# 4 - The Sweet Tears of Follow Through

Episode 4

Hi. My name is Rick Lewis, I'm a speaker, author, entertainer, and you have tuned in to episode four of The Follow Through Formula Podcast.

The Follow Through Formula Podcast is surrounding a project I've started called Life Leap. This is an online community space I want to create where people can come together and support each other to really talk about and face those things that are important but that they have not been attending to. This is a place to gather together as a community to support one another to move forward and keep taking action on what matters most.

Because I