremarkable looking. He’s short, with a robust chest

and a friendly, disarming manner. His home sits on a verdant five-
acre piece of land with grand trees and lush tropical planting. The
house itself is new. When Hurricane Alicia planted itself for three
days over Houston in the fall of 2004, Maisel’s house went under¬
water. It cost him $4,000 just to have his carpeting hauled away.
Standing in the new wing of the house, he points to the sixty-inch
Sony Jumbotron that occupies the better part of a rebuilt wall.
“That TV was under three feet of water. And it still works. I

call it the miracle TV."

Maisel does not throw around the word “miracle" casually.
Truth is, he doesn’t really believe in the miraculous. He believes in
the power of intentionality. He helps people develop what he calls
“uncommon certainty."
We walk past the swimming pool, through a fence of shrubs,
and into a great spreading lawn. A 150-foot pine towers above us.
There are oaks everywhere. We walk across the grass to an area
defined by four high stakes or poles connected at the top by a
single strand of wire. Streaming ribbons—red, blue, yellow,
orange—flutter from the poles.
“It’s a cathedral,” says Maisel. “This is a sacred space.”
What makes it special is a small semicircle of ashes dead center
in the square. It looks innocuous now, maybe the remnants of an
old campfire. There was a fire here alright, but not the kind to
toast marshmallows on sticks. For one thing the fire was very hot;
the coals reached temperatures of up to 1,400 degrees. For an¬
other, people walked on the coals.
“Here’s where I help people transform their fears,” says Maisel.
John Maisel is a firewalker. By some accounts he is a champion
firewalker. He has done over three thousand walks. Most of them
are 10 or 12 feet in length, but he’s also gone a lot further. He
claims to have walked 310 feet, which, improbably, is almost 100

44
 Anything's Possible

teet past the longest firewalk in the Guinness Boo\ of World Rec¬
ords (Guinness, however, names Maisel among a handful of “rec¬
ommended” experts). He uses Texas red cedar, which burns at
1,200 to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. He’s tried oak, but the embers
come out with sharp, hard edges that could hurt your feet. He
claims never to have had an injury.

A couple ot weeks ago, he Hew to Vermont at the behest of the

Benfield Group, an elite international group of top salespeople
headquartered in Britain. Maisel does most of his corporate work
lor a lee ol between $5,000 and $8,000. The morning ol the Ben¬
field conference was spent in intense exercise led by a retired Navy
Seal. The firewalk was the evening conclusion. When it came
time, nine out of ten took oil their shoes and socks and stepped
across the embers. No one was injured.
How is this possible? Maisel dismisses the most common
claim—that the ash provides a “cushion”—with a sweep of his
hand. No, it’s all about the power of mind. He coaches rookies in a
five-part plan: 1) know where you are, namely in front of a bed of
red-hot embers; 2) know where you’re going—envision yourself
on the other side; 3) have a plan—and never run; 4) lollow the
plan; 5) expect the best.
He might have added: don’t underestimate the difficulty. Last
year the producers ol the TV show Survivor flew him to the Pearl
Islands to determine whether a firewalk was a safe and feasible
test. He decided it was not.
On the other hand, he successfully ran a firewalk on another
distant atoll, the island of Mareah off Tahiti, for MTV. He ran
another at a Conde Nast sales retreat for the top people at its now-
defunct magazine Cargo.
The explanation of how a barefooted human can step on red-
hot coals and not get burned can get a little mystical. As Maisel ex¬
plains it, it’s all about connecting with nature, “the only life force

45
YES YOU CAN!

on earth that can communicate with fire.” He talks a lot about de¬
veloping “uncommon certainty,” which he defines as knowing
without having to know how you know.” He is very respectful of
Native Americans, particularly the Lakota Sioux, who made a
habit of walking on fire. He believes it is “absolutely possible to
have ice-cold fire.” He sees facing a firewalk as being on the
threshold—either propelled by fear or invited by the sense that it’s
okay. If you pick the right way, then there is no limit to what you
can do. Maisel has seen devotees bend steel. He has seen a man
make the walk in pantyhose—and nothing burned.
“It’s all about goal-setting,” says Maisel. “The belief that any¬

thing is possible.”
Like many converts to a motivational career, Maisel got into it
through a crisis. His life, as he puts it, had stopped working. Mostly
he felt alienated from his oldest son. Seeking to establish some
bond, something “far out there,” he decided to walk on coals.
Three thousand firewalks later, he is talking to his son—more
than talking. His son has joined the ranks.
“He has fire immunity like no one I’ve ever seen,” says Maisel.
“He can sit on coals. He can pick up coals.”
Not everyone needs to walk on coals to turn their life around,
not in Houston. Garrison Wynn used to sell funerals.
He was a hotshot manager at one of the world’s largest pre¬
arranged funeral companies, Service Corporation International.
Before that he was an actor and stand-up comedian. Funerals,
he found, were easier on the nerves. The business was all about
telemarketing. You called and hoped you got the man of the
house. The pitch was simple: you’re going to die before she does,
relieve her of the burden, freeze the price.
“I was known as the punk boy manager, young and arrogant. I
fired fourteen people and they all sued me. So I went into indus¬
trial sales. I flew around the world to conferences, to Jakarta, Bali.

46
 Anything’s Possible

It was too weird. Automatic weapons in the morning, call to

mosque in the evening. So I quit my job and joined a company that
showed people how to build better relations with the IRS. What
do I know about taxes? Nothing. But I was good as a presenter—
very good.”

Next he started doing corporate entertainment gigs. He

worked Houston s civic circuit (“Houston’s a great place, the
meetings are open to anyone”). He did the clubs—Lions, Elks,
“something called the Optimists Club, which was a bunch of the
most negative people you’ve ever met.” He went to a Rotary meet¬
ing and met the head of “some gigantic organization.” Now he’s
got relationships with top gas and oil companies.
“I make more money doing an hour of speaking than in a
month of stand-up,” he says. “My business is huge.”
I don’t doubt it. We are cruising a wealthy suburb of Houston
in his BMW convertible. He points out his old house, the one he
moved up from, which is pretty nice. His furious patter notwith¬
standing, Wynn is a very likable person. He’s funny about his act¬
ing career. He did a movie, Laughing Boy, “that was so bad it went
to video while we were still shooting.” Like many speakers, Wynn
has a confessional side; he’s happy to share his life—and not all of
it is pretty. He had health problems. He was a hard-drinking
party animal. He bounced around a lot. He knows his limits.
“My line is, I’m at least as lucky as good. If you want to be a
motivational speaker, you’d better have a damn good story. You
better have survived death or a plane crash or cancer or burns. You
need to be missing some limbs, because no one cares about your lit¬
tle story. So I don’t talk a lot about myself. The worst reason to be
a speaker is thinking you’ve got a bunch of stuff to tell people and
want to show how smart you are.”
Wynn works hard. His new company is called Wynn Solutions.
He talks about the “Truth of Success.” He does over a hundred

47
YES YOU CAN!

gigs a year for between $5,000 and $8,000. A lot come through
agencies—speakers’ bureaus. Like Keith Harrell, he knows that
the price of fame is marketing. He spends big on videos, and his
Web site, which is “riddled” with search words, has high-end
graphics. He’s realistic—in fact, that’s his mantra. The most suc¬
cessful people aren’t the best or sharpest—they’re the ones who
manage their expectations realistically. Kerry was a lot smarter
than Bush, Bush spent more on tutoring than tuition. But look
who’s president—the guy we’re comfortable with. Wynn is equally
realistic about change. Pain is a great motivator. “When the pain
becomes greater than the fear of change, they change. And some¬
times not a minute before that.”
What about self-knowledge? I ask him. He shrugs.
You can be in therapy forever and not move an inch. “A lot of
people,” he says, “are driven crazy by how much they know.”
It’s conceivable that Wynn would not be where he is without an¬
other’s help. He was funny and a great entertainer. He could keep
an audience of a thousand amused. But nobody was getting much
out of his talks. There were, in the lingo, no “take-aways.” The
woman who got him to deliver the goods is Mary Beth Roach-
Elkins.
You’ve seen her likes in beauty pageants, the tall, stunning
Texan who twirls batons and majors in speech. Roach—her pro¬
fessional name—was all that and more. A national collegiate ba¬
ton champ, she toured beauty pageants for a year before hitting the
books again—for a master’s in speech and a “mammoth study” on
Mae West. In high school she’d competed in speech. Now she
tried Dale Carnegie, liked the teaching but not the pay, and ended
up at the 1984 NSA convention in Phoenix with an unusual busi¬
ness card. She had herself pictured on one side looking profes¬
sional; on the other side, Roach was dressed as Mae West.
That first night, she ended up at a restaurant with the previous

48
 Anything's Possible

year’s convention chair, John Daley, his wife, and friends. In¬
trigued by her card, Daley asked for a quick demo. Minutes later
his friends were falling off their chairs. It led to NSA’s hig pooh-
bah, Nido Quebain, inviting Roach to do a walk-on at the ban¬
quet and then perform at NSA’s upcoming “Hotlanta” confab.
1 had twelve minutes, ’ says Roach of her gig in Atlanta. “I was
in full costume. I had funny lines and lots of audience interaction.
Then I changed right in front of everybody, the jewelry, the wig,
the fenders. I got someone in the audience to put it all on. In thirty
seconds. I wasn't even an NSA member then. Nobody had heard
of me. But that put me on the map. That started my career.”
She became a coach. Soon the phone was ringing off the hook.
Jim Tunney, the ex-NFL ref, wanted help with his new career,
motivational speaking. The third wife of Jerry Lee Lewis, his un¬
derage third cousin, needed a boost with her book, Great Balls of
Fire. Roach charged $300 an hour and helped them all. Wynn
learned to “get on message”—not just do funny lines. Roach took
on a doctor, a genial family GP in Houston named Ken Davis,
who'd successfully tried amateur speaking when he got bored
with palpating stomachs but whose confidence took a serious hit
the day he turned pro.
“He was not very good,” admits Roach. “He had terrible ges¬
tures. He didn’t know how to outline a speech. But we worked on
it. He told a joke one day and it was funny. I told him, ‘I bet you
were the class clown.' He was amazed: ‘How did you know?’ So I
started him telling jokes.”
The doctor got funnier but no more focused. Then one day he
received a telephone call. “You’ll never believe who called this
morning,” he reported to Roach.

“Okay, who?”
“A national radio personality. Want a hint? ‘And that’s the
. 5 JJ
story.

49
YES YOU CAN!

“Paul Harvey!” she yelped.

It seems Harvey had been reading Chicken Soup for the Soul
and came across a fable on baseball that Davis had written about
his dad. Roach was stunned. She never knew Davis liked baseball.
The next coaching session she got him talking about it—about his
Yankees obsession and autographed balls and some crazy games.
She got him telling funny stories. Together they developed his first
speech, a seven-minute talk called “Baseball’s Like Life.”
He won an international speaking competition sponsored by

Toastmasters.
He developed it into a keynote. He wrote a book, Candy,
Booze and Sex. He developed a speech about stress called “From

Burned Out to Fired Up.”

Davis did forty-five programs in 2004. Some were free local
gigs, many in the medical community. But he also did corporate
slots and got paid $3,500. The year 2005 was filling up fast.
“It’s a good diversion from the medical practice,” says Davis.
Roach, meanwhile, had stored her Mae West wig in the attic
and was giving her own speech, “The Art of Being Exceptional.”
It was all about discovering your uniqueness and turning your
passion into success. “My father had a tenth-grade education,” she
says. “But he always loved roads. He built one of the largest con¬
struction companies in Texas and became a multimillionaire.”
Roach’s own ambition took a new turn.
“Eventually,” she says, “I got tired of speaking. I was a very
good entertainer, I was good with people, and I was still good-
looking. So I decided that my uniqueness was to marry a very
wealthy man and make him happy. Which is what I did. His
name’s Hartzell Elkins and he was the former CEO of Coca-
Cola. He retired at forty-seven. He plays golf and likes to grill. We
have three ranches and we’re always entertaining.”
There are countless others in Houston. Sue Pistone, a Get

50
 Anything's Possible

Organized guru, got the speaking bug when her self-esteem was
on the floor after a bad marriage. She was invited to a rally featur¬
ing Cavett Robert and Zig Ziglar.

I felt they were talking to me. They made me feel really good.
They helped me set goals. I didn’t know people did that for a liv¬
ing, omigosh! Right then 1 decided to be a professional speaker.”
For the next six years she read a self-improvement book a week.
She gave her first paid speech at the age of thirty-seven. Now she
helps others get organized. She belongs to a “Mastermind” group
with a bunch of Houston speakers, among them Jim Jacobus
(whom we’ll meet shortly up the road in Dallas), software mil¬
lionaire Wayne Springer, and a woman named Theresa Behenna.
Behenna’s a pianist—Pistone calls her “awesome, I mean Carnegie
Hall awesome.”
It would be wrong to leave Houston without a nod to the city’s
newest and most famous motivational speaker. Three years ago he
was running audiovisuals at his daddy’s church. Today he’s pastor
of that church. His sermons are franchised dozens of times a week
in virtually every state. A fifteen-city national tour in the spring of
2005 filled sports arenas. His own congregation is now so big that
it recently moved into the refurbished Houston Rockets arena,
which seats twenty thousand. His book, Your Best Life Now, hit
the top of the self-help best-seller charts in 2004 and went on to
sell three million copies.
Sue Pistone, among his legion of fans, says, “Omigosh, I listen
to him every single morning! He touches my heart. He’s simple
and honest and not pretentious. When I travel, I TiVo him.”
We are speaking, of course, of Joel Osteen.
I happened on him by chance one Sunday morning while
watching TV on a treadmill. 1 am not a church person, yet I was
mesmerized. A handsome, athletic-looking man with slicked-back
hair and a perpetual smile that seemed strangely sincere, Osteen

51
YES YOU CAN!

patrolled the stage of a huge auditorium while cameras picked up

shots of his vast, riveted congregation, white, black, Hispanic,
young, old. He spoke with impressive precision. He talked nonstop
without notes. I loved his stories. That first morning it was some¬
thing about hunting dogs in a pickup truck who were totally
focused—unlike humans, who cluttered their lives with worry and

errands.
Another day he told about a class in time management. The
professor took a mason jar and filled it with big rocks. “Is the glass
full?” he asked a student. The student said yes. The professor
poured in gravel. “Now is it filled?” Yup. He poured in sand, then
water. Now was it filled? Absolutely.
“What’s the lesson?” asked the professor.
“There’s always more we can do?” the student answered brightly.
The professor shook his head. “You missed the point com¬
pletely. In life,” he said, “you have to start with the big rocks.”
Osteen held out his arms. “Those rocks are our dreams. Our
possibilities. And we need to make them a priority. Don’t wait for
tomorrow to take that step. It could be embracing God. It could be
starting a business or even getting out of debt. Whatever it is, my
friends, you need to start with the big rocks.”
In the spring of 2006, Osteen signed a publishing deal with Si¬
mon & Schuster worth an estimated $13 million. That would top
previous record-holders Bill Clinton ($10 million) and, more re¬
cently, Alan Greenspan ($8.5 million). More significantly, he
swapped a big advance for what’s known as a copublishing agree¬
ment, entitling him to fifty percent of Simon & Schuster’s profits
on his new book.
The preacher knows all about big rocks.

52
 PART TWO

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

*
 THE MILLION
DOLLAR HUSTLE

Does this resonate at all? You trudge into the office in

body armor to deflect the day’s indignities. Just once, you’d like
someone to appreciate the stuff you do. A little respect—is that
too much to ask? Maybe you’re not feeding orphans in Africa, but
it’s something. If only you didn't have to convince yourself of that
every morning.
A motivational speaker can help.
That’s certainly the strategy of an organization called the Mil¬
lion Dollar Round Table (MDRT), a worldwide organization of
insurance salesmen, or—as MDRT likes to bill itself—“The Pre¬
mier Association of Financial Professionals.” It counts 28,000
members in seventy countries. At one time, members had to qualify
with Si million in sales. That requirement has now been softened
to $67,000 in commissions, and the organization downplays the
“Million Dollar Round Table” name. Instead it promotes MDRT
as an acronym for Members, Drive, Relationship, and Trust.
That last word may be the key to its most troublesome
problem—poor public image. A 2001 Gallup poll of honesty and
ethics in professions ranked car salesmen lowest; just above them
on the list were advertising writers and insurance salesmen. We
should be more forgiving. These folks are under a lot of pressure
to sell policies. Lots of times they work alone. They need reassur¬
ance, they need some loving. No wonder they flock to MDRT’s

55
YES YOU CAN!

annual meeting. For the seven thousand-plus attendees, it’s a non¬

stop blast of pep talk and uplift.

“Many people join MDRT just to come to our meeting,’’ says
Sharon Neville, the meetings’ executive producer. “It’s the jewel in

our crown.”
Guess who else comes to the meeting? That’s right—speakers.
Lots of speakers. MDRT’s 2004 confab in Anaheim clocked in
with one hundred speakers. And only the anointed mount this hal¬
lowed platform. Careers are launched here. It’s where unknowns
dream of breaking into the majors. It’s where stars cement their
reputation. The annual meeting of MDRT is the World Series of

speaking.
MDRT is an old organization, founded back in 1927, spawned
from the National Association of Life Underwriters (NALU), a
group formed in 1890 to combat the poor reputation and corrupt
practices of so many insurance salesmen. It was a Boston salesman
with John Hancock, Paul F. Clark, who came up with the idea of
forming an elite subgroup, a so-called “inner circle,” to raise stan¬
dards and secure goodwill. During the annual meeting at the
Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, he got thirty others to join
him. Their goal was not entirely high-minded. They were also out
to sell policies, and came up with thirty-eight sales techniques
guaranteed to win clients, classics like “Keep quiet when a prospect
pauses to think"—and not-such-classics like “Promise to buy a ru¬
ral fellow a fine new pair of pants if he’ll sign up.”
The group is considerably more sophisticated now—and well
endowed. Company headquarters are a sprawling 65,000-square-
foot three-story building in the Chicago neighborhood of Park
Ridge. There are eighty people on staff. Many of them work at the
MDRT Foundation, a charity that has dispensed over $10 million.
Groups that champion children's needs are prime recipients,
though the foundation also aids seniors, the poor, and disabled

56
 The Million Dollar Hustle

people. It virtually started the Make-a-Wish Foundation. There is a

bracing pride about it in its concern lor others, which is how
MDRT would like to portray the sale of hie insurance. One tape of
an annual meeting has members crying, “I protect the innocent!”
and I live a life of significance!" The big themes in its seventy-fifth
anniversary souvenir program were “Sharing” and “Caring. That
event, like every annual meeting, was an amped-up feel-good gala
that is part business school, part cheerleading practice, and part
evangelical revival. To quote from the seventy-fifth anniversary
keepsake, it is where “members leap up to applaud industry heroes
and honored guests. They cheer at the tales of triumph and sob
with compassion at tales of adversity conquered. When the names
of deceased members scroll on the main platform screen, members
grieve as they would for close relatives.”
“We’re probably the only organization whose primary modus
operandi is to make our members feel good about what they do
and about themselves,” says Ray Kopcinski, VP and Meeting Ser¬
vice director. “That’s the focus of our annual meeting. It’s impor¬
tant for our members to get recharged.”
But it is the speakers who have made the annual meeting leg¬
end. Over the years, MDRT has nabbed most of the major players,
from Colin Powell and Barbara Bush to Lee Iacocca and Queen
Noor of Jordan. Often, however, it’s the no-names that bring out
the handkerchiefs. Again, the program: “When a nine-year-old
who sold hair combs to benefit children with cancer spoke, mem¬
bers bought out her entire supply. When children with Down’s
syndrome performed a hoop dance, two members—both male—
stayed seated, overcome with emotion as the room emptied."
Motivational speakers are big in the mix. So acclaimed is the
podium that MDRT receives more xk\an fifteen hundred tapes a year
from meeting hopefuls. At company headquarters, there is an en¬
tire room with floor-to-ceiling shelves and cardboard cartons—all

57
YES YOU CAN!

crammed with videotapes. Videotapes are the calling cards in the

speaker business. You want to sign with a bureau? You need a tape.
You want a gig at IBM? You need a bureau and a tape—and it bet¬
ter not be one ol those cheapo one-camera shoots with a red curtain

and no audience that looks like bad porn.

But you can't tell everything from a tape, which is why MDRT
also stages a full dress rehearsal months before the meeting.
Kopcinski has his standards. No “slick Willies.” No canned guys.
Even then, he admits, the occasional clinker slips through. He’s
particularly sensitive to the mere “performers,” the men and women
who have a platform persona but turn out to be totally different
offstage. Kopcinski recalls, with a grimace, a speaker whose entire
speech was “don’t sweat the small things in life, go for what’s im¬
portant, the big stuff,” but who was a nervous wreck in person.
“He was throwing up offstage. He kept saying, ‘I’m not going on,
I can’t do this.’ Our producer said, 'If you don’t do this I’m going
to kick your ass.’ Basically he pushed him out there."
Another offender was a big-time basketball coach who gave one
of the best speeches ever. “He comes across as a warm and witty guy,
and you think, 'Gee, I’d love to sit down with him and swap sto¬
ries,’ ” says Kopcinski. “He wasn’t that kind of guy at all. He arrived
in a limo, jumped out, walked right up to the stage, did his thing. As
soon as it was over, he didn’t say hi or boo or good-bye. He jumped
back in his limo and was gone. He wasn’t a people person at all.”
The majority, of course, are big hits. Neville herself was partic¬
ularly moved by Joan Brock. You may have heard of Joan Brock.
She was the woman teaching braille in a school for the blind
when she, astonishingly, went blind herself. The victim of a rare
disease, she eventually learned to cope and starred in her own cable
TV movie, which culminated in her speaking at MDRT. That
launched her speaking career. Marvels Neville: “She could walk
out and sit on a stool and you’d never realize she was blind.”

58
 The Million Dollar Hustle

Not all hard-luck stories qualify for the platform. The folks at
MDRT are very discerning. Overcoming adversity is a big draw,
but the speaker can’t have courted disaster. Joan Brock went blind
by accident, stresses Neville. Not so the people who climb moun¬
tains and get into sticky situations because they’re reckless. One
such, a Texas M.D., has never spoken at MDRT. The doctor sur¬
vived an incredible ordeal descending Everest in a storm that
doomed seven other climbers in 1995. He clawed his way through
the ice and lost his fingers. But what kind of man, asks Neville,
leaves a wife and kids behind to take that kind of risk? Not the
type you'll find speaking at MDRT’s annual meeting.
Anything to do with children goes over big. Among last year’s
highlights was an autistic twelve-year-old who had become a jazz
pianist. He wrote the official theme song for the conference,
which happened to be “Wow!” And who will ever forget the
young Israeli and Palestinian boys who started from opposite sides
of the stage? With each statement they took a step closer, until
they came together center stage to thunderous applause.
What members get out of these speeches in the long term is
harder to nail down. Kopcinski concedes that the impact can be
hard to assess. So much depends on personality, readiness, tim¬
ing. No one does formal studies, though there is ample feedback
from those who’ve been struck by a speaker’s message. Kopcinski
himself is a prime example. A few years back, he was sitting
through a rehearsal listening to yet another speaker—half-
listening, really, over the years he’d heard dozens and dozens—
when his ears pricked up. He doesn’t even remember the name of
the speaker. “He was one of those ‘now’s the time, you say you’re
going to do it—do it’ speakers.” But something clicked. Before
the speaker was even done, Kopcinski was out of the auditorium
and on a phone in the hall, making arrangements to climb Grand

Teton.

59
YES YOU CAN!

He’d always meant to take a shot at climbing, but circum¬

stances were never right. He didn’t have the money; he had young
children. Now he went into overdrive. He became a man pos¬
sessed. He climbed Grand Teton, a moderately challenging moun¬
tain in Wyoming. He climbed it again with his son. He climbed
Mount Ranier three times, Mount Whitney three times, Mount
Kilimanjaro, Mount Opus in Russia, and Mount Incagua in South
America. He’s gone ice climbing twice.
“Circumstances conspired to make it the right time,’’ he says.
Producing a major meeting is a big deal. There used to be lots
of businesses devoted to just that: staging the event, hiring speak¬
ers. Of late the business has declined, hurt by recession and a pref¬
erence by some companies to make do with PowerPoint. MDRT,
however, is not one to cut corners. Its meeting remains as big as
ever. The company that stages its events is Chicago-based
Williams/Gerard Productions (WGP). For more than ten years,
John Honore has been MDRT’s go-to guy at WGP. He sets up the
huge screens and checks on the lights. He arranged the boom
camera in Anaheim, the same big rig that worked the Oscars and
the funeral of Ronald Reagan. He did the same for other clients,
such as Domino’s Pizza and Kellogg’s. It’s given him a privileged
peek at the world of motivational speakers. He talks about them
with the high-speed patter of a sideshow pitchman who’s still
amazed by what’s out there.
“Frank Miles, he was a street musician. He jumped off a cliff in
a hang glider, hit the ground and died, then got resuscitated. That’s
the twist. He almost died but didn’t. So he does all these stage
tricks with fire and apples and a blindfold. He does a Danny Kaye
Hip. He gets an executive to lie down onstage and drops a bowling
ball on him—or seems to. It’s all about managing your fear.”
We’re having lunch in Chicago’s fish mecca, Shaw’s Crab
House. Honore’s office is seven doors above; he’s come down in an

60
 The Million Dollar Hustle

elevator that opens directly into the restaurant. It’s nice—it saves
time.

He takes a stab at his halibut. “Boh Wieland. He’s a ’Nam vet,

lost his legs, comes bolting from the back of the audience, wheels
down the center aisle. Gets out of his chair and humps his torso
into a chair. T hen he tosses the chair. He walked across America,
one hump at a time. That’s his thing. ‘I lost my legs but I didn’t
lose heart.’ ”

Another amputee may be even more impressive. “Tony Chris¬

tianson. The guy’s got no arms and no legs. He comes up with this
kick-ass rock music, stage left, drags his ass across the stage, then
climbs this scaffold with no arms and legs. Here’s how fucked up
his life was, he tells you, and here’s what he did about it. You
should get off your ass, too.”
Honore’s a vaudeville act all by himself, a curious mix of cyn¬
icism and high humor. He knows what’s behind the curtain in
Oz, but he loves it anyway. Not all of his favorite acts are limb-
challenged either. He’s a big fan of DeWitt Jones, a National Geo¬
graphic photographer who quit chasing a ho-hum sunset when
Masai warriors imparted the wisdom of the veldt: shoot a pack of
endangered hunting dogs. He admires Michael Abershoff, a
young captain in the military who shaped up his crew and gets
$25,0000 a gig. He loves Dale Irwin, another Chicagoan, the guy
who does skewed wrap-ups of what went before. “Funny funny
funny.”
But ultimately he’s got a soft spot for speakers who stop at the

thigh.
“There’s this guy Ronan Tynan, a double amputee. He was born
with these funky little legs where his foot comes out of his knee.
He’s an award-winning horseman, mega-medals in the Special
Olympics. He wanted to be a medical doctor and did that. He used
to sing in pubs. Now he’s one of the Irish Tenors. It’s a wonderful

61
YES YOU CAN!

story. Overcoming adversity. It’s all about inspiration. You can do

great things.”
According to Honore, Tynan might still be singing in pubs
were it not for MDRT. He was a total mess when he showed up to
audition. “This no-legged tenor had nothing to say. He swore like
a sailor. He wouldn’t play ball, and we had to fire him. He finally
got it. After MDRT, 20/20 made an eleven-minute film about him.

MDRT did it.”

I ask Kopcinski if this is true. Just about, he agrees. Tynan was
indeed fired during the rehearsal held months in advance of the
annual meeting. He used a lot of “f-bombs,” says Kopcinski, and
his speech was a disjointed mess. Tynan begged for a second
chance; Kopcinski finally relented and summoned the MDRT
rescue squad. MDRT has a vested interest in making its speakers
look good, especially the rookies. Its speechwriters stand ever
ready to help with a manuscript. There are voice coaches and con¬
sultants to advise the media-naive how to communicate under the
lights. The effort pays off for both MDRT and the speakers. Ty¬
nan, with the help of the rescue squad, mustered a much-improved
performance.
I’m curious to see the lasting effect of MDRT magic. I’m curi¬
ous to see Ronan Tynan.

I catch up with Tynan one wintry day in January at the Soaring

Eagle Casino and Resort in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. The casino
and resort were built in 1987 on a sprawling Chippewa Indian
reservation. Located outside the tiny town of Mount Pleasant in
the state’s far north, the complex comes as a sudden surprise in this
fiatland of snow and ice. The spacious lobby of the hotel overlooks
a frozen lake. To the right are entries to the spa and pool. But go in
the opposite direction, along a long broad corridor, around a bend,

62
 The Million Dollar Hustle

push through a set ot double doors, and immediately the air is

filled with the clanging of a thousand slot machines, the Muzak of
cascading coins. You could be in Atlantic City or Reno or Vegas.
In the middle of this neon sea are a dozen blackjack games; an en¬
thusiastic crowd leans into a craps table. It’s ten in the morning.
Continue on now, past the roast beef cart where gray slabs of
meat simmer in a vat of water, past the hostess stand for the $12.95
all-you-can eat buffet, past billboards promoting upcoming acts
like Joe Cocker and Brooks & Dunn. Soon enough you arrive at
the entertainment center, a vast auditorium spread wide and en¬
veloping a broad stage. It is here that Tynan will shortly be ad¬
dressing the Michigan Road Builders Association (MRBA).
At least, that's what it was called a year ago, when Tynan was
booked. Several members had seen him at other conventions and
were so excited that they got their organization to scrounge up the
extra dollars—Tynan charges about $25,000. It may be money
well spent, since this event has turned out to be more significant
than anticipated. Just a month ago, MRBA merged with Associ¬
ated Underground Contractors, and the unified organization is
called the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Associa¬
tion (MITA). This is MITA’s first convention, and the president of
the new combine couldn’t be more pleased about securing Tynan.
“We got him to do a forty-five-minute presentation plus two
songs,” says Mike Cochran excitedly, as we wander the trade show
just beyond the auditorium. “He won’t tell me which ones, but I’m
hoping for a particular song he sang at the nine-eleven memorial.”
That was the huge event at Yankee Stadium. Tynan also sang
at Ronald Reagan’s funeral by special request of the president. He
sang at George W. Bush’s inaugural by special request of the
president. What makes him most remarkable, however, is not his
voice but his story. Tynan was born with a lower-limb disease
that resulted in very short lower legs. Spurred on by his father, he

63
YES YOU CAN!

nevertheless became an accomplished horseman, jumping to sev¬

eral first-place finishes. At age twenty a horrific motorbike acci¬
dent tore off one leg and caused the amputation of the other.
Competing on prostheses, he proved an outstanding athlete in the
disabled Olympics. He tore down the ioo-meter track in an as¬
tonishing 13.5 seconds—on fake legs. He hurled the discus 215
yards, which remains a record. He likely would have broken more

records; instead he decided to become a doctor.

His residency would have been uneventful had he not landed
on a game show, Go For It. Contestants competed in singing, and
Tynan won. It gave him the confidence to pursue yet another
career—as an opera singer. He won numerous competitions, cli¬
maxing with a staged concert of Madame Butterfly. In 1992 he was
asked to join the Irish Tenors, a popular tour group named after
the Three Tenors. In 2004 he left the group to devote more time to

motivational speaking.
He’s been so successful that ordinarily his appearance here
would seem unlikely. The trade show is modest by convention
standards—maybe twenty booths and tables manned by Central
Asphalt, the Concrete Pipe Association, and St. Regis Culvert.
It’s a friendly group of men, eager to hand out free pens or
Krackel bars along with the paving brochures.
By showtime at 1 pm, close to six hundred people have drifted
into the auditorium and taken seats. The lights darken. A spot¬
light settles on the lectern where the keynote speaker is intro¬
duced: “I give you Ronan Tynan!”
He comes onstage to warm applause and launches into his first
song, “If You Can't See Your Blessings.” It’s a stirring ballad, and
Tynan’s ringing voice fills the auditorium, finishing with, “There’s
a world of light inside of you.” Then a video rolls on two giant
screens, clips from Barbara Walters’s 1999 piece on Tynan that she
did for 20/20.

64
 The Million Dollar Hustle

In the world of motivational speaking, a major topic is the

“canned" versus customized. It’s an issue that was hotly debated
at the NSA convention. Keith Harrell was one ol many who felt
the motivational speaker was entering a new world—“I used to
be known as King Fluff,” he admitted—a post-9/11 world
where companies were reluctant to spend frivolous dollars. Some
speakers have adapted and now lean toward the customized, ac¬
knowledging the crowd, addressing relevant issues. They might
research a company, interview executives, discuss problems and
strategies, even learn individuals’ names. Ronan Tynan is not in
this camp.
There are no references in his speech to the challenges of build¬
ing culverts or disposing of hazardous waste. He is not interested
in grading or runoff. He is here to recap his remarkable life. He
recounts the highlights, the extraordinary father who helped him
win horses races, the Olympic triumphs, the years as a doctor, the
singing. Sprinkled throughout are amusing stories, not a few of
them sexual. The time he stepped on a soprano’s long train and
exposed her ample “backside”; the time, soon after he got his pros-
theses, when his dancing partner bumped up against him and ex¬
claimed, “My, you’re hard!” He has other, less racy tales, several
from opera: the time, playing Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madame But¬
terfly, when he tripped and landed on a prostrate and supposedly
lifeless Butterfly. Whereupon the stage manager inadvertently
broadcast through his live mike: “Well, if she wasn’t dead before,
she sure is now!”
The heart of Tynan’s speech is a summons to appreciate what
others do for you. Over and over again he repeats how much he
owes to his father, friends, his sister Fiona. “You see in yourself the
strength others see in you,” he says.
He envisions a better world. “When you’re happy, people feel
good around you.”

65
YES YOU CAN!

He believes everyone is special. “All of us are ordinary people,

but we are recognized for doing extraordinary things.”
We all need to step up to a challenge, “to throw life’s discus a

little bit further.”

I jot down these phrases even as I wonder at some of the para¬
graphs that follow. Without question, Tynan is a commanding
presence at the lectern. He’s got that compelling singsong Irish
brogue. But not all of it. . . tracks. Later, transcribing my tape of
his speech, I find it seems almost humorously disjointed.
Here, word for word, is Tynan on feeling good about himself:
“When I look in the mirror in the morning, I think, ‘I’m
great!’ And the mirror, of course, never lies. You really do believe
in yourself. What other people see in you, the strength that is
waiting to be harnessed. I would never focus on what I have but
what I want, and the focus opens up realms of possibilities. But
most important, it frees up my mind. So try it, get up in the
morning, go to that bathroom, look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m
.15??
great!
Here is Tynan on living in the moment:
“To have a challenge is like driving in a Formula One motor
race and you have seventy-five laps to cover and two pit stops.
Which hopefully takes less than ten seconds to change tires and
get refueled. Well, in the Formula motor race of life, in my life,
every so often you go to a prosthetic office and get measured for
limbs. Once you get measured, within a week off you go. Remem¬
ber, gentlemen, there is no reverse gear in life. Once one day is
gone, it is gone. Whatever mistakes were made, were made. And
we can only benefit from them.”
A typical Tynan bit of encouragement:
“We cannot become what we need to be by remaining the way
we are. Change is painful but it’s ever needful. We want to im¬
prove and come out the other side. Through work and the dedica-

66
 The Million Dollar Hustle

tion of the people who believe in you—you can become amazing.

You possibly are.”

Its hard to know what the road builders make of this advice.
Certainly there is nothing, not a word, that relates to the Michigan
infrastructure, though he does concede at one point, “My road
through life has had some twists and turns.” This is then followed
immediately, and curiously, by: “Nature cannot be tricked or
cheated. She will only give up the struggle when you have paid the
price.”

Often, what starts out as hearty uplift ends in outer space. If

there is anything remotely connected to his audience, it is this:
“You know, my father used to say to me, ‘Blaze a new trail;
that’s your style,' and it actually became my style. And believe me,
talking to you today, you have all blazed your trail, and you’re all
embarking on a major imagination, which is phenomenal. But to
blaze this trail we have all received so much help along the way—
and the most important fact is to be grateful and humble in receiv¬
ing this wonderful encouragement. People who have recognized
your talent and want so much for you to succeed. You’re sitting
beside them, and you know what? They have an amazing gift.
They sometimes can’t contain themselves with joy when they see

you succeed.”
I may have imagined this, but several road builders glanced
skeptically to their right and left. In my notes, beside some of
these last remarks, I have scribbled: “They can’t?” and “Hunh?”
Given his exhortation to change and blaze trails, I was puzzled
by his farewell sentences: “Don’t ever change. Be proud of why

you are you. God bless.”

