Advice From Strangers

Sometimes, the best advice you’re ever going to get comes from people who barely know you. Or somehow, they do know you even if they can’t possibly.

When you first meet, they take stock, as we all do. They develop a summary impression of who you are and what you’re about. They season that impression with intuition.

And then sometimes, unburdened by the intricate communicative rhythms typically cultivated via lasting association, these strangers deliver inputs which can seem inappropriate so early in a relationship.

If we recoil, as we might naturally do, we can be forgiven. But if we listen, we might just hear platinum-grade honesty capable of changing our lives.

Time for a story.

The year is 1994.

I’ve been enlisted in the US Air Force for just over four years. And in the eighteen months preceding this photo, everything has changed. But not as much as it will change afterward.

I met two very important women in that time. Two women who would change my life.

One of them I haven’t seen in 30 years. The other, I’ve seen nearly every day.

When I met my wife, she wasted little time in asking me a series of provocative questions. To do so, she had to wade through a lake of frivolity.

My non-work focus was split amongst a number of vacant hobbies. Playing a hockey game on my Sega Genesis. Listening to rock music at dorm-inappropriate decibel levels. Replaying the movies “Hot Shots” on VHS until its audio was pitch-impaired by the stretching of the tape. Deepening my unfolding love affair with Guinness.

But she managed, early in what we couldn’t know would become our journey together, to occasionally knock me from my torpor with the knuckles of larger and more serious subjects.

Long before we had settled on a life together or even contemplated it remotely, she had questions.

“What’s your long-term plan?”

She could see I was good at my job. She could see that having come from a modest socioeconomic background with shortages of neither boredom nor misery, I was satisfied with a steady paycheck, good times, and activity to fill my days.

But she could also see I was settling for a confined horizon. She saw things I me I didn’t see in myself.

Had I recoiled from her inquiries because of the newness of us, many things wuld today be different. But I listened. And her curiosity tumbled my brain.

By making me think about the future, and by inhabiting my life as someone I wanted to impress, she got me to start thinking beyond the three feet in front of my cranium. She stirred within me a previously dormant concern for the future.

“Why aren’t you going to school?”

Leaving high school, I had no steering impulse. No sense of purpose. No discipline, regimentation, or industry. While generally harmless and good-natured, I was also quite useless.

Bumbling aimlessly, splitting my time between between beer, music, and baseball, I was trending toward a Big Lebowski adulthood. Paraphrasing Red Foreman, I needed a good kick in the ass.

What I did have was just enough of a tiny spark of self-awareness to know what a dumbass I was. The one thing 17-year-old me would not do is make a predictably futile attempt at higher education.

I knew I wasn’t ready for the freedom and temptations of campus life. Had I opted for that path, little doubt I’d have been chucked into the dumpster behind the library within a semester or two. Nothing to show for it but a swollen liver, swollen indebtedness, and “avoid” stamped into my academic record.

A few years later, having learned a trade and made some headway in the world, I hadn’t bothered to revise my assumptions about any of this.

My wife had gone to college. She knew what it actually was and wasn’t. She knew the ocean of difference between a 17-year-old and 20-year-old attitude toward learning.

She saw my hunger for growth, and how it stood out as a personality trait. And even if I wasn’t ready to admit it, she saw that I was ambitious underneath it all. Craving achievement. Wanting to prove myself.

She saw in me that I was not only mistaken about my relationship with education, but 180 degrees wrong. She knew I belonged in the books, even if I didn’t. And she saw this is a constructive path for the energy welling within me.

She nudged. With subtlety and open-ended questions, she lightly tapped me on the shoulder until I veered into a new direction.

The way I saw it, if going to a class or two would impress this absolute treasure of a young woman, I would certainly give it a shot.

But notice something interesting. Christine wasn’t my supervisor, at least not yet. It wasn’t her assigned role to help me think about my future. Had I stuck with only the “authorized” sources of feedback, I’d likely be setting pins in a bowling alley these days.

And had I recoiled from the advice of a relative stranger, it would have been truly unfortunate.

The other woman I met was Staff Sergeant Jeanine Downey, pictured at the far right of this picture of a picture from the pre-digital archive.

Jeanine was a temporary supervisor assigned to help me navigate a training program. I knew her for five weeks and have never seen her again.

But I can remember the words she said. More than that, I can remember how she made me feel. In fact, I can’t not remember that feeling. Because it changed my life.

Downey was my instructor at Airman Leadership School (ALS). For the uninitiated, this is the first tier of Air Force enlisted professional military education. In those days, the focus of ALS was leadership development, public speaking, professional image, and management skills.

