Thank you Colin Powell for changing - if not saving - my life

It was early 1996 and General Colin Powell’s name was being considered as a Presidential candidate and would possibly have considered it if it were not for the concern and worry about his safety from his wife Alma, someone Powell loved deeply and was devoted to.

He was the top keynote speaker at an international real estate conference for Coldwell Banker in Dallas that more than 10,000 people attended.

One of those attendees was me, not because I worked for Coldwell Banker, but because I was providing a presentation on one day and then the same talk on the next day.

I was relatively new to speaking and new to moving beyond the comfort zone and safety of my psychiatric and psychotherapy practice. I was expanding beyond my practice because my first book, Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior, had recently been published and my publisher was urging me to do speaking events to promote it.

When I spoke to the person who booked me for the event, she told me, “Try not to be too inspirational, because that is for the keynote speakers, and instead focus on practical tactics that your audience can use, and it might help to use some tricks to grab their attention.”

To make a long story slightly shorter, I gave the first of my two presentations.?In hindsight now, I think it went better than I thought at the time, but I couldn’t help but notice the people who kept leaving my talk to go elsewhere. The "tricks/gimmicks" I had tried as I was advised that were out of character for me all backfired.

Being new to speaking in such settings and to make matters worse, I focused too much on those leaving instead of the vast majority who stayed and felt an acute sense of failure.

Following the talk, I experienced a deep sense of embarrassment and had an anxiety attack that flirted with panic.?I felt I had totally blown it, lost my sense of who I was (in retrospect I feel embarrassed now that such a trivial affront to my ego should knock me so off balance). I didn’t sleep the entire night during which my mind played with some very dark and self-destructive thoughts and I debated whether I should cancel the repeat of the first presentation on the following day.

However, I felt that if I cancelled, I would never speak again.

That’s when I went to hear Colin Powell give his inspiring, heartfelt keynote to the entire attendance of 10,000+ in the Dallas Memorial Auditorium. ?He spoke of his childhood and his talk overflowed with gratitude and honoring his family and country. At the end of his talk, there was a Q & A.

The Q & A was moving along well when one person raised his hand and asked, “General Powell, I understand that your wife has had depression, been in psychiatric hospitals and had shock treatments. Do you want to comment on that?”

You could hear a pin drop at the rudeness and offensiveness of this questioner. It immediately pulled me out of my funk of having not decided whether to give my second presentation or not. I wondered how Powell would respond. Would he ignore the disrespectful interloper? Would he say something politically correct about mental illness needing to be treated with the same parity as physical illness (for his wife had indeed suffered from depression)? Would he counter with a hostile retort?

That is when I heard his response which to this day, still gives me the chills from its power, and his presence when he replied, “Excuse me sir, the person you love more than anyone in this world is living in hell and you don’t do anything within your power to get them out. Do you have a problem with that sir?”

In that moment you felt the power of his statement so fully that if an election for President was held on that day, you felt that everyone in the audience would have voted for Powell.

I subsequently created a formula to capture what Powell did.

Aggression + Principle = Conviction; Aggression – Principle = Hostility.

It is good to be aggressive a quality we admire in top athletes, but it needs to be informed and tied to principle (or in the case of athletes, intense training and practice). And Powell’s principle? “Say what you will about me, but don’t you ever cross over to say anything disparaging about my wife or my family!”

On the other hand, when aggression is tied to nothing it can cross over into hostility which will often bring out the worst in us and make a bad situation worse.

Powell’s courage and poise under fire inspired and emboldened me to decide to give my presentation immediately following his talk rather than cancel it and run.

When I started my presentation I told the audience of around 250 people that if any of them had bought the audiotape from my prior session the day before (which was recorded), I would be happy to refund them their money, because in my mind I hadn’t provided anything of value.

I then asked the audience to raise their hands if they felt it had been an honor to hear Colin Powell and that he had inspired all of us to be the best version of ourselves.

Apparently, I was not the only one so moved by his talk because nearly the entire audience raised their hands.

I proceeded to give a spontaneous, improvised presentation asking the audience how they would feel if their mom or dad were in the Emergency Room and they were worried about their condition and the ER doctor or nurse told them that they would need to wait because they needed to attend to more severe cases. To the ER staff it might seem that their mom or dad weren’t that important, but to them they were.

I then made the analogy that if they treated a client any differently and better who was wanting to buy a $3 million dollar home that they could easily afford vs. a client looking for a house for $100,000 which was their life savings, that they should feel ashamed of themselves and have a different agent or broker handle the $100,000 home if that person would treat that client better.

My presentation continued and was filled with other examples I was passionate about in putting the welfare and well-being of their clients and customers first.

By the end, not only did anybody leave this presentation, but I received a standing ovation. And following it a small in stature male real estate broker came up to the stage and patiently waited to speak to me.

When it was finally his turn, he took my hand in both of his hands, looked me in the eye and said, “It was an honor listening to you Dr. Goulston.”