Whatever doubts I have are temporarily shelved as Tynan con¬
cludes with his second song. It’s called “The Isle of Hope Is Always
on Your Mind,” and it’s a truly uplifting ballad. Mike Cochran got
his wish: it’s what Tynan sang at the World Trade Center memorial

67
YES YOU CAN!

(and also at Ronald Reagan’s funeral). His ringing voice fills the au¬

ditorium.
There is a generous round of applause. Tynan hurries off to
change, then catch his ride to the airport. We’re slated to talk in
the car. Tynan’s bureau, which set up the interview, nixed a slot
before his speech because, it was explained, “Ronan’s not a morn¬

ing person.”
The car is a midsize sedan, a local taxi, and Tynan settles his
large frame into the front seat. I slide into the back, and we start the
hour-long drive to the Saginaw airport. It’s begun to snow, visibil¬
ity’s dropped, and Tynan looks anxiously out the window. Last
night he opted to cab it from the Detroit airport—two-plus hours—
because his connecting flight to Saginaw was held up by weather.
Before we talk, however, he wants a few minutes on his Black¬
berry.
“No, it’s ‘mam,’ not ‘man,’ ” he says irritably. No, ‘mam, mam!
Right, well, she’s a pain in the butt... I don’t know what she’s af¬
ter .. . Tell her to read the book.” He’s connected to someone else
now. “What are the bills? Is there enough money in that account?
They have to deliver something and they haven’t delivered any¬
thing. Dinner? That sounds very expensive. I’m not happy paying
until the end of March.”
The calls go on for ten minutes before he turns in his seat. I ask
how he got into speaking.
“I was asked to do it. It was 1999. An organization thought my
life story was worth sharing with other people. After Barbara
Walters did 20/20. It was an agency.”
“Which agency?” I ask.
“Which agency? Carlton put you in touch with me, didn’t he?”
says Tynan, referring to his agent, Carlton S. Sedgeley, president
of the prestigious Royce Carlton firm. “So it was Carlton.”
What’s the message of his speech? I ask.

68
 The Million Dollar Hustle

“There’s huge hope, huge possibilities. When people believe in

you and encourage you, you can do anything. Ultimately every¬
body’s striving for the same goal. It’s just that people have to take
different roads to get there. It’s like snakes and ladders. One time
you climb, next time you slip. You have to keep going back and
trying and trying and trying. It's an endless trial but tremen¬
dously rewarding when you succeed.” He glances anxiously out
the window. “The fog’s really dense here. This is the backside of
nowhere.”

I ask a few more questions. His answers lean toward the short
side. He’s done “huge” corporate work. Companies ask him back
six or seven times. He has several speeches. The one he delivered
today, “Living Life to the Fullest,” seemed to grab people the
most. Two others are “No Reverse Gear in Life” and “Hitting the
High Notes." They each “incorporate different premises of my
life.” He says it’s a great thing to share and perform.
I ask if he has a particular purpose or mission to impart. “I
think we’ve gone through that," he replies sharply. “If people can
look at someone’s life and make something out of it . . . I’ve writ¬
ten my own autobiography. That would be the most important
thing for someone to grasp on.”
He peers through the windshield. “This is no drizzle. These
weather people never seem to get it right.”
“They only need a quarter-mile visibility to land," offers the
limo driver.
“It doesn’t look like a quarter-mile to me,” says Tynan anx¬
iously. He squints ahead. “Nothing’s going to get out of here.”
I ask if he’s ever needed special coaching. Tynan, definitively,
says no. I ask, “What speakers have inspired you?”
“Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush is a phenomenal speaker.”

“In what sense?”

“She’s iust a tremendous person and does tremendous work. I

69
YES YOU CAN!

do work with Barbara on the literary program—that’s not motiva¬

tion, we’re getting off the topic here.”
“Anyone else?”
“Frank Abagnale. You surely should know about him. There’s
been a movie about him with Tom Hanks.”
I ask if people can really change after a speech.
He sounds exasperated. “You’re really kind of hinting around
the same question the whole time. I mean, a speech is a summa¬
tion of someone’s life and belief.”
“Can people speak without having the extraordinary life you’ve
had?”
“I don’t speak for myself,” he replies cryptically. “It’s not about
me. It’s about how many people have affected me and brought me
to where I am. It’s about sharing other people’s greatness with you.”
“Do you believe that everyone has some greatness in them?”
“You were at the speech, weren’t you?”
«T V
1 was.
“Well, what did you pick out of it?”
“That you were supported and encouraged by your dad—”
“There you go. You’ve answered the question.”
I feel bad I’ve annoyed him. Tynan, however, is more focused
on the weather, which is not looking good. He’s nervously
fondling his Blackberry. I try to ingratiate myself, note his various
remarkable lives. They’re professions, he corrects me. He’s only
got one life.

“It goes back to the point I’m telling you,” he says. “Some people
have a talent for photography. Some people have a talent for design.
Or minds for technology. You just have to tap into that resource.”
I’ve run out of questions. His answers have begun to seem ran¬
dom. Mostly I’m worried he’ll simply get more irritated, if that’s
possible. I thank him and tell him we’re done.
“That’s grand. I’m sure that’s loads for you to operate on.”

70
 The Million Dollar Hustle

He goes back to his Blackberry. At one point he asks again who

else I'm talking to. I explain I’m interested in coaches, too. I think
coaches now play a role in how people hope to change.
He agrees and starts talking about coaches. But when I turn on
my tape recorder he sees it and barks, “Stop!”
So ends my day with Ronan Tynan. His flight to Detroit leaves
as scheduled. I last see him hurrying through the small airport to
his gate. II he sees me, he doesn’t let on. He hands over his ticket
and hurries past.
You’d never know he didn’t have real legs.

71
 THE BOOKERS

“I was riding my b i k e and a tree fell on my head.”

It’s clear something bad has happened to Rosemarie Rossetti. A
dark-haired, attractive woman in a smart green suit, she tells her
story from her wheelchair. It seems that, to celebrate her third
wedding anniversary, she and her husband opted lor a romantic
bike ride on a secluded forest path. There was no storm, no wind,
no rain. It was a beautiful afternoon under a perfect blue sky.
Rosemarie was in front, her husband behind. They’d hardly rid¬
den a hundred yards when her husband cried, “Look, something’s

falling. Stop!”
It was too late. For no apparent reason, an eighty-foot-tall tree
ripped free of its trunk and came crashing down on Rosemarie.
H er helmet was crushed. Her life was changed forever.
But she isn’t here to complain. She’s here to promote her book,
Ta\e Bac\ Y°ur Life, and to peddle herself as a speaker.
“My back was broken,” says Rossetti. “It’s been an incredible
journey."
She is at the back of the ballroom, pitching her tragedy—and
resurrection—to the head of the Irvine Convention Bureau, Bob
Berry. Berry is politely attentive. He might be more interested, ex¬
cept he’s got a tragic drama of his own to relate.
“I heard another incredible story last week,” he tells Jean Bon¬
ner from the Corpus Christi Convention Bureau. “You know that

72
 The Boomers

airplane crash in Colombia? It was in the mountains. There were

only four survivors. This guy got out but his daughter was trapped
in the fuselage. The only way he could communicate—”
“I saw that!” says Bonner.

“Okay, everybody. We’re about to start. Seats!”

We are gathered in the ballroom of the Omni Park West on the
outskirts of Dallas, an improbable fifteen-story hotel in the middle
of a vast field, equidistant from downtown Dallas and Dallas-Fort
Worth Airport. Close to a hundred people have flown in for to¬
day’s event, the semiannual speaker showcase hosted by the Five
Star Speakers Bureau.
A showcase is akin to a cattle auction. Twenty speakers each do
a ten-minute pitch for an audience of potential buyers. The buyers
include insurance companies and government agencies, retail asso¬
ciations and meeting planners. All are clients of the Five Star
Speakers Bureau, which is staging a reprise tomorrow in Anaheim,
California.
By most estimates, there are over six hundred speakers’ bureaus
in the United States. Five Star is one of maybe ten high-profile,
successful bureaus. It’s a nice business to be in, at least at the top.
Bureaus typically take a 30 percent share of a speaker’s fee. Unlike
literary agents, their corollary in the publishing world, the folks in
bureaus don’t spend weekends poring over ungainly manuscripts.
They don’t need to waste a lot of money on real estate. A bureau
can be anywhere. Five Star is headquartered in Kansas City,
Kansas. Other prominent bureaus are located in Florida, New Jer¬
sey, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.
We can thank Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Mor¬
mon Church of Latter Day Saints, for the advent of speakers’ bu¬
reaus. In 1873, a vigorous campaign was under way to eliminate
polygamy in the Mormon community. A favorite joke of the time
was, “All girls marry Young—in Utah.” One who did, Young’s

73
YES YOU CAN!

nineteenth wife, Ann Eliza, packed up and fled. She promptly

switched to Methodism, and at a small private gathering “testi¬
fied” to her conversion, urging other women to flee the “bondage
of Mormonism.” A young journalist, Major James B. Pond, heard
of the gathering and reported what Ann Eliza had said to the As¬
sociated Press, which ran it nationwide. Ann Eliza’s spicy revela¬
tions about Mormon lust fests proved irresistible. P. T. Barnum
telegraphed his interest.
Pond, who was committed less to journalism than to the fast
buck, realized he had a gold mine. He rented a hall and charged
$1.50. There wasn’t an empty chair in sight. He and Ann Eliza
toured the country to packed houses, and by the end, Pond esti¬
mated she had pocketed $20,000.
It was the first of many tours Pond managed. His basic strat¬
egy was to promise speakers a set fee for each lecture, then pack
the hall and rake in a profit. Ministers were a big draw. Pond re¬
cruited T. DeWitt Talmage in England and paid him $10,000 for
one hundred lectures. He made a killing with Henry Ward
Beecher, who delivered over twelve hundred speeches lor Pond.
This was a trifle compared to another in Pond’s stable, the mag¬
netic alcoholic-turned-temperance-stumper, John B. Gough, who
gave 9,600 speeches and drew 9 million people. Not everyone
leapt at the opportunity. Most famously, Rudyard Kipling de¬
clined to sign a contract in an 1895 letter to Pond:
“You forgot that I’ve already wandered over most of the States
and there isn’t enough money in sight to hire me to face again some
of the hotels and some of the railway systems that I have met with.
America is a great country, but she is not made for lecturing in.”
Mark Twain had similar qualms. He was a hugely popular per¬
former onstage, strolling the platform as he lit and relit his trade¬
mark cigar. His deadpan delivery was highly rehearsed. He broke
into the business on his own, renting his first hall in San Francisco

74
 The Bookers

with the announcement: “Admission one dollar; doors open at

hall past seven; the trouble begins at eight." His career on the cir¬
cuit took off, though it took its toll. “Talking lor money is work ”
he once wrote Pond, who managed him, “and that takes the plea¬
sure out of it.”

Twain wrote a lot more letters to the man who turned bureaus
into a permanent business: James Redpath. A pal of Eastern
literati, Redpath was so taken with a lecture by Charles Dickens in
Boston that he announced to his stepdaughter at breakfast the next
day, “There should be a general headquarters, a bureau for the
welcome of literary men and women coming to our country for
the purpose of lecturing." He was as good as his word, and the
Redpath Literary Bureau in Boston quickly became the place to
hang out for the likes of Julia Ward Howe (she wrote the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic”) and Pond recruits Henry Ward Beecher
and T. DeWitt Talmage. Dozens of others took to the podium at
Redpath’s urging. Barnum himself signed on. “Judged by former
literary and platform standards, P. T. Barnum, the great circus
man, would make a strange companion for certain lyceum celebri¬
ties,” observed Redpath biographer Charles Horner, “yet Redpath
wanted Barnum, and so Barnum he secured.”
What distinguished Redpath were his zeal, his resolve, and his
connections. “It is doubtful,” wrote Horner, “that very many in
American history have enjoyed the friendship of more men and
women of note than did Mr. Redpath.”
Bureaus today function on one of two models. A handful of top
bureaus sign speakers to an exclusive contract, working much as lit¬
erary agents do in publishing. If you want to book, say, Colin Pow¬
ell or Alan Greenspan, you’ve got to go through the Washington
Speakers Bureau (WSB). Its list of celebrity clients—motivational
and otherwise—dwarfs most other bureaus. Competing for Wash¬
ington politicos (and many others) is the capital’s other prime

75
YES YOU CAN!

agency, Leading Authorities, Inc. (LAI). Of the three hundred

speakers in its catalog, fifty are signed to exclusive deals. Mark
French, LAI’s founder, downplays any rivalry between the two

bureaus.
“We work with them, we book a lot of their speakers, they
book ours. It’s a friendly and healthy competition.”
The two bureaus nevertheless operate very differently. WSB is
the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, the old-time prestigious agency
that’s got its hooks into top speakers ranging from Powell to
Stephen Covey. Its president, Harry Rhoads Jr., declined to be in¬
terviewed when 1 called, saying in ominous Godfather tones, “You
will never see my name in print.”
LAI was more cooperative. It can also be more proactive in
pursuing new talent. The author of a recent business best-seller
contacted the WSB and never heard back. It was a different story
with LAI. The bureau bought hundreds of books to send to
clients. It booked him across the country. “It’s the Hollywood
mind-set,” says the author. “Washington Speakers wants you to
know they’re more important than you are. The message is: Come
back when we can charge fifty grand."
All bureaus are on the constant lookout for new talent. LAI
tracked down the business writer when a marketing VP saw his
book shooting up best-seller lists. Supreme Court Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor’s worth skyrocketed the day she announced her
surprise resignation. “We’ve placed a call or two,” acknowledges
LAI president Mark French. “I’d certainly like to find out if she’d
be a speaker.” French puts her in the same category as the biggest
draws, such as Powell and Bill Clinton. (When French and I
talked, O’Connor had not yet responded.)
The exclusive deal can be a bit misleading. In the literary
world, no agent horns in on another agent’s writer, at least, not di¬
rectly. Poaching is considered very bad form. The bureau world is

76
 The Roofers

more practical. II LAI, for instance, gets a call from one of its
clients to book Colin Powell, it calls up its friendly rival. If Powell
ultimately gets booked, the agencies split the fee, or, more fre¬
quently, the bureau with the exclusive deal takes two thirds.
The vast majority of bureaus lack the clout to sign speakers on
an exclusive basis. And here’s where the fun—or trouble—begins.
Anyone can call himself a speakers’ bureau. Design a Web site,
stick up pictures of Nelson Mandela or Tony Robbins, and then
troll for a client. Maybe you've got the client signed, maybe you
don't. Maybe you know where to find the speakers, maybe you
don’t—or don’t even try. A few years back, there was a big
brouhaha when a company booked Bill Moyers and he never
showed up for the meeting. Why would he? He had no idea he’d
been booked. The so-called bureau had simply promised his ap¬
pearance to a client and then pocketed the $ 10,000 fee. More than a
few groups—and speakers—have been victimized in similar fash¬
ion, though no phantom bureau has been foolish enough to dangle
a top TV journalist again. (Moyers launched a CBS investigation
that resulted in the arrest and conviction of the fake booker.)
Running a phantom business is a rarity, but there are other
twists. The man who’s credited with starting the modern era of
bureaus, Harry Walker, was the most notorious offender. He was a
master of the two-contract scam. Basically, he would contract to
book speaker X for $5,000. Then he would tell the client that X’s
fee was $10,000—and pocket the difference. His audacity was leg¬
endary. He once booked President George H. W. Bush for an
Amway convention and refused to accept Amway’s $80,000 fee,
insisting on $100,000 without telling the president. When Bush fi¬
nally got wind of the Amway holdup, he switched to WSB as a

booking agent.
Though the speaking business, especially the motivational end,
goes through ups and downs, the top bureaus do very well these

77
YES YOU CAN!

days. Growth was at a peak right before 9/1 x, when it tanked.

French is happy to report, “Since then it’s been a steady turn up¬
ward. We’re almost back where we were.”
Bill Leigh of the Leigh Bureau is more enthusiastic. “Motiva¬
tional speaking is more popular than it was in the nineties, espe¬
cially at the top end of the market, where there’s a move to
outsource leadership.” The demand for new styles of leadership
has mushroomed since all the corruption scandals. There’s a new
offensive to target top senior executives, adds Leigh. There’s a
new emphasis on humane management, on ethics and honesty. He
cites the demand for Lance Secretan, a leadership speaker who en¬
courages execs to get people to love each other and tell each other
the truth. “Five years ago,” says Leigh, “that wasn’t the message.”
Bureaus occupy a tricky place in the speaking business. The
speakers are obviously what they sell, so it’s important to keep them
happy and busy. But most of a bureau’s time and resources are spent
cultivating the “client”—which is whatever organization is buying a
speaker. Without regular clients, you’re not going anywhere. Repeat
business is everything. To maintain loyalty, bureaus need to stay on
top of a client’s needs. If the client is big and global, the bureau
needs to be attuned to a country’s quirks and customs. Leigh is an
expert on such subtleties. He makes sure a motivational speaker in
the United States doesn’t give the same speech in, say, Germany.
“German audiences love a pessimistic ending. You want to end
on as gloomy a note as possible. That doesn’t work here. The U.S.
likes an upbeat finish. We’re very comfortable with the Q and A,
it’s not an add-on, it’s an integral part of the talk. The English
don’t like that. Japan’s an extreme example. Don’t ask for ques¬
tions, because you’ll never get them.”
Occasionally a speaker can ignore borders. The hot example of
a European jumping the pond is Marcus Buckingham, an English
import who quickly became the biggest “no-name” speaker on the

78
 The Boomers

circuit. In 2004 he gave forty-hve speeches at $55,000 each. His

first two books. First, Breaks All the Rules and Now, Discover Your
Strengths, together sold 2 million copies worldwide.
By the same token, a speaker who bombs in one country may
find an audience in another. Chester Elton was not a household
name in the States. His schtick was carrots—as in, employees do
better with carrots than sticks. He wrote A Carrot a Day, which
settled near the basement at Amazon; his 120-page handbook,
The 24-Carrot Manager, fared even worse. Then he took his act to
China. The Chinese loved him. He filled an auditorium in Harbin.
People lunged for the furry orange carrots he threw from the stage.
As a Barenaked Ladies song blasted from speakers, half the audi¬
ence jumped to its feet, screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“I love coming to China,” says Elton, who sold fifty thousand
books in the country. “I feel like a rock star here.”
As in publishing, where every writer’s got an agent, it’s virtually
unheard-of for a speaker to work solo—without a bureau. Most
bureaus are inundated with tapes of would-be speakers. Speakers
will do anything to get a bureau’s attention. Frank Candy, who
runs the American Speakers Bureau in Florida, knows what it’s
like to feel anointed—and he doesn’t like it. He was at the NSA
meeting in Phoenix.
“I’m walking around with that badge that says ‘Speakers’ Bu¬
reau,’ and I’m a moving target,” he recalls. “I’m in the men’s room
at the resort hotel, standing at the urinal. This guy walks up, pulls
down a zipper, and starts taking a leak. He’s standing next to me
and he glances over and sees my badge. Then he reaches for his
dick with one hand and sticks his other out to shake my hand.
‘How you doing?’ I’m stunned.”
Candy is not much more receptive to speakers who approach
him through less informal channels.
“Speakers .. . they’re like ants. They’re in a line to my door.

79
YES YOU CAN!

They want me to do something for them. 'Look at me, I’m a great

speaker. Hire me.’ Guess what. I’m going to pay out fifty thousand
[the cost, he says, of doing business]. Why should I do all the workr
A lot of people want representation but they’re not willing to pay
the price. They want charity. I’m not in the charity business.”
Candy is likely articulating what other bureaus dare not speak.
Volunteering this ruthlessness, of course, is not typical. Candy
himself is not typical. Alone, perhaps, among bureau owners, he
backed into the business from speaking, which he got into by acci¬
dent. He was in the business of buying and selling distressed com¬
panies. A local newspaper did an article. The local Rotary Club

asked him to talk about his success.

Personally, he’s got a compelling story—or a lot of stories. One
is the Vietnam War: there were twenty-four in his squad; three
came back. One committed suicide; the other is in a mental insti¬
tution. From this grim history, Candy salvages: “I believe there’s a
reason I’m here. There’s a divine reason. I feel I have a mission.
We’re not here long. We can lead better, more positive lives. I be¬
lieve in leaving the campsite better than when we came in.”
That noble thought does not translate into much compassion.
He’d like to think he’s just being realistic. "I don’t do diseases and
I don’t do people who’ve lost their legs. Too many people have a
broken spirit. It’s been amputated. And you know what? There’s
no prosthesis for an amputated spirit.”
Not every bureau has qualms about lost limbs. There was a
feeding frenzy when word got out that climber Aron Ralston had
freed himself from a boulder by sawing off his arm with a jack¬
knife. Even Royce Carlton, a bureau long proud of its high-
minded reputation, showed early interest.
“A colleague recommended him,” says Carlton S. Sedgeley,
president of Royce Carlton. “He looked like a very good project.
But we never contacted him.”

80
 The Boomers

Projects—Sedgeley calls his unsigned speakers “projects”—are

always popping up on the radar at Royce Carlton. But Sedgeley
has high standards. When we talked, he had seventy-three speak¬
ers signed, many exclusive, and saw no reason to chase down
more. Though of course he gets tempted. Or a colleague recom¬
mends someone. Or Sedgeley is contacted. One consideration is
what Sedgeley calls “shelf life.” You need staying power to make
big money on the speaker circuit—one reason he didn’t follow up
with Ralston. However, he was seriously mulling Judith Warner,
who wrote Perfect Madness, the hot Lx>ok about stressed working
moms that landed her a Nightline exclusive and a Newsweek cover.
He’s intrigued but worried. Another Newsweek^ cover that in¬
trigued Sedgeley bombed on the hustings.
“Some of these things are better as a book, not a lecture proj¬
ect,” he says philosophically. “You can get good buzz at the begin¬
ning, then it wanes. As I said to Judith this morning, You’re the
one who creates the interest, the project. Then if it’s there we take
advantage of it on your behalf.”
Take advantage he does. Fees vary, mostly based on who is
where on the celebrity curve. If they’re on the way up, so much
the better. Daniel Goleman approached Sedgeley after writing ten
books but before he became a marquee name. “I’m writing this
new book. I think it’s really important,” he told Sedgeley in 1994.
Sedgeley was interested. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Mur¬
ray had just written a “hateful” book, The Bell Curve, claiming
racial disparities in intelligence. Goleman’s focus on other factors,
which he called “emotional intelligence,” made a lot of sense.
When Goleman’s book first came out, Sedgeley booked him at
$4,500 a lecture. Now Goleman’s fee is $40,000. That’s just in the
United States. He charges $60,000 for Europe and $70,000 for
Asia. Still, Goleman turns a whole lot down. How many lectures

a year does he do?

81
YES YOU CAN!

“Not enough,” says Sedgeley.

He had the same complaint about New Yoi\ Times columnist
and Middle East expert Thomas Friedman. When Friedman’s
name recognition soared after he wrote The Lexus and the Olive
Tree, Sedgeley urged him to talk to corporations, guessing they’d
cough up $80,000 a speech. But Friedman balked: “I can open my
wrist only so many times—then I’m going to bleed.” “There’s got
to be someone who’s talking about what you’re talking about,
said Sedgeley, whereupon Friedman suggested a big magazine ed¬
itor whom Sedgeley won’t identify. He will say that the man made
$700,000 from speaking in 2004.
“That’s a lot of money for a part-time job," observes Sedgeley.
Increasingly, speaking has become a tempting sideline for lots
of top executives who quit the rat race or get decommissioned.
They put together a resume, maybe a video, then go hunting for
bureaus. We are awaiting such a person now in the office of Brian
Palmer at the National Speakers Bureau (NSB).
NSB is one of the older bureaus. It was started by Brian’s dad,
John, who conducted backup bands for Peggy Fee, Andy
Williams, and the Three Stooges, traveling on the Stooges tour
bus. Intent on a new start, he scoured a New York phone book for
businesses that didn’t exist in his hometown, then stole the book
from his hotel and brought it back to Chicago. It was 1972, the
year he started the bureau. Brian worked there part-time through
high school and college, then took over the business when his dad
died.
The offices are in a small office/industrial complex an hour
north of the city. Palmer is forty-five, a pleasant, balding man and
a tougher businessman than he might seem. He runs a seemingly
casual ship. There are four people present this morning, most
sprawled on his spacious office rug. Behind his desk, Palmer him¬
self perches on a giant inflatable blue ball; his assistant Brenda also

82
 The Boomers

has one of these balls behind her desk but at the moment sits bare¬
foot on the rug. An account executive, a woman, is also barefoot
and sports tattoos and a toe ring. A booker, Don Jenkins, wears
cargo pants and sandals.
It is nine in the morning, and the group is awaiting a moun¬
taineer named Susan. Susan has a twin claim to fame: she was a top
sales executive in the telecommunications industry and she climbed
Mount Everest. She has also climbed the Seven Summits—the
highest peaks on all seven continents—and she did it with her hus¬
band, Phil (who’s a professional guide). She is the fourth American
woman to climb the Seven Summits and one half of the first couple
in history to pull off the feat. She and Phil have contracted to write
a book to be called Together on Top of the World.
Susan might seem a no-brainer to sign, but Palmer can afford
to pick the best. His office gets an average of ten videos a day. His
staff no longer views unsolicited tapes. If a speaker wants feed¬
back, he or she has to send a $150 check made out to Lamb’s Farm,
a local charity. Many send the check, and just as many are an¬
noyed and think it’s ridiculous. Palmer doesn’t care. Some tapes,
at least, are good for entertainment value. “We at the National
Speakers Bureau love really good tapes,” he says, “and we adore
bad tapes.”
The technical disasters are always good for a laugh: fuzzy
Toastmaster tapes from the back of the room with a really bad
on-camera mike (the better tapes take sound from a microphone).
Some are boring, some make no sense or the stories are awful.
One man—a Palmer favorite—sent a tape on his hobby, which
was “looking at dog skeletons and decomposed carcasses and fig¬
uring out what led to their demise.” Palmer passed up another
tape from a certain breatharian—a person who believes man can
survive without food and needs only water to drink and air to
breathe. Palmer’s skepticism was confirmed the day he spotted

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YES YOU CAN!

him before a speech cowering in the corner of a Ramada eating a

cheeseburger.
These diversions aside, Palmer is a big booster of speaking.
“Public speaking is the world’s second-oldest profession,” he says.
“And just like the first, it ain’t going away.”
In part he attributes its appeal to the cooling effect of other me¬
dia. “A lot of people go to meetings to see a live performance be¬
cause television, its opposite, has become so prominent. How many
people go to church? Not many. Seeing a live performance is an
extraordinary occurrence. It’s an event, an oration, a show. People
can be very forgiving in that situation. People really want to like a
speaker."
Motivational speaking in particular can be a huge draw. It’s most
effective, says Palmer, when it follows Aristotelian laws of rhetoric.
Palmer is a big fan of what Aristotle calls the “enthymeme,” an ar¬
gument in which the target group supplies a missing premise to
reach a conclusion. “The result is a lot more persuasive and pow¬
erful than if I give you all the ideas to make the conclusion. It’s on
page fifty-four of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.”
A connoisseur of oratory ancient and modern, Palmer is
equally alert to the gaffes speakers make. Tops, in practical terms,
is playing to the audience. Speakers become addicted to getting a
reaction—a laugh, a smile, a cheer. They forget who hired
them—and who may or may not hire them again. It’s impossible
to predict who in the audience will like a given speech. So think
about one person: the one who pays the bills.
Personalization, the buzzword in the business, gets Palmer very
nervous. Nothing’s more embarrassing than when a speaker “pre¬
tends to care, then they switch, put in their quarter, and give a
[formulaic] speech.” That’s a red flag. Another is following the
herd. Larry Winget, a tremendously successful showman with a
goatee and shaved head, spawned a horde of clones with shaved

84
 The Boomers

heads and goatees. “Stop trying to look like a speaker,” Palmer ad¬
vises his brood. “It you’re not outrageous, don’t he outrageous. It
you’re not funny, don’t be funny. Be yourself. And don’t tell some¬
one else’s story. Don’t tell the starfish story!”

You know the starfish story. A guy is walking along the beach,
the beach is littered with starfish. Starfish die if they stay too long
on land. So this guy sees a man picking up starfish and throwing
them back in the water. “There are thousands of starfish here,” he
observes. “Why waste your time? What’s the difference?” The
first guy bends down and throws another starfish. “You know
what? I made a difference in the life of that starfish.”
Another red flag: the corporate chestnuts. Please, not Star-
bucks and Nordstrom again—stories about how the key to suc¬
cess is customer service. “I can’t tell you how many times a client’s
disqualified because he tells a Nordstrom story”—the classic be¬
ing the guy who buys tires, takes them to Nordstrom to return.
Nordstrom, which doesn’t sell tires, cheerfully takes them back
and issues a refund, then returns the tires to the original retailer
to get its money.
With all these caveats, with all his informed cynicism, you’d
think Palmer would despair of finding new talent. Not so. “I’m a
big believer in motivational speakers,” he says with real enthusiasm.
Which is why all eyes in the room turn expectantly as Susan
the mountaineer is shown in. Dressed in a trim black suit and
white blouse, she’s a compact, attractive, blonde-haired woman
with a quick smile and an easy laugh. Some might struggle to rec¬
oncile the petite professional with the image of her high on the ice,
all sinew and muscle, driving pitons into the rock. But NSB has
seen its share of climbers.
“We’ve booked quite a few Everest summitters,” Palmer tells
her, not ungraciously but setting the tone for the meeting. It’s Su¬

san’s job to sell herself to NSB.

85
YES YOU CAN!

She does it with good humor and gusto, but it’s hard to read this
barefoot group of bookers. They like that Susan’s a businesswoman
first—she ran a sales team that produced some $300 million in an¬
nual revenue—and happens to be a climber. Climbers who pitch
lessons learned on the mountain—teamwork, perseverance—don’t
always relate to their audience. Her twist is how her business ca¬
reer helped her climbing, not vice versa.
Palmer nods. “People want to hear from success—not about it.”
“Exactly,” she agrees. “For instance, when I did IBM. I was the
keynote. They used the mountain as a metaphor. Every quarter
was a camp. First you’re at ten thousand, then sixteen thousand.
Same at Microsoft. I’m very good at large systems sales. I’ve
walked in their shoes.”
She hits all the right buttons. She’s big on building long-term
relationships and sales with a long lead time. She focuses on the
big picture, not on lots of widgets. Which is why she did so well at
IBM and Microsoft.
She mentions IBM and Microsoft a lot.
The Everest stuff is less polished. It’s not that she doesn’t have
great stories and bits of inside info—in fact, she reels them off
easily. Two months on the mountain, “and you feel like crap.”
You’re always coughing, your nose burns, you’re hungry, dying of
thirst, can’t wait to hit base camp and that bottle of Coke—“sugar,
caffeine, it’s cold!” You try to stay away from groups. On their first
attempt, her husband’s eyes froze over and turned purple. A valve
in his oxygen mask was clogged. Fourteen hundred feet from the
top, and they did a U-turn. Better than so-and-so, who had to
bivouac and lost all his fingers and toes. Kilimanjaro’s a hike—
until the last day. She’s heard that the New York banker who ran
Google’s IPO wants to do it. Susan’s talked to his personal trainer,
and the banker’s not in great shape.

The problem, if there is one, is that Susan hasn’t woven all

86
 The Boomers

this stuff into a narrative—at least here. She talks about the
“back story”—her romance with her husband the guide, how
they met, their climbing—it’s the crux ol the book. But the rug
group seems unimpressed. Plus they have to draw out the good
stuff. Plus she’s got competition. If a client can pay $10,000, the
obvious pick is Jamie Clark. Under $10,000—Susan’s fee is
$7,500—there’s Jeff Salz. If you want a woman, there’s Stacy Al¬
lison or Sharon Wood.
“Who’ve you lost dates to?” asks Palmer.
She’s lost a few, she acknowledges. In the climbing area, a cou¬
ple of non-Everest climbers. She gets business work when they
can’t book, say, Vince Poscente.
Maybe to be nice, or maybe because she truly will end up an
NSB speaker. Palmer ends the meeting with a few tips for Susan.
Come to tell your story. When clients ask a prospective speaker
questions, give short, quick answers. If they want a conference
call, do it. Don’t make last-minute travel plans. Show up early
and don’t run to catch the first flight afterward. Mingle. Talk up
NSB. Joe Calloway, an NSB stalwart, refers plenty of people to
NSB. I’m not the right guy, he might say, but call whomever. For¬
get marketing yourself with brochures. Your best marketing tool
is your next speech. Oh, there’s a big shift to electronic proposals.
Susan might consider an online calendar. Basically, be a good
sport.
“I love hanging around before and after,” she says.
“You remember that song on Soul Train?” says Palmer. “Or
maybe it was American Bandstand. ‘She’s Easy to Dance To.’ ”
Susan writes all this down. Palmer stands. Everyone shakes

hands. The meeting is over.

“Average,” is how he sums up the interview when she’s left.
There are a lot of Everest climbers, he repeats. It’s good that she
handled $300 million. The businessperson who climbed Everest is

87
YES YOU CAN!

an angle. Still, she didn’t really answer all his questions. He gazes
off in the distance. He bounces on his big, blue, plastic ball.
“I’m a hard person to please.’’

Pleasing a bureau is an important part of a speaker’s job. Even if

you’re already signed with a bureau or do regular work with it,
you’ve got to maintain your profile. That’s why speakers jump
when they’re invited to do a showcase. At the Five Star showcase
in Dallas, they pay their own hotel and air tickets. Jim Jacobus, a
very busy motivational speaker from Houston, cheerfully coughed
up the plane fare for today’s event and tomorrow’s in Anaheim.
Jacobus is a lively 240-pounder in a slick silver-gray suit with a
rambling good-ole-boy Texas twang. He played football in col¬
lege. He’s a three-timer on the World Championship softball team
and six-time winner of Chrysler’s Long Drive competition (he
once smacked the ball four hundred yards). A peak performance
expert, he’s done seventeen years in sales with Fortune 500 compa¬
nies. His most popular speeches are “Diving Fife Farge . . . Get¬
ting the Most out of Life” and “What It Takes to Live at the Top!”
He starts by pointing to the “I Love My Wife” button on his
lapel. “I wear it to honor my wife. If you don’t, then don’t hire me!”
He’s got a quiz to get things going. Who’d take a million dol¬
lars to chop off a finger? How about a foot for two million? Both
ears for ten million?
“How about a child . . . that’s not a teenager?”
Big laugh.
“Or a spouse for five bucks.”
The house rocks.

“But seriously,” says Jacobus. He wants to make a point, which is:

we’ve all got these gifts ... to do something extraordinary. He has
five key principles to get us there. They are, in order: Get Excited;

88
 The Boomers

I Will Pay the Price; Live Life Large; Been There, Done That—Still
Working on It. He elaborates on each one but runs out of time be¬
fore he gets to his fifth principle. It doesn’t matter. Here’s the secret:
we’re all one decision away from having everything we dreamed of.
We are also one step away from losing it all. It’s our choice.
“Thank you, and God bless!”

Numbering your principles or strategies is basic horse sense to

any motivator. The next speaker is another numbers person, a
short, blue-suited dynamo and sales superstar with an English ac¬
cent named Patricia Fripp. Her Web site, incidentally, is one of
those you stumble on when you Google Cavett Robert.
Following Fripp is Rick Searfoss, the astronaut who piloted two
space shuttle missions. A lithe, athletic man, he strides out in his blue
astronaut uniform with the flag and NASA patches while the big
screen shows a Cape Canaveral blastoff. Searfoss is in the alphabet
camp. Specifically, he is a “P” man. Who’s to say what’s impossible,
he says, if you have Purpose, Program, People, Perspective. Later he
works in a couple of A’s to spell “PAPA”—which stands for Prepa¬
ration, Awareness, Perspicacity, and Accountability. It all comes
down to lessons you learn in the cockpit. The key to flying a plane is
Iterate, Reform, Improve. Guess what? Same in the corporate
world. You need agility. You need to “work the matrix.”
“The F-18, which I used to fly” is how most paragraphs begin.
He shows pictures of earth from space. Talk about perspective!
He shows a Russian cosmonaut floating into the space capsule
with an American flag. Talk about teamwork!
He shows his five-year-old daughter clapping as Searfoss drops
the Challenger onto the runway. “Good landing, Daddy!”
You can’t put a price on that kind of video. Searfoss, of course,
does. He charges $12,000 for a keynote speech, $15,000 for a half
day. Among the day’s speakers, he’s tops in the money department,
nosing out game show host Bob Eubanks ($10,000 keynote) and

89
YES YOU CAN!

walloping the likes of Steve Ford, the former president’s actor son
($5,000), and submarine commander Scott Waddle ($5,000).
It was Waddle, you may remember, whose fast-attack sub, the
USS Greenville, performed an emergency surface maneuver and
cracked into a Japanese fishing boat. The fishing boat sank and
nine onboard died. I’m curious to hear what he has to say. But it’s
time for lunch.
I end up seated between Jacobus and a man from the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which happens to be the largest
among the U.S. government’s twelve intelligence agencies. I find it
alarming that our spies needed motivation, but he eases my fears.
He’s really in charge of the training programs.
During lunch, Jacobus tells me a little more about himself. He
got into the speaking business during a presentation he arranged. A
friend tapped him on the shoulder and said, “ ‘You can do better than
that. So I went home and told my wife. That was fifteen years ago
March first. I’m just good at communicating. Always have been."
The big challenge is to create value and offer a significant return
on investment. Jacobus prides himself on preprogram research and
often queries a client. “I asked one guy, what do you want me on?
And he said, ‘I want you on at eleven, and make sure you get us out
by tee time at one. I don’t care what you talk about.’ ”
He laughs and goes back to his chicken.
Steve Ford has the first afternoon slot. A tall, handsome man,
Gerald Ford’s third son, he runs up the steps to the stage—and
trips. His arms pinwheel and he nearly falls Hat on his face. It gets
a big laugh.
He has plenty of funny stories. There was the time he was speak¬
ing in Nigeria and asked his host for a word in Swahili. The man
offered, “Jambo,” which means “Welcome.” Steve said “Jamba,”
which means “You let gas,” and the natives went wild.
There was the time in Montana when a retinue of ten Secret

90
 The Bookers

Service agents kept close watch on Steve. He shows a picture of

them in cowboy hats and chaps. Well, Steve decided to play a
trick. Returning to camp, he fired a Winchester, then flung him¬
self across the saddle. An agent saw the lifeless body and cried,
“My career, my career!”