I can’t tell the focus today, because I am out here in a pasture where I have been for some time. But I trust that it continues to be a major milestone for airmen as they opt for an airpower career rather than a single term.

In 1994, ALS was a prerequisite for promotion to Staff Sergeant. Driven by wanting to make my new bride proud of me, I’d studied hard and made the list. To actually wear those new stripes, I needed to survive this course, which I found super challenging.

About a week into the ALS journey, in a scheduled 1:1 feedback session, Jeanine said something that knocked the wind out of me. Something I have never forgotten. Trained in Security Forces, she was characteristically blunt.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you’re honestly just wasting time. If you haven’t earned a degree and been commissioned within the next few years, you’re just pissing away an opportunity many others would love to have.”

It was like a verbal punch in the mouth. Or actually, slightly more demeaning, one of those white-glove slaps across the cheek. But it got my attention, which of course was her objective.

I’m sure Jeanine must have been internally amused by my look of bewilderment as I sat stunned, cocking my head goofily like the RCA dog listening to the gramophone.

But after the wave of astonishment faded, we engaged in a talking session which revolutionized my self-concept.

A bona fide badass with impeccable bearing and character was painting a picture for me of a much bigger future than I had previously thought possible.

She turned the mirror upon me, forcing me to acknowledge my personal qualities as she and others saw them. We talked about communication. Leadership presence. Optimism. An impulse for team spirit and mutual support. She told me about my strengths and how to accentuate them.

And then she suggested that I treat my remaining time at ALS not as a rite of passage, but as a springboard for taking these qualities to a bigger scale.

“The bigger team you lead, the bigger difference you can make.”

She was taking my graduation for granted, which gave me the psychic initiative. I lifted my aimpoint from survival to winning.

Jeanine wasn’t the person signing my performance reports. She was a fleeting presence in my world and we both knew it.

But had I stuck with taking advice from those who knew me well, or questioned her credibility because we came from different career fields, I may not have absorbed her wisdom.

After that meeting, everything changed. I started to see myself differently. Rather than simply project confidence, I was actually feeling it.

The impact on my performance was profound. I had new reasons to work harder. To find those extra margins of individual excellence I had previously left untouched. There was more to unlock. I got hungry for it.

The picture at the top of this piece is me graduating a few weeks later at the top of my class. Not something I had considered possible. Not something I saw coming, even as I stood taller and felt myself growing into something different.

My classmates were the most impressive group of people I had ever encountered up to that point. For me, the dumbass, to somehow stand out … well, that knocked me for a loop. My expression in the picture is one of shot nerves and confusion rather than pride.

But as the hubbub gave way to reality of a really cool achievement which meant the world to me, I started to truly believe.

And then to act on that belief. And then to grow from the results of those actions. And then to notice that growth and believe even more. And then to act on that larger belief. And so it continued.

In aviation parlance, my professional life went vertical after that and just kept climbing.

There would be many twists and turns. But that moment, wearing that sweaty, purse-lipped half-smirk of restrained but terrified joy in the RAF Lakenheath club auditorium while a few of my best friends applauded, was the moment my paradigm shifted.

And it was all a result of listening to the advice of two relative strangers who somehow carried the key insight I needed at that moment in time.

Because I knew they cared, I cared what they knew. And those seemingly innocuous sequences of conversation were powerful enough to break and re-assemble my personal mold.

We are lucky for the voices in our lives. Often, they whisper truths we can’t otherwise decode. The fact they speak expresses that they care. And for most of us, knowing someone cares about you is the single most powerful feeling in the world.

My reward for listening to those voices and hearing those truths was 30 years of opportunity to exercise leadership and influence others. To extend and build humanity into organizations and their underlying codes. To inspire and develop others, building them up as I’d been built by others.

I’m grateful for those voices, and glad I was disarmed enough in those moments to hear them. To know I didn’t have it all figured out.

Self-doubt is a blessing. It places us in a search for meaning. Certainty makes us deaf to things we need to hear, most of all about ourselves.

In the years since, any time I feel ego pushing me to wall off an input, I try and remind myself I only have the life I have because of a capacity to listen, and then to reconsider my own perspective based on new information.

Of course, chance plays a role too. Had those voices come earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready to hear them. Had they come later, I may have been dislocated from the pathways they opened and unable to bridge back.

All the more reason to keep your radar switched on all the time, so you have the best chance to detect the key signal at the actionable moment.

TC is an independent writer and expert in organizational leadership.

This article appears in original form at The Radar, where Tony publishes regularly. If you enjoy this work, please consider becoming a subscriber.