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Authors: Harvey Mackay

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BOOK: Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door

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Mackay’s Moral:
As Harry Potter put it, “You sort of start
thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”

RECONSTRUCT YOUR ATTITUDE

Chapter 12

Anger Is Only One Letter

from Danger

The more you grow up, the less you blow up.

There was a father who had a son with a bad temper. The father knew the danger of anger, so he gave his son a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence. The first day the boy had driven twenty-seven nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as the son learned to control his anger, the number of nails he hammered daily gradually dwindled.

The son discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence. Finally, the day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at all. He told his father about it, and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.

The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, “You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one.”

Anger is a natural human emotion. The problem is not anger; the problem is the mismanagement of anger. Mismanaged anger and rage is the major cause of conflict in our personal and professional relationships.

One out of five Americans has an anger-management problem. Some of the problems that we hear about daily in the media are domestic abuse, road rage, workplace violence, divorce, and addiction.

People get angry or upset an average of ten to fourteen times a day. And anger is especially prevalent in the workplace. The most common triggers of anger at work are favoritism, unfair performance appraisals, and perceived sexual harassment. How do you keep hold of your temper before it flares into a heated storm or, worse, violence? Here are some tips:

•
Acknowledge your anger.
Don’t pretend it’s not there or ignore it in the hope that it will go away.

•
Don’t be hyper about slights.
If a coworker doesn’t acknowledge you as you pass in the hallway, it may simply mean he or she is racing to get to the bathroom.

•
Know what’s ticking you off.
If you’ve had a fight with your spouse, leave your baggage at home. Or if you’re under the gun on a project, don’t take it out on a coworker.

•
Don’t get angry just because someone else is.
If your coworker is mad at something or someone, it doesn’t mean you have to be angry, too.

•
Track your anger signals.
Anger reveals itself physically through a racing pulse, shortness of breath, or pacing. Read the signs before your anger gets out of hand.

•
Chill out.
Find ways to temper your temper before it flares. Do breathing exercises, take a walk, or even do busy work.

•
Log it.
If someone’s pushed your anger button, write down the reason. Be brutally honest for your purposes, but don’t send it to the person. Just the act of logging it in your notebook will help you feel better.

•
Deal in a friend.
If it’s unwise to direct your anger at the source, confide in a friend.

A young job candidate was in the reception area of a major company on a hot, humid day after an interview. He stopped to make a call on his iPhone, and apparently got some bad news. Not quite under his breath, he rattled off a string of unrepeatable words.

The receptionist could sense all the other visitors in the waiting area were embarrassed by the outburst of profanity. Realizing his gaffe, the angry job seeker tiptoed to the exit. As he pushed the elegant brasspaneled door open, the receptionist calmly said, “Sir, I believe you are leaving something behind.”

He quickly turned and asked innocently, “Oh, what’s that?”

“A very bad impression,” the receptionist responded.

Mackay’s Moral:
When a person strikes in anger, he or she
usually misses the mark.

Chapter 13

You’re Never a Failure

Until You Think You Are

The devil offered all the tools of his trade, the old fable goes, to anyone who would pay the price. They were spread out on the table, each one labeled—hatred, malice, envy, despair, sickness—all the weapons that everyone knows so well. But off on one side, apart from the rest, lay a harmless-looking, wedge-shaped instrument marked “discouragement.” It was old and worn, but it was priced far above all the rest.

When asked the reason why, the devil explained, “Because I can use this one so much more easily than the others. No one knows that it belongs to me, so with it I can open doors that are tightly bolted against the others. Once I get inside, I can use any tool that suits me best.”

A very real problem within all of us that can cause an attitude crash is discouragement. In fact, I’ve always gone out of my way to stay away from negative people. I like to surround myself with positive, upbeat people who constantly encourage me.

The word
encouragement
means “to put courage into.” Conversely, discouragement takes courage out. How can you reach for the stars, go bravely where no man has gone before, or climb the highest mountain if you lack courage?

Author Glenn Van Ekeren outlines the four pitfalls of discouragement:

1. Discouragement hurts our self-image.

2. Discouragement causes us to see ourselves as less than we really are.

3. Discouragement causes us to blame others for our predicament.

4. Discouragement causes us to blur the facts.

One of the greatest novels in American literature was the result of a very discouraging day for the author. Nathaniel Hawthorne had lost his job at a customhouse, and went home to break the news to his wife, Sophia. Rather than the reaction he expected, she was joyous. “Now you can write your book,” she told him.