He has sobering remarks, too—literally. Like his mom, Betty, he

ended up at a meeting raising a hand. “Hello, my name is Steve—
and I’m an alcoholic.”
There’s a hush in the Park West Ballroom. Who knew?
He has plenty of inspirational words. His dad was always a
hero. A star football player at Michigan, he quit the team over a
racism issue. “Character,” the younger Ford quotes, “is what you
do when no one is looking.”
“What kind of stories will your kids tell about your character?”
Three speakers later, my wait for Waddle is finally rewarded. A
short, barrel-chested man in a tight jacket, his message is Account¬
ability. He treated his crew on the Greenville with respect. Along
with his men, he followed the sub credo: “Get up, get back, get
down, and get dirty.” During a time of low navy morale and high
turnover, his men became the top-ranked crew in the Pacific Fleet
for sailor retention. Then he hit a Japanese trawler with a bunch of
VIP guests aboard.
He took sole responsibility. While a corrupt corporate America
was playing Pass the Blame, Waddle remained a stand-up guy.
His career in the navy was finished.
“My name is Scott Waddle,” he concludes. “My time is up. I’m
free to answer questions.”
I give Waddle the day’s character award. I’m honestly im¬
pressed. For humor, the title goes to Bill Brooks, former CEO and
ex—college football coach.
“Our team finished five and five,” he said. “We lost five at home

and five away.”

91
YES YOU CAN!

“I coached at a small Catholic college and could only recruit

small Catholics.”
“We choked so much that the Heimlich maneuver was part of

the pregame warm-up.”

Maybe you had to have been there.
Several weeks after the showcase, I call up Five Star to hear if
the showcase yielded bookings. A vice president confirms it did,
though he doesn’t have specifics. I call Jean Bonner from the Cor¬
pus Christi Convention Bureau. Turns out she was pretty discern¬
ing. She liked some speakers, others she didn’t, Ford was great,
maybe a little stiff. Fripp left her cold. She didn’t seem real. “Don’t
get me wrong—Fm in sales myself.” The astronaut’s uniform was
impressive, but once he got into the technical stuff—“brick wall!”
She’s turned the program over to her education committee.
There’s still one slot open. They’re hoping to the get the Chalk Guy.
“The Chalk Guy?”
“Sam Gilman. He was a football coach and now he’s an artist.
He’s got a big blackboard. He draws a picture while he’s doing his
presentation. At the end it’s this huge chalk drawing, a waterfall
and sunset and people walking down a path. He asks, what path
are you on?”
She lets out a sigh. “He’s pretty expensive, but maybe he’ll drop
his fee.”

92
 TALES OF THE TAPE

Speakers’ bureaus aren't the only businesses to thrive on

the coattails of motivation. Both speakers and bureaus owe a ma¬
jor debt to another inspirational juggernaut: the audiotape indus¬
try. Before tape, of course, there were records. The dual impact of
records and tape can be traced to a single man, the remarkable
Earl Nightingale.
Nightingale was born in Los Angeles in 1921 into modest cir¬
cumstances. His father cut out when Nightingale was twelve,
leaving the family to cope with the bottom of the Great Depres¬
sion. His mother took a job in a sewing factory. Nightingale and
his two brothers lived with their mom in a tent city on the Long
Beach waterfront. His one escape was the library, where he read
voraciously. At seventeen he joined the Marines. Sent to Hawaii
and stationed aboard the USS Arizona, he was blown off the ship,
unconscious, during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rescued by a
sailor, he was one of only twelve Marines on the ship to survive.
Lollowing the war, he became an instructor at Camp Lejeune,
then gave up the military for radio. He started at KTAR in
Phoenix, then moved to Chicago, where he joined CBS and be¬
came the voice of heroic pilot Sky King (“I think I see them in
that canyon, Penny”). His epiphany came at twenty-nine, when he
read Napoleon Hill’s Thin\ and Grow Rich and happened on the
words, “We become what we think about.”

93
YES YOU CAN!

The words rocked him back on his heels. That was it! It was
the same stuff he’d read in Emerson. In Lao Tse. In Buddhism.
Slowly, in his head, he began to craft his own version of Hill’s
message. It was another five years, however, before it saw the light
of day—and then purely by happenstance.
It was 1956, and Nightingale had bought a small side business,
a Franklin Life Insurance agency. Every Saturday morning he
gave his salesmen a pep talk. The talk was such a hit that when he
announced a two-week fishing trip, his office manager panicked.
Sales would plummet. The agency would flounder. To ease the
man’s anxiety, Nightingale made a recording to be played in his
absence. It was called “The Strangest Secret.”
He called it that, he’d later explain, because the secret of why
we become what we become was not a secret at all—and therefore
strange.
“Have you ever wondered why so many people work so hard and
honestly without ever achieving anything in particular,” he said on
his recording, “and why others don’t seem to work, and yet seem to
get everything? ... The difference is goals. People with goals suc¬
ceed because they know where they’re going. It’s that simple.”
He cited a blue-chip cast of history’s stalwarts, from Marcus
Aurelius and William James to Disraeli and “my old friend Nor¬
man Vincent Peale [who] put it this way: ‘If you think in negative
terms you will get negative results.’ ”
At the end he outlined a thirty-day action plan “for putting the
Strangest Secret to work for you.”
While Nightingale was casting for bass, his staff sat mesmer¬
ized by the record player. Everyone wanted a copy. The families
wanted copies. Friends wanted copies. People who had never heard
of Earl Nightingale wanted copies. Sales of the record soared, so
much so that thirteen years later Nightingale signed on with a
small mail-order company to help with distribution. It was run by

94
 Tales of the Tape

an acquaintance, Lloyd Conant. The two joined forces and

formed the Nightingale-Conant Corporation of Chicago (NC). It
soon grew into a bustling enterprise, the takeoff spot for anyone
who wanted to spread an on-air message of uplift.

In 1959, the two introduced Our Changing World, Nightingale’s

five-day-a-week five-minute radio program. It quickly became the
most syndicated program in the history of radio. Nightingale
recorded five thousand programs. The following year the com¬
pany began marketing Lead the Field, Nightingale’s first full-
length recording. It went on to sell over a million copies.
In 1978, the company had branched into publishing new au¬
thors. Its second author was Dennis Waitley, whose The Psychology
of Winning remains NC’s best-selling audio program of all time,
with sales of 1,500,000. Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Achieve¬
ment owns second place, with sales of 1 million.
Nightingale himself was inducted into the radio hall of fame in
1985 and died four years later, in 1989. “The nightingale has fallen
silent," intoned his friend Paul Harvey. At the time, Nightingale’s
business called itself “The World’s Biggest Self-Development
Company,” and continues to lay rightful claim to the title. Com¬
pany headquarters, ten miles north of Chicago in suburban Niles,
are in a single-floor building the size of four football fields. You
get to the main entrance, an unobtrusive glass door, by walking
through a vast parking lot. Just inside under twinned pictures of
Nightingale and Conant (who also died in the eighties) is in¬
scribed: “You are what you think about.”
What NC thinks about is satisfying the country’s appetite for
self-help product. That product is everywhere you look. It’s just
past reception, stretching to the office of NC president Vic Co¬
nant, Lloyd’s grandson, in the Hall of Hits, where the framed pro¬
gram covers from Tracy, Tony Robbins, and Wayne Dyer ferry
you along with encouraging smiles. It’s down another hall and in

95
YES YOU CAN!

the vast manufacturing rooms, where a fearsome machine, the

Apex Pad Printer, slaps “How to Build Self-Esteem” labels on
blank cassettes, more than five thousand an hour, while the
whirring Tachos 90 snips a continuous tape feed of Robbins’s The
Power to Shape Your Destiny with laser bolts.
To the uninitiated, it’s business as usual. But Dan Strutzel,
NC’s VP of Marketing, remembers what used to monopolize time
on the Tachos 90. Just a few years ago, prior to the crash of 2001, a
lot of what you saw were the big three: Nightingale’s Strangest Se¬
cret, Waitley’s Winning, and Tracy’s Achievement.
“All the top sellers were about accumulating wealth,” says
Strutzel. “Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Pm Rich Beyond My Wildest
Dreams, Multiple Streams of Income. Now it’s all about realistic
wealth-building. TDIW, which we released just after the crash, is
a huge, huge seller.”
TDIW—Transforming Debt into Wealth—is so big, it get its
own shorthand. It’s on the conveyor belt now, cartons and cartons
of it, hefted onto forklifts by beefy men with tattoos. We head into
the storage area, which is as big as a NASA hangar.
“Motivational speakers moved to a wealth angle when we had a
stable economy,” explains Strutzel. “You assumed lifetime em¬
ployment. The big thing was staying motivated on the job, work¬
ing up the ladder. It’s very different now. Now it’s: I need hard
skills, entrepreneurial skills. Who’s going to give me that?”
“People no longer trust their employers or the government to
take care of them. So the focus is on a cash lifestyle. You don’t buy
into the illusions of the American Dream. Too many people are in
debt.”
They could sink further into debt perusing NC’s thirty-three-
page catalog. The first three pages, headed “Wealth,” offer pro¬
grams such as David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire and Robert
P. Miles’s How to Build Wealth Tike Warren Buffet, both Si 19.95

96
 Tales of the Tape

for a boxed CD set. Other programs, notably the “Buy 2, Get 1

Free" promotions, come cheaper.

I ask Strutzel what other changes he’s noted. It’s all about the
quality of life, he tells me. The priorities are on new accomplish¬
ments, unleashing the unlived life, nurturing creativity. A recent
survey by The Futurist magazine, he says, found the highest num¬
ber of people ever chose to trade money for time. Time is the new
luxury. People are buying books like The War of Art, about defeat¬
ing the blocks to self-expression, instead of The Art of the Deal.
NC does more than just sell books, tapes, and CDs. Increasingly
the company’s exploring new ways to secure and expand its market
reach. The “old generation,” says Strutzel, were passive TV watch¬
ers; with the new generation, the business model is switching from
purely catalog and mail order to radio, the Internet, even blogs.
“Lots of our authors blog,” says Strutzel. “It’s all about interaction.”
Interaction is what’s happening in the large tract of office space
where we wind up our tour. The middle of the room is occupied
by platoons of busy saleswomen who operate computers. Sur¬
rounding them are a dozen cubicles belonging to what NC calls
“consultants.” They’re here to answer questions, to help customers
delve deeper into a product, and to coax seekers into a twelve-
session coaching program. We pause outside the office of an at¬
tractive fortyish woman, McKaylee Allan, whose business card
reads “Personal Development Consultant.” She’s reading a copy of
Angel Numbers, by Doreen Virtue and Lynnette Brown. She seems
surprised I’ve never heard of Doreen Virtue.
“Oh, you have to read her,” she tells me cheerfully. “She’s won¬
derful. She tells you all about numbers. It’s kind of the same phi¬
losophy as figuring out which stars and planets are in alignment."
She’s reading the book, she explains, to prepare for a phone
chat with a customer who wants to know more about angels and

astrological numbers.

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YES YOU CAN!

Angels make sense to Strutzel. The biggest surge in titles, he

tells me, is in spiritual growth.

“Evangelical titles are now mainstream,” he says. “The Purpose-
Driven Life is now the second-best-selling hardcover in history, af¬
ter the Bible. Which means the top two books are Christian titles.
The new trend is character and integrity. Zig Ziglar’s See You at
the Top was all about getting there. Our new program with Zig, A
View from the Top, is about perspective and what’s important.”
What’s important at NC, of course, is sales—and particularly
gratifying are orders that come in bulk. Entire companies have
been known to distribute the goods. Spirituality aside, there are
few more evangelical consumers than converted executives.
Consider Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where the relatively modest
offices of Secco Inc. are located. Though small in numbers—
scarcely one hundred employees—Secco is big on providing com¬
fort and a livable environment. It is a contracting company that
specializes in commercial refrigeration and electrical construction.
It installs heating and repairs air conditioning. But these are not just
any air-conditioning repair men. They have been conditioned them¬
selves by just about every book and tape to hit the self-help market.
After superstar Ken Blanchard addressed an employee meeting to
talk about his best-seller, Gung-Ho!, the entire company joined
ranks with the animal kingdom. They started about their tasks em¬
bracing the Spirit of the Squirrel. Watch squirrels, urged Blan¬
chard, and you’ll see a bunch of animals all working toward the
same goal: storing food for winter.
After mastering the Spirit of the Squirrel, the AC troops, man¬
agers included, began following the Way of the Beaver. Beavers are
in control of their goal, said Blanchard; when a dam breaks, they
don’t need anyone to tell them where to put sticks. Secco staff ac¬
cepted the Gilt of the Goose. Geese fly in perfect synchronization,
they work like a team. Now, when a Secco worker isn’t doing a ter-

98
 Tales of the Tape

rific job, he doesn’t get reprimanded by the boss; instead, he gets a

comradely nudge and a, “say, we haven’t heard from the goose for a
while.”

“It’s an easy way to communicate,” says Barry Kindt. “It breaks

down the barriers. It builds morale. That’s why I love Gutig Ho! It
makes sure you have the right team on the bus before the bus goes
someplace.”
Kindt is Secco’s president and the man responsible for the heady
air that wafts through every Secco pipe and duct. Nearly every posi¬
tion has its required reading list. That includes books by all the top
names, from Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar to Michael E. Gerber (he
wrote The E-Myth). Any new hire has to read the gospel, Gung Ho!,
and watch the thirteen-minute tape of Who Moved My Cheese? That
tape, which cost Kindt $495, is part of a serious tape library under
the stewardship of Secco’s foreman, who usually fixes condensers. A
large room had to be added onto Secco’s offices for the library,
which bears the nameplate “Secco University” over a cap and gown.
And finally, employees—or rather “coworkers,” as Kindt doesn’t
believe in the corner office culture—are all subjected to what Kindt
calls “the best sales book ever written: Green Eggs and Ham. It’s kind
of a joke now. The new hires go, ‘What’s that?’ Everyone else
groans, ‘Oh, no, not Dr. Seuss! He’s brought that out again?’ ”
They don’t groan much. For three years running, Secco has
been rated among the top fifty “Best Places to Work in Pennsylva¬
nia.” Those who get jobs at Secco stay a long time. Kindt is the
first to admit it isn’t for everyone. Potential hires go through an
“arduous” hiring process that includes a personality profile. Most
plumbers and electricians have never heard of such a thing.
“It’s not a fit for everyone, that’s for sure,” acknowledges Kindt.
“But it’s what we believe. We make a huge investment in people.
That’s long-term thinking. These are tough times and we push

commitment. We band together.”

99
YES YOU CAN!

Kindt started thinking long-term early. He is the proud owner

of an original 1952 copy of The Power of Positive Thinking. He
can’t remember how he got it, but he remembers why. His
brother-in-law kept taunting him, telling him he’d never amount
to anything. It launched Kindt on a lifelong buying spree that in¬
cludes every self-help author from Brian Tracy (“one of my all-
time heroes”) to a tape of Napoleon Hill’s Thinf and Grow Rich
(“unbelievable, it’s a classic”). He recently ordered thirty work¬
books for Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The first week, seventeen home technicians showed up at dawn at
Secco University to learn about paradigms. Next week it was self-
evaluation, then on to Habit Number One.
Kindt used to be a tape-of-the-month subscriber at Nightingale-
Conant. These days he takes a walk to Borders or Barnes & Noble,
each within blocks of his office. He has a corporate discount at both.
You don’t want to know what he spends at Amazon.com.
“My wife is just about fed up,” he smiles.
Though far from a major urban hub, Secco has plenty of access
to resources. If Kindt feels like stretching his legs, he can hike to
the nearby town of Mechanicsburg, where his pal, none other
than Charles “Tremendous” Jones, runs the unusual online book¬
store ExecutiveBooks.com. “Tremendous,” you may remember, is
the ex-insurance salesmen who wrote Life Is Tremendous, which
has 2 million copies in print. His bookstore bills itself “The Pre¬
mier Supplier of Sales and Motivational Media on the Internet.”
Though small compared to Nightingale-Conant, the Web site is
nevertheless overwhelming, evidence of the robust market for self-
help product. Indeed, many speakers make far more money from
“back-of-the-room” product than they do from speaking, which is
why so many self-publish. Unlike literary types, speakers don’t con¬
sider a self-published book the brand of shame, a no-confidence

100
 Tales of the Tape

vote from the arbiters of taste in New York City. Rather, it’s a way
to corner profits.

Tony Robbins, tor instance, is a publishing machine, though he

was far from the first. Dale Carnegie did very nicely with his book
How to Win Friends and Influence People. Nightingale pressed his
own record, Lead the Field, the first speaking album to hit gold.
And then, of course, there was Zig Ziglar.

Ah, Zig Ziglar.

The very name elicits chuckles. His cornball aphorisms seem to

come from the Paleozoic era. His relentlessly upbeat message, his
upbeat lifestyle, prompts instant gagging. As recounted by Texas
Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth, he wakes up every day at
dawn before his “opportunity clock” (that’s his alarm) goes off. He
croons his ritual greeting to his wife of fifty-eight years, “Hey,
Sugar Baby, I sure do love you.” He reads his Bible. He pores over
magazines like Readers Digest for inspirational stories. He opens
his “personal performance planner” and jots down positive things
he hopes to accomplish that day, such as, “Let’s make this a day
worth remembering!”
Go ahead, laugh. Zig’s laughing all the way to the bank. He still
commands $50,000 a speech. That’s if you can get him. He used to
fill basketball arenas. On the few occasions he still gets up to

speak, the faithful line up to plunk down $1,595 f°r a set °f his
tapes. Not that money matters. His priorities are elsewhere. The
day we met, right before our appointment, he did a free taped
commercial for one of his preacher friends. The morning before,
he addressed a Sunday school class.
“A priest or a twelve-year-old can come to my seminars,” Zig
told me. “They won’t hear profanity. They won’t hear any sexism.

101
YES YOU CAN!

They won’t hear any suggestiveness. They will hear specific direc¬
tions on how you can live a better, more effective, profound, bal¬
anced life.”
They have been coming to Ziglar seminars for decades. They
have made his books, See You at the Top and View from the Top,
huge best-sellers (which Ziglar publishes himself, leaving
Nightingale-Conant to hawk the tapes). They carry his tapes in
the trunks of their cars. They send him letters, thousands of let¬
ters, of which there is a small sampling in the phone-book-sized
volume in the waiting area of Ziglar’s office. Some are on official
stationery from dignitaries, some are handwritten and cover two
or three pages. Almost all contain phrases like, “You changed my
life” and “I will be forever indebted” and “I never could have sur¬
vived the ordeal of my sister’s cancer . . .”
Zig has his own thank-you memorial. It’s called the Wall of
Gratitude, a short walk past the phone book of letters. If you didn’t
look, you’d bang right into it. It’s a gallery of portraits of everyone
who’s made his life so remarkable, starting with his mom.
The wall notwithstanding, during the first few decades of
Zig’s life, gratitude was in short supply. Not a lot went Zig’s way.
True, he met his sugar baby, Jean Abernathy, during his service in
the navy (she’s referred to throughout as “The Redhead” in his
autobiograpy, Zig) and she gave him three wonderful daughters.
But life in the Ziglar household was a roller coaster. Born in Ya¬
zoo City, Mississippi, he bounced from place to place and job to
job, all in sales. He sold stainless-steel cookware. He peddled
WearEver pans and Nutrilite food supplements and Saladmas-
ters. He did time in the “multilevel” marketing industry, going
from Arcadian China to NutriBio animal feed to skin care prod¬
ucts. Often he couldn’t afford gas—and worked door-to-door
wherever the car rolled to a stop. He was so “crazed” and “over
the edge,” he confessed, that he invented an “automatic bottom

102
 Tales of the Tape

washer, which he intended to market to senior citizen homes

and to victims of hemorrhoids.

Several incidents changed Zig’s life. At a Saladmaster convention

he got distracted in an elevator, the elevator shot up—and he was
jerked to safety only inches from losing his leg and life. God, he
sensed, was preserving his life for a reason.
In 1950 he watched a fellow named Bob Bale give a motiva¬
tional talk and was knocked out. “I’d never seen anybody have so
much fun and also do good. That’s when my dream was born.”
He was lying in his swimming pool one night, admiring the
heavens and God's work, when a “star fell” and left a sparkling trail.
“On July 4, 1972,” he wrote, “Christ asked me to come to Him and
I did.”
He met Cavett Robert, founder of the National Speakers Asso¬
ciation. Zig was then at Mary Kay, doing speeches at sales meet¬
ings and conventions. Robert heard him and urged him to put it
all in a book. The original title was “Biscuits, Fleas and Pump
Handles.” One of his fans, a man from Arkansas, sent in another
suggestion: See You at the Top. Zig published it himself. It still sells
upward of fifty thousand copies a year.
Meeting Zig in person is both a thrill and a disappointment.
Greeting me at the door to his office, he looks great. At seventy-
eight, he has the same sharp eyes and engaging, seductive smile
that grace the covers of his books. The voice is syrup-smooth, the
same honeyed patter I’d heard on his tapes, an irresistible drawl
but perfectly modulated, that often ends a sentence with a quick
up inflection. Hollandsworth identifies it as an “uh.” As in: “The
difference between success and failure is fourteen inches. That’s
the distance from the top of your head to your heart-uh.”
As in: “How do you handle setbacks-uh? Well, you start by un¬
derstanding you can take the word stressed, which backwards

spells desserts-uh.”

103
YES YOU CAN!

He is cordial yet canny. His conversation is an effortless stream

of stories, jokes, and anecdotes, many of which I’ve heard on his
tapes. I get the impression that, short of blatant rudeness, little
could disturb his composure. He has answers for every question.
He has a mass of facts at his fingertips, invariably prefaced with
“incidentally.” As in: “Incidentally, did you know that six out of
seven doctor visits result from family-uh problems?”
Speakers he admires? Brian Tracy. I ask why, and the ready¬
made answer makes me feel sucker punched.
“He told me what I think is probably the single best advice I’ve
ever had in the business. He said, ‘Find out what it is you have to
say; boil it down to a two- or three-line statement, and go and talk
about it. If they’re willing to pay for it, do it for a living. If they

won’t, do it for the joy of it.’ ”

How’s the motivation business these days? I ask him.
“Doing just fine,” he chuckles. “Training’s better, the charlatans—
the guys just in it for a buck—are on the way out. The audience is
more sophisticated. They can tell when a speaker is one person on
the platform and another person off.” Which is not true of Zig.
He believes in family all the way. “My wife and I have been mar¬
ried fifty-eight years and are more in love than ever. It’s called the
home-court advantage.”
Zig is an expert at home-court advantage. He winds up where
he likes.
“But life has its setbacks,” I prompt.
“Absolutely. Everything is hunky-dory and then, boom, you’re
fired; the maid walks out; you lose a child; or something really bad
happens. How do you-uh handle it? The first thing I remember is,
God does permit U-turns. Failure is an event, not a person. Yester¬
day really did end last night; today is a brand-new day. Remem¬
ber, you don’t drown by falling in water, you only drown if you
stay there-uh.”

104
 Tales of the Tape

I ask if he thinks people can change their behavior after listen¬

ing to a speaker. Zig takes five minutes responding, and I quickly
forget the question. In the last ten or fifteen years, he tells me,
more people are tuned in to integrity. If you act with integrity you
don't have fear or guilt. Not everything’s relative. One of his fa¬
vorite sayings is: Truth can be denied but it can’t be avoided. He
asks people in his seminar if they’d hire a CPA who is relatively
honest. The people at Enron and WorldCom were relatively hon¬
est. They didn’t lie about everything. That cost the stock market
$6 trillion, according to the Associated Press, and the average
American family $60,000.
“Some things are right and some things are wrong. When I
come home from an out-of-town trip to my wife of fifty-eight
years, not one time has she ever asked me if I have been relatively
faithful.’’
Admittedly, it can be hard to put together the image of a totally
devoted faithful husband with that of a man hawking Saladmas-
ters and bottom flushers. But who knows? Zig is that rare
combination—utterly outrageous and completely sincere. Or so it
seems. If you’re at all suspicious, if relentlessly upbeat values
make you squirm, well, you don’t want to spend an hour in Zig’s
company. He sneaks his wife into half the conversation. He talks
endlessly about family. All his children and grandchildren live
within a two-hour drive. One granddaughter (“that pretty
blonde”) works down the hall. So does his son, he’s the CEO. An¬
other son’s the COO. His youngest daughter edits his books. His
assistant might as well be family—she’s been with him twenty-
eight years. Her schooling stopped with tenth grade.
And he peppers his talk with thanks to the Lord. He owes
everything to Christ. His voice is a gift from God. His career
“exploded” when he became a Christian. His new book, Better
Than Good, profiles twenty-five success phenomena who followed

105
YES YOU CAN!

biblical principles. When I leave, he gives me a copy of his autobi¬

ography, Zig. He inscribes it by pressing a rubber stamp onto a
blank page. The end of the printed inscription reads, “If man can
take moldy bread and make penicillin out of it, just think what a
loving God can make out of you.”
Under his signature he writes a biblical reference, Isaiah 40:8. I
look it up and read: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the
word of our God stands forever.”
A view from the top indeed.

106
 THE BOTTOM LINE

Zig Ziglar commands $50,000 and up. Most speakers

charge less. A few get more. For the companies that hire them, the
tee can be the tip of the iceberg. There are airline tickets, limos, first-
class hotels. Take five hundred top managers away from their jobs
for a day, or even a bunch of salesmen, and the cost skyrockets. Add
it all up—the employees holed up in expensive resorts, those speaker
fees, and the extras, the work hours lost, the incentive pens and
mouse pads, the fees to meeting planners—multiply all that by the
number of meetings, thousands every year, and you’re talking serious
money. By one estimate, it all costs U.S. companies over $150 billion.
You’d think, given this investment of time and resources,
there’d be ample evidence it was worth the effort. You’d think
wrong. The group that would logically benefit most—professional
meeting planners—has shown virtually no interest in document¬
ing the success of their meetings. Only very recently has Meeting
Planners International (MPI) taken steps to find out il companies
get what they pay for. The initiative to nail down the return on in¬
vestment (ROI) is in its infancy.
Is it possible—just possible—that meetings are a waste of
time? A costly extravagance? That all that money for speakers
could be better spent on office plants or aid to Africa? Do speak¬
ers contribute anything to the bottom line? Jason Jennings, corpo¬
rate consultant and author of Less Is More, is skeptical. He and his

107
YES YOU CAN!

research team have come up with an interesting fact. After studying

four thousand companies and rating the ten most “productive —
based on various criteria from revenue per employee to cash
How—they found that none spent much money motivating their
workers. “They don’t have to,” says Jennings. “They’ve made the
work so magical, so fulfilling, they don’t need vision statements,
they don’t have to come in with carrots.”
What works to motivate workers, he believes, is “an authentic
cause that becomes the culture of the company.” He cites IKEA
and its pledge to build “furniture for the many—not for the few,
not for the rich, not for design magazines." To underscore its com¬
mitment to the masses, IKEA founder and chairman Ingvar Kam-
prad Hies economy, stays in a Motel 6, and takes one vacation a
year—a two-week bicycle trip. IKEA doesn’t stage rah-rah re¬
treats with the Chalk Man or an astronaut.
Jennings himself is a speaker. He claims to get one thousand re¬
quests from bureaus a year—and selects eighty. He picks carefully
and he does his research. He gets a “diagnostic." (“Doctors don't
hand out prescriptions without a diagnosis. That's illegal.”) He gets
a list of attendees and calls them to find out, as he puts it, “what’s
keeping them awake at night.” He gives them “take-aways.” With¬
out that kind of dialogue, Jennings believes companies are throwing
their money away. The week before we talked, he’d traveled to a
conference of financial service execs in Cincinnati. The main
speaker, handsomely paid, could have been talking Swahili. Every¬
thing was an acronym: “This is our PERQ, the speaker bumbles on
about that. Next it’s the EMC initiative. Then it’s something called
SIMQUE.” When the woman was done, Jennings cornered a group
to ask what they thought. “They told me it was the biggest bunch of
bullshit they’d ever heard. They didn’t understand a thing.”
And yet every year companies spend considerable sums on re¬
treats and meetings and conferences.

108
 The Bottom Line

Why does that budget exist?” asks Jennings. “Because it ex¬

isted last year. Because the CEO wants to prove his jet is bigger
than yours, because he wants to show off the size of his dick at the
country club. Why are there all these meetings? Because they’ve
always been there. No one has ever challenged the wisdom of hav¬
ing them.”

Companies that stage meetings have produced little data,

which is not so surprising. Up until recently, almost all meetings
were arranged under the auspices of Human Resources or Sales
or Marketing. Why would anyone in those departments initiate
research that risked showing that the huge expenditures they’d
authorized had produced no results? Whose heads would roll? In
these more budget-conscious times, meetings have largely drifted
into the cubicles of those in Procurement, the folks with spread¬
sheets and calculators on their desks. The new mandate has be¬
come accountability. Not surprisingly, the meeting profession is
suddenly nervous.
Marsha Flanagan is the VP of Development at MPI. When I
asked her why the industry had only recently addressed the ROI
problem, she was quick to take exception. Oh no, she said. “We’ve
been studying it since 1995.” The reason there have been no re¬
sults, she explained, is because the previous ten years had been de¬
voted to an “awareness campaign.”
That's a lot of awareness. Its impact is yet to be determined.
The first ten years were tagged Phase One. Phase Two is imple¬
mentation. Weeks before we talked, MPI staged its first “training”
to learn how to document ROI. The seminar was held in Miami
and aimed at MPI members at the chapter level. I asked Flanagan
how many had attended. She said she didn’t know. The maximum
intended, she allowed, was twenty. I asked if she could let me
know how many actually attended. A few days later she got back
to me. Eight people showed up in Miami.

109
YES YOU CAN!

The next training was scheduled for December, in another six

months.
It’s not that MPI has been blind to the problem. “It is the
number-one most requested topic of meeting professionals,’
Flanagan told me. A recent cover story in the MPI magazine is ti¬
tled: “ROI: Why It Matters.” Writes author Carol Patton: “The
meeting planning function has never been under more scrutiny
from ‘C-levels’—senior executives looking to ascertain value and

see proven results.”

It’s not that efforts haven’t been made to evaluate meetings.
The files of HR planners bulge with completed questionnaires.
It’s not that ROI is itself a foreign concept. “[But] for years,”
writes Suzie Amer in Successful Meetings magazine, “the term has
been used so loosely and in such a wide variety of contexts that it’s
thought to refer to everything from the ergonomics of chairs to the
relevance of the keynote address. And while some of these factors
affect ROI, none singularly defines it; rather, return on investment
measurements must consider all the aspects of a meeting to arrive at
an explicit and definitive value." (Well, yes. That would be the point.)
It’s not even that ROI has never been measured. Every once in a
while, a lonesome consultant pays some attention. In a much pub¬
licized study, Sprint took a close look at its “hospitality events”—
such as “social functions” at the Super Bowl and the NCAA Final
Four. It turned out that customers who got the star treatment were
more likely to renew their service contracts than customers who
didn’t get courtside seats.
They did a study to determine that?
ROI has become like the elephant in the room. Everyone knows
it’s there—but nobody knows how to get it out. To be fair, the in¬
ertia that prevails in the meetings industry is partly a product of
the field of ROI itself. In her book, The Bottom Line on ROI, Pa¬
tricia Pulliam Phillips pays homage to the pioneering work of

110
 The Bottom Line

Donald Kirkpatrick, who, in the 1950s, developed a four-level

evaluation to hgure out if training programs, say, were successful.
The last level was “Results.” The only trouble was that Kirk¬
patrick neglected to weigh results against the price of the pro¬
gram. It took several decades for the next guy to tack on a fifth
level—namely, what it costs to improve results. That insight has
been hailed as a breakthrough.

“Phillips," writes Patricia Phillips, “converts the monetary

value and compares the monetary benefits to the fully loaded costs
of the program.”
The double Phillips is neither a typo nor coincidence. Patricia
happens to be married to none other than Jack J. Phillips, who
wrote the seminal book Return on Investment. He founded the ROI
Institute, which, though headquartered in a sleepy Montgomery,
Alabama, suburb, counts over two thousand organizations that use
its methodology. Twelve hundred have completed “certification
programs” in its workshops. The magazine Successful Meetings
named him one of the Top 25 Businessmen of Note in 2005, say¬
ing: “Behind the dispassionate analysis lies a deep desire by Phillips
to help people who have languished in organizations without the
recognition they deserve—like a lot of meeting planners.”
It was to Jack Phillips that “languishing” meeting planners
turned to help assess their meetings. In 2004, MPI staged training
courses to acquaint key personnel with Phillips’s work, officially
called the Phillips ROI Methodology. The meetings met with
mixed reaction. As reported in the magazine Meeting News, “the
word ‘daunting’ was frequently bandied about during interviews
with presenters and attendees.”
“We stressed this can be daunting,” said Jamie McDonough
from Fusion, a production company that delivers content to meet¬
ings. It was Fusion that brought in Phillips to work with MPI.
“It is a daunting task, you need to do a lot of research and come
YES YOU CAN!

up with a plan,” said Jan Engehretson, a conference manager for

Tastefully Simple, a direct-sales gourmet food company that got
the ROI pitch. “To me the problem is the time commitment.
Where do you find the time to do something like that?”
Flanagan herself conceded, “With any measurement system it
takes an additional time to learn, and may be beyond the current

skill sets of some meeting planners.”

She wasn’t kidding. I tracked down Jack Phillips to hear about
the method. It is not a method for children. When I ask Phillips
how it works, he takes a deep breath. “Here’s the chain,” he says.
First you do the “reaction” phase. You get a response from peo¬
ple at the meeting. Was the meeting useful? Important? Do you
intend to do something different? Step two is learning. What did
you learn? Did you gain new insights? Step three comes in a mat¬
ter of weeks; it’s the implementation phase. A questionnaire. Fo¬
cus groups. What exactly did you do differently? Have you
changed your ways? Tried a new approach? “Here’s where it gets
tough,” continues Phillips, because you're trying to measure con¬
sequences, impact. Then it’s payoff time, step four, another ques¬
tionnaire to gauge “implications.” If you’re doing something
differently, there should be consequences. A payoff. "That’s what
we’re trying to track,” says Phillips.
Done? Nope. Here’s where Kirkpatrick folded up his tent. Now
it’s time to “stretch it a little further,” says Phillips. What’s the mon¬
etary impact? Less employee turnover? Team working better?
Sales up? Phillips and his group check results a year later. “Once
we have that value,” says Phillips, “we try and weed out other fac¬
tors. We ask what percent of the improvement was related to the
speech. We ask about the confidence in that estimate—the error in
allocation. Let’s say it’s sixty percent. Then we do the math. Sup¬
pose sales are up four hundred thousand dollars. Say twenty per¬
cent is due to the speaker. We’re talking eighty thousand dollars.

112
 The Bottom Line

We figure in the error. Sixty percent of eighty thousand is forty-

eight thousand. We subtract that number from the cost of the
speaker—his fee, hotel expenses, lost work hours. That’s the ROI.”
The good news, says Phillips, is that you don’t have to debrief
every person attending the meeting. A dozen will do. “You just
capture that sample on a random basis.”

The bad news is: people don’t like to hear the bad news. In
other words: What happens if the ROI is negative?
Phillips addresses the problem head-on in his book: “One of the
greatest fears is the possibility of having a negative ROI . . . Few in¬
dividuals want to be involved in a process that exposes a failure.
They are concerned that the failure may reflect unfavorably on
them.” They’re concerned they’ll get fired. You don’t underwrite a
study that shows you’ve been squandering company money.
Phillips quickly offers “steps” to undo the damage. Question
the “feasibility of the impact study.” Don’t oversimplify the conse¬
quences of a negative ROI. Head it off by looking for early warn¬
ing signs. Manage expectations. Use the information to drive
change. “Sometimes,” writes Phillips, “the negative ROI can be
transformed into a positive ROI with some minor alterations.”
You may call that cheating; others call it management.
However one views it, measuring the ROI of meetings—and
isolating the impact of speakers—threatens to drift into the realm
of science fiction. Phillips himself concedes that it’s hard to pre¬
dict what will work and what won’t at a meeting. Reaction to any¬
thing can be so capricious. For instance, he tells me, he just saw
two movies. He loved Neverland, the “real” story of Peter Pan. He
found it very touching. But that was it. It inspired him to do ex¬
actly nothing. Then he and his wife saw Shall We Dance, a film
about regular folk competing in ballroom dancing. Within a

week, they’d begun classes.

You just never know.

113
YES YOU CAN!

There is another view, which paints the future of ROI work in

a much more favorable light. David Rich, head of strategy for the
giant consulting firm the George R Johnson Company, is a big be¬
liever in ROI. Johnson happens to be the exclusive agency of record
for IBM’s events planning, and when Rich arrived, he stuck Lew
Gerstner’s picture over his desk. Gerstner, IBM’s longtime chief,
was a model for measuring achievement. “He wanted results that
were meaningful, the objective monetized value. Not the return on
cute pseudometrics. Did everyone have a good time at a meeting?
If that was your report, he’d kick you out of your office. Sure, ROI
can be measured. The meetings and events industry makes it sound
harder than it is. It just takes some effort and practice.”
The ROI of event marketing should be easiest to measure. You’ve
got everyone face-to-face, points out Rich, you’ve got their addresses
and phone numbers. The problem is that the events industry has en¬
tertainment roots, it lacks corporate marketing discipline. MPI is
still new at the game, and the Phillips methodology is not the “gold
standard.” It’s complicated, acknowledges Rich (“Though not as
complicated as some”), and there are other models out there.
Whatever the final word on ROI, Rich doubts it will call meet¬
ings themselves into question. “Events are the shoulders on which
messages are carried. It’s hard to cut through the clutter of adver¬
tising. It’s a way to recommit, to declare a new vision. Face-to-face
is where most change happens. Events are intimate conversations
on a large scale, and speakers play a large part, they can be a
tremendously powerful tool.”
Provided, says Rich, they deliver the right message at the right
time in the right situation with the right person. Don’t hire any
old big name because the chairman read his book at bedtime.
So here’s the bottom line. Everyone’s talking ROI these days.
Postrecession, post-9/11, there’s no wiggle room when it comes to
dollars and cents. The CEO demands accountability, and meeting

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 The Bottom Line

planners had better deliver. The gravy train has pulled into the sta¬
tion. That’s short-term. Long-term, it’s a question of whether the
ROI troops can deliver a usable result before everyone in the meet¬
ings industry stops caring, which may be the secret hope of speak¬
ers and bureaus alike.
Even Jamie McDonough of Fusion, a fan of both Phillips and
ROI, admits not every result can be measured in dollars and cents.
“Intangibles,’’ he says, “are definitely a factor.”
Those intangibles—enthusiasm, excitement, teamwork—look
a lot better to a CEO in the context of hard data, adds McDo¬
nough. But it doesn’t take much prompting before he’s waxing
eloquent about the special value of speakers.
“Take a pharmaceutical convention. They’re a bunch of sales
reps. You give them an astronaut. They’ve never seen the moon.
They don’t know what the earth looks like from space. But the
point is to expand their ideas, to open their minds to see the world
differently. Meetings aren’t normal events. They’re not supposed
to be.”
“There’s no tangible return on investment,” declares Jay Kemp,
vice president of the International Speakers Bureau in Dallas, “but
motivational speakers get asked over and over to come back and
speak to the same groups. Why is that? Because study after study
shows that companies are going to be more successful when the
employees are happier.”
You can take those words to the bank. Elappier workers make
more productive workers; they stick around. Burnout costs run
high. Attrition drives down the bottom line and profit margin.
That is the view of Larry Johnston. Johnston was a bright star
at GE, one of several likely candidates tagged to succeed CEO
Jack Welch. When the job went to someone else, Johnston quit to
head up the huge grocery chain Albertsons. One of his first calls
was to Ed Foreman, the motivator who’d helped turn around

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YES YOU CAN!

GE’s faltering medical division in Europe. He reached him on his

cell phone in Denali National Park.

“Did you see this morning’s Wall Street journal?”
“Larry, I’m in Alaska. I’m hiking Mount McKinley.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m hiking!”
“I’m taking over Albertsons.”
Foreman was surprised. “What do you know about groceries? ’
“I know about people,” Johnston replied, “and that’s where you

come in.”
Since that day three years ago, Foreman has run dozens of
meetings for Albertsons. Johnston hires him several times a year.
He hired him for an event in August for newly promoted Jewel
store managers, which is where we are now, in the Chicago Room
of the Hickory Ridge Marriott. The first morning session has just
started, and already eighty men and women are punching the air
while they shout, “I’m awake! I’m alive! I feel great!”
Before we met, Foreman got nervous and wanted to be assured I
wasn’t “one of those tongue-in-cheek investigative 60 Minutes types
who’ll call me a snake oil salesman.” I told him no, I wouldn’t think
of it. And I wouldn’t; he’s much too sincere. He believes in eating
right and thinking positive thoughts. We have sixty thousand
thoughts a day, he reports, and most of them are negative. Six out of
ten people, according to a survey, hate to go to work. More heart at¬
tacks happen on Monday between 8 and 9 am than at any other
hour. So dump the trash and think about “laughing, living, and lov¬
ing.” Give yourself a fifteen-second laugh break every morning and
afternoon. “All the water in the world can’t sink a ship,” he likes to
say, “unless it gets inside it.” If you’re depressed, try yelling, “I’m
depressed!” You can’t yell and be depressed at the same time, so
your mood shifts. In other words, you are what you think about—
the gospel of Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale.

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 The Bottom Line

But Foreman’s got a twist. His program is a three-day immer¬

sion deal. You have to eat healthy, get up at six for a walk, then read
a “sell-help book" lor twenty minutes. You’ve got to follow along
in the workbook. You ve got to pledge to stick to his program for
thirty days. 11 you do, he promises, you’ll start each day saying,
“Good morning, God" instead of “Good God, it’s morning.”
Johnston is lar from the only top exec whose companies have
hired Foreman to goose up the troops. Caterpillar and Exxon Mo¬
bil and American Airlines, to name but a few, have made him a
very busy—and rich—man. Not that he needs the money. He grew
up poor in West Texas, dreaming of being a millionaire, and be¬
came one at the age of twenty-six. His goal shifted to $i million a
year, then $i million paid in taxes. He won’t say when he reached
that plateau, but it was likely way back when. He’s seventy-eight, a
spry, Iriendly man with a commanding handshake.
He made his first fortune in oil and gas. A Republican, he ran
for Congress in a hugely Democratic West Texas district and won.
He moved to New Mexico and won a congressional seat there,
too. He’s the only man in one hundred years to serve in Congress
for two states. In a squeaker, Foreman lost the New Mexico seat to
his former good friend, the lieutenant governor, and opted to go
back to Texas and back to making money. He made his second
fortune in ready-made cement. He’s been on chummy terms with
six presidents.
He is, not surprisingly, a pal of Dallas neighbor Zig Ziglar. Zig
took Foreman's Richer Life seminar, Foreman has attended Zig’s
program. He has read Zig’s philosophy of life into the congres¬
sional record. Before the lunch break, the eighty Jewel managers
line up for their Life Is Terrific tote bag and copies of Norman
Vincent Peale’s slim book, Success. Their assignment is to go to
their rooms and read it after lunch. That’s alter a short meditation
and change of clothes. You’ll feel fresh, promises Foreman.

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YES YOU CAN!

Most everyone seems okay with the program, sucked up in Fore¬

man’s infectious enthusiasm. They leave the room in high spirits. I
ask Foreman if there’s any permanent impact. Absolutely, he says.
In thirty days, his research shows, 80 percent of those in the pro¬
gram feel better. In a year, 50 percent say they’ve improved their life.
“That’s not bad,’’ he says. “Twenty percent would be good. Ten
percent would be good.”
He used to let a company calculate its own ROI, then Foreman
would split the results. After a while he dropped his percent to
twenty-five, then ten. Clients still figured he was overpaid. Now
he takes a fee.
Foreman does about sixty programs a year. His accountant wants
to know why he still works so hard, and Foreman tells him, “Be¬
cause I enjoy it! I enjoy it more than fishing or golfing or hunting.”
Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have fun. Before we join the store
managers for lunch in the cafeteria, he wants to show me pictures of
a five-week safari he took a few months back. He took 1,500 pic¬
tures and whittled them down to 130. There are maybe 20 in a small
book. We flip past lions, zebras, gorillas, a rhino. The scene shifts to
Egypt. There are shots of Foreman on a camel, of the pyramids, the
sphinx. He stops at a picture of what looks like rubble.
“That’s the quarry they used,” he says. “The pharaohs knew
how to motivate people. Back then it was work or die.”
He chuckles and points toward the cafeteria. “Lunch?”

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 PART THREE

THE HELP-ME GENERATION

 CHANGE, PLEASE

So here’s the big question: Do people change after

hearing a speaker? Is their outlook on life any different? Do they
sell more widgets? Ray Kopcinski of MDRT got struck by a bolt
of lightning and pounded oft for Nepal, but how often does that
happen? Aren’t speakers like Chinese food? You get roused and
excited, you’re thrilled with possibility, then half an hour later
you’re your same old dull, lethargic self again.
One thing is certain: In the United States we’re big on the idea
of change. We always were. Our country was founded on the be¬
lie! that something better lay over the horizon. Those early souls
braved months at sea, storms, illness, death, to improve their lot.
America was the land of opportunity. You could come here root¬
less and settle a valley. You could start with nothing and end up
rich. Optimism was in our genes, it energized us, it promised a
better future, from Plymouth Rock to Daisy Buchanan’s dock. In
The Great Gatsby, that green light was a beacon of possibility, elu¬
sive maybe, but always there.
A proclivity to change is in our blood, and possibly on our
DNA. In his book American Mania, Peter C. Whybrow argues that
our mobile habits and derring-do are based in the country’s appeal
to a migrant culture. “Migrants are a ‘certain kind of people,’ ”
posits Whybrow, “for whom a love of competition, curiosity and a
willingness to take risks are instinctual and enduring talents . . .

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YES YOU CAN!

America is an unusual nation, in many ways a genetic experiment

as much as a social one.” He traces the impulse to change to one of
the brain’s neurotransmitters, dopamine, and finds that the pres¬
ence of dopamine in one receptor, the D4-7 allele, is one predictor
of change. Studies of immigrants have actually shown a high cor¬
relation between dopamine in that receptor and “novelty-seeking

profiles.
Some people prospect for change in the hopes of more riches.
They do it for adventure—because they want a new landscape.
The rest of us look to change because we don’t like who we are.
We’re not satisfied. It’s these dual propellants that power the moti¬
vation business: we’re optimists, we believe in a better future;
we’re disgruntled, unhappy with our lot.
A fundamental dissatisfaction feeds the sprawling self-help sec¬
tion in Borders and Barnes & Noble. We’re not pleased with our love
life, our money, our work. A 2003 survey by the Society of Human
Resources found eight out of ten workers wanted to leave their jobs.
There’s so much to fix. Information itself has become a problem. In
the twenty-first century, we’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of
things we need to know, by the endless trail of Internet links and the
limitless universe of blogs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, it’s said, was the
last person who knew all there was to know. Today, most of us can’t
figure out how the latest cell phone works. Entire fields of knowl¬
edge, such as physics, go through a wash cycle every eight years.
And it’s not getting any better. The more we have, the less we
seem to be content. In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry
Schwartz argues that the profusion of wares, from jeans to
40i(k)s, is detrimental to our well-being; instead of abundance, it
produces stress and anxiety.
“People can never relax and enjoy what they have already
achieved,” writes Schwartz. “At all times they have to stay alert for
the next big chance.”

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 Change, Please

What seemed okay yesterday is no longer good enough today.

Our surroundings look shabby. We re dissatisfied with our
kitchen, our curtains, our deck. At one time in 2004, there were
twenty-four television shows running on home improvement. We
call in the queer guys to help with our closets and wine cellars.
We entrust our out-of-control children to an English nanny.
“Makeover Madness," one scribe at Vanity Fair called the blitz of
grumbling on television.

Nothing is impossible to fix. We could even swap our spouses!

The ABC television show Wife Swap gets an average of 250 calls a
week from people who’d like to switch homes.
Wife Swap typifies the impulse to change as well as the inertia
that is such an obstacle. The show, modeled on an English proto¬
type, has two distinct phases. In week one, the wife observes and
tries to adjust to her new surroundings and family. Given that
most swaps are with polar-opposite households, this produces an
agony of hand-wringing and muttered despair. An anal-retentive
dust-obsessed mom steps into a horror of filthy dishes and un¬
mopped tile. A mom who carefully regulates her kids’ allowance
has to deal with wild girls who shoe-shop on Dad’s Amex. An up¬
tight, classy marketing woman swaps families with a farmer—and
has to milk cows in a barn! Week two is when it gets interesting:
the transplant moms set the rules. The kids howl, the dad protests,
tempers fly—it makes for very successful television.
Here’s a typical show. Paulette from New fersey is in the proud
tradition of anal housekeepers. She cleans five hours a day; every
other day she cleans under the radiators! The family’s carnivorous;
meat is on the menu every night. The kids are spoiled. Mike Ju¬
nior, who’s ballooned on chicken nuggets, could be the poster boy
for the anti-McDonald’s litigants. He watches tons of TV and
plays lots of video games. Older sister Nicole orders breakfast in

bed the night before.

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YES YOU CAN!

Elizabeth, Paulette’s counterpart out in California, is a vegetar¬

ian. She cleans fifteen minutes a day, tops. She believes “meditation
is more important than hygiene.’ Her partner, who’s black, “works
as a poet and all-around artist.” He meditates two hours each morn¬
ing and thinks “time is an illusion.” This is his seven hundredth trip

to earth.
“Coming up,” says the announcer, “Elizabeth will have to eat
meat and face her new mother-in-law.”
Tragicomedy ensues. Elizabeth and Adolfo, it seems, aren t
even married! “We just haven’t gotten around to it,” Elizabeth
smiles. Paulette is horrified by the house she’s walked into. “It’s . . .
filthy! I’m so upset, you have no idea.” She sobs the day she sees
ants crawling on the kids’ underwear. Elizabeth turns out the bet¬
ter sport. She gamely thrusts her hands into a bowl of chopped
meat while cheerfully reciting, “Let go, grow, do something dif¬
ferent, go for it.” But watch out when Granny visits. “If there’s one
person on earth who’s a bigger cleaning fanatic than me,” warns
Paulette, “it’s my mother.”
Can you guess what happens?
Paulette, who’s got Ajax for DNA, can’t wait to get down on all
fours again. Elizabeth—surprise—hires a cleaning woman. And
she and Adolfo get married!
“What’s amazing to me," says Stephen Lambert, the show’s
producer in London, “is that it doesn't sound like such a big
deal—ten days in someone else’s house. But it’s astonishing how
much of an impact it has on the people. They’re often profoundly
changed, living in another person’s house.”
The motives to volunteer vary. Obviously, concedes Lambert,
some just want to be on TV. For others it’s a strategy to change
household details or shift the couple’s power dynamics: “They see
it as a kind of marriage therapy.” A third group shows up to

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 Change, Please

flaunt the superiority of their own lifestyle. Whatever the motive,

virtually all volunteer requests are initiated by the wife.
“The women are more dissatisfied, they get a rougher deal,
they want more appreciation,” says Lambert. “They still do the
lion’s share of domestic work. The husband thinks it’s not going
to have a big effect, hut then it really starts to rile them. When the
new wives get a chance to change the rules, it drives them potty.”
But they adjust—or bide their time. Invariably the separated
spouses fly into each other’s arms at the end. They shower kisses,
they cling to each other’s neck, they’re thrilled to be back. Never,
not once, says Lambert, has a wife opted to stay with the trial hus¬
band. Lambert maintains “significant changes” take place (though
Wife Swap has done no long-term follow-ups). If you’re in the
home-stability camp, these adjustments may sound heartwarming.
"Dads make more ot an effort, uptight mothers are no longer so
obsessively tidy, often pets are introduced, a dad spends more time
with his kids.”
Yet Lambert is the first to admit the final results may be
skewed. “There’s much less emphasis on change here,” he says. “In
England it’s more of a car crash. But in the States, ABC has
pushed to focus on the transformation. The audience wants to see
change. It’s something very American.”
Ultimately, the show is profoundly conservative. Exposure to
wildly different lifestyles has very little impact. Even for families
motivated to change and willing to air their worst behaviors on
television, the couples take only baby steps. This would not sur¬
prise Dr. William Pinsoff, president of the Family Institute in
Evanston, Illinois. Elis organization is undertaking what is ar¬
guably the most far-reaching study of what motivates people to
change. He understands all too well the obstacles.
The institute operates out of a large new home on a leafy side

125
YES YOU CAN!

street on the campus of Northwestern University. It’s well funded

by Chicago’s top foundations. Despite its academic lodging, the in¬
stitute has remarkable reach, with tentacles in every neighborhood
of Chicago. “What’s so extraordinary and wonderful about the in¬
stitute,” says Pinsoff, “is that last year we did almost three thousand
therapy sessions. That’s lour thousand cases from all over Chicago.”
That breadth will give a lot of credence to the institute’s study
and its primary tool, the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change,
known, not surprisingly, as the STIC (as in “stick"). Very simply—
and it’s not simple at all—clients who see therapists get evaluated
with the STIC for a variety of personality traits and functions.
Over time, they’re scored on various scales, and it’s all plugged into
a computer. In Pinsoff’s “grand vision," the data become part of a
huge database against which therapists can measure progress.
“Ultimately,” he says, “we’ll develop a typology that predicts
change profiles.”
Pinsoff gets very excited when he thinks about the study’s po¬
tential. It will provide a window on how people change in therapy.
Virtually all previous theories were derived from a clinical setting.
Now he’s designing a road map, a way to calculate what's working
in therapy and what isn’t.
Exactly how people change is not yet so clear, however, admits
Pinsoff. He can recognize the clients who’d like to change but
don’t know how (“I can’t express my feelings”) or fear the conse¬
quences (“my wife will leave me if I become more assertive”). Pain
is the best motivator. “If you’re terribly depressed, or losing your
job, or your wife’s about to throw you out—well, you’re probably
ready to say, you know what, I should change!” Therapy can help
“il the person just needs to be pushed or pulled, given information
and support.”

But what’s the best propellant? Pinsoff, a self-confessed

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 Change, Please

“change freak,” is impatient to get the answers. But for now, he

can only sit and wait while his treasured STIC sucks up data.
Psychoanalysis, which he personally found valuable, seems almost
archaic. He mistrusts coaches, because half of them are unlicensed
and don t know what they’re doing. In general, he shoots for a
middle ground, an approach that’s both “depth-oriented” and
'active-directive. Therapy is limited only by the ignorance of
therapists themselves: the problem is that there’s no clue to what
works. So many people want to change, but they lack the informa¬
tion. The STIC will provide that information. A new day is
dawning. “Some people,” he bursts out, “you can tell them what to
do and they do it!”

“Of course, in the psychotherapeutic world,” he adds, almost

wistfully, “there’s been a prohibition against telling people what
to do.”
There is no more fundamental field of psychological study
than change and its driving force, motivation. Textbooks have
been written on the subject. Entire departments in universities
puzzle it out. Psychologists have devoted their lives to studying
motivation. It’s not surprising that it holds such a grip on psychol¬
ogists. After all, it asks the question: Why do we do what we do?
It doesn’t get more fundamental than that. Or more complicated.
Intelligent people have been trying to find answers since the
time of Aristotle, who argued that the mind is a blank slate and
we are masters of our own free will. In the opposite corner, the de-
terminists felt all behavior results from previous conditions. The
free-will people and the determinist side battled it out for cen¬
turies. Around the seventeenth century, things got a little muddy.
Descartes, for instance, hedged: you do things because you want to
(that is the soul talking) but also because you have to, or instinc¬
tively (the body). Finally he came down on the determinist side—

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YES YOU CAN!

we do what we do because of innate ideas. T he nature-nurture de¬

bate is pretty much an outgrowth of the philosophies of Aristotle

(who had Plato on his team) and Descartes.

Psychology, in general, operates out of the determinist camp.
Everything we do has a cause. There’s a modicum of free will,
because we can pick our poison—we walk down the aisle of a su¬
permarket and select any cereal we want. But there’s always a rea¬
son we select the particular cereal we do. Sigmund Freud was
emphatic about this. Everything we do, we do for a reason, whether
we know it or not. Freud pretty much ruled the roost for the first
few decades of the twentieth century. It wasn’t until the 1940s that
psychologists began to look at motivation through a different lens.
The concept of “drive” became a big deal. Drive was a more so¬
phisticated way of thinking about instinct. A man named Clark L.
Hull wrote three influential books in the late forties and early fifties
proposing that drives are tied to needs, such as hunger or thirst, but
could also be larger, more fundamental. The hunger drive is more
encompassing than mere food-seeking. Drives energize behavior. In
his comprehensive book, Motivation: Theory and Research, Herbert
L. Petri devotes fifty pages (and thirty-five pages of references) to
drive theory and all those who had started to pick it apart.
B. F. Skinner was not one of them, but he’s responsible for a
still gloomier view of the human condition. Skinner traced behav¬
ior to mechanistic roots, focusing on internal need states—hunger,
thirst, sex. He observed hungry rats in a cage. A rat accidentally
tripped a lever that provided food, then soon had his behavior
“conditioned” to trip the lever intentionally for food. This did not
suggest a very lofty theory of learning. Thankfully, along came
Abraham Maslow, who took motivation out of the mechanistic
and posited a more embracing, if more elusive, explanation for be¬
havior. He called it Positive Regard. People just naturally want to
feel good about themselves and their environment. They want

128
 Change, Please

to be effective in controlling the world around them. They are “self-

actualizing.’’ Maslow’s theories were tricky to prove in the lab, but
they offered an optimistic and flattering image of human nature.
This generous, high-minded view got a second boost from
Carl Rogers. He, too, believed that the major motivating force in
personality is the actualization of self. He differed with Maslow
only on how a person reaches that state and what that person is like
when he or she gets there. His client-centered therapy drew lots of
adherents—and would have major implications for other strategies
of change such as coaching (which we’ll come to shortly).
A contemporary of Maslow and Rogers, Viktor Frank!, got his
bona fides in the grimmest way imaginable: he survived Auschwitz.
In doing so, in his ability to transcend the most awful circum¬
stance, he posited yet another lofty need of man: to obtain a sense
of meaning and purpose. His great book, Man’s Search for Mean¬
ing, was compelling testimony.
Maslow and Rogers had argued that people just naturally want
to live happier, more fulfilling lives and, given the chance and
skills, will take steps to improve their lot. This theory about the
ability to control one’s destiny soon got another bump from the
champions of cognitive therapy. Skinner and his ilk had banned
words like “will’’ and “consciousness.” Now, it turned out, an im¬
portant component of change could be thinking and feeling. It
was all good news for the motivation business. You can will your¬
self into a different state. You are consciously in control of your
actions. Earl Nightingale was ahead of his time. You are (and can
become) what you think about.
Not many speakers dwell on the negative. You hear about the
horrors of damnation from the pulpit, not the podium. The moti¬
vation business has mostly relied on boosting confidence, setting
examples, dispelling excuses. Ronan Tynan can throw a discus
without legs, so you can darn well get up in the morning and do

129
YES YOU CAN!

your crunches. Feel you got dealt a lousy hand? 1 hink about the
woman on her bike who had a tree fall on her head.
The messages are clear. You don’t drown if you fall in water,
you only drown if you stay in it. Stressed is desserts spelled back¬
ward. You are what you think—that’s the big secret. So think big.
Set the bar higher. Look in the mirror each morning and say, “I’m
great.” Make a plan. Set goals. Be invincible.
But does it work? Can change be that simple? Surely meaning¬
ful change takes time. Or does it? Tony Robbins thinks we’ve sold
ourselves a bill of goods. During his first week in neurolinguistic
programming, he saw lifetime phobias fly out the door in an hour.
“Why is it that most people think change takes so long? In real¬
ity, it’s only difficult because most of us don’t know how to change!”
For most people, Robbins suggests, instant change means you never
had a problem at all. “If you can change that easily, why didn’t you
change a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, and stop complaining?”
All changes are created in a moment, argues Robbins: “It’s just
that most of us wait until certain things happen before we finally
decide to make a shift.”
Robbins gives one hundred seminars a year. Fie makes a for¬
tune. But does he make a difference? Lots of people say yes—and
no. I have coffee with Dedrea Gray, who is just back from ten days
in Majorca with her art-dealer husband and thirteen-year-old son. It
was her son who got her to take a Tony Robbins seminar. He was
having trouble with school cliques; he lacked self-confidence. A
friend raved to Dedrea about the seminar. A month later, she was in
Chicago’s McCormick Center with 1,200 other people facing six feet
of red-hot coals. “I was definitely afraid. They were real. I thought,
‘No way!’ ” But she looked at her son and walked. That was a year
ago. Now she says, “It was an amazing feeling. It was powerful to
think you can train your mind to block out reality.”
What impressed Dedrea most, after the coals, was Robbins

130
 Change, Please

himself. He was indefatigable, totally focused. He never left the

stage. Three days, twelve hours a day. He never seemed to eat or
drink or go to the bathroom. “He was really strong, amazing. If
he makes a lot of money—so be it.”

Her son is doing better, and Dedrea’s still got the Robbins
workbook she filled out that weekend. She’s not about to sign up
again though. Well, why should she? She got what she wanted.
She flips a few pages, smiling curiously at the resolves and fan¬
tasies she listed.

Stephen Covey, the man who wrote 7 Habits, also takes trans¬
formation one step at a time—but on the living room rug. He puts
more emphasis on homework. The first three habits of effective
people are all about creating character, and you don’t pull that off
overnight; plus habits one through three are the building blocks
for the next three habits, so you can’t cheat and hop around. If you
want to make small (read: insignificant) changes, then alter your
behavior. If you want to make big changes, you’ve got to switch
how you see things. You need, says Covey, a paradigm shift.
Which takes time. Don’t hurry it. Start with a mission statement.
Get everyone involved. Covey offers up the mission statement of
his own family; instead of charades or Scrabble, the family spent
its evenings hammering out a document that is not for the light¬
hearted. “Our family mission statement,” Covey intones on a tape,
“is to create a place of order, love, and happiness and to provide
opportunity for each person to become responsible, effective, and
interdependent in order to accomplish worthy purposes
which are then described.
Brian Tracy, the third musketeer of motivation, falls some¬
where in between. How to Get Everything You Want—Faster Than
You Ever Thought Possible, trumpets the subtitle of his book,
Goals! In truth, the title says it all. The way to get richer (happier,
more powerful, more successful) is to set goals. He fills 250-plus

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YES YOU CAN!

pages with tips and guidelines that don’t require any writing on
your part (so many self-help books fill pages with “progress” re¬
ports), leavened with lots of quotes from the likes of Zig Ziglar,
Marcus Aurelius, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Napoleon Hill.
There are those, naturally, who don’t believe you can change by
reading a book—even a big book like Covey’s or Robbins’s 500-
plus-page Awaken the Giant Within. A lecture won’t do it. You’ve
got to really think about stuff. You need to immerse yourself.
You need to take the Landmark Forum.

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 THE FORUM: GET IT?

Landmark Education, as it’s formally known, is hardly

alone. There are any number of groups that foster change in an
intense, supportive environment. Formally, they are gathered
under the rubric “large group awareness training.” A few groups
are relatively new. Some have been around for decades. Almost
all owe a major debt to a Unity minister named Alexander
Everett.
English by birth, Everett arrived in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1962
to start a boarding school. While founding what is now the Fort
Worth Country Day School, he concocted a training program to
raise awareness, spiritually and personally, and called it Mind
Dynamics. In 1970, the headquarters moved to San Francisco and
became a staple of the New Age in California. Sessions were at¬
tended by what would soon become a blue-ribbon group of apos¬
tles, including:

• Werner Erhard, who, in 1971, founded est, which evolved

into the Forum;
• The foursome—Bob White, Randy Revell, Charlene Afre-
mow, and John Hanley—who started Lifespring in 1974;
• Howard Nease, who founded Personal Dynamics;
• Jim Quinn, who founded Lifestream;
• Thomas D. Willhite, who founded PSI Seminars.

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YES YOU CAN!

It was good to have such a robust legacy, since Everett himself

didn’t stick around long. The year he moved to San Francisco, he
sold Mind Dynamics to William Penn Patrick, an ambitious if
unscrupulous fellow who peddled cosmetics through a pyramid
organization called Holiday Magic. The training for that group
promoted hard-hitting group encounters and did not mesh well
with Everett’s milder philosophy. A spate of lawsuits eventually
ended both Mind Dynamics and Leadership Dynamics. Penn
Patrick met a more dramatic death when he crashed his F-86
Sabre at an air show in Sacramento.
By strange coincidence, airplane tragedy soon claimed another
of Everett’s disciples. This was Thomas D. Willhite, who started
PSI around the dining table of his Wisconsin home with his wife,
Jane. Soon the couple migrated to California, where they pur¬
chased High Valley Ranch, a 1,700-acre cattle spread in Lake
County. Their idea—unfair, of course, to summarize in a
sentence—was that humans possess great untapped potential and
strength, which can be accessed during educational programs.
Under the Willhites’ leadership, the company expanded its course
offerings and locations.
Willhite didn’t live to see PSI’s more dramatic growth. He died
flying his stunt plane over High Valley Ranch, whereupon his wife
took over. She is still PSI’s president, and the headquarters remain
the ranch, the site of various training sessions. The organization
offers a four-day basic seminar plus many other programs, some
for children and teens. There are PSI programs in fifteen cities
from Seattle to Singapore. I was introduced to PSI by a fellow
toastmaster (more later) and recent PSI convert who hoped I’d en¬
roll. She took me to several introductions, where graduates greatly
outnumbered guests.

The head of a major transportation union, a genial, clean-cut

man in his forties, testified that PSI had changed his life; it saved

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his marriage and launched him into meaningful work. He seemed

pleasantly focused and totally guileless. He told a story about a re¬
cent Chicago visit from Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta
whom he would never, pre-PSI, have dared approach. They spent
several minutes talking in private.

A PSI staffer who lives on the ranch was nothing if not practi¬
cal: “You walk out of the seminar with forty-two tools in your
pocket—ready to use!”

"It changed my life,” reported another graduate. “I’ve done

Tony Robbins, Silva, I’ve firewalked. This is not for basic human
needs. It’s for people who want to learn and grow and contribute
quickly. PSI guarantees growth.”
And it does. If you’re not satisfied, you can get your money
back. This was a point repeatedly stressed by my fellow toastmas¬
ter. She knew it would change my life. She sent me e-mail testi¬
monials from thrilled graduates. As my friend, she wanted me to
experience the basic seminar. Wasn’t it worth $450? Wasn’t it
worth one weekend of my life?
Undoubtedly it was. But I had a good excuse. I’d already en¬
rolled in the Landmark Forum.
Thus do I find myself early one Friday morning in Chicago’s
River North area, at 820 North Orleans Street, in a low-slung gray-
stoned building that is both dull and modern. Just below street level
and visible through plate glass windows, platoons of exercisers run
on the treadmills of Crunch Fitness. Up half a flight of stairs we
await a different sort of shape-up. In a large fluorescent-lit room,
162 participants sit on folding chairs. We’re a diverse lot. There are
kids who look like they haven’t hit twenty; there are card-carrying
AARP members. Maybe 5 percent to 10 percent of the room is
African American. In the far back corner a woman sits ready to
translate to ten Hispanics. Just about everyone looks nervous, some
of us for a reason. We know Landmark is vaguely connected to est,

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YES YOU CAN!

whose intense weekends featured lots of browbeating and no bath¬

room breaks. I want a break as soon as I sit down. I he chairs, di¬
vided into three sections facing the front of the room and a raised
platform, are clumped uncomfortably close together. A woman
next to me has brought a cushion. Later she’ll confide that she
brought a suitcase of cushions. She heard the chairs were hard. We
are scheduled to sit on these chairs until midnight today, then again

on Saturday and Sunday.

“Good morning!”
Our leader, Jeff, strides to the stage. Everyone has been urged
to dress casually and comfortably. Jeff is wearing a periwinkle-
blue shirt and matching blue tie. He’s trim, medium height, an at¬
tractive fortyish man with black hair and a spreading bald spot.
The only flaw in his handsome face is a Bob Hope ski-slope nose.
He settles into a director’s chair behind his lectern. He appears ex¬
tremely at ease.
“Let’s take some time to talk about concerns or questions you
might have. Anyone?”
“Why can’t we bring in coffee?”
“It could stain the carpet.”
What’s underfoot is, generously, a carpet.
“I heard this was part of est. Is that true?”
Uh-oh. Cat’s out of the bag.
Jeff doesn’t bat an eye. You could have been asking about the
weather. Yes, Werner Erhard, this guy in the seventies, started
this thing called est. Probably we’d heard of it. Well, Landmark
took about 4 percent and created its own “technology.” There
are about fifty leaders like him. Cities all over the world. People
from everywhere. Ordinary people, extraordinary people, Jeff’s
had them all. Oscar winners. Miss Universe. NFL quarterbacks.
You name it.
“And here’s the thing,” says Jeff. “No one’s more extraordinary

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 The Forum: Get It?

than you. That’s right. You think jumping this high is extraordi¬
nary? Not to an Olympic high jumper. To them it’s just ordinary.
And you know what.' They’re as dissatisfied as you.”
He tells the tale of an Olympic swimmer, a guy who won the
gold. Took him fifteen years of practice. Showed up every morn¬
ing at 5:30 at the pool. Won the gold and appeared on TV, radio,
the Today show. Greatest thing that ever happened to him. But you
know what? In the Forum he confessed it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t
enoughl

"See, it’s all relative. Anyone seen the movie Citizen Kane? The
greatest movie of all time, right? About the little happy kid who
went merrily sledding, then got rich and powerful. Accumulated
cars and companies and women. Died alone in his huge mansion.
What did it all mean? What did it mean? Rosebud. He was trying
to get back to the sled.”
The way he tells it elicits a shiver.
The first order of business is this. We’ve got to distinguish be¬
tween what actually happened in our lives—and what we thin\
happened. Let’s say Mommy took away our favorite fire chief’s
hat when we were five. Okay, that happened. So Mommy didn’t
love us, right? Wrong. That’s our interpretation of what happened.
Jeff draws two circles on the blackboard. On the left, stuff that
happened; on the right, our interpretation. Then he draws an over¬
lapped circle between them. That’s our “story.”
“Your job is to move all of ‘interpretation’ out of ‘what hap¬
pened.’” Later this will become, “Your job is to take your past out
of your future.”
This is radical stuff, Jeff says. Over the hours it will build to the
view that our past doesn’t matter. That’s right. Our past doesn’t

matter!
Jeff is going to show us. He picks up his director’s chair. He
carries it around the stage. He pretends to meet people but keeps

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YES YOU CAN!

talking to his chair. Sometimes he listens to the chair talking.

Then he gets tired and dies.

“Now it’s over. But hey, you’re in good company. You had a

crummy, ordinary life.”

Jeff looks at us like he hasn’t told us anything. Like, what, you’re
surprised? He returns to the blackboard. He does another dia¬
gram, this time a box. It’s us. He draws another box around it, our
should/shouldn’t voice. We want to look good, that’s what it’s all
about. Isn’t that right? We all try to be successful. Rich. Attractive.
Smart. We want to avoid looking dumb and foolish and a failure.
“By the way”—he glances over his shoulder—“there’s nothing
wrong with being comfortable. It’s just not authentic.”
Oh.
Over the next three days I’ll hear that phrase a lot. “By the way,
there’s nothing wrong with being vain.” Or ambitious or un¬
happy. “You’ll do what’s comfortable,” says Jeff, “and that’s okay.”
Of course he doesn’t really mean it’s okay. If it were, 162 of us
wouldn’t be sitting on these hard chairs in this fluorescent-lit room
from nine in the morning until midnight. Something is not work¬
ing in our lives. That’s why we’re here. That’s why there’s a Forum.
There’s a lot about our story. And that’s what it is—a story.
Something we made up. We think it’s real—but it’s not. We keep it
going with our “racket.” A racket is “a fixed way of being with a
persistent complaint.” You “run” a racket.
Jeff is great at identifying rackets. Let’s say you sit down in a
chair and this woman you like doesn’t sit next to you. Here’s where
your mind starts going. Jeff draws in his lips, his face tightens. He
starts talking ratatat, half mumbling. “‘She doesn’t like me or
she’d sit next to me. Maybe she likes the man she’s sitting next to.
He must think I’m pathetic. Maybe she does, too. Probably all the
people in the room think I’m pathetic. Of course I never . . . blah-
blahblahblahblah.’ You’re running a racket.”