Unconvinced, Hawthorne asked her, “And what shall we live on while I am writing it?”

Sophia opened a drawer that contained a substantial amount of money and told him, “I have always known that you were a man of genius. I knew that someday you would write a masterpiece.” She went on to explain that she had saved some of the household money each week, and had accumulated enough to last for a year. And with that, Hawthorne set to work on
The Scarlet Letter
, required reading for many of us in our high school English classes. And all because Sophia Hawthorne refused to let her husband be discouraged.

In her book
The Right Words at the Right Time
, Marlo Thomas tells the story of Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA superstar center. When he was fourteen, he attended a basketball camp expecting to astound the coaches with his brilliance. He was in for a rude shock. He had been a star in his San Antonio high school, but at the camp he was just one of many star athletes. Not getting the attention he was accustomed to from the coaches, he began to worry that perhaps he wasn’t good enough to make the grade. His self-confidence took a nosedive.

Discouraged, he turned to his parents for advice. I’ve had some conversations with Shaq’s mother, Lucille, about that advice. She told him, “You must fulfill your dreams while there’s still room for you to do so. Attack them with a full head of steam. There’s no opportunity like now. This is the time you can show people.”

His confidence almost gone, Shaq told his mother, “I can’t do that right now. Maybe later.” Then, says Shaq, his mother said the words that he remembers changed his life: “Later doesn’t always come to everybody.”

Mackay’s Moral:
You aren’t finished when you are defeated;
you are finished when you quit.

“By god, you’re not a man who’s afraid to fail.”

Chapter 14

Being Your Best with

Things at Their Worst

If at first you don’t succeed . . . you’re doing about average.

Rebounding from rejection is an essential skill to acquire, especially in job hunting. Here are five tips for beating rejection:

•
Ten setbacks are the going price for any worthwhile win.
If you look at the major league baseball standings at the end of any season, you’ll find that, out of thirty teams, only eight make the playoffs, and only one of those winds up winning the World Series. Are those annual standings the end of the world for the twenty-nine losers? Hardly.

•
Analyze every failure, but never wallow in one.
President Harry Truman once said, “As soon as I realize I’ve made one damned fool mistake, I rush out and make another one.” Failure is a condition all of us experience. It’s our reaction to our failures that distinguishes winners from losers. What makes a great racehorse as compared to a cheap claimer is not just speed, it’s heart. A claimer usually makes just one run. Once the horse is passed, that’s it, the animal quits and the race is over. But stakes horses, the best of the breed, are different. Even if they fall behind, they’ll come back and try to regain the lead. There’s no quit in them. Like National Football League (NFL) coaching legend Vince Lombardi’s teams, they never lose, they just run out of time. Defeats are temporary. Heart and class are permanent.

•
Don’t rationalize away the hurt.
You didn’t get the job? Turned down for a raise? Denied admission to the college of your choice? Don’t kid yourself and try to cover up the hurt with “Gee, I didn’t really want it anyway.” Of course you wanted it. “I suppose I didn’t deserve it.” Of course you did. Self-delusion and self-hatred aren’t the answer. Don’t let your worth be defined by others. Point your head in the right direction and get back in the game. It’s not a permanent condition; it’s a short-term setback. You have a goal. The particular job or raise or school may have been a stepping-stone to that goal, but that’s all it was. There’s more than one way to cross a river. Now you’re going to have to rethink the path, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon the goal.

•
Don’t walk around as if you’re wearing a scarlet letter.
For heaven’s sake, who knows you were turned down for a job or for admission to Harvard? It’s not going to be the lead story on the evening news. Rejection is only as big as you make it. Take an inventory of human emotional responses, like love, hate, greed, fear, jealousy, grief, envy, gratitude, compassion. Now compare them to self-pity. Of all the emotions on the list—some constructive, some not so constructive—I’d venture that self-pity probably has fewer positive applications, and can do less for you than just about any of them. Whatever you do, don’t take rejection personally. It may have nothing at all to do with you.

•
Start worrying when they stop considering you as a contender.
Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, and Richard Burton never won an Oscar. Babe Ruth was never named MVP. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson all lost elections for the presidency before they won one. Losers? No. Legends.

Mackay’s Moral:
Failure is not falling down, but staying
down.