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 The Forum: Get It?

I think about the previous night, when my wife was late.

Again. I sat waiting in the car, quietly seething. She knows 1 hate
it when she’s late. If she doesn’t know it, then something’s wrong
in our marriage. So she knows it—and must be doing it because
she doesn t care. About me. If I say something, she’ll remind me I
didn’t pick up the dry cleaning. But those were her clothes. Why
didn’t she . . . blahblahblahblah.
She was just late.

“Think about all the stuff that goes through your mind in
traffic.”

Well, yes. Why isn’t the guy in front of me paying attention?

He’s talking on his cell. I should call my office on my cell. Only I
don't have an office anymore. Maybe I worked in the wrong pro¬
fession. If I’d figured out the right profession instead of doing
what I . . . blahblahblahblah.”
Jeff would say we re running rackets all the time.
I actually love this idea of rackets. It’s all too true. I particu¬
larly love the word “racket.” Very clever, both a scam and a lot of
noise.
The second day’s agenda includes “Getting Complete with Your
Parents.” Guess what? says Jeff. “They are what they are. They did
what they did.”
He’s very good at making a mockery of how much weight we
put on our gripes with our parents. Let’s say you’re dead, heading
for heaven. Here’s how the dialogue goes. “Thanks for the life,
God. It would have been really great except for those horrible par¬
ents who made me feel not loved.”
Kind of pathetic, wouldn’t you say?
How come, he asks, you attribute everything that’s bad to your
parents and all that’s good to you? Sound familiar? Guess what.
They did the best they could. Did you ever imagine what their sto¬
ries were? Some did really bad things, okay. But it doesn’t matter.

139
YES YOU CAN!

Whether they loved you to death or raped and molested you, you
still have to accept them—or you can’t move forward.
“No matter what kind of parents you had, or what happened, it
has nothing to do with being complete. My father didn’t love me?
It’s a story. Do you get that? Her husband cheated. So did her father.
It snowed yesterday. That happened. It’s not bad or good. Get it.?
This is getting a little thornier. Forgive the father who aban¬
doned your mother? Who raped you? Right, says Jeff. Get your
past out of your future. Or you’ll never move forward.
“Or don’t,” says Jeff with a careless shrug of his shoulders. “You
don’t have to worry. You’ll all be dead soon. They’ll bury you six
feet under and throw dirt in your face. And you know what the
men who do it will be saying between cigarettes? 'You want to go
to Wendy’s for lunch?’ ”
He gives us that look. Funny, right? Think about it.
Here’s the format. Every three hours we get a thirty-minute
break. Around six we get a ninety-minute dinner break. Other¬
wise we sit in our chairs. You can get up for a glass of water from
pitchers at the back. You can go to the bathroom if you have to.
But then you might miss something, says Jeff. Like something re¬
ally important. Up to you.
Most of the time Jeff talks. He stands at a lectern and Hips
pages from a book in a black binder that I’d love to see but obvi¬
ously can’t. He does diagrams on the blackboards. There are rules.
No side talk. No talking without raising your hand. Note-taking
is frowned upon, so I write surreptitiously. And frequently he in¬
vites all of us to “share.”
There are three microphones, two on the side, one at the
back. Hands go up, and we line up behind the microphones.
When someone is finished sharing, everyone claps. It almost
doesn’t matter what we share. Occasionally, after a very moving
or funny sharing, the applause is marginally more enthusiastic. It

140
 The Forum: Get It?

is extraordinary to me what people share. A hig, tough black man

breaks down weeping as he talks about calling his son. A young
woman gets up the nerve to call her ex—and learns an incredible
truth. People tell their "stories’’—how they struggled, were aban¬
doned, ignored, pressured. They finish, there’s applause, they re¬
turn to their seats.

Occasionally things don’t go so well—that is, Jeff gets tough

with the person at the mike. One woman squirms under his ag¬
gressive “coaching.” She likes her story. She thinks it’s real. Her
dad was a creep. He hit her mom. It was real. Of course she mis¬
trusts men. From the vantage point of our chairs, however, it’s
clear; she refuses to “get it.” She’s stuck, blocked. She’s dragging
that chair around. It's sad, then weird, then exasperating.
“You should warn the next guy,” Jeff tells the woman to nervous
laughter. "By the way”—he swivels his focus on us—“she’s in good
company. If you’re not seeing yourself in her—shame on you.”
The laughs stop.
“How many of you see a piece of yourself in her?”
Hands go up.
Whereas the first day seemed to drag, to loom as endless, hours
creeping by, now time speeds up. It’s four o’clock already?
Jeff himself is a walking advertisement for the Forum. Appar¬
ently he was something of a lost soul wandering the wilderness be¬
fore he “got it.” He tells a long story about what happened after
his “advanced training.” To celebrate, he and his twin brother
were driving into Wyoming for a ski trip. Right at a stunning
setting—lake, mountain, sky—was a roadside sign: a ruined golf
course for sale. Screech of brakes. They wrote down the number.
Hey, why not? At the auction no one else showed up. Did they
know how to run a golf club resort and restaurant? Who cared? A
year later, the place was a flourishing hot spot, a newspaper head¬
lined “the Twin Brothers Miracle.” Then they got the idea to turn

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YES YOU CAN!

it into a music venue. Glenn Campbell opened. Jeff introduced

him to sixty thousand people.

He leans over the podium. “If you’d told me a year before I’d

be introducing Glenn Campbell . . .”

When you clear out all the noise and distraction, anything is
possible. That’s the Forum message. Get rid of your stories and
rackets. Free your future from your past. Start with nothing. Then
the future is yours to create. Then you can do whatever you want.
You can be anything. You can be, in Forum lingo, “an extraordi¬

nary person.”
After three days at 820 North Orleans, you buy it. I buy it. I feel
a surge of liberation, freed of the drag of endless gripes from my
past. My parents hadn’t loved me enough. Okay. So what? I spent
endless hours—days, weeks, years—tailoring my behavior to look
good. How dumb is that? I regretted all the things I’d never done,
the places I never traveled, the relationships I wasted. Right. Put it
away. Is that what I want on my tombstone? “Here lies Jonathan
Black ... he regrets he never lived.” Come on!
Okay, there’s no denying the experience is carefully scripted.
There’s that big black binder. All those jokes, those smart sponta¬
neous looks—Jeff’s done this a hundred times. Still, it’s a powerful
script. Just how powerful becomes clear sometime on Sunday af¬
ternoon. Most everyone’s giddy; it’s after a break. Half the room
has called friends and family to tell them about this miracle, to
“enroll” them. Jeff is going to impart the big secret. And that se¬
cret is . . . you’re trapped.
He does a very funny imitation of a hamster on a wheel. Run¬
ning running running, getting tired, little paws drooping, falling
dead.

“You know what will determine the number of people at your

funeral? The weather.”

There are several uncomfortable laughs.

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 The Forum: Get It?

You re like the donkey, says Jeff, with the carrot two inches in
front of its nose. Never getting there. You’re like a train—on rails.
“You're a machine. That’s the whole story. That’s all I’ve got.
Now you know. You don’t like it? That’s a racket.”
The mood in the room has gone grim.

“The only difference between a rock rolling down a hill and a

human is that the human talks about it all the way down.”
Hahaha.

He reads a speech from Macbeth. “By the greatest writer in the

English language. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ... a
lot of sound and fury signifying . . . nothing.”
He turns a page. He looks at us.
“Life is empty and meaningless.” He goes to the blackboard
and writes it in yellow chalk. “Life is empty and meaningless. Wa¬
ter’s water, rocks are hard, and this is it.”
Uh ... is he serious? This is what we’re being left with?
“You wanted something more?” he says. “You paid all that
money and this is it? This is it.”
He stands there looking at us. He’s not kidding. This is it. This
is it?
“There was a tsunami. It snowed yesterday. It’s not bad, it’s not
good. There was a tsunami. This is it.”
One person can’t stand it. He calls out, “There’s God.”
“I didn’t say there wasn’t,” Jeff says without expression.
The man jumps to his feet, sputtering. He believes in Christ the
Lord. He has his faith. Life has meaning.

“Says who?”
Lor fifteen minutes—what feels like an eternity—this man
keeps insisting there’s more. There’s God, faith, love. Jeff doesn’t
budge. His expression never changes. The room has grown in¬
creasingly uncomfortable. The man’s getting red in the face. He
refuses to listen to Jeff. “I think you’re feeling insecure in your

143
YES YOU CAN!

faith,” Jeff suggests. “Will you try that on?” He won’t. He refuses.
Then he’s broken his agreement to be “coachable,” says Jeff. He

should leave.
The man does. He’s the only who’s walked out during the entire

weekend.
Jeff seems oblivious. Okay, there is something more. He goes
back to the blackboard. Under “Life is empty and meaningless
and empty,” he writes, “It’s empty and meaningless that life is
empty and meaningless.”
And thus begins the process of resurrection. It’s a painful, pro¬
tracted process. I’m as frustrated as anyone. But Jeff persists. Slowly,
slowly, he brings us back. Don’t we get it? The other side of nothing
is . .. what? Everything. Get rid of the past. Throw out your future.
Retire the “becoming.” Instead, have a life of . .. being.
Later, someone will tell me that much of the Forum comes
from Heidegger. The whole bit about authenticity. The being-
and-nothingness stuff. It makes sense. But this doesn’t occur to me
at the time (maybe because I’ve never read Heidegger).
Gradually the mood in the room lightens. There’s hope. More
than hope. Freedom. Whatever you want. It’s up to you!
And just like that, I’m feeling great again. Electric with possi¬
bility. I can practically feel my hair bristle. What a jerk I’ve been!
I’m pumped. This Forum thing works\
I can’t wait to tell my friends.
That, of course, is a backbone of the Forum. It’s almost an im¬
perative. You need to spread the word. You need to be generous,
not stingy. It’s like when you discover a new restaurant, says Jeff.
Do you go, “I just went to this incredible new place—but I’m not
going to tell you where it is. I’m not going to tell you its name. But
the food was . .. fantastic!”
The word the Forum uses is “enrollment.” It’s right up there on
one of the big hanging signs. “Enrollment,” it reads, “is causing a

144
 The Forum: Get It?

new possibility to be present for another such that they are

touched, moved and inspired by that possibility.”
In the abstract—which it is—it’s pretty turgid stuff, though
nothing compared to the next and final precept: “The results you
get out of your participation in the Landmark Forum are a prod¬
uct of the possibilities that you invent for yourself and enroll oth¬
ers in your having gotten.”
I try to parse that sentence but eventually give up. More to the
point, if I wanted to be skeptical—if I were a cynic—I’d say en¬
rollment sounds a lot like marketing. Or a pyramid scheme. You
get something you like but have to tell (or is it sell to?) others.
But, hey-—that's just a racket I run. Isn’t that how I got to the Fo¬
rum? Someone “enrolled” me, and I’m grateful, aren’t I? What
does it matter if I'm being manipulated? You’re manipulated
into buying a car. Something good happened, and I should be
thrilled to spread the word. To make a declaration. It’s what they
did in biblical times. Only then it was called the news. It was the
Gospel.
Of course, you didn’t have to pay for the Gospel.
Cynic! Racket!
Get it?
Got it.
This “Get it? Got it” bit, incidentally, is one of the things I find
most annoying about the Forum. It’s a shorthand to clear through
the clutter, to confirm you’ve listened, but its use wears down with
repetition. Everything’s get-it-got-it, and it doesn't much matter
what there was to get. You’re supposed to be on time, for instance,
and if a Forum staffer asks where you were, you could say, “I got
tied up killing my grandmother”—and they’d say, “Got it.”
There are plenty of people who “get” the Forum. To date, the
Forum has processed two hundred thousand people. Plenty swear
by it. They say it’s changed their lives. You can read the testimonials

145
YES YOU CAN!

from a folder handed out on Sunday—in case you’re interested in

having them do a business presentation.

And then there are those whose opinion of the Forum ranges
from skeptical to downright hostile. I’ve got friends in both camps.
Most of the people I queried felt it had a big impact at the time.
One woman launched her business. Another got out of a bad

relationship.
Most of the people I know didn’t continue.
“It works here,” said a therapist friend, tapping her temple,
then laying her hand on her heart, “but not here.’
What many object to is the aggressive way Forum people lean
on others to join—or stay committed. You sit through an introduc¬
tory session, and someone immediately demands, “Do you want to
register?” No? Why not? What’s stopping you? You just need time
to decide? Is a week enough time? Can we call in a week?

And they do.

The last session of the Forum seminar is Tuesday evening after
the weekend. Everyone’s been encouraged to bring guests. A few
come alone, but most have family or triends—and sometimes lots
of friends. The fluorescent-lit room is jammed. There are hun¬
dreds of chairs now. Jeff, who’s promised us he’ll be “awesome,” is
indeed masterful—funny and cunning and smooth. “Like [vice-
presidential candidate] John Edwards,” says my wife, a lawyer
who’s duly appreciative of a courtroom smoothie.
Jeff starts out with a zinger. “If you had to choose, you wouldn’t
be who you’re being.”
Let’s see, he hypothesizes, I’m six or eight years old, when I
grow up I want to be: a person who lives with a lot of stress; a
woman in a so-so relationship; a man who withholds love from
the people he loves; a woman who doesn’t much like her work and
isn’t appreciated.

Doesn’t sound so good. Sounds pretty foolish. Well, the Forum’s

146
 The Forum: Get It?

out to transform you—because you’re stuck in a way of being you

never meant to be.

He recaps the weekend. The ground rules, our pledge of in¬

tegrity. The little voice we listen to that never says anything good.
Our rackets. The illusions we live with, the idea that it matters how
we look to other people. What formed our identity—decisions we
made as a five-year-old. Then the next “conversation”—What does
it all mean? We’re machines, cranking it out. The ultimate
inauthenticity—that our lives have inherent meaning. Nope. A
tsunami is just a big wall of water.
Four people “share” at the microphones—stirring, upbeat break¬
throughs. Lives transformed. Entire new ways of being. Who
wouldn’t be thrilled? Who wouldn’t. . . sign up for the Forum?
This is the kicker. While the guests are divided into groups and
led to other rooms for an “introduction,” we graduates are sub¬
jected to a hard sell to sign up for the next stage in the “curricu¬
lum”—the Advanced Weekend.
I don’t think Fm the only one who failed to realize the Forum
was only one third of the “Landmark Curriculum.” There’s also
the Advanced Weekend and the Masters Learning. Jeff, as usual,
makes the best possible case. The Forum is great—but it’s like ex¬
pecting to be a doctor and dropping out after the first year of med¬
ical school. So . . . those who are ready to register . . . please stand.
Maybe a fourth do. They’re applauded and are directed to half
a dozen registration tables in back.
“Okay,” says Jeff. “Now how many intend to register, but just not

tonight?”
Another twenty hands. Jeff does his “someday" speech. 1 want
to be free . . . someday. I want to transform my life . . . someday.
Guess what? It never gets easier later. Fifteen more stand.
“Alright,” says Jeff. “Now the rest of you, how many feel you
would sign up except for commitments?”

147
YES YOU CAN!

More hands. More registrants. And so it goes. No fewer than

six more attempts to get us to dispense with excuses . . . and regis¬
ter. By the end, maybe half have put down at least a deposit for the
next Advanced Weekend, which costs $795. Except that if you
register in the next four days, there’s a $200 discount.
Myself, I don’t do the Advanced. I do, however, sign up for a
ten-week seminar, which is offered free if taken within a month
of the Forum. By the time of the first Thursday meeting, one
month later, some of the weekend glow has evaporated. I’m still a
big fan. “Should I do it?” friends ask. Of course, I answer. The
way Jeff puts it, weighing objects in each hand: “Hmmm. Double
latte or start a journey? Cubs game or change my life?” Sure, do it.
How could you possibly spend three days with more benefit? It
was exciting. Compelling. Insightful. I was a Landmark convert.
That was before the seminar.

The topic of the seminar is Effectiveness. Same room. Another

160 people or so, many of whom I recognize from my weekend.
The leader is a woman, a brash, in-your-face personality, with
none of Jeff’s cunning or quiet command. I’m sure lots of people
love her. I’m not one of them.
(Racket, racket.)

Before the first session ends, we are all handed pieces of paper
to sign with half a dozen pledges. We promise to be on time, to
alert a group leader if we are going to miss a session, to keep all
discussion confidential. We promise to attend all sessions. I sign
only because the alternative is to get up and head for the door.
It doesn’t take long before I lose patience. The official aim of
the seminar is to “initiate an intention that leads to a possibility to
achieve breakthrough results with impact and velocity.” “Did
everyone get that?” our leader asks. “Should I say it again?” The

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more she says it, the worse it gets. Everything sounds like jargon. I
miss the third session to attend my seven-year-old son's school per¬
formance, a fantasy about plants in which he is playing a seed.
Two days later I get a call from the seminar’s second-in-
command. She s sorry I missed the session; it was “awesome,” and
to "restore my integrity,” a member of the “critical team” will he
calling to fill me in. The next day, twenty minutes into that call, I
apologize that I have to go. She insists we aren't “complete.” I
hang up anyway. The number-two woman calls to find out what’s
wrong. Why was I being blocked? What was I afraid of?
"Jargon,” I say. “Bad coaching.”

“Coaching’s a two-way street,” she cautions. “You promised to

be complete and you weren’t.”
“It wasn’t helpful.”
"I get it. But why are you being inauthentic?”
We lock horns. I’m back in the other camp, that group of stead¬
fast doubters who resent being bullied and recoil at the herd men¬
tality. I'm on the outside looking in, feeling like I've lost
something. I’m sorry to have my faith in Landmark suffer this
puncture. Ten days later it takes another hit. The seminar leader
had generously agreed to put her social life on hold and offer
coaching to anyone who wanted it, so I signed up for a fifteen-
minute slot one afternoon.
When I call, a voice I vaguely recognize as the leader is talking
business. It takes a full minute before she says, “Hello, sorry." Now
I hear traffic noise. She’s in her car. I start by saying I want to talk
about feeling ambivalent about the seminar. “I know you feel am¬
bivalent about your daughter,” she responds. Hunh? “I don’t have a
daughter,” I say. She says, “Oh.” Then, “Sorry, I was confusing you
with someone else in the seminar. Jonathan Blackwell.” (Later I
discover there was another Blackwell—no Jonathan.) Our conver¬
sation degenerates. She wants me to think of a time I jumped into

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YES YOU CAN!

something. ( come up with directing theater in college. She asks

what that meant to me, but I can’t think. I’m feeling distracted. I’m
not comfortable on the phone. She’s in her car. She thought I was
someone else! This is coaching?
I chicken out and beg off the phone call, promising to “think
about it.” Instead I write her an e-mail complaining. She responds,
“I confused you with someone else. Big deal. The world is fuck¬
ing falling apart around us ... do you get that?”
I love her spunk, but still . . .
After the fourth seminar, I hand in my name badge.
A friend had a similar experience. She loved the weekend, then
couldn’t abide her seminar. She got tired of people sharing their
breakthroughs. “Someone lost ten pounds. Another woman an¬
nounced she’d gone on a date and hadn’t slept with the man. Well,
duh.”
I was back among the cynics.
In fairness, I should report happier results from others. Several
people I know continue to benefit from Landmark, months and
even years alter they completed their “curriculum.” At a neighbor¬
hood Thai restaurant, I have lunch with a man who’s been in¬
volved with Landmark for twenty years. He’s gone to maybe
thirty seminars. He’s not dogmatic, he’s sympathetic to my com¬
plaints, but he’d much rather sing the praises of Landmark. It
changed his life. He used to be a hard-charging antitrust attorney
married to a woman with the “world’s greatest legs.” He had two
Mercedes in the garage, a house in Hilton Head, South Carolina,
the works. Turns out he wasn’t happy. Landmark opened up a
brave new world. Remarried, he’s got a million projects now.
Movies in production, TV shows, half a dozen books with rights
he’s about to hawk at the London Book Fair. He loves the work,
the interesting people, the thrill of being alive.

“It’s all about possibility,” he tells me. “I’m a dead man. Okay. I

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 The Forum: Get It?

can either live out the rest of my life as somebody acted upon—or
I can choose. I can play the game.”

Six months later, I start another Landmark seminar. It’s on

Commitment, given by a dapper, middle-aged assistant state’s at¬
torney. He’s likable and smart. There are bankers in the seminar,
and geologists. There’s a kid covered in tattoos. I’m here because
it’s free, offered because the Effectiveness seminar was an ac¬
knowledged bust. Our scattered leader was replaced for sessions
six through ten, which is unprecedented. (No one will say why,
just that she’s “okay.") I’m not very committed to the Commit¬
ment seminar. I vacillate. The jargon makes me crazy. I don’t
want to “invent a possibility." I skip a couple of sessions. When
I’m there, however, it’s invigorating. You couldn’t invent the stories
people “share." A man reunites with his domineering sister,
knowing he’s right but able to stifle the accusation that she’s
wrong. Their dying father breaks down in tears when they hug. I
clap along with everyone else.
It’s disturbing how many of us harbor habits and behavior and
feelings we’d like to change. It’s moving, even thrilling, when some¬
one screws up the courage to try. You could argue that none of the
changes will last, and maybe they won’t. Landmark doesn’t much
like the word “change." The work is all about “breakthroughs” and
“transformation.” And yet Landmark graduates, some very success¬
ful people, believe it turned their life around. The list is long. There
are celebrities—you’d know their names. There are ordinary Joes.
There are people like Thomas Leonard, a Forum graduate, who
likely would have notched up a place in history anyway.
Surely you’ve heard of Thomas Leonard.

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 SEND IN THE COACH

Thomas Leonard is the g o d f a t h e r of coaching. We

are not talking here about coaches who run athletic teams, though
they are top draws on the motivational circuit. Vince Lombardi, of
course, ruled the roost. Phil Jackson is up there with him. Coach K,
the legendary Mike Krzyzewski from Duke, gets in the neighbor¬
hood of $20,000 an appearance. Bombastic Mike Ditka made hun¬
dreds of thousands long after he won a Super Bowl ring for the
Bears. Few question their paydays. Coaches by nature are great
motivators. They exhort their teams at halftime, they’re canny psy¬
chologists, they know when to yell and when to pat a fanny.
The coaches we’re talking about are different. Like their coun¬
terparts on the athletic held, they aspire to be quick-change artists.
But they don’t shout, they don’t impose zen meditation. They
don’t impose anything. Quite the contrary. To quote from the offi¬
cial International Coach Federation (ICF) site: “Coaches are
trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to in¬
dividual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies
from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and re¬
sourceful.’’

There are two different kinds of coaches: business (or executive)

coaches and personal (or life) coaches. Though often intertwined,
especially in the early nineties, when Leonard first promoted the
concept, they mostly require separate skill sets. Business coaching

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evolved from a bunch of disciplines, ranging from “industrial psy¬

chology” to management consulting. Most business coaches are
guides in the interaction between a person and work. Life coaches
deal in the more intimate realm of personal relationships, hopes
and dreams, coping with conflict, new patterns of individual be¬
havior. Life coaches are what interest us here. For starters, they’re
everywhere. There are coaches who help people write, work, shop,
clean, speak, parent, sleep, get up, stay thin, or stay sober. Seeing a
therapist is so yesterday. Being a therapist—well, who has time?
You can crack the coaching profession in seconds (or so it seems).
This is the Information Age, the age of interactivity. Coaches are
nothing if not interactive. And so optimistic! You want to make
changes? Let’s do it!
It was not always so simple. For decades, the Freudian model
prevailed in the realm of therapy. If you had serious questions and
went into therapy, you looked at dysfunction; you struggled to un¬
derstand why you did what you did. Invariably the finger pointed
to childhood—an overbearing mom, a cold dad, your uncle the
molester. Ultimately, after a year, or five years, or ten, you gained
sufficient insight to solve your problems.
But ten years was a long time. Along came psychologists, who
hadn’t spent five years chasing a medical degree. Who cared?
Most problems didn't require a knowledge of hemoglobin. Cer¬
tainly not depression—the common cold of mental health. The
focus of therapy shifted. Carl Rogers’s breakthrough 1951 book,
Client-Centered Therapy, suggested that the client, in alliance with
the therapist, had the potential to change and grow. The theories
of Abraham Maslow put even greater emphasis on the client’s
ability—and impulse—to realize his potential.
The medical model took a body blow. Maybe it was a mistake to
explore what was intrinsically wrong—maybe the better focus was
on becoming, on achieving what Maslow called “full humanness.”

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YES YOU CAN!

To figure this out, you could sit in a chair and talk. Maybe you’d
talk for a couple of years or, if you were lucky, just one.
Along came Milton Erickson, a highly influential psychiatrist
and the so-called father of American hypnosis. Speed was a big
draw in Erickson’s work. By thwarting the “reason” for an illness,
patients got better in miraculously short time. Two of Erickson’s
students used this approach to develop neurolinguistic program¬
ming (NLP), and there followed a host of “solution-based”
therapies with names such as “rational-emotive therapy” and “psy¬
chosynthesis.” The idea was to focus on taking personal action
and responsibility for one’s life choices—which could be done,
theoretically, with the snap of a finger. The project of getting bet¬
ter went into warp speed once a group out of Palo Alto, the Men¬
tal Research Institute, came up with a new model called Brief
Strategic Therapy. Forget a year. Hell, forget six months. How
does six weeks sound?
The health insurance industry, too, was in the fast lane. As the
twentieth century waned, the new model was all about managed
care. And you couldn’t manage without measuring. To gauge suc¬
cess, you had to gauge results—quantifiable results. The inner child
was much too elusive. The tolerance for long-term therapy shrank.
That impatience hit shrinks hard. Between 1990 and 1994, 70 per¬
cent of psychologists suffered a 50 percent cut in revenue, almost all
because ol managed care. Patients (or clients) wanted a different
kind of solution. They couldn’t afford to talk and talk and talk.
Coaching came at the perfect time. It held out the promise of
quick shifts in behavior. Change didn’t have to be a grim, labor-
intensive process. You didn’t like the way things were going? Al¬
right, let’s think about it. What are you after? What would make
you happy?

Thomas Leonard knew how to ask the right questions. By

training, he was an accountant and financial trainer in the San

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 Send in the Coach

Francisco Bay Area. Increasingly he found that his yuppie clients

wanted more than market tips. They wanted to know what to do
with their six-figure incomes; they wanted lifestyle advice. His
epiphany supposedly came the day a client couldn’t decide on the
color for his new Mercedes and asked for Leonard’s help.
A therapist might have asked why color mattered. Or inquired
about this problem in making decisions. Or asked what color car
his father drove.

Leonard said, “How do you feel about red?”

The client took the keys and drove away happy. It was the in¬
vention of coaching as a profession.
“We live in a culture that’s impatient,” says Phillip Humbert, a
psychologist who coaches. “Everyone wants to change—lose
weight, increase sales, be better parents, quit smoking. So everyone
goes into therapy or buys a self-help book or goes to a Tony Rob¬
bins workshop. But it doesn’t work, or only works partially or
works temporarily. Coaching said, ‘We’ve got a new pill.’ ”
That pill can best be described as an open-ended conversation
in which the coach guides the client down emerging paths. It
takes a little from Rogers and Maslow, a little from cognitive ther¬
apy. It borrows from the world of business consulting and per¬
sonal development courses. It is diametrically opposed to the
pathology model, which sees the client as being ill. With that
model you imagine a scale of zero to minus ten, with zero mean¬
ing normal, average, freedom from sickness. The aim of therapy is
to bring the patient to zero. Coaching goes the other way, from
zero to positive ten. Its goal is increased performance. Whereas
therapy is based on insight, coaching vests little in understanding.
It aims for results. Its focus is action. Therapy investigates the
past. Coaching aims for the future; it’s goal-oriented.
In their book Therapist as Life Coach, Patrick Williams and
Deborah C. Davis offer potential coaches a bunch of exercises

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YES YOU CAN!

called “Try It!” Here’s part of one: “What do you want? Really re¬
ally really want? What do you have in your life that you want more
of? What have you dreamed about or always wanted to do .. . ?”
Can’t decide what color car to buy? What color have you al¬
ways really, really liked? Pick red and get the keys.
Leonard didn’t invent the term “coaching”; William James
used the word back in the 1890s; it was on Earl Nightingale’s LP.
Leonard settled on “coach,” he says, “because I went through the
dictionary and it was the best and most descriptive word.” He
didn’t invent the field of “life planning” either, but he was the one
who gave it a brand name. It was Leonard who developed a system
of management tools for helping people solve problems.
“Give people information that solves their problems, and they
can change in the blink ol an eye,” says Humbert. “Leonard fig¬
ured ii I change my behavior and feelings—well, that sure looks
like a cure. If it quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
In 1992, Leonard started Coach U, which trained people online
and by teleconference. That distant connection, the portability of
coaching, became one of its biggest draws. Clients no longer had
to lie on a couch or sit in a chair in a therapist’s office. They didn’t
have to be in the office at all! This was a boon to many profes¬
sional clients who had previously wasted hours getting to and
from appointments. No more embarrassing three-hour vanishing
acts mid-afternoon. You could get business done in half an hour,
the common duration of a coaching session. Therapists benefited,
too. It added flexibility to their schedules. It freed them from an
office. A coach could coach from his home. A coach could coach
while on vacation!
“There are no parking concerns and no need to dress up,” gush
Williams and Davis. “We know coaches who live in very remote
communities, on boats, even RVs.”
There were, of course, downsides. Gone was that intimate face-

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to-face encounter that presumably afforded a therapist key behav¬

ioral clues (though many people being coached say they welcome
the freedom to be less inhibited). Another problem was the loos¬
ened barriers to entry. From the start, coaching grappled with the
question of who was properly qualified. A psychiatrist or psychol¬
ogist hung a plaque on the office wall. The office itself meant he
or she was likely doing something right. But a coach could be
sprawled in his or her messy bedroom. The at-home aspect made
it especially appealing to part-timers, often the same demographic
that got a real estate broker’s license and sold a couple of houses a
month between hauling the kids to soccer.
These were problems that coaching would have to address. But
they weren’t foremost in the heady early days of the profession,
the mid-nineties. Back then, the concept of coaching was growing
by leaps and bounds. In 1994, Leonard started the International
Coach Federation, largely supported by funds from Coach U. In
1995, another coaching pioneer, Laura Whitworth, founded the
Coaches Training Institute in San Francisco, soon to become an¬
other mainstay of training. That same year, Whitworth and her
colleagues also founded the Personal and Professional Coaches
Association (PPCA). In 1996, Leonard sold Coach U; in 1997,
ICF and PPCA merged.
Are you following this? You need to, because this is where

things get messy.

In large part, the problem was Leonard. For all his promotional
genius, for all his personal flair, he was an elusive person whose
behavior was rife with contradiction. Fie saw coaches as intimates,
allies—yet “Thomas didn’t do personal relationships very well,”
says his own coach, Shirley Anderson. To understand their clients,
he believed, coaches needed to be compassionate—yet he was of¬
ten “indifferent to other people’s feelings.” He hated public speak¬
ing, yet dreamed of being on Oprah. He could cut friends dead.

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YES YOU CAN!

Leonard and another coach, a seeming intimate, argued over the

direction of ICF—and never spoke again. Months after Leonard
sold Coach U for $2 million, he was still living in an RV.
It was the sale of Coach U that began the ruckus. Why did he
sell it at all? Likely he was simply restless or wanted another chal¬
lenge. Whatever his motives, he gave it to Sandy Vilas, a top
trainer, and took a sabbatical. Then he tried to rejoin ICF, the or¬
ganization he’d founded.
“They said, ‘Sure, fill out this form, prove you’ve gone through
the training program, jump through this hoop,’ ” relates Stephen
G. Fairley, coauthor of Getting Started in Personal and Executive
Coaching. “Leonard said, ‘Screw you, I started this program. I’m
going to start my own new organization and put you out of busi¬
ness. So he started CoachYille.”
If Coach U was big, CoachVille was a monster; it exploded onto
the scene, taking off like wildfire. Fairley, who knew Leonard
then, remembers an e-mail in which Leonard announced plans to
recruit five thousand members within the year. In six months he
had ten thousand. Fie wanted twenty thousand the next year—and
got thirty thousand. Almost every month there were two-day con¬
ferences with waiting lists.
“The conferences were capped at five hundred and the rooms
were sold out,” says Fairley. “Packed. People were lined up out the
door. It was boom boom boom.”
Then Leonard suffered a heart attack and died. He was forty-
seven.

The line to be his successor formed. One of the more likely

candidates would have been the fast-rising star on the circuit, Jen¬
nifer White, who’d written the best-selling book Wor\ Less, Make
More. But six months before Leonard’s death, she had dropped
dead of a brain aneurism, gone at the age of thirty-three.
High on the list to take over CoachVille was a fellow named

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 Send in the Coach

Dave Buck, a good friend of Leonard's and a frequent companion

on tour. When Leonard’s will was read, Buck got CoachVille, and
Sandy Vilas, who’d bought Coach U from Leonard, was named
executor. This created big problems. The primary competitor to
CoachVille was now in control of the estate. Subtle maneuvering
gave way to battles that led to the courts and lawyers. It was, most
everyone agrees, an ugly situation. The acrimony lasted for five
years and was not resolved until the pivotal 2003 ICF Convention
in Denver.

I happened to be at that convention. The mood in the grand

ballroom of the Marriott was tense as Buck came out to address the
opening session. He started by heaping praise—adulation—on
Leonard. The man was an “amazing visionary.” He’d synthesized
consulting, mentoring, and marketing. He had an extraordinary
“zest for life,” said Buck. “He called us to lives of service.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“And now,” declared Buck, “the hostility between these two
organizations, the organizations that Thomas founded, is over.”
It took several beats to digest. Then the ballroom erupted. Peo¬
ple stood and cheered.
“As a memorial to Thomas,” said Buck, “the animosity ends
here and love begins.”
Coaching had reclaimed its integrity, and none too soon. The
profession was booming—it was new and everyone wanted in.
Coaching was growing so fast that everyone hunted for niches.
“Looking for Fed Ex Clients,” read one notice on the Denver bul¬
letin board. Marcia Wieder, “America’s Dream Coach,” hyped her
appearance on Oprah and offered her own six-day “certification.”
Suzanne Falter-Barns, author of How Much Joy Cati You Stand?,
stood at her table taking names for a six-day “Writer’s Spa” in Taos.
The mood was infectiously upbeat. Paul Pearsall, the speaker, au¬
thor, and psychologist, gave a two-hour keynote and had the entire

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YES YOU CAN!

convention of twelve hundred up on their feet chanting Hawaiian

songs and swaying their hips.

It was curious to see a motivational speaker address a crowd of
coaches. In many ways, at first glance, the two professions would
seem to have little in common. Speakers stand on a remote stage,
they’re raconteurs, performers, persuaders. Get on with it! Lifes
not a dress rehearsal! Coaches work quietly at a client’s side, tak¬
ing hints, synthesizing, gently directing. Yet both face the same
challenges when it comes to strategies for change. What stirs a per¬
son to take new steps? Was it something you said—or a person’s
long-thwarted inner voice? In the very specialized study of moti¬
vation in academia, the debate revolves around intrinsic versus ex¬
trinsic. Do people respond to internal drives, or do those impulses
get crafted by practice and circumstance? Can we control and

choose what we do?

It’s a topic hotly debated in scholarly journals. The behavior-
ists, the apostles of B. F. Skinner, have stubbornly argued we re¬
spond to stimuli and act mechanistically. We do action X and
happen to get a reward and so continue to do action X. A psychol¬
ogist, Edward Deci, disagrees: human beings, he feels, have more
of a hand in their fate; we respond to more complex cues. He did
an experiment with two groups. Group one got an extrinsic re¬
ward, money, for solving a puzzle called SOMA; group two got
nothing. Afterward, both groups were left alone and secretly
watched. The group that was paid stopped playing; the group not
paid kept playing. Rewards, it was argued, actually undermine
motivation.
Deci, now a top man in motivation and professor at the Univer¬
sity of Rochester, developed what’s called self-determination the¬
ory. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he’s not a big fan of inspirational
speakers. If he’s “bored in some hotel room,” he tells me, he might
watch one on TV. “But the whole idea of ‘This is how I did it’ is

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 Send in the Coach

very bizarre. Stories are fine, but they need to provide a way for
people to think about themselves.”

The problem—and this applies equally to speakers and

coaches—is that we live in the world. “It’s fine to get people
charged up about doing their jobs differently. But that has nothing
to do with any real change in the individual’s motivation. You
need to pay attention to the setting. What’s going on in the work¬
place? Human beings need encouragement to grow and feel com¬
petent. That’s number one. Number two is: Do they have a sense
oi choice, ol sell-initiation, or are they coerced? Intrinsic motiva¬
tion is part of who we are, but we need nourishment. Plants grow,
but they need sun and water.”
“Can people make dramatic changes?” he asks. “Yes, if they see
the light. But it takes more than decision. You have to be disci¬
plined. You have to get into an exercise pattern. The environment
can either support or undermine you. That’s critical.”
In the nature-nurture debate, Deci likes lots ol nature and a
dollop of nurture.
At the Denver coaches’ convention, there was more attention
paid to the how than the why. To be sure, several workshops were
devoted to developing research to give the profession credibility.
Coaches want to be taken seriously, given the same validation as
therapists, and surveys are under way to establish benchmarks. On
the whole, though, barriers to entry were mostly ignored. In Be¬
coming a Coach, a meaty sell-published book (lots of sections but
no page numbers), Coach U CEO Sandy Vilas hung out the wel¬
come sign to just about everyone. Who can be a coach? The cate¬
gories ranged from athletes and single parents to “those with
diverse interests” and “early adopters.”
The next section was titled “What demographic groups do
coaches come from?” The answer? All demographic groups. Except
for children, anyone could be a coach. You could be a coach. The

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YES YOU CAN!

three groups noted, complete with testimonials, were "Baby

Boomer,” “Gen X-er,” and “Retired.” (In other words, anyone
from thirty to seventy). In the last, a certain Michael Sheffield
wrote: “I am sixty years old and retired from the landscape design
business . . . Becoming a coach was the perfect shift for me, and

Coach U made the shift very easy.”

In the Chicago area, I went looking for a retired person to see
how the new coaching career was going. I found Mel Zahn.
Zahn is a good-looking, balding, sixty-six-year-old grandpa.
His father founded a big drug distribution company; the son ran it
for thirty years, cashed it in for a lot of money, and retired. Two
years ago Zahn sold his huge Highland Park home, to “downsize,"
he says, and built a new house in Fort Sheridan, the big army base
twenty miles north of Chicago. The vast property had surrendered
to developers, its barracks turned into condos, its officer housing
rehabbed for Chicagoans who could afford it. There remains one
lonely house with a plaque on the lawn to commemorate its leg¬
endary owner, General George C. Patton. Patton, of course, was
the military’s greatest coach and motivator.
Zahn is content to live in his shadow. His house, however, is no¬
body’s idea of downsizing. There’s a huge double-floor living
room with expensive furniture and nice art. It overlooks a deck
that faces a thick grove of trees. Zahn’s upstairs office is the size of
most people’s living room. Zahn has another home in Florida,
where he and his wife winter. His big passion is boats. When he’s
not sailing his boat on Lake Michigan or around the Caribbean, he
works at his other pastime, coaching.
“I try to keep it to a couple of days a week,” he says, “so I can
have the rest of the time free.”
This is not to say he doesn’t take coaching seriously. Though
anyone can call themselves a coach—and lots do—Zahn opted for
school. He could have picked from any of literally hundreds of

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 Send in the Coach

coaching schools. Coach U, under the aegis of Vilas, operates en¬

tirely by teleclass, CD-ROMs and downloadable material—and
costs $4,795. It requires two hundred training hours. “This is great
if you enjoy lots of information and have the time to spend,” reads
their online ad. “However, some people may not like the idea of all
those training hours.”

Zahn narrowed his choice to two other highly regarded

schools, both certified by ICF: the Hudson Institute in Santa Bar¬
bara and the Coaches T raining Institute (CTI), fifty miles south in
San Rafael. He picked the latter because it runs seminars in the
Chicago area. He paid $7,000 and went to four weekends. That
got him training—but not certification. For that he needed five
clients for supervisors to judge his skills. He rounded up friends
and referrals, then got permission to tape the half-hour sessions.
His supervisors approved. Zahn passed a four-hour written exam
and became a certified coach. He can now add the initials CCP
(Certified Coach Professional) after his name on his promo
brochure.
I ask what skills Zahn acquired, and he’s quick to answer:
“Listening.”
Like many in the coaching profession, Zahn listens for one pri¬
mary problem: people want to change. The urge is rampant, but so
many balk. “Interview anyone—seventy-five percent don’t like
their jobs. They get up in the morning, they do it because that’s
what they know. ‘I’m afraid to make another move,’ ‘I know what
I’ve got,’ ‘I’ve been working here for x number of years,’ whatever.
At some point, usually in their mid-forties, people wake up and say,
‘There must be something different out there. But what is it?’ ”
Zahn, to use his words, helps them “find their passion.” He gets
them motivated. Sometimes it takes a few sessions, sometimes it
takes a year. He calls himself a facilitator. He’s got no agenda. It
all comes from the client. One company hired him to energize a

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YES YOU CAN!

lethargic employee in finance. It turned out the client was much

more excited about human resources. He’s making the switch.
The company appears to be happy. “They wanted to see changes
in this individual, and they have.”
Zahn markets himself as a personal coach, as do most agents of
individual change such as therapists. Indeed, no small number of
therapists are making the switch to coach. In Zahn’s coaching sem¬
inars there were several going for certification. Some therapists
want to incorporate coaching techniques into their practice; some
intend to split up their practice. “If a therapist or counselor chooses
to add life coaching to her practice,” write Patrick Williams and
Deborah Davis in their book, “she can easily market her services
nationally and even internationally with the practice of telephone
coaching.”
For many, coaching provides an opportunity to switch careers.
Mira Barbir is a slim, attractive, forty-year-old woman who lives a
few suburbs south of Zahn. She was a highly successful attorney
at First Chicago and the bank’s senior counsel for many of her
eight years there. But she eventually decided the work was not
fulfilling—it didn’t speak to Barbir’s deeper beliefs and skills with
people.
“I wanted to live my values more fully. I love people, I was a
great friend. I used to help people for free. A friend told me, ‘You
should get a job where you talk on the phone.’ I said, ‘Yeah, where
do I get one of those?’ ”

She found out soon enough. A series of “synchronistic events”

led her to Coach U, the one founded by Thomas Leonard before
all the mess with CoachVille. She graduated in 2001 and started
seeing clients. Of course it wasn’t quite that simple.
“You’ve got to market yourself,” she cautions over green tea at
the Evanston health food cafe, Blind Faith. “Coaching is great. It’s

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 Send in the Coach

an amazing, amazing profession. But you need to get that it’s a

business.”
Not everyone gets that it’s a business—or cares. Stephen Fairley
estimates the majority of personal coaches are between thirty-five
and fifty-five years old and two thirds are female. “A lot of these
women are educated with bachelor’s or master’s degrees, even a
doctorate. But they don't see coaching as a profession,” says Fair-
ley. “It's not a career or business—it’s a hobby. Say your husband’s
making a couple of hundred g’s a year, you're bored at home, the
kids are gone to school, you’ve got time on your hand. The barri¬
ers to entry are low, there are teleclasses, you hear it on Oprah,
you’ve watched Starting Over ...”
The problem—and there is a problem—is that coaching is very
much an evangelical profession. That is, lots of people are out
there making a good living selling coaching. At the ICF conven¬
tion, CoachYille’s promo material promises, “From zero to sixty
thousand in a year.” The aforementioned Suzanne Falter-Barns,
“America’s Dream Coach,” was busy hyping her “self-help sa¬
lon,” which promotes publishing a book. Why publish a book?
“If you’re a coach or speaker, self-help books are great for busi¬
ness,” offers Falter-Barns. “They not only help others and spread
your mission; they give you instant credibility . . . especially if you
publish them with a major publisher.” Falter-Barns can help! She
offers a complete kit—report, downloadable advice, a binder.
“You’d think all this material would cost. . .” It begins to sound
like a Ron Popeil infomercial for the Veg-O-Matic. Not even one
thousand. Not even five hundred! No, it’s available for the aston¬
ishing price of . . . $187.
Mira Barbir is not planning to write a book or hawk her ser¬
vices on late-night cable. She doesn’t have to. Coaching is not her
hobby. It’s her business, and her business is going great guns. She

165
YES YOU CAN!

likes to limit herself to eighteen to twenty clients. Any more, and

she’s spread too thin. Sessions average forty-five minutes, usually
in a three-month package; once a week for three weeks, then a
week off. The package starts at $375 a month and goes consider¬
ably higher for corporate clients. The duration varies. Sometimes a
couple of months works just fine. A few clients have been seeing
Barbir for upward of three years.
Not actually “seeing” of course. Though initially Barbir may
meet a few clients if it’s feasible, virtually all sessions are con¬
ducted on the phone. Most find the phone model wonderful—
there’s real rapport. And of course, it’s convenient, since Barbir has
clients all over the country. In person, Barbir is disarmingly can¬
did. She never ducks questions. When I ask how she’s doing, she
responds brightly, “I’m making a very handsome, lucrative liv¬
ing.” She’s good at moving the conversation along. “Great ques¬
tion,” she frequently responds. For all her boosterism, she’s careful
not to denigrate more traditional therapy. But she’s clearly moved
past it.
“I don’t want to hear you complain for the hundredth time
about what your mother did to you. Not that I’m making light ol
that. I respect you have to explore it. I have compassion for your
problems. But at some point you have to stop telling your story.
What’s been shown over and over, in the new psychology, in the
new quantum physics, is that your mind can’t distinguish between
your retelling the story of your childhood trauma and your reliv¬
ing it. What are you going to do? What do you want? That’s my
big question.”

Clients are attracted to her, says Barbir, because they see them¬
selves in her. She’s made major leaps and transitions. She’s
emerged with a sense ol peace and satisfaction. Are you content?
Barbir asks them. Do you have control over your own mind—or is
it tormenting you?

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 Send in the Coach

“ ‘You mean I have a choice?’ clients say. ‘I can create something

different? No, really? Holy smokes, if I can change this, look at all
the other cool things that can happen!’ ”

Granted, it’s no accident we’re sipping green tea at Blind Faith,

where the waitresses in brown sack dresses move to the rhythm of
Tibetan bells. Barbir’s definitely New-Agey. She’s interested in
holistic development—mental, physical, spiritual. She talks read¬
ily of our “monkey mind” that’s locked into “belief structures.”
She herself believes in a larger order. When 1 suggest that law
must seem a left turn, she quickly shakes her head: “Oh no. I don’t
believe it was. 1 think everything in life is perfect, it all follows. It’s
beautifully orchestrated in ways we can’t begin to know from our
limited vantage point.”

If you’re in the market for a coach, there are lots of ways to find
one. You can ask a friend, who invariably has a friend who uses a
coach. You can go online. In my neighborhood in Chicago you can
walk down Racine and drop by the Full-Life storefront, where a
working psychotherapist, Dr. Joe Siegler, will give you a $250 con¬
sultation, then farm you off to a coach on his staff. You can walk
further, down Racine to North Avenue, and wander into the Tran¬
sitions Bookstore the second Tuesday of every month. That’s
when the minions of Bruce Schneider, Ph.D., explain what coach¬
ing’s all about and pitch their $6,ooo-plus program.
Schneider himself is in Manalapan, New Jersey. His Web site
refers to him as a “Metaphysician, author, empowerment guru,
Reiki master, former athlete.” He was none of these things when a
drunk driver smashed into his car, killing himself and providing
Schneider with an experience that changed his life. He floated
above his body. He realized that God was all around him. Fifteen
years later he wrote the book Relax, You’re Already Perfect. Soon
after that he founded the Institute for Professional Empowerment

Coaching (IPEC).

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YES YOU CAN!

Transitions is Chicago’s one-stop shop for anything transfor¬

mational, a vast and soothing emporium of books, CDs, wind
chimes, and crystals. Its aisles of books are labeled Spiritual, Wealth,
Addiction, Women, Martial Arts . . . you get the idea. Promptly at
7 pm, Michele Knight mounts a small platform in the cafe/readings
area. She’s got an easy laugh and a straightforward manner.
In fact she’s very good at outlining what coaching’s about—and
what it’s not. Coaching is not therapy or counseling or mentoring,
though it’s got elements of all three. It is helping individuals “gain
clarity. It is for people seeking out truth, who want to know what
life’s all about.” Coaching is also a “young and growing profes¬
sion.” There are two hundred thousand dentists, says Michele, and
seven thousand certified coaches. Certified by ICF, she hastens to
add, not by the medical profession.
“You don’t need to bother with insurance papers,” she says.
“This is actually a good thing. You’re not constricted by their cat¬
egories. This is a cash business, so you don’t have to wait two or
three months for insurance to pay you back. Those are some of the

benefits.”
She has a riddle to tell. There are two children born on the
same day at the same time with the same parents—but they’re not
twins. What are they?
We scratch our heads, we offer up feeble guesses. All, of course,
wrong. They are, says Michele finally, triplets. Of course!
The riddle is a tool to help understand coaching. Coaching is
about changing our mind-set—discarding the strictures we’ve
placed on our thinking and feeling. It’s about releasing our blocks,
freeing ourselves from “gremlins.”
Inevitably, though smoothly, she gets around to I PEC. The
course consists of three weekend “modules” spread out over seven
months. Eighty-five percent of IPEC students have paying clients
by graduation. IPEC helps with all aspects of coaching, even mar-

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 Send in the Coach

keting. It’s a great profession. “I have a lot of at-home moms who

wake up and work in their jimmies, then shower later!”
The cost for the three modules, plus books and teleclasses, is
$6,400.

I don’t have the time or money or inclination to take the

course—though I’m sure it’s worthwhile—but I’m curious to get
another taste of coaching. The Nightingale-Conant magazine,
AdvantEdge, offers a thirty-minute consultation free. “You’re Al¬
ready Excellent. Let Coaching Make You Outstanding!” trumpets
the double-page ad. I call the 800 number and quickly get sched¬
uled for a phone session in four days. Two days later Richard Piet-
roske calls to confirm our 10 am talk. I ask who he is. He says a
consultant. Two days later, precisely at ten, the phone rings.
About the first words out of his mouth are: “Did you know we
are the world leader in personal development?”
I say I do, and we get down to business. On a scale of one to
ten, how would I rate my emotional satisfaction? My physical
health? My spiritual side? I give myself sixes and sevens. What
would I like to be doing? What challenges are holding me back?
I tell him I'm an ex-editor, now a writer. He asks what I’m writ¬
ing, and I tell him a book on motivational speakers.
“Here’s one thing I want to recommend for you,” he says with¬
out missing a beat, “and this is something I’ve found useful myself.
Get a stack of index cards—write your goals on the cards, place
them wherever you spend the majority of your day. It will help
you get there faster.”
(This, curiously, is the exact same “Try It!” tip offered in
Williams and Davis’s book.)
Next he wants me to imagine I’ve discovered a key that will un¬
lock any area of my life. Which area would it be? I say “spiritual.”
Imagine how that would make me feel, he goes on. Once you do
that, it becomes a domino effect; it’s a key to every aspect of my life.

169
YES YOU CAN!

“That key is personal coaching,” says Pietroske. “Someone to

bounce ideas off. One-on-one interaction. Totally objective. A
coach will help you draw up your blueprint for success. You’ll sit
down and mastermind. He’ll show you how to do things.”
He happens to have the perfect coach in mind. He’s the presi¬
dent of something called Performance Gains in Hoffman Estates
(a suburb near O’Hare). He spent thirteen years in management
positions at Sears, fourteen years in the transport industry. Took a
regional sales office from $2.5 million to $4 million. He was a
1999 finalist for the Business Ledger Emerging Entrepreneurial
Achievement Award.
Finalist? Why can’t I work with the guy who won?
“We have a program that goes along with his coaching,” says
Pietroske. “It’s by Brian Tracy, a very successful author, one of
America’s leading authorities on human potential and human ef¬
fectiveness.”
“Can I ask what this costs?”
“I was just getting to that.”
But first. . . what I’ll be getting. Two “Jumpstart to Success”
coaching sessions. Fourteen personal coaching sessions. A 250-
page personal success coaching companion—“leather bound.” I’ll
also receive Brian Tracy’s Personal Success Coaching Program,
twelve cassettes or CDs, whichever I prefer. An additional custom
audio program that my coach and I will select, a postcoaching ses¬
sion, plus a copy of Tracy’s Twenty-One Secrets of the Self-Made
Millionaire.

The entire program, in five installments, is only $579 per in¬

stallment.

I tell Pietroske I’ll need to mull this over, and he says, “Fine, can
we make an appointment to revisit this?” I tell him, “How about
five days.” He gives me his phone and extension. He asks for my
e-mail.

170
 Send in the Coach

I hang up and do the multiplication. Close to $3,000. Within

the hour I get an e-mail from Pietroske thanking me for taking
the time to talk and offering a few other options, starting with the
Brian Tracy “Platinum” series, which includes two sessions with
Tracy himself and costs $10,000.
Wow. But then, what’s wrong with people making money off
my self-development? Is it supposed to be free? I think of my
Landmark Forum weekend, counting up all those heads, multi¬
plying 160 by $400. Why am I so suspicious? Brian Tracy has
changed people’s lives. What’s this resistance all about?
Blahblahblah.

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 BOARD GAMES

I’ve decided to see what a speaker with coach credentials

can do. Mike Ditka, “da coach” in my hometown Chicago, is too
busy golfing. Vince Lombardi’s dead. Coach K came through the
weekend I was away in Dallas. So I settle on Brian Biro. He was a
championship swim coach at the University of Southern Califor¬
nia and I’m putting myself in his hands. He, in turn, is putting a
board in mine.
It’s a 7-inch-by-i 1-inch piece of pine, 1 inch thick. Right in the
middle, right where it’s supposed to split, are two angry-looking
knots. I flip it over. Three knots, big brown swirls. Brian warned
us about knots. If you’ve ever tried to drive a nail through a knot,
he said, you know what happens. The nail bends.
Soon, in a matter of minutes, I’m supposed to drive the fleshy
part of my hand, right beneath the thumb, through the board.
I glance at the guy standing next to me. There are no visible
knots on his board. It probably wouldn’t matter if there were.
He’s a football linebacker with a bull neck and weighing, oh, 250
pounds.

It’s not about strength, Brian cautioned. Then he told a story

about a big corporate meeting where a spindly woman in a wheel¬
chair with a withered arm insisted on giving it a try. Brian had to
lift her out of the chair. A colleague held onto the woman’s crooked,
lifeless legs. First time, she missed the board entirely. Finally, to wild

172
 Board Games

cheers, she smacked her hand into the board—but it didn’t break.
She tried it four more times. Then five, six, seven, eight. On the
ninth try she did it. Her hand flew through the board like paper.
Her colleagues were screaming. She jumped in Brian’s arms. It was
the greatest experience of her life.
It was supposed to be a heartwarming tale. Only it didn’t help
me. I have good use of all four limbs. Other than being half the
linebacker’s size and two or three times his age, I have no excuse.
There are sixty-five of us spread in a big circle. We are meeting
in the giant sports complex of a major Midwestern university.
Gathered in the room are the select leaders from the school’s
twenty-five different intercollegiate teams. There are big, bruising
football players and coltish runners and lean-muscled swimmers.
All have been handpicked to attend a daylong “Leadership Train¬
ing” seminar. Before a lunch break were seminars on how to be¬
have ethically and how to dress for job interviews. The afternoon
belongs to Brian Biro.
Brian gives about eighty seminars a year. Most are corporate
meetings. Some can be as small as fifty or sixty in attendance. This
summer he’ll be helping twenty-five hundred Sprint salespeople
develop their vision and break a board. Three days before, he was
at Allstate for a meeting of its Agency for Technical Business Inte¬
gration, or, as Brian puts it, “the guys who interpret from the field
to tech. It was great. These are staff, not managers, people who
never get anything. But some VP who’d seen me previously really
wanted his people to have me.”
Companies love Brian. He’s spoken to Allstate twenty times,
Sprint forty times. Today is his fourth shot at this school’s Leader¬
ship Training. He gets $8,500 an appearance, not including travel

expenses.
He’s a short, high-octane showman with a quick, engaging
smile. He’s wearing slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, which

173
YES YOU CAN!

shows off his ropey-muscled arms. For the first two hours, with
everyone facing the front on chairs, he paces from right to left to

right like a zoo cat on meth.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun,” he begins. “We’re going to
be flying! Today is about leadership, which is nothing more than
making decisions. You’re the CEO of your own life. This is about
breaking through and taking charge.”
For ninety minutes he goes nonstop about personal break¬
throughs and the value of teamwork and “vision keys.” Occasion¬
ally he flips through pages of two flow charts on easels. There’s
stuff on them like, “I live with extraordinary E-power. Play full
out!” E stands for energy. Brian is a big believer in creating your
own energy. It’s not like the weather. Don’t whimper, “Gee, I hope
I have enough energy to get through the day,” or “I wish I had the
energy to make love to my wife tonight.” You do!
“Or maybe you’re one of those people who’s so exhausted by
work you go home and can’t even reach the remote. When it’s all
over, are you going to say, 'Did I live a great life?’ or ‘My gosh,
why didn’t I?’ ”
Brian’s got a promise to make. A bunch of promises, really.
There’s going to be something here for everyone. “Grab it!” Brian
urges. “I want you to feel awesome about who you are.” For his part,
Brian is ready to give it his all, “everything I got. I’m here to do the
work God put me here to do.” At the end of the day he promises a
“real-life unforgettable breakthrough performance. You’ll remem¬
ber it forever.” His last promise, his favorite: we’re all a team.
So let’s get started!

Are you willing? Aha, wrong word. Caught you. “Willing”

means nothing. The operative word is . . . “eager.” He flips the
pages on his easel to “The Eager Meter.” Where on the scale are
you? Comatose—or a kid on Christmas morning?
Alright then! We’ve all got a Window of Opportunity. That’s

174
 Board Games

right, says Brian, it’s our “WOO.” Let’s hear you say it. “WOO.”
Now he gets the entire room chanting “Yes,” faster and faster,
“Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes.” Then everyone raise an arm, fingers
spread to the sky, wriggle that hand, and shout, “WOO!” then
smack your hands together with a shattering “YES!!!”
Goofy? Maybe, but his energy is infectious. No one’s yawning
anymore. The kids are exchanging grins. They’re into it!
Between WOO claps, he tells stories. He’s a good storyteller.
There’s the personal fable about his five-year-old daughter Jenna.
Seems the family was sitting in a tiny cafe in a tiny town in Montana
with spectacular views of the mountains. No one was talking to
anyone else, no one saw anything, every table was isolated in its own
private world. Then little Jenna went to the big plate glass window
and exclaimed, “Look, Mommy and Daddy—we’re in heaven!”
Bingo. Soon everyone in the cafe was talking to everyone else.
Nine years later, Brian and his family still ski with the couple they
met alter Jenna’s visionary moment.
"She was the only one who saw heaven. All we saw was our
day.”
He’s got a story about the value of setting your own standards.
It’s about ultramarathons—the really long races. The ultimate is
something called the King, in Australia, and it’s 600 miles! Well,
along came a sheepherder named Cliff who’d never run it but fig¬
ured, why not?—he spent lots of time on his feet with the sheep.
There was the expected chorus of scorn. He shuffled, “he ran like a
noodle,” says Brian. But guess what? He didn’t stop for twenty-
four hours. He took minimal breaks and kept on shuffling. And he
broke the world record! And you know what else? He was sixty-
one years old! For the next four years, everyone ran like Cliff—and
broke the world record every year. How’s that for modeling?
There’s a long weeper about a scrawny, outcast first-grader
named Teddy and his teacher, Miss Thomson. When Teddy’s

175
YES YOU CAN!

mom dies, he gives Miss T homson an old bracelet and perfume.

The other kids hoot. Miss Thomson, bless her, is touched—the
bracelet and perfume belonged to his mother. Life goes on. Even¬
tually Teddy vanishes, sending her three letters—when he gradu¬
ates from college, when he marries, when he finishes medical
school. “You’re the best teacher I ever had,” he tells her. “No,
Teddy,” she corrects him. “You’re the best teacher / ever had.”
It’s a story Brian lifted from Chicken Soup for the Soul, he tells me
later, but so what? There’s nothing new under the sun. “The princi¬
ples I teach have been around forever. Any time you think you’ve
thought up something brand new, it’s in the Bible or Socrates.”
Brian got the teaching bug as the swimming coach at USC. He
coached for eight years, very successfully, and only quit “because I
had no life. I made a difficult choice. But balance is important. You
can’t be one person at work and another at home. If you do, you
get very mixed up.” He got an MBA at UCLA and tackled the
corporate world, rising to VP at a major air freight company in
the Pacific Northwest, engineering a major turnaround. When
everything was going great, he told his wife, “Honey, we’re doing
great. Let’s quit.”
“Alright,” she agreed. “Let’s go for it.”
She’s happy they did. For his eighty annual seminars, Brian gets
a fee of $8,500 a pop. Prominent among his books is Beyond Suc¬
cess: The 15 Secrets of a Winning Life, which hit number seventy-
one on Amazon. He sells a bunch of other books and CDs at
seminars and through his Web site. His “The Unstoppable Spirit—
Life Change System” includes four CD’s and a Vision Workbook
and sells for $49. He has a radio program on the Internet.
He’s either humble or a very sly salesman. He claims to abhor the
marketing side of his business and, since an epiphany one day in the
St. Louis airport, has never looked at a single evaluation. “If people
care, they’ll give you their feedback—the rest is just an ego trip.”

176
 Board Games

He s a big believer in family. Children can be our biggest inspiration;

they’re often the only reason we change. It’s one of the challenges
here in the Commodore Room. These kids have no kids.
But he’s got their attention. Here he is at the easel, flipping to
another vision key: “The Past Is History. The Future Is a Mystery.
The Gilt Is Now. That’s why we call it the present!”

Some of the kids in the room are writing that down on the pads
that came in their handsome black leather folders. Some are just
looking. No one’s snickering.

Brian has a disarming manner. There’s something terrifically en¬

gaging in his presence. You could make easy fun of his easel homi¬
lies or chicken soup stories or WOO claps. But he’s one of those men
who seem so totally sincere, so genuinely animated, so full of broth¬
erly goodwill and humanity—well, he makes you believe.
This is important, because the climax of the afternoon is the
Big Breakthrough. It’s one inch of knotty pine.
He’s got everyone gathered in one big circle. We’ve all got a
pencil. First thing . . . write on your board what you want to break
through. It could be anything. It could be a habit, a limit, an ob¬
stacle. It could be anxiety. Inhibition. Fear of failure.
I write “Fear of failure.”
Now turn the board over and write what you’ll feel once you’ve
broken through. I can’t think of anything good and write “Free¬
dom.” I’m feeling anxious, however. Suppose “fear of failure" isn’t
my big problem? Everyone’s afraid of failing. Maybe that’s mask¬
ing something deeper. And if it is, that means I’m not fully com¬
mitted, which means my chances of breaking the board are
seriously diminished.
No time to split hairs. Brian is going through the basics.
Stance. One foot forward, one back, find your balance, your cen¬
ter. Put a finger on that fatty lump below the thumb. That’s what
you want to hit. If you’re right-handed—left arm thrust out, elbow

177
YES YOU CAN!

locked, palm at ninety degrees. Right hand at your ribs. Don’t

aim for the board. Focus—and this is critical—beyond, lock on
the eyes of the person holding the board. Envision you’re flying
through the board. Try it now. First slow, reverse the hands, now

faster.
Brian demonstrates. Though he says he’s only a rookie at mar¬
tial arts, he’s got that steely focus, that lightning whipsaw in his
arms. Whap!
You can practically hear the air snap. It looks like he could go
through concrete.
He tells everyone to cheer. Chant the board-breaker’s name,
louder and louder! Make it deafening. You’re a team!
He singles out a short, unassuming girl named Patti and brings
her up. She looks determined, if nervous. Brian’s holding the
board. She’s in her stance.
“Patti, Patti, Patti!”
She’s got her arms positioned, eyes dead ahead.
“Patti, Patti, Patti!”
She takes a breath, her hand shoots forward . . .
And the board splits! The room erupts with congratulations.
Initially I’m relieved, but relief quickly gives way to anxiety. It’s
going to be very embarrassing if little Patti breaks it and I don’t.
We divide into smaller circles. Five prearranged volunteers get
their boards up. Give everyone four chances, says Brian. After
that, take a break or join his circle. I’m in Brian’s circle.
The first kid takes his position while we chant his name. “Kevin,
Kevin, Kevin!”
Brian’s got his eyes drilled on Kevin’s eyes. Kevin tenses.
Crack!

We scream his name. Kevin looks both stunned and exhila¬

rated. Brian grabs him in a bear hug.
Next.

178
 Board Games

The first five kids in our group break their boards. They all
have the same reaction: surprised and thrilled.
I go sixth. I take my stance, fix my arms. It’s impossible not to
lock onto Brian’s eyes. The circle is going, “Jonathan, Jonathan,
Jonathan!”

I can’t even hear it. I’m in the zone, or trying to be. Focus, quick
breath. Next thing I know, the board’s split. Truly I can’t believe it.
Brian squashes me in a hug. I feel . . . really great!
The feeling persists. It’s a definite buzz. I feel it all the way
back to Chicago. I run up the stairs to show my kids the board that
Daddy broke.
“Cool,” says Lucian, going back to his Playmobil castle.
Adrian, my other son, doesn’t comment.
I decide to get more informed feedback. I contact Mike Bray, a
vice president at Sprint. Bray’s been at Sprint twenty years. He
manages teams of more than a thousand. His job is to clean up a
division that’s not making enough profit. He’s a fix-it gunslinger.
“There’s a problem, people stick me in it, a year or two later we’re
back on track, then I go somewhere else. I’m an ‘ops’ guy, I go
around and fix process.” In twenty years at the company, he’s re¬
vamped Operations, Service, Billings. Whenever he picks a new
team or sets a new mission, he hires a speaker. It’s his way of say¬
ing, “This is my management style; here’s what you have to do.”
He’s hired football coaches like Tom Landry and stars like John

El way.
“It’s all about lasting impact,” he tells me. “Lots of motiva¬
tional speakers give people plenty of energy—for the moment. A
day or two later they think, ‘That was a lot of fun, nice break,
now it’s back to reality. And reality sucks.’ ”
The go-to guy in his roster is Biro. He always comes back to
Biro. There’s no hard evidence to quantify his impact. Bray can’t
justify the expense with a stunning ROI. But he gets his extra

179
YES YOU CAN!

budget anyway, because invariably things turn around when Brian’s

been there. The last division Bray fixed went on to show a $500 mil¬

lion uptick.
What does Biro contribute? In his work, Bray explains, a big
problem is attitude. “You’ve always got people who go, ‘Aw, we
can’t do that,’ or ‘It’s too hard,’ or ‘We’ve never done that before.’
Everybody throws out excuses. It’s human nature.” Just imagine
if the engineers in Houston told the Apollo Thirteen astronauts
they were doomed by a lousy air filter, he offers. In a noncritical
environment they couldn’t have jerry-rigged the thing in years.
But give it a time frame, make it life and death—then nothing’s
impossible.
That’s what Biro does. He challenges people to perform, to ex¬
ceed what they think are their limits. It’s not a three-hour trick.
The results stick. Big results. “Epiphany” isn't too strong a word.
Bray’s got stories of grateful employees—transformed employees—
who’ve sent him letters and e-mails after a Brian Biro seminar. Oc¬
casionally people break down in sobs. They clasp Bray’s hands and
tell him he’s their savior. They hug him, shaking and crying. One
woman finally confronted her abusive husband. She’d never had
the guts to stand up to him. Another sought help for an alcohol
problem. It’s the kind of thing that makes Bray feel good; it’s what
he wants to remember when he retires. Forget the big promotion
and stock options. It’s the letters he’ll remember.
He got one last night. It’s from a woman who recently attended
a Biro seminar in Kansas City. Bray doesn’t even know the
woman, she was one of seven hundred in attendance. But he’s an¬
swering her now.

This woman’s got two kids, Tyler aged ten. Rusty aged seven.
Tyler’s the athlete, she’s good at everything. Rusty—well, he loves
sports, but you wouldn’t call him gifted. So his parents just en¬
couraged him to go out and play and have fun. Then this woman

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 Board Games

heard Brian Biro. It totally changed her attitude. The very next
Saturday, she had a talk with Rusty, gave him a pep talk, told him
how to play the game differently. Would you believe it? He scored
two goals! Her son had never scored goals. She figured maybe it
was a fluke. The next Saturday she told him the team was de¬
pending on him for offense. He scored two more goals! The team
won its first game! Not only that—he starred on defense. The
coach was amazed. Mom was thrilled. Rusty, who wasn’t the type
to brag, was bursting with pride and self-confidence. During the
final game, he notched another goal.
"I know this sounds corny,” the woman wrote, “but I can hon¬
estly say I will never ignore the possibility of untapped potential.
I'd appreciate it if you could pass this on to Brian. He’s an amaz¬
ing speaker.”
But just how difficult is it to break a pine board? I take my
busted board to a tae kwon do school on Chicago’s Ashland Av¬
enue. The woman who runs the place, a fourth-degree black belt,
is conducting a class for kids on the mat beyond. I introduce my¬
self to the man behind the desk, Barry Wayland. When he reaches
to shake my hand, the entire right side of his chest bulges.
I ask him how hard it is to break a board.
“Let’s see what you have,” he says pleasantly.
I hand it over.
“Not hard at all. I’ll show you.”
He returns with a i-inch pine board, maybe twice the size of
mine, no visible knots.
“You want to push your hand through like this. Watch your fin¬
gers. Look past the board.”
“I thought you—”
“It might take a couple of tries,” he says helpfully.
So here I am again. Only Biro’s not here to drill me with those
eyes. There’s no circle of supporters screaming my name.

181
YES YOU CAN!

I go into my stance. Focus on Wayland’s huge shoulder. Pull

back.
Crack!
It splits in half. Wayland takes the pieces to the desk and writes
my name and date on the pine.
“Come back and bring your kids to class,” he calls as I leave.
I drive away disappointed. Anyone can do what Brian Biro
makes such a big deal of. But slowly it dawns on me. I might never
have broken the board without that surge of confidence from my
day with those athletes. I certainly wouldn’t have thought to do it.
Two months ago, I’d never broken a board. Now I’ve split two. On
my first try! I sail in the front door and yell:
“Hey, guys, I’ve got a great new after-school class you’ll like!”

182
 PART FOUR

CAN WE TALK?
 TOASTMASTERS

Tell someone you’re writing a book about motivational

speakers, and you’re apt to get this reaction: “Great, are they all
cranks and charlatans?" Maybe that’s human nature—the reflex re¬
sistance to change. Secretly we’d like to believe that the man onstage,
whipping us into a lather of fortitude and resolve, is himself a spine¬
less wimp who lives alone in a trailer park—the apostle of loving
and laughing trudges home to domestic despair. It’s so much easier
on the psyche. We’re vested in unmasking a hustler, the firebrand
Frank T. J. Mackey in Magnolia, Tom Cruise doing crazed flips in
his underwear, preaching “seduce and destroy” to a salivating
crowd of mealymouthed men. Turns out Tom Terrific is not what
he seems. Confronted with the truth—an abusive pop, a suffering
mom—the face splinters, the fagade crumbles. It’s our secret hope
that the man’s a fraud. It would make it so much easier.
So here’s the bad news. None of the speakers I met or interviewed
or heard about appeared to be two-faced frauds. Plenty exaggerated
their resumes, their success, their keynotes at IBM and Microsoft.
Not all were totally truthful. To evidence his self-effacing manner,
Jason Jennings told me a joke—“and this really happened to me”—
about how he showed up for a big gig (in India!) and found only one
person in the audience. At the booker’s insistence, he soldiered
ahead, only to have the single cheering guy grab him on the way to
the exit: “Don’t leave—I’m the next speaker!”

185
YES YOU CAN!

True story, said Jennings.

I heard the same joke told on a tape by Frank McGuire, a top

dog at FedEx. (One of you guys is fibbing).

Okay, so they’re not felons, but what’s the big deal? Anyone
can stand up in front of a crowd and tell them they are what they
think about. Goals are not news. This isn’t rocket science. If any¬
body can become a speaker, there’s no reason to be impressed—
and not a lot of sense in taking what a speaker says seriously.
So how hard is it to become a speaker? I’d like to find out.
First step is to find who I’m up against. What’s the local compe¬
tition? I’m not after the Ken Blanchards and Stephen Coveys. I’m
looking for talent like myself, the lower-rung guys who don’t have
star bureaus to book seminars in India. I get my first lead stranded
at a tiny Montana airport after a wedding. While we wait for spare
parts to arrive, another marooned passenger and I exchange pleas¬
antries. Where are you from? Phoenix. Chicago. What do you do?
When I say I’m writing a book on motivational speakers, he bursts
out, “You have to meet my sister Fern!”
Fern Silver is a sixty-year-old dynamo. She lives in a modest
apartment on the north fringes of Lincoln Park in Chicago. Her
study’s equipped with a formidable Mac and shelves and shelves
of books. She hurries to a file drawer and pulls out a scrapbook
filled with testimonials. She flips through the letters.
The key phrases are highlighted in red. “Unbelievable.” “Excit¬
ing.” “What a finish!” “Don’t lose the girl!”
They’re speaking of Fern’s presentation. The one in which she
runs onstage in a football uniform and helmet. She was a tomboy
as a girl, running track, playing street ball with her brother’s
friends. At the University of Illinois, she “veered to my feminine
side” and did splits on the cheerleader squad. Then it was back to
the gridiron—at least as metaphor.

“People mask themselves. To be successful in business or

186
 Toastmasters

sales—or your own life!—you’ve got to get to your true self. Your
true purpose. You’ve got to take off the stuff that stops you.”
That’s what Fern does. She comes onstage in a football uniform
and begins to disrobe. The helmet goes first. It stands for our
mind and the thoughts that control us, says Fern. Bam. On the
floor. Then the pants and padding. Get rid of that protection! Fi¬
nally the shirt. Fern wants it off her back. She gets a volunteer to
help take it oft. It’s all about trust. Helping one another.
She did this presentation first for New England Financial. They
were so thrilled, they asked her to do it again, and she did—for
twenty-one years. When she’s finished, she gives each person her
Magic Mug. But first they have to look right into her soul, eyeball to
eyeball. Then they have to give her a hug. Men cry, says Fern. In
twenty-one years, only two people chose not to take the mug.
It’s her Magic of Change Mug. On it is a rainbow, “all the
elements in each of us that make us great, from darkness to
possibility.”
Fern makes a modest living as a speaker. She does workshops
and training. In them she invariably trots out a children’s book. A
favorite is Dragon Soup by Arlene Williams. “Talk about purpose!
Here’s a girl who’s willing to go to the mountains, which was very
dangerous, to get jewels to save her family. Or how about
Dr. Seuss? Oh, the Things You Can Do That Are Good for You:
Doesn’t that say it all?”
The tot Bible is The Little Engine That Could, of course. It’s all
about perseverance, willpower. I think I can I think I can I think I
can. It’s the story about how to get over the mountain. With valu¬
able cargo, with a mission, all those kids who need food and milk
and vegetables. It’s a book, stresses Fern, about choice.
Fern shows me a dog-eared copy of The Little Engine That
Could. Every page, every margin, is literally covered with auto¬
graphs. There are lots of baseball players: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock,

187
YES YOU CAN!

Steve Garvey, and, of course, Ferguson Jenkins. Seems Fern and

her kids were big baseball fans. They were devastated when Fergie
quit baseball because his fiancee had committed suicide and killed
her child as well. Fern and her kids sent him cards, chocolate,
cookies. A year later she saw him at a baseball convention at Mc¬
Cormick Place in Chicago. She walked right up and told him she
was thrilled he was back playing. She told him about her work
with kids. He signed the book and waved over all his pals. Now
the book’s got everyone—“New England VPs, CEOs, important
newspaper people, kids, thousands of signatures, they all signed
because they believe the message has to be shared.”
I get another lead at my kids’ school. One of the moms wonders
why Fm not working at my job anymore. I tell her what Pm do¬
ing, and she immediately writes down a phone number. “You’ve
got to talk to Mike Willis.”
Willis is a strapping, handsome man in his late thirties, a self-
confessed fitness buff who runs triathlons. He held a high-
powered job at the Swiss investment banking firm UBS. He was
the managing director of IT, ran a five-hundred-person team in
Chicago, and directed a global team of four thousand. That’s
when he started speaking, but he’d much rather talk about being a
fan. He’s big on evangelical preachers, sports coaches, anybody
with an upbeat message.
“I’ve read them all,” he tells me over a latte at Starbucks. “I’m
the target market.”
His favorite is Tony Robbins. He just bought the new twenty-
CD set. He loves the enthusiasm, the core message: be enthusiastic
and upbeat, develop a game plan, and take massive action. “He’s a
live wire.” His interest fades when Robbins starts talking finances.
It goes completely when Robbins gets on his fitness kick. Willis
lifts weights himself. He doesn’t buy all that stuff about negative
resistance. “His problem is, he wants to be one-stop shopping.”

188
 Toastmasters

At least he’s not boring, says Willis, like Stephen Covey. Great
books, strong content—as a speaker, deadly. Willis has been a fan
of Wayne Dyer since college, when he read Your Erroneous Zones.
Now Dyer’s getting a little New-Agey for his taste. Worse is
Deepak Chopra. He’s high on Ken Blanchard, who did that great
book with Don Shula, Everyone’s a Coach. Coaches rank right up
there along with evangelists. Lou Holtz was number one, before
he handed the mantle to Pat Riley. For preachers, no one beats Joel
Osteen. Willis watched his TV show and bought his best-seller,
Your Best Life Now.

As a speaker, Willis likes to talk about core values—respect,

honor, decency—“not the kind of stuff they teach you at Harvard
Business School." That’s why he handed out lightsabers to his five-
hundred-person sales team after he saw a Star Wars movie. The
code of the Jedi—you don't get more high-minded than that. “I
knew it was campy,” he says, “but the fact is, they remember. Four
years later, they’ve got those lightsabers up in their cubicles.”
I take a pass on seeing Willis in action. I opt instead to catch
George O'Hare. Willis is very twenty-first-century. O’Hare got
into speaking the old-fashioned way: he sold encyclopedias at
Sears, then he moved up to vacuum cleaners and sewing machines.
“It was the old pitchman method. Here’s how it goes: ‘We’ve
got only so many left. This is the very last day. And we’re going to
give you this, too.’ I was good. Very good. I was making four hun¬
dred dollars a week. That was back in 1949—one hundred dollars
was good then. So I got promoted to cold-spot refrigerators. My
mother-in-law loved that!”
O’Hare is seventy-eight, a scrappy, lanky, fast-talking gentle¬
man in his trademark uniform: blue suit, red tie, and polished
black shoes. He wears the same uniform to every speaking engage¬
ment, which is where we’re heading now. He’s at the wheel, and
we’re speeding along Illinois 31 to a breakfast of the Algonquin

189
YES YOU CAN!

Rotary Club. It’s early, not much past 6 am. 7 he sun hasn’t risen.
It snowed last night, then the temperature dropped, and the trees
are frosted in white. It’s a winter wonderland. O’Hare doesn’t pay
much attention, though. He’s too busy talking. He’s spoken to Ro¬
tary clubs before. He does occasional corporate events. He loves to
speak in Iront of kids. He claims he’s spoken to 900,000 public
school kids.
“ ‘Accentuate the Positive,’ that’s the title. Mostly it’s a canned
speech. I try to make it look spontaneous. But I learned something.
Life is based on H_0, don’t try and make it H^O. Don’t try and
reinvent the wheel. My speech is twenty-nine and a half minutes.
Sometimes I go to thirty-five. Of course, workshops are longer.”
He’s been speaking for ten years. He got into it when he retired
from Sears. “I worked there sixty-eight years,” he likes to say. “Ac¬
tually it was only thirty-four, but I worked twice as hard.”
He wasn’t much good as a speaker when he started. He didn't
have the motivational skills to motivate others. Then he saw an ad
in the Chicago Tribune. Come see three of the greatest speakers in
the world. Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, Paul Harvey.
O’Hare paid $10 and went to a hotel auditorium. He taped every¬
thing and ducked into the bathroom every break to test his
recording—couldn’t hear a thing; he was too far back. So he ended
by walking out with $260 worth of tapes. He’s got a bunch of Zig
Ziglar tapes in the trunk of his car. He plays them all the time.
“They’re like music.”
Zig was a big influence in his life, but nothing like Dick Gre¬
gory, the nightclub comic who exploded onto the scene with his
books Nigger and From the Bact^of the Bus. O'Hare met him when
he was the appliance manager at Sears and also ran its records di¬
vision. Back then, everybody wanted their name in ads. The Rat
Pack. Streisand. Aretha. O’Hare knew them all. Sears made him
VP of Public Relations, tapped him to head up a Junior Chamber

190
 Toastmasters

of Commerce leadership training. His secretary told him he ought

to see this new nightclub comic. It was the start of a great if un¬
likely friendship. Gregory—or “Greg,” as O’Hare calls him—was
how he met Muhammad Ali. More than met—O’Hare accompa¬
nied Ali on trips to Africa, Tokyo, and Munich during the sunset
years of the fighter’s career. He was there as an enforcer, to make
sure Ah ate vegetables before his fight. Greg had put Ali on a pre¬
fight diet to get him into shape but was too busy himself running
his cross-country bicentennial marathon to oversee it.
“ 'George, I’m going to have a steak today; is it okay?’ ” O’Hare
says, doing a very good hoarse, rumbled mime of Ah. “I said, ‘No,
we're going to follow this thing to the letter, champ.’ ‘How much
that Dick Gregory pay you?’ he says. 'Nothing? He pay you noth¬
ing} George, you going to go to heaven when you die, the service
you give your fellow man on earth will pay your rent in the here¬
after.' ”

O’Hare got another tip from Gregory. They were both speak¬
ers, nonstop speakers who occasionally, rarely, would lose their
voice. “I got Greg's formula,” says O’Hare, “which was from, you
know, the singer who never shows up, not Caruso . . . Pavarotti.
Red pepper in chamomile tea, stir it up and take it as hot as you
can. It tightens your vocal chords. It’s artificial but it works.”
At seven-thirty we pull into the parking lot of the Port Edwards
restaurant in Algonquin. It’s a sprawling place on a picturesque
spit of the Fox River. Just inside, a fake fishing boat floats in a large
pool of goldfish. We’re directed to a room decorated with diving
bells and harpoons on the wall. Maybe twenty people have already
hit the buffet, and their plates are mounded with scrambled eggs
and bacon and danish. This is a “bring your spouse” breakfast, and
there are half a dozen women in attendance. O’Hare himself de¬
clines food—“I never eat before I speak,” he tells me.
The meeting opens with the Pledge of Allegiance, a blessing,

191
YES YOU CAN!

then a hearty chorus of “God Bless America.’ Gregg Cook, an Al¬

gonquin chiropractor and the morning chairman, makes the an¬
nouncements. Santa’s coming to help serve cookies and hot
chocolate at the gazebo. Volunteers are still needed for casino
night. The “Books for the Barrio” drive went great; he’s checking
on cheap shipping of the books to the Philippines—not easy, since
a lot of the usual container ships are working the war in Iraq.
“If anyone’s got a transportation connection, let me know.”
“Hey, Gregg,” someone calls. “How’s our exchange student

doing?”
Not so great, apparently. Mostly it’s the family here, admits
Cook. Seems the mom was negative from the start. Kind of got
forced into it. At least she’s stopped going through the French
girl’s clothes and drawers. So things are, well, looking up.
On that hopeful note, Cook introduces the morning speaker.
O’Hare bounds from his chair. He rockets to the front of the
room, arms flapping.
“My name’s George O’Hare and I’m not related to the airport.
The only claim to fame with the name was my uncle, who raised
me after my father was shot when I was seven. He used to broad¬
cast every night at ten on WGN with big-name bands. ‘From the
beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, from the Aragon Ballroom,’
he would say, ‘this is Husk O’Hare, the genial gentleman of the
air.’ Does anyone remember Husk O’Hare? ‘A smile is worth a
million bucks and doesn’t cost a penny. Smile and the world
smiles with you; cry and you
He leans into his audience, hand cupped behind his ear.
“Cry alone,” a few respond.
O’Hare plunges ahead. He’s had only one cup of coffee, but
he’s wired. He hops from foot to foot. He swings his arms. “Don
told me there’d be a few senior citizens present. Let’s see. Pepsi¬
Cola hits the . . .”

192
 Toastmasters

“Spot.”

That hasn t been on radio or television for sixty-three years!

We’re all victims of subliminal seduction. Television isn’t entertain¬
ment, friends, it’s de-tainment. It’s gloom and doom. The weather¬
man says thirty percent chance of ram. Why not seventy percent
chance of sun? Parents, raise your hands. Grandparents are the most
important people on earth. My grandma told me, any time someone
has slighted you, when you’re feeling blue, down, go in the bath¬
room, close the door, stare in the mirror, say, 'Starting today and for
the rest of my life I’m going to . . . ac-cen-tu-ate the positive,’ ” he
sings, “ ‘e-lim-in-ate the negative. Latch on to the
He stops dead, cups a hand behind his ear.
“Affirmative," offer several voices.
“ 'And don’t mess with . . .’ ”
“. . . Mister In-between,” they oblige.
O’Hare wheels to face each side of the room. “Now I’m going to
give you a formula from the world’s greatest coach—and don’t you
dare say Mike Ditka! I’m talking about the greatest coach that ever
was, the man who led Green Bay to seven world championships.
Vince .. . Lombardi. Life is like football, he said; football’s like life. I
asked Bob Hope, I said, ‘Bob, you’re eighty-seven years old, you’ve
got all the money in the world, why don’t you retire?’ He said, ‘I
can’t.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, 'It’s not in my contract.’ We’ve all
got a contract—with ourselves: to make today the most positive pro¬
ductive day of our life. It reminds me of a song. ‘You’ve got to . . .
live a little, take ... a little. That’s the glory of
Bends to the audience, ear cupped.
UT >>
Love.
It’s hard to tell what his audience makes of him—or exactly what
his message is. One minute he’s off again on his television rant, the
modern-day scourge, forty thousand scenes of violence, twice as
much sex, the Music Man in Algonquin railing against pool. Then

193
YES YOU CAN!

he’s on to his “Momma,” who told him “eight years before she went
to heaven, the two days never to worry about were ... yesterday and
tomorrow. Yesterday with its aches and pains and regrets and to¬
morrow with its fears and apprehensions and adversaries. Live every

day as if it were your last, and some day you will be right!
He gets his first modest laugh.
“People say, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling? Don’t tell
them! Eighty-five percent couldn’t care less, and the other fifteen
are glad you’ve got the problem. Here’s the right answer: ‘Terrific

and getting better!’ How do you feel?”

Ear cupped.
“Terrific and getting better.”
“Louder!”
“Terrific and getting better!”
Audience participation hasn’t exactly eased the tension here in
the Port Edwards breakfast room. No one’s looking at anyone
else. Who is this guy? Even these good-hearted Rotarians, these
fellows who smile and warmly shake your hand with their mouths
full of scrambled eggs, even this civic-minded band of brothers,
men who send books to the poor, who serve cookies in the gazebo,
who judge no one, even these men are squinting their eyes. And it
goes on. O’Hare is writing a book himself. The title’s so powerful
he may not put anything inside it. It’s all about excuses. I lost a
husband, a wife, a promotion, the respect of my boss, a friend, a
policeman . . . and landed in jail. And the title of his book is . . .
He reaches into a black bag, turns his back to the audience. Spins
around with a T-shirt plastered over his suit jacket. It reads . . .
“Fake It Until You Make It.”
A few guffaws among the Rotarians.
“I have a contract with corporate America. I speak to all the big
shots. They’re all scared. ‘I'd like to change but I’m too poor or too
young or too short or I smoke or I drink or I’m white or a woman.’

194
 Toastmasters

My book will tell you you're living in the greatest country in the
world, where you can have what you want, be what you want, if
only you . .

He’s bent over his bag. He pops up with another T-shirt. This
one’s . . .

“Get Your ‘But’ Out of the Way.”

He’s on a roll now. He’s a blur of gesture. Names By out.
There’s a Dick Gregory story, how Gregory introduced him to
Martin Luther King in a hotel room. He rattles off guests on his
TV show. Richard Simmons, Senator Paul Simon, Harold Wash¬
ington. He asked each one the secret of success. TV broadcaster
Bill Kurtis put it best. Find what gives you a “tingle” and do it for
the rest of your life.
He reaches into his bag.
Dutiful respect has given way to apprehension, to fear, that this
guy who’s seventy-eight, who hasn’t sold vacuum cleaners for fifty
years, who'd have a hernia if he lifted an encyclopedia today,
who’s shimmying across the floor like fames Brown, this guy
could have a .. . heart attack! And when he doesn’t, when he pops
a boom box out of his bag, announces his “theme song,” then hits
the button and starts flapping his arms to Aretha Franklin, cup¬
ping his ear, well, damn, you’ve got to hand it to him, he’s seventy-
eight and it’s eight in the morning after a blizzard and he’s
buzzed, his face is as red as his tie, well, al-right.
“You got to ac-cen-tu-ate the positive,” sings Aretha. “E-lim-
i-nate the negative . . .”
O’Hare takes over. “Today is the first day of . . .”
“The rest of your life!”
“Start saying, Yes . . .”
UT I
1 can!
“What’s the best way? Ac-cen—”
“—tu-ate the positive!”

195
YES YOU CANI

“When are you going to do it?*

“AW!”
When he’s finally done, when Cook steps in and says, “Give a
hand to George O’Hare,” the room erupts in applause. You
wouldn’t exactly call it cathartic. It’s more a sense of relief—that
O’Hare has survived. But that’s something, isn’t it? At seventy-
eight. And this was the man who stood up to Muhammad Ali,
who denied the champ his steak! Who’s gotten up before dawn,
for no money, who shook the hand of Martin Luther King, a sales¬
man, and no Willy Loman either, who’s been humping for almost
eight decades . . . talk about motivation!
Several weeks after the breakfast, I called up Don Brewer, a lo¬
cal attorney and the man who’d arranged for O’Hare to speak. I
wondered what the reaction had been.
“Oh, phenomenal,” said Brewer. “I don’t know how old he is,
but it’s amazing the amount of energy he’s got for a man that age.
Everyone really liked him. Inspiration? Who knows. Everyone
picks up something. I’d hire him again in an instant. I’m in poli¬
tics, and he’d be great at one of our strategy retreats, either at
lunch or as a dinnertime keynote. In fact, I’ve been meaning to
send him a picture of my dad. He worked all his life at Sears.”
I’m not exactly buoyed by Brewer’s enthusiasm. Decades
younger, I can’t imagine performing with O’Hare’s energy. I’ll be
lucky to drive a golf cart at eighty. I’m not climbing into a football
uniform or passing out lightsabers. I don’t need a gimmick. I need
help.
I need Toastmasters.
Toastmasters has very little to do with becoming a professional
toastmaster. This is not where George Jessel learned his trade. It is,
however, a great place to learn public speaking. Everyone says so.
Lots of the top pros cut their teeth at a Toastmasters club. Getting to
the finals of its annual championship—or winning—is money in

196
 Toastmasters

the bank; you can nail a choice spot at the National Speakers Associ¬
ation or Million Dollar Round Table convention. For rookies it’s the
place to acquire invaluable tips and experience.
Thus do I find myself one chilly evening in the small audito¬
rium of a hospital on Chicago’s Near North Side. There’s a raked
bank ol seats and a modest proscenium stage. Upstage and to the
right is a podium draped with a large banner reading “Lincoln
Park Toastmasters." There are maybe fifteen of us scattered around
the auditorium.

The meeting gets going with Meg Mattson, the club’s treasurer,
who is this evening’s designated “Jokemaster.”
She hops up onstage. “Fellow toastmasters. Honored guests.
Did you hear about the girl who was taken to the hospital after
she’d swallowed twenty quarters? The parents cornered the doc¬
tor to ask about her condition. ‘No change,’ he reported.”
There’s a pause, then lots of guffaws and clapping.
"An X-ray technician started dating a new girl, but all the doc¬
tors said, ‘I don’t know what he sees in her.’ ”
Laughs and applause.
“It was so cold last night. . . ,” she pauses meaningfully,
“. . . that a chicken crossed the road with a cape on.”
Dead silence.
“Capon, get it?”
A few hearty laughs.
“I got that from Garrison Keillor,” she confesses. “Okay, just to
keep it seasonal: someone asks God what he’s doing for the holi¬
days, and he says, ‘I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not going to earth.
Last time I got a Jewish girl pregnant, and they’ve been talking
about it for two thousand years.’ ”
She climbs down to warm applause.
Next up are prepared speeches. The first on my printed eve¬
ning’s schedule is “Tanya’s Job Hunting Tips.” A woman sits cross-

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legged on the stage and assumes a yoga pose. “Visualize a door.

Now approach the door and open it. Outside is a beautiful forest.
There are deer . . .” It’s unclear if this is meant sincerely or as a
spoof on meditative strategies. In any case, Tanya’s job-hunting tips
are useful, if less than startling. She suggests smiling. She says it’s

good to cultivate friendships.

The next speaker, a young gentleman from the Philippines,
reads a speech called “We’ll Call You,” about being stopped at
Customs and having to rethink his life.
After a short break, it’s time for evaluations. The official
“Ah/um Counter,” a woman named Dana Shapiro, says, “I detected
one ‘ah' and two ‘urns’ in Tanya’s speech. I didn’t detect any in Her¬
nando’s.”
Evaluations follow. There are several people exclaiming, “Great
job!” and “I could really relate!” “The one thing I think might be
improved,” one woman suggests to Hernando, “is your organiza¬
tion. A couple of times I got lost. But great connection to the audi¬
ence. You really looked around. Good use of notes. Good
enunciation. I'm sure everyone in back could hear you. Great job!”
“I really like the two parts of your speech, Tanya,” offers an¬
other. “Especially when you stood up and faced the audience. The
only thing, well, maybe the end. You end a little abruptly. So, well,
you start in a safe place, the forest, and maybe you could end there,
too. Otherwise—great job!”

The generous kudos are understandable. Toastmasters likes to

call itself “the world’s premier self-improvement club.” It may
also be the oldest. The man responsible is Ralph C. Smedley, an
earnest Midwesterner who graduated from Wesleyan University in
1903 and took a job as director of education for the local Young
Men’s Christian Association. Smedley figured if you wanted to get
ahead, you needed to communicate—so he got his boys to stand
up and talk. He got other boys to say what they thought of the

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speeches. He called his group “The Toastmasters Club,” because it

reminded him of after-dinner speeches at banquets.
The club was a hit, but it floundered and died when Smedley
left Bloomington for a bigger YMCA job in Freeport, Illinois.
Again Smedley started his club. Again he got transferred and the
club disappeared. It happened wherever Smedley moved, until he
landed in Santa Ana, California. This time, Smedley didn’t
move—and the club took off. Eventually he quit the YMCA and
opened a tiny office in a downtown bank. At his death in 1965, the
organization counted 80,000 members and 3,500 clubs. In 1973 it
decided to admit women, and membership jumped. Today there
are over 200,000 members in almost 10,000 clubs, many in foreign
countries. The Santa Ana club still meets, though it is now rechris¬
tened the Smedley Number One Club. In Smedley’s memory, an
empty chair holds a permanent spot by the lectern.
The Lincoln Park club is one of about thirty in the city of
Chicago (there are even more in the suburbs). I try another meet¬
ing, this one in the second-floor conference room of a boutique
hotel off Michigan Avenue. When I clicked on the group at the
Toastmasters Web site, I got this reply: “We’re a friendly spirited
bunch of guys and gals who like to learn and laugh.”
Not a bad description. The demographic looks thirtyish, most,
I learn, in sales or marketing or small business. There’s also a
bunch from foreign countries: a Guatemalan, several Finns, a man
from South Africa. There are four other guests tonight, all cheer¬

fully welcomed.
I’m getting a handle on the routine. A toastmaster welcomes
everyone. There’s applause when anyone stands up (or sits down).
No Jokemaster here, but much else is the same. The meeting gets
going with a question that everyone answers—“What movie would
you watch on a desert island?” The question doesn’t much matter.
The point is to get everyone on his or her feet talking. Then it’s time

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for Table Topics, presided over by a “Table Topics Master.” She s

got a bunch of subjects; you get two minutes to respond. Tony,
would you please talk about... ice fishing. Karen, what kind of
outdoor party would you throw in winter? Peter, talk about. . .
snowflakes. The “timer” holds up a succession of green, yellow, and
red cards. Warm applause accompanies the end of each speech, no
matter how halting or odd. The idea: good training to think on your
feet. Oh, and fun—everything in Toastmasters is fun.
After the prescribed eight-minute break, it’s on to the meat of
the meeting: the speakers. The Guatemalan has announced a bold
agenda: all ten speeches will focus on a different aspect of Toast¬
masters. A fiftyish interior designer, who arrived as a teen from
Finland, talks about starting her own business, the challenges, the
fun, her divorce and kids. The last speaker is a designer whose topic
is “Working with Feng Shui.” He hands out a map with I Ching
signs indicating where to locate wealth or love or career in a room.
The evaluators give their own speeches, while the timekeeper
holds up his colored cards. The grammarian reports on “urns” and
“you knows” and “likes.” When the meeting is over, a few repair
to a nearby hotel lounge for drinks.
I like this group, but there are also, curiously, three people con¬
nected to the place where I used to work. I decide to check out one
more club, where nobody knows me.
This one’s called Extreme Toastmasters. It meets in the spa¬
cious second-floor lounge of an old apartment building, an anom¬
aly amid its towering new condo neighbors near Michigan Avenue.
The building boasts its own swimming pool, which wafts clouds
of chlorine into the lounge whenever the door is opened. The chlo¬
rine and name aside, the club seems a welcoming place. The
lounge was secured by a tenant toastmaster and past president of
the club, Lisa Loverde.
Loverde is an attractive mid-thirties blonde who wears bright

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colors and has a pleasant, infectious laugh. She’s tonight’s Table

Topics Master. I do my best to avert her gaze, but eventually she
catches me and smiles. How about it? I come to the front of the
room, and she hands me a slip of paper that reads, “What would
you do if you were given a $100 gift certificate at Starbucks.”
I read the question over and freeze. What would I do? I start off
rambling about the inflated price of coffee and pastries. But where
is that going? I switch to talking about my favorite pastry, the but¬
tery Classic Coffee Cake with the crumb topping, and how irritated
I am when they’re out of it and ask me if I want the raspberry
crumble instead. But where’s this going? It’s another dead end.
One hundred dollars? I’d put it in the tsunami relief can, I say,
pleased to come up with something concrete. Then . . . then . . . I’d
give the rest, a huge tip, to the “barista”—someone will later com¬
pliment me for using this word—and urge her to do something
better with her life. Pause. I guess that’s it.
“Thank you,” I finish. There’s warm applause. I’m both
pleased and appalled—pleased I got up on my feet, appalled I
couldn’t think quicker.
After a break it’s on to the speeches. Most speakers are work¬
ing their way through volume one of the Toastmasters manual,
which outlines ten speeches with suggested emphasis. Tonight’s
first speaker, Marie Giannola, dark-haired and dramatic, is on
her sixth speech, with a mandate to focus on vocal variety. She
gives it an impressive start, holding up an apparent list of New
Year’s resolutions, then leaning forward and bellowing, “Rip

them up!”
Loverde is up second. Her speech, “Getting along with Patti"
(another toastmaster) is a required “roast,” number three in the
advanced manual. In a daring move, she has everyone shut their
eyes and then actually sings, “Ave Maria.” She has a nice voice.
She does a terrific job of involving some of the audience. Half a

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YES YOU CAN!

dozen times she’ll look straight at a person and say, “Imagine my

surprise, Peter . .
The mood is cheerful, upbeat, and supportive. When it’s evalu¬
ation time, no one says, “Maybe you should stick to your day job.
The fellow evaluating Maria’s speech—he’s the club president—
has one suggestion. When she shifts sideways, she almost gets her
legs tangled. He urges her to simply slide left and right. Also,
when she tears up that list of resolutions—why not actually rip
the paper in half, scrunch it into a ball, and throw it into a
wastepaper basket? Marie nods enthusiastically. Good idea.
He has a comment for Lisa, too. She kind of loses the connec¬
tion between her personal contacts. Lisa nods. It’s something to

work on.
I decide this should be my club. I like the lounge with its comfy
old chairs and sofas. The members seem pleasingly eclectic. There’s
a truck driver and Mensa member, a Texas transplant who jokes
that he’s here to get rid of his accent. There’s a man my age, a
lawyer/doctor. One woman is in sales and marketing; she wants to
improve her presentation skills. A young man from India, a soft¬
ware engineer, hopes to become a terrific speaker—then the mayor
of Chicago. His expression stays serious while everyone laughs.
Over the next few months I’ll get to know many of them better.
Tim Wilson, the club president, forty years old, has a high, nasal
voice and dresses in suits and ties. He worked at Arthur Andersen
before the firm collapsed and he took a job at Deloitte Touche.
Given his avuncular manner and confident tips, not to mention his
suits, I assume he is some kind of account executive—and am sur¬
prised to learn he is, in his own words, “a secretary.” Turns out he
wears suits here because they discourage them at work. Giannola is
a part-time teacher and Weight Watchers counselor. Phillip Lane,
the doctor/lawyer, is a fiftyish man with bushy eyebrows and pas¬
sionate ideas about medical ethics. Santosh Iyer is Indian, tall and

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 Toastmasters

sturdy, with a brisk confidence and quick wit. Gail Stone is a warm,
cheerful sixtyish woman with a sly sense of humor. Long before
she was an event planner and started her own business—“The Gail
Connection”—she was a hostess at Chicago’s famed Pump Room.
She’s a table tennis champ. She will soon become a PSI zealot.
The club was started three years before by Rocky Romero, Ec¬
uadoran by birth, who also founded Michigan Avenue Toastmas¬
ters, then split off to start Extreme Toastmasters when the first
club got too crowded. He’s fifty, a smoothly handsome man with
bright, mischievous eyes that belie his modest manner and Buddha
smile. He cut his teeth in sales, then fell under the sway of
W. Clement Stone, the insurance giant who wrote Success Through
a Positive Mental Attitude. He still remembers the elevator ride he
took with Stone—so in awe of the great man, he couldn’t speak. It
was the start of a journey that’s included everyone from Tony
Robbins to Deepak Chopra and Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote Rich
Dad, Poor Dad. It’s one of his favorite tapes. In his condo over¬
looking the Chicago River, he has hundreds of motivational tapes
and books, about $40,ooo-worth of “product.”
Loverde may be the only one who joined Toastmasters specifi¬
cally to become a motivational speaker. She grew up in a luxury
Gold Coast condo amid the city’s cultural elite, watering orchids for
the conductor of the Lyric Opera. Her father, a politically connected
circuit judge, died of prostate cancer when she was six, leaving
Lisa’s mother, a coal miner’s daughter, to take a menial clerk’s job.
When her mother died a few years later of cancer, Loverde took over
the struggling household. She did everything from managing a
hugely successful Web site for “clean family jokes” to landscaping
the Lincoln Park Zoo. She worked ten years in marketing and brand
management, then joined Toastmasters at the urging of her friend
Patti. She got another boost visiting her sister in Houston, where, at
Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, half the congregation lined up one

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YES YOU CAN!

Sunday to meet a much-hailed psychic. When it was Loverde s turn,

the woman gripped her hands, looked in her eyes, and said, You
have a message to tell. You’re going to use your voice, child.”
It was sign enough for Loverde. She’d always wanted to help
others. “It just never occurred to me you could make money talk¬
ing to people,” she realized. She quit her job and started to give
“leadership” seminars. Toastmasters seemed a great way to ramp
up her speaking skills. To move things along, she’s putting to¬
gether a book called The Confidence Game, all about how success¬
ful people psych themselves up to perform.
ET, as Extreme Toastmasters is known, turns out to be a dy¬
namic club. Most clubs meet biweekly; ET meets every week on
Wednesdays from 6:15 pm to 8:15 pm. There are rarely fewer than
a dozen attendees and frequently as many as twenty. Often two or
three guests who found the club online will try an evening and end
by joining. The cost of membership is a modest $170 a year, and
that includes the hefty Toastmasters manual and a monthly copy
of Toastmaster magazine. The club soon becomes so popular that
there ensues a speech crisis: not enough slots to give everyone who
wants to speak the chance to do so. The solution, which requires
several lively debates, is to turn one Wednesday a month into an
“all-speech” meeting.
I schedule my first speech for one such evening, thinking the
numbers will ease my nerves. A few days later I attend a Toastmas¬
ters “seminar,” an evening of bonding and networking for all
Chicago members. It takes place on the fourteenth floor of a down¬
town office building, the headquarters of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
One ol the more interesting seminar sessions is led by an ET
member, Patti Johnston, the friend of Loverde’s who got her to
join. She has an effective manner of looking you straight in the
eye. She talks in sharp, bright sentences. She smiles a lot. She puts
a lot of drama into her facial reactions. Her topic is Mentoring.

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 Toastmasters

Mentoring is a big deal at Toastmasters. Just about everybody

has a mentor when they hrst get going. Patti herself heaps praise
on her own mentor, none other than Rocky Romero, who happens
to be sitting two seats away at the table, beaming his Buddha
smile. I probably should have picked a mentor myself—it’s very
much in the spirit of the organization. Plenty of people join
Toastmasters to run tor office or to command attention at sales
meetings, hut there’s this other agenda: finding a supportive group
of nonjudgmental pals, a cozy club where any effort gets ap¬
plauded, a hybrid of Rotary, 1 think, and Alcoholics Anonymous.
Up in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers offices, I grab a slice of
pizza and troop into another session, called “Speak and Be
Happy.” It’s led by an African-American woman, a civil rights at¬
torney. Mostly she offers strategies to “take the terror out of the
talk.” Everyone is afraid to stand up and speak in front of a crowd,
she says. The first trick is to replace the fear with confidence. Do a
lot of mental rehearsal. Take a few long, deep breaths. If you’re
physically nervous, hold out your arms and rotate. She demon¬
strates this. Someone asks if you are supposed to do this before or
after you go onstage. She smiles.
Her second strategy is to remember you can’t control what oth¬
ers will think of you anyway. So you might as well plunge ahead.
I try to keep this in mind as I sit through the various speeches
the night of my presentation. In the Toastmasters manual, the
first required speech is the Icebreaker. “The general subject of
this talk is ‘you,’ ” reads the manual, “but that subject is too
broad for a short four-to-six minute talk. You must narrow the
subject by selecting three or four interesting aspects of your life
that will give your fellow members insight and understanding of

you as an individual.”
The manual goes on with several paragraphs of advice. I need
an “interesting” opening sentence. I should come up with three or

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YES YOU CAN!

four “main points” and emphasize them by using stories or anec¬

dotes. If I need notes, advises the manual, use three-by-five-inch
cards and place them on the lectern. Do a trial run with family or
friends. Don’t think of it as a “speech”—just pretend you’re hav¬
ing a talk with friends. Dress nicely. “When you look right, you

feel good about yourself.”

Everyone feels nervous, the manual assures me. Make it work
for you. There is more helpful information on pages 80 and 81.
Oh, don’t end by saying, “Thank you. The audience should be
thanking you for the information you’ve shared. “Just say, ‘Mr. (or
Madam) Toastmaster’—then enjoy the applause!”
I have several problems with all this. The first is the stuff about
nervousness. I don’t have pages 80 and 81 of my manual. I haven t
received the manual in the mail yet. All I have are three xeroxed
pages on the Icebreaker. Then there’s that business about notes. In
the lounge where my club meets, there is no lectern. Speakers just
stand on the carpet and talk. There’s nothing to lean on, nothing
to retreat behind. Notes, if I have any, will have to go in a pocket.
Finally, there’s the topic of my speech—three or four interest¬
ing aspects of my life. Unfortunately, the most interesting thing
going on right now is my giving a speech at the Extreme Toast¬
masters club. I weigh several options and settle on being laid off
from Playboy. I’d come from New York to take the job as manag¬
ing editor, envisioning a two- or three-year stint, then returning
home with a buffed-up resume. But the years went by, and I never
left. It was the pay and Chicago, then a wife and kids and a house.
Fifteen years after I arrived, I was job hunting again, the victim of
a transplanted editorial office. The surprise of my working at
Playboy (I identified myself as a writer to the club) should carry
me for a paragraph or two. I’ll get sympathy for being let go.
I type out the speech word for word a week before. I rehearse it
several times a day—by myself; I can’t imagine anyone else in the

206
 Toastmasters

room. I pick a dozen key transition words and change them to

capitals and boldface. I skip the suggestion about cards.
There are maybe fifteen people at the meeting. It turns out that
tonight is also a competition to determine who moves on in the
Toastmaster of the Year contest. I’ve missed the preliminaries, but
it’s down to a three-way speak-off between Santosh, Lisa, and Tim.
Santosh’s speech is called “You Are What You Want to Be,” and I
spend most of it thinking about my own speech, trying to remem¬
ber the transitions. Lisa gives a speech titled “The Little Things.”
She talks about walking into her condo kitchen and seeing the sun¬
light streaming behind her lilies; she describes the pleasure of peel¬
ing a navel orange. It reminds her of grade school, she says, when
she handed out orange sections to classmates in exchange for favors.
She pretends she's in grade school handing out the sections.
Last is Tim. His speech is called “Tuscarora,” which is appar¬
ently a ghost town in New Mexico where, as a child, he followed
his dog into the desert and had to be rescued. He stages a little
drama, acting out himself and his mother arguing. Then he acts
out the dog. He jumps around. He has a lot of vocal variety. He
makes emphatic gestures with his hand. I think he overdoes the
“picture” of the house disappearing over his shoulder in the desert,
but it gets my attention.
We each mark up scorecards with half a dozen categories. I’ve
got Tim ahead on just about everything. Lisa comes in second, partly
because I can’t remember a word Santosh said. The group disagrees.
Santosh grabs second, Lisa comes in third. She smiles gamely when
the results are announced. It’s time for an eight-minute break.
I resolve not to think about my speech. I check my car through
the window to see if I have a parking ticket. I talk to Gail about
her upcoming PSI weekend. I drink some Coke.
Tim introduces me. There is a big round of applause.
“Fellow toastmasters, honored guests ..

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YES YOU CAN!

I launch into the first paragraph, which is about layoffs. They

used to be just numbers. Nothing to do with me. Then one day I
got fired. I had a great job, too—at least men thought so. Manag¬

ing editor of Playboy.

The revelation gets the expected chuckles and looks of sur¬
prise. I’m off and running. Talking about my checkered career.
Losing the big office, all those perks. Home alone, forced to figure
out who I am without the business card. But happy to be . . .
Happy to be . . . what?
I can’t remember. I take a breath and wait for the thought to
come back. Happy to be . . . panicked! Everyone is watching me,
smiling encouragement. It’s no use. The seconds seem like hours.
“Hmm, I seem to have lost my place,” I finally confess, and fish
the paper from my pocket.
Oh, yes—happy to be back in control of my life. The word
“control” was helpfully capped in boldface.
I steam ahead. The worst has happened. I grow faintly relaxed.
Add a little inflection here, some expression there. Even unlock
my hands to make a gesture. I coast into the windup. Now I think
differently about people laid off. They’re individuals. Few maybe
as privileged as me. “But I hope they see change as an opportunity.
That’s how I see it... at least for now.”
It isn’t the end of Beethoven’s Ninth, but everyone claps. I walk
back to my seat, modestly shrugging to indicate the huge gaffe
they are kindly overlooking.

My evaluator doesn’t even mention it. Somebody else does.

“Never reach into your pocket,” he advises kindly but with authority.
The comments are predictably upbeat. I seemed really genuine.
(I had?) I made a connection. I had a nice voice. (I did? I’d always
hated my voice.) Could these people be trusted? I go home vastly
relieved it’s over.

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 LET THE CONTESTS BEGIN

Big excitement at Toastmasters! Let the contests

begin! The real contests, that is. The winner of our club competi¬
tion, Tim, is heading for the division competition. Winner goes on
to the sectionals, then the regionals, then to the finals, to be held in
Toronto in June. I remember seeing the winner of the 2003 com¬
petition at the NSA convention. It was Darren LaCroix, the guy
who “fell forward” across the stage. He’s famous now. Who will
be the new “Toastmaster of the Year”?
The contest is being held in the small auditorium of a downtown
accounting business. Tim arrives looking confident. It turns out he
has reason to be—he’s the sole speaker from Central Division
North, so he wins by default. He gives his speech anyway. He pre¬
tends to be himself as a child, looking up at his mother. He looks
down, pretending to be his mother. He runs in circles, pretending to
be the dog. He disappears into the desert. We all applaud.
Then it’s the District 30 finals. Setting the stage for the drama
to come, it’s a wild weather night in Chicago. Severe thunder¬
storms race across the city and there have been tornado warnings.
Outside the glassed-in thirty-eighth-floor conference room at
USB headquarters, the night sky crackles with lightning. Inside
we sit tensed, ignoring our pants cuffs drenched from the rain.
The evening’s toastmaster is introduced. He holds up a manila
envelope. In a break with precedent, he says he’s going to announce

209
YES YOU CAN!

the evening’s losers right away. Anxious looks shoot around the
room. He tears open the envelope. He turns it upside down. He

reaches inside. He shakes it. It’s empty.

“There are no losers in Toastmasters,” he exclaims to gleeful

applause.
Tim goes first. When his name is called, he bounds to the front
of the room. We’re on our way to Tuscarora. “Is there tumble¬
weed in Tuscarora?” inquires young Tim. By now I feel I could
give the speech myself, though Tim seems to have notched up the
action tonight, given it an extra punch. His loyal dog, Fritz, races
frantically in circles. There’s an audible gasp when young Tim
glances over his shoulder—and Tuscarora has disappeared! We
wince when his dad slugs him after the rescue. We applaud when
he concludes with a hearty, “Mister Toastmaster.”
Another win for ET!
Or is it?
Number two doesn’t look like much of a threat. A tall, stooped
man, he delivers a rambling diatribe called “Shadows.” It’s a ring¬
ing cry for just leaders, as opposed to unjust leaders. The unjust
leader triumphs with arrogant will but never experiences “the inno¬
cence of a child. Can we live in a world like this?” he concludes.
The sole woman in tonight’s quintet is an appealing young African
American who reminisces about her aunt with Alzheimer’s. A
heartwarming tale but not championship material.
But suddenly the competition gets stiff. The next two men are
formidable. Robert Lee, handsomely suited in blue, has the slick
panache of a TV preacher with an urgent message: “Listen to
your Inner Voices.” He once ignored a whispered tip to bet Sugar
Candy, the long shot in a horse race. Darned if the colt didn’t win!
He has other, more uplifting stories. Of course, it isn’t enough to
listen. “You can hope and you can wish,” he warns, “but nothing
happens until you act." His compact, focused gestures have the

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 Let the Contests Begin

earnest stab of an evangelist. There’s a lot of God stuff. A story

about Moses and his followers who beg for rain but then lack the
confidence to “do the dishes.” Surrender, urges Lee. “We don’t
know how prayer works—we only know it does.”
Real applause greets the end of his speech. I begin to get ner¬
vous for Tim. This guy is good, with lots of authority. I check my
program, figuring he's been doing this stuff for years. Turns out
he only joined Toastmasters a few months hack, thinking it a way
to promote his self-published book, The Power of Coincidence. In
real life he’s a heating and air-conditioning repair man.
The tale about a lost boy and his dog is fading as sure as the
town of Tuscarora. It fades further with the last speaker.
If Lee is slick, Ken Mitchell is smooth. A short, husky African
American, he starts with a funny story about his attendance at a
Tony Robbins seminar. He works in his devoted wife and his
adorably clever two-year-old girl. His speech, “The Sorcerer’s Se¬
cret,” includes three tips for getting what you want: Believe, Be
Specific, and Be Persistent. He has everyone in the room repeat af¬
ter him. He has a soft but commanding voice, seems unflappable,
doses his message with religion, and ends, “The magic wand is in
your mind. You possess the power.”
Tim’s finished.
He takes his third-place finish with good grace. Later that night
he will send our club a generous group e-mail saying, “I learned a

few things.”
Robert Lee, the heating and AC guy, takes second.
Ken Mitchell is going on to the sectional finals.
Good for him—and not so great for me. It’s clear that if I’m se¬
rious about this motivation business, I need to start thinking about
a message. I wonder again how people make the leap from living
their lives to telling others how to lead theirs. This is beyond a
sympathetic ear on the phone, a chummy suggestion to switch jobs

211
YES YOU CAN!

or try yoga. This is in the area of: listen to me, I know the secret of

life, I can make you fulfilled.

I don’t know any secrets of life. Fulfillment is still a goal. Prob¬
ably this is a fatal flaw. Or is it? It’s everyone’s suspicion that the
gung-ho, live-on-the-sunny-side-of-life speaker is in marriage
counseling and on Paxil. I remember Ray Kopcinski’s story about
the hotshot motivator who had to be pushed out onstage. Maybe I
don’t actually need to be living the values I’m urging on others.
I give a speech lamenting Chicago’s obsession with comparing
itself to New York. I do another on a vacation I took to Tunisia. I
make a visit to Chicago’s main library, the Harold Washington Li¬
brary, and hunt down section PN-4121. It’s the Public Speaking
section—“Rhetoric,” in the catalog. I’m astounded. There must be
five shelves. I count almost two hundred different books, every¬
thing from the Dummies guide to I Can See You Naked. Celebri¬
ties like Ed McMahon and Art Linkletter have written books.
There’s one called The Sir Winston Method by James C. Humes, in
which I learn that Churchill stuttered and fainted the first time he
gave a speech.
I check out a slim, antiquated volume, The Art of Public Speak¬
ing by Albert J. Beveridge. An Indiana senator, Beveridge helped
establish the Progressive Party and won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize
for his four-volume life of American statesman John Marshall. He
was also quite the man in front of a crowd. I take heart from ad¬
vice he gives on page 65: “Fear not that your speech will lack fire.
If you mean what you say, fervor will come naturally and with ef¬
fectiveness. The fact that you are in earnest will give force and
vigor to your delivery.”

Beveridge is big on “extensive preparation”—by which he

means write and rewrite and get suggestions from friends. I’m too
anxious to show what I’ve written to anyone else. I have learned
one thing, however (though not from the senator). Don’t memorize

212
 Let the Contests Begin

your speech. If you do, you risk forgetting a word or sentence and
losing your place. Then you could find yourself at the end having
said nothing. Better to block out the speech in sections you can re¬
member. Then fill in as needed.

The very last paragraph of Beveridge’s book is less than helpful:

“Be as brief as you are simple, as plain as you are fair, and, content
with a good job well done, stop when you are through.”
I decide to broaden my research. At Northwestern’s School of
Communication I track down Professor Irving Rein, who’s com¬
pleting a textbook, How to Write a Speech. Rein is a consultant to
politicians and corporations; he tells them how to get their mes¬
sage across. Rein himself is not much of an advertisement for
speech writing: he never goes to meetings. In his entire life, he tells
me, he's been to one, something in San Diego, he can’t remember
what. He does remember being underwhelmed—which did not
surprise him. Public speaking is a lost art. “It’s a declining field.
We’ve become a culture where people don’t want to listen the way
they used to. People used to go to a Chautauqua speech the way we
go to a movie.”
Rein pays scant attention to motivational speakers. Oh, maybe
one or two. They all say the same thing. You don’t control your
destiny; here’s the secret. But they’re cost-efficient. “It’s a lot
cheaper for a company to hire a speaker for twenty-five thousand
dollars than launch a program that’ll cost a million.” There aren’t
that many speakers he admires. Bill Clinton’s terrific. One of the
best he’s ever seen. “He talks in audience terms, he’s a master of
the informal style. The grand style is no longer in,” he says, with
more than a trace of bitterness.
Across campus, at Northwestern’s Meclill School of Journalism,
Clarke Caywood, associate professor of corporate public relations,
sounds more upbeat. He sees more opportunities to speak—and
better speakers. There are so many experts now. Corporations

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YES YOU CAN!

expect their top executives to be able to deliver a message. “How

you relate to an audience can make or break you,” says Caywood.
Unlike Rein, he likes speakers who get personal; it gives them
credibility—unlike journalists who rely on third-party authority.
Olympians, addicts, it can be compelling stuff for an audience.
What makes a great speech, he tells me, is storytelling. Storytelling
is huge; his own daughter is in Hollywood studying storytelling.
“People are tired of PowerPoint. In my class we’ve outlawed it. In
the university we teach storytelling as the way to get a message
across.”
Storytelling, in fact, is the subject of a featured article in my
July Toastmaster magazine. The article is called “Why We Tell
Stories” and was written by the second-place finisher in the 2004
World Championship of Speaking. People make a special connec¬
tion to stories, writes the author. It’s an important tradition in
Africa (the article is illustrated with a picture of a warrior with a
bone through his nose). He offers lots of examples; others have
done serious research. At the Center for Creative Leadership, an
important think tank in North Carolina, a resident scholar, Talula
Cartwright, has been gathering material for years.
“Stories help people remember,” says Cartwright. “It can be
compelling or funny, it almost doesn’t matter. People who go to
seminary learn to use stories in sermons. People in drama know
the inspirational value of a story. A story helps people remember.
But if businesspeople want to use a story, there’s nothing in their
training to help them.”
Cartwright is one of the few who doesn’t mention the most her¬
alded story-speech of 2005: Steve Jobs’s commencement address at
Stanford. Google “Steve Jobs Speech,” and you’ll see what I mean.
The first paragraph of his speech finishes, “Today I want to tell
you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three sto¬
ries. The first story is about connecting the dots.” It’s about Jobs’s

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 Let the Contests Begin

unwed young mother putting him up for adoption, how he

dropped out of Reed College and studied calligraphy—then ten
years later designed the Mac, with its fabulous multiple typefaces.
Story Two: How he got Bred from his own company, Apple, and
started NeXT Software and Pixar Animation Studios, which got
him fame, fulfillment, and a wife. Story Three: how Jobs got diag¬
nosed with a fatal cancer, only to find his cancer was a rare, cur¬
able form. From this brush with mortality he learned that death is
“life’s change agent" and adopted a slogan from The Whole Earth
Catalog'. “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
Then he said, “Thank you all very much,” and sat down.
Me, 1 was brought up by my biological parents. I couldn’t get
an interview with Steve Jobs. What stories? I’ve never even had a
car accident. The closest I’ve come to death is . . . thinking about
my speech!
I've titled it “Never Too Late." It’s about making changes. The
night I’m to give it, there’s a power-packed lineup, and everyone de¬
livers. Lisa does a very funny speech called “In a Huff,” about an
awful clerk at the new furniture store, Huffington’s. A relatively
new member, Parul, relates a childhood accident falling off a
bridge in Tibet—and surviving without a scratch. “Carpe Diem” is
the title of Santosh's impassioned speech. I think it’s about me. It’s
my time. Go for it.
I start out with the message: more and more people are switch¬
ing careers midstream. I offer numerous examples—a Chicago
options trader who became a chess coach, a sixty-nine-year-old
woman who started work as a flight attendant, Grandma Moses,
who didn’t pick up a brush until she was eighty. I grew up believ¬
ing you figured out what to do and stuck with it. But was that al¬
ways smart? Maybe we assumed an arbitrary identity. Who said it
wasn’t all due to an accident of circumstance—and then the
weight of routine? In a shameless reprise of the Forum, I ask,

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YES YOU CAN!

“When did the life we lead, the decisions we made, become our

‘story’?”
I end with: “There’s a T-shirt that reads, ‘Life Isn’t a Dress Re¬
hearsal.’ It’s something to think about’’—and here, trying actually
to believe what I’m saying, I point to the sides of the lounge, then
indicate the floor directly in front—“Maybe it’s time you came out
from the wings and took center stage.”
Amazingly, everyone thinks I’m totally sincere. They buy it!
A week later I’m on my way to a meeting of the Illinois chapter
of NSA. I need to network. Getting a bit more comfortable speak¬
ing is one thing, but where am I going to speak? Besides, I'm sure
I’ll get tips. NSA is the big time. Toastmasters is, well, friends. It’s
a sluggish drive out to Oak Brook, a business hub thirty miles
from Chicago. I arrive late and slip into the banquet room of Mag-
giano’s, a franchised Italian restaurant known for decent food and
huge family-style servings; the meeting’s already under way.
There are maybe a hundred people gathered around a dozen
round tables. At the lectern is Sam Horn, a robust fiftyish lady
with a big hat who’s written a book called Tongue Fu!
“Whether it’s a book or speech, you've got to tell and sell your
pitch," says Horn. “My trick? Valley Girl your topic. There’s this
dating grandmother, she wants to call her book Hell on Heels.
Okay, but how about a role model. How about. . . Bridget Jones’s
Mother’s Diary?”
There are delighted claps around the room.
“Here’s another one. A woman with a serene baby, always
calm. Now who’s really calm?”
Hands shoot up.
“Somebody asleep?”
“A heart surgeon?”
“The Dalai Lama?”

“Exactly. The Dalai Lama. So here’s another trick. Alphabetize.

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 Let the Contests Begin

Dalai bama, Dalai gama, Dalai . . . mama! That’s how the writer
got her book deal.”

The woman next to me looks thrilled. A singer/comic turned

speaker/author, she’s writing a book herself, she whispers to me,
all about the wise, witty stuff her son said while going to school;
she’s calling it Backseat Buddha.

I’m impressed but skeptical. What comes after the catchy

cover? You have to write two hundred pages. Horn doesn’t bother
with these details. You need to carve out a niche, she continues. If
you’re specializing in a trend, if that’s your speech, give it a word.
She, Sam, hit on one accidentally! She was talking to someone
about adults who act like kids, she was trying to say “puberty” and
said “pubertuity.” Book deal! Then there was her friend who no¬
ticed all the twentysomethings moving back in with their parents
and came up with . . . “adultescents.”
Ba-da-bum. Book deal!
Horn makes it sound easy. However, the news for rookie
speakers is less than heartening at a panel with meeting planners.
One woman hires speakers for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, another
for the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. The
latter is a mouthful but hardly a joke; its annual trade show draws
25,000 people, and Louise Pochelski has lots of tips. Never leave a
voice mail that doesn’t start, “Hi, my name is blah-blah and blah-
blah suggested I call.” She, Louise, is swamped with messages;
connections mean everything. “Your mom always said return
phone calls. Guess what? It ain’t gonna happen!’’ In a proposal,
be specific. Tell how you’ll contribute to the bottom line. Use bul¬
let points—not paragraphs—and no more than four. Pochelski
does have some encouraging words. She’s always up for new speak¬
ers. Names mean nothing. It was Peter Jennings who gave her some

perspective.
She was thrilled to get him, she figured she was home free.

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YES YOU CAN!

Then, unbelievably, he peeped at the huge audience from behind a

curtain and went into shock. “It’s so big!” he exclaimed.

“What’s the problem?” said Pochelski. “You talk to millions.
“I talk to just one person,” Jennings replied. “The cameraman.”
So Pochelski waved over Clarence, her best cameraman, and
told Jennings to talk to him. He did and the day was saved.
1 catch an impromptu session in the hall outside the restrooms.
A bunch of men and women are hyping a school for public speak¬

ers called Candidate U.

“It’s the best investment you’ll ever make,” insists one graduate.
“You get all eight competencies required by NSA, chimes in

another.
“The best, and I mean best, speakers come. These are the

experts.”
“Sam Horn charges five hundred dollars an hour."
“Anywhere else and you’d be paying hundreds of thousands of

dollars.”
“And you don’t get one speaker each session—you get three"
It does sound like a good deal. Speakers need to learn the ropes.
Beginners face that zenlike conundrum: you can’t speak without
credentials, but you can’t get credentials without speaking. To join
NSA, you need to qualify with twenty paid engagements a year or
$25,000 in earnings. Candidate U doesn’t guarantee gigs, of
course, or even set them up, but it helps with everything from busi¬
ness cards to developing a topic.
I take a pass. For one thing, Candidate U includes eight three-
hour sessions on the first Tuesday of every month. They are al¬
ready in session five.
Plus it costs $400. The Loverde lounge is practically free.
I go back to Toastmasters with renewed determination. For a
month I attend every meeting. I read the magazine cover to cover.
Tim hands out a leaflet one night announcing a lunchtime “special

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 Let the Contests Begin

event” with several top speakers in action. I mark the date on my

calendar—and then almost miss it taking one of my sons to the
doctor. Finally the baby-sitter arrives, I hand him off, grab a cab to
the Loop, and hurry into the meeting as the emcee’s winding up
his introduction.

“And now, two of the best speakers working. Legends, my

friends. The names need no introduction . . .”
I’m hunched over, turning off my cell phone, when he an¬
nounces the first speaker. I lift an astonished eye.
“My name’s George O’Hare, and I’m not related to the airport.
The only claim to fame with the name was my uncle, who raised
me after my father was shot when I was seven. He used to broad¬
cast every night at ten on WGN with big-name bands. ‘From the
beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, from the Aragon Ballroom,’
he would say, ‘this is Husk O’Hare, the genial gentleman of the
air.’ Does anyone remember Husk O’Hare? ‘A smile is worth a
million bucks and doesn’t cost a penny.’ ”
I must have missed the names on the leaflet.
“ ‘Smile and the world smiles with you. Cry and you . . .’ ”
“Cry alone!”
It’s deja vu all over again, every word and inflection.
“I worked at Sears for sixty-eight years. Well, it was thirty-four
years, but I worked twice as hard!”
“The best coach in the world—and don’t you dare say Mike
Ditka!”
“TV isn’t entertainment—it’s de-tainment.”
The Toastmasters love it. Sadly, with time and space con¬
straints, this is the fifteen-minute version. There’s only one T-shirt:
“Get Your ‘But’ Out of the Way.” We get only a few bars of “Ac¬
centuate the Positive” before O’Hare raises his arms in triumph,
then cedes the stage to another legend . .. Johnny “Transition Man”
Campbell, who comes running out in a red cape.

219
YES YOU CAN!

Campbell was an insurance claims adjuster before he “got

downsized to the right size but wasn’t paralyzed.” He’s survived
“multiple corporate downsizings and mergers.” His message is all
about overcoming fear of losing time . . . power . . . control . . .
love. Stressed by change? Transition Man can help! You just need
a vision. You need to practice . .. LIFE, which stands for Love, In¬
tention, Faith, and Execution. The details are slightly murky, but
there’s no denying Campbell’s high good humor and energy.
Toastmasters, he claims, is the ticket. T-Man, as he calls himself,
earned his DTM (Distinguished Toastmaster award) in 2004. He
charges $3,000 and up a speech. He always wears his cape.
I’m feeling buoyed, on the Toastmaster track—until another
problem occurs to me. The longest speech in the manual is eight to
ten minutes. Where do I get to practice my half-hour rabble-
rouser? The answer comes in the form of an e-mail from Lisa
Loverde. In conjunction with Toastmasters, Harris Bank is spon¬
soring a “First Fridays” event at its Loop headquarters. Loverde is
giving the debut speech on Presentation Techniques. I’m in.

220
 THE PLATFORM, FINALLY

Somebody apparently neglected to mention the big

event to Harris Bank. A few weeks later, twenty of us get name
badges and troop through security to a basement meeting room
where, in place of a Toastmasters banner, we’re greeted by a large
sign with a crayoned picture of a cruise ship reading, “Happy
25th, Annette!” There's a clothesline of strung semaphore flags
that presumably spell the name of the Harris workhorse.
Loverde, ever the professional, gamely helps rearrange the
chairs. Everyone’s got nerves, she assures the audience. Try singing
in the shower first. She likes “Lean on Me,” by Bill Withers. Hold
your fists tight for five seconds. The trick to a good presentation is
to: Try It, Time It, Tape It. She goes twenty-five minutes. I join
the group after to congratulate her. I meet the toastmaster and
Harris Bank employee who arranged this, Allen Green, and vol¬
unteer for the next Friday.
But what am I going to talk about? In the midst of stewing
about this, I decide that could be the topic: “What Should I Talk
About?” I e-mail this update to Green, who e-mails me back, “I
thought you had some ideas.” I make this amusing interchange the
opening of the speech I give. It gets a few laughs. Then, with the au¬
dience firmly in tow, I launch into the speech proper, which is noth¬
ing more than a bunch of categories. I can’t come up with a good
five-letter acronym and offer POSIP—for Personal, Observational,

221
YES YOU CAN!

Story, Inspirational, and Persuasive. I couldn’t think of an adjective

for “story,” I explain (sympathetic chuckle from audience). I go into
details about each category (seeming interest from audience). I
wrap up with a line about every speech being about oneself—and
self-discovery (somewhat startled look from audience, which had
not been prepared for this barn burner).
I did it. I stood up and talked for thirty minutes to twenty peo¬
ple about a totally concocted subject. I’m ready for the big time.
Except—what should I talk about? What is my speech? I can’t
talk about “what to talk about” indefinitely. First off, I need a
snappy title. Make it personal, give it some narrative, I suppose.
And throw in an inspirational angle. I try to picture how I’d like
my audience to leave the room. I don’t see them running to the
nearest North Face store for a map of K2. A simple “Hmmm, I
never thought of that before” would suffice.
So here’s what I come up with: how I grew up despite my
years at Playboy. I’ll toss in stuff about Hef, the mansion, the ar¬
ticles; my growing frustration (yes) and how my life changed
when I had kids (paradigm shift! Are you reading this, Stephen
Covey?) On to how I designed a magazine for dads and then
did it online (true), how being laid off was something I half
engineered (okay, I’ll exaggerate). A few minutes on the benefits—
alright, imperative—of change. Some kind of wrap-up, me the
architect of my own life.

I’ll call it “From Miss June to Mister Dad”—and hope no one

thinks it’s about my coming out as a transvestite.
Now all I have to figure out is where to give it. My thoughts
drift to George O’Hare and his breakfast blast. Of course. A Ro¬
tary club. After some digging, I discover a speakers bureau in a
Chicago suburb that specializes in matching speakers to clients
that want speakers but don’t pay. You send in twenty-five bucks,
they send out a bulletin.

222
 The Platform, Finally

“I’m sure you’ll be very much in demand,” the woman tells me.
“Everyone wants to know about Playboy."

Sure enough, days after they list the speech, I get three e-mails
from interested clubs. I pick the Kiwanis club in Elmhurst. They
meet Tuesdays for lunch at Angelo’s Restaurant. The first date free
is early October.

Then a tunny thing happens. The more I think about giving a

speech, the more real it becomes, the more I get this uncomfort¬
able feeling. What am 1 doing up there? What makes me think I
have anything to tell anyone? Who should listen to me? Em not
like—I can’t even say when this astonishing fact dawned on me—
my dad! I grew up the son of a preacher man. My own father was
a motivational speaker.
Let me explain. New York City is home base for something
called the Ethical Culture Society. It’s what people call a “humanist
religion,” except it isn’t really a religion because it doesn’t espouse
any god or divinity. A man named Felix Adler started the Ethical
Culture Movement in 1876, and the New York Society spawned
what soon became one of the more highly regarded private schools
in the city. My father was a leader in the Ethical Culture Society.
There were other leaders, but in his prime many thought him the
most charismatic, a man with gravitas. On Sunday mornings he
would mount the podium at the Ethical Culture Society at 64th
Street and Central Park West, and give what was called a “talk.” He
could get very passionate. He was a very big antifascist way back in
the thirties. Social issues were dear to his heart. He believed you had
to take care of the poor and give everyone equal rights. He was pals
with Eleanor Roosevelt. He was on the board of all sorts of liberal
organizations—the NAACP, the ACLU, the Urban League. On
Sundays he stood up there and told everyone why they needed to
heed their conscience. There was no afterlife. This was it. You’d
better do something good while you’re here.

223
YES YOU CAN!

His talks were often broadcast on WQXR. To those who’d

heard him or heard of him, he was famous.
How could I have gotten involved in this motivation business
and forgotten him? Just maybe (just obviously!) he was the rea¬
son. Wasn’t I competing with him by doing this Toastmasters
thing? Trying to knock Pop off the platform. Replacing him up
on the big stage. How transparent was that!
1 swear it never occurred to me, doctor.
The notion that speech-giving might run in the family does not
quell my mounting anxiety. I’m not being paid, true, but I still
have to perform—and I am not a performer. Just how much I’m
not a performer is driven home by a meeting I go to a week before
my date with destiny in Elmhurst. I should be home polishing my
remarks. Instead I am in the Imperial Ballroom at the Fairmont
Chicago hotel.
Assembled are 250 partners from Grant Thornton, the interna¬
tional accounting firm, which is celebrating its twenty-fifth an¬
niversary. The partners have traveled to Chicago from Japan and
Brazil, Spain and Singapore, South Africa and Peru. Tonight
they’ll be enjoying a private tented fete at Millennium Park. But
now it’s four in the afternoon, time for “Live Out Loud!” featur¬
ing the adrenaline-filled Aussie Amanda Gore.
Unsuspecting, the partners troop into the vast ballroom after
a water and soda break. They are oblivious to the cartons stacked
in the back of the room marked “Magic Wands.” They settle
into their seats. Music swells, and out runs the fetching gamine,
Gore.

“Hi! Hello! Squish closer together,” she commands. “Get next

to your neighbor. Alright now, if you have a tie on, take it off!”
7 his is a bad sign. It soon gets worse. Gore wants everyone to
open their hands and look at the space between the fingers. Now
clasp hands with the person on either side. “It’s corny but just do

224
 The Platform., Finally

it! Don’t go”—she squinches up her face—“‘Awww, what is this

anyway? We’re accountantsJust do it!”

Now she wants everyone to look in their neighbor’s eyes and go,
"I see the sparkle!” She pretends to be in the audience, mimicking
our skepticism: “ ‘She’s mad, she’s completely mad!’ ”
Gore is anything but mad. She is no feel-good crackpot. She
knows a lot about the body and medicine. She knows about quan¬
tum mechanics. She was one of the founders of NSA. She is furi¬
ously busy. Every time I corresponded with her, she was on her
Blackberry at another airport. Her fee per event is $15,000.
She is very cunning at getting these suits to act more outrageously
than you could imagine. At each new command she pretends to be a
Grant Thorntonite and whines: “ ‘I’m sorry. No. We are not doing
that.’ Loosen up! ” She tells about watching a mom and her teenager
walking a Sydney street, when the girl abruptly stopped and de¬
clared, ‘‘Mom, build a bridge and get over it!” Get over it, Grant
Thornton! Gore does an arc with her hand. The bridge. You don’t
even have to say it. Let’s say your own teenager makes that face in
front of the refrigerator. Don’t say anything. Do the arc. Get over it.
She has everyone do the arc. She reaches into a box and pulls on
a set of floppy bunny ears. Laughter’s good for the heart. “It’s okay
to make money and be silly! If all you do is make money, what
happens next?” She gives the audience a sudden sober look:
“Nothing. You die.”
Twenty minutes into her speech, she has everyone give their
neighbors a thumbs-up and cry: “Yes! That deserves a Ta Da!” At
the thirty-minute mark, they’re wiggling smiley-face fingers at
everyone around them. At the sixty-minute mark, they have to
leap out of their chairs, then peck their neighbor’s cheek while

they go, “Zoot Zoot!”

After an hour and a half, they are sprinkling pixie dust on two
neighbors and shouting, “I am a fun fairy!”

225
YES YOU CAN!

Everyone is handed a pink magic wand when they leave.

The antispeaker grouches, the motivation cynics, would dis¬
miss Gore as a colossal waste of the company coffer. Let down
your hair? Laugh more? Please. This is not the door to business
with China. This is not even helpful. Seriously, no one’s going to

wear bunny ears at work.

Then there’s the other camp, where I pitch my tent. Good mo¬
tivational talks—stress on “good”—are events, they’re theater, they
take us out of ourselves, they get the molecules jumping. If only
briefly, our worldview shifts. Some part of us gets excited. We’re
invigorated, touched, inspired. A performance will do that. We go
back to our desks and hotel rooms altered, if but for an hour. My
bunny ears go off to Amanda Gore. She’s absurd and silly—and
she’s in another league.
I try not to think about her as I drive out to Elmhurst. I re¬
member the lawyer’s advice at the Toastmaster seminar: you can’t
control what others will think of you, so you might as well plunge
ahead. So true! I imagine I’m Rocky Romero, an authority, confi¬
dent, smooth. But-—but I’ll never be as good as my dad.
Build a bridge. Get over it.
I get to Elmhurst half an hour early. Somehow—an omen?—I
get lost. I have to stop at a gas station for directions to Angelo’s. A
helpful driver knows the way. I lean through the open window.
“Angelo’s!” he cries. “Sure! The most popular restaurant in town!
It’s right on the main drag. You’ll never find parking!”

It’s 11:45 AM- I park m front. I walk past a dark, empty dining
room and sprawling lunch buffet and head upstairs. I meet the man
who recruited me, Paul. He owns the Chevy dealership. He points
out others as they troop in. A retired banker. A hospital administra¬
tor. A handyman. A priest. A dentist. There are maybe thirty peo¬
ple, half a dozen of them women. They serve themselves lunch
from vats of pasta and chicken and settle at three round tables. I’m

226
 The Platform, Finally

in the front between Paul and the new president. There’s a gavel
and a huge brass bell at his place.

The good news is that there’s a large lectern where I could set
the notes I’ve written on index cards. The bad news is that I’d be
invisible behind the lectern.

We eat. We chat. The president gongs his bell, and we all stand
to face the Hag and sing “America the Beautiful.” We place a hand
over our hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s time for
“reports.” Checks lor the “installation” are coming in fine. Volun¬
teers are still needed for Peanut Day.
The president explains he doesn’t have all his paperwork yet.
“Anybody got a birthday coming up before the next meeting?”
A man raises his hand to cries of “Way to go, Joe!” In two days
he’ll be seventy-five. We sing him a hearty “Happy Birthday.”
“Anniversaries?”
Mirthful remarks at the expense of the group’s sole bachelor,
who’s in his forties.
“And now it’s time for our program.”
Paul does the introduction. There’s warm applause. I get up
and step to the side of the lectern.
I start with my opening joke about the couple in their sixties who
retrieve a bottle from the surf, whereupon they’re each granted a
wish by a grateful genie. The wife wants to travel, finally. No prob¬
lem, says the genie. Poof. She’s got round-trip first-class air tickets.
And you, sir? The husband drops his voice; if it’s okay, he’d like a
wife who’s thirty years younger. No problem. Poof. He’s ninety.
They laugh. I’m off and running.
“A lot of people think that man must be Hugh Hefner. But of
course it isn’t. If it were Hef, as we called him, he’d ask for a wife
fifty years younger.”
As for me, I quickly continue, I’m not a Playboy lifer, and I
launch into a longish bit on my checkered career at magazines in

227
YES YOU CAN!

New York. I want to come off like an East Coast insider but also a
victim of circumstance; I’m here to pitch the upside of change. I
offset Playboy Mansion tidbits with serious (read: thwarted) aspi¬
rations back in editorial. I toss in the online magazine I started for
dads, figuring I’ll pick up bonus points in family-friendly exurbia.
On to being laid off, and the lessons learned therein. Shamelessly,
I throw in my editorial consulting company, Pulse, in the hopes of
nabbing business. I save the transformation stuff for last. The
windup is part “What happened, happened” (thank you, Jeff) and
part “I’m living each day as new and exciting and different.”
1 lose my place only once, and mostly manage to cover it up. I
don’t catch anyone yawning. Okay eye contact. The women don’t
seem appalled, the priest smiles. Big demerits for clasping my
hands a million times. I give myself a B.
What did they think of it? Of me? Who knows. I get a bunch
of questions. Nice round of applause. Then we all stand and face
the Kiwanis flag and sing the club song, “We Kiwanians . . . help
the children of the world."
Nobody runs up after to slip me a business card. I’m not re¬
cruited for anyone’s corporate retreat. My enthused blurb for
change—“You can’t see around the corner, get the molecules
moving!”—has no one charging out the door. The woman whom
Paul pointed out as a mystery writer doesn’t bother to say hello.
Maybe she was bored.
Build a bridge.

I drive back to the city minus two bucks for tolls and five bucks
for gas. The lunch was free, so I guess it’s a wash. I have another
two weeks before my next gig, at the Exchange Club in Aurora.
Life on the road. I could get used to it.

228
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer couldn't ask for a gutsier agent than Chris Calhoun, or a

more sensitive and canny editor than Panio Gianopoulos. Thanks
as well to the following: Kate Nolan for her hospitality; Jan
Grayson for his introductions; Carol Anderson for her persistence;
Jim Rohrbach for his optimism; Jeff Harvey and Cathy Mardikes
for their U of C cards; Ted Fishman for his fellowship; Gale Stone
for her generosity; Brian Muldoon for his inspiration; Steve Wall-
man for his trust; the good people at Playboy for showing me the
door I chose to avoid; Kaarina for her indulgence and her miles;
my friends at the Red Hen for more caffeine than could possibly
be healthy.
%
Jonathan Black was managing editor
of Playboy for sixteen years and before
that, executive editor at GQ. He is a con¬
tributor to many national magazines as
well as the New York Times. He lives in
Chicago.

Jacket design: mjcdesign.com

Cover photograph: Getty Images

Author photo: Randy Belice

"By turns hilarious and absorbing, Yes You Can! is one part expose, one part
meditation on the curious conviction of so many Americans that all they
need to change their lives is a good talking-to, and on the touching personal
dreams that so often underpin that belief."
—Scon Turow

Today's keynote speaker is Joe Calloway, a tall, pepper-haired man with an

easy Tennessee drawl. His theme is Letting Go.To get to the nextlevel,to truly
change, you've gotto create space—literally. "Here's a take-home exercise,"
says Calloway. Go to your attic and throw stuff out. That box of old videos?
Toss it! Those books you've never read and never will? Onto the street. That
old speech you loved to give? Let it go. "But I love my speech!" you say. Let it
go. Don't get stuck doing something you're good at.
He's got an unusual wrap-up. The lights dim, and a big video screen
flashes the first of several quotations: "Success is like underwear—when it's
too comfortable it's time to change."
"Do we dare to be ourselves? That is the question." The line below it
reads, "Pablo Casals."
"Don't fear mistakes. There are none!" Miles Davis.
There follows a screen: "Joe has left the building."
Then: "Trust me, it's over."
Then: "Are you still watching this? Let it go."
Ripples of uncomfortable laughter. Eventually a few people push back
their chairs. More follow. The ballroom begins to empty. The words remain on
the screen.
I've come to Phoenix with an attitude: that speaking is a scam, that com¬
panies are wasting tons of money, that nobody can change just from listening
to a speech.
Let it go, says Joe.

9781596910003
02/27/2019 7 12-2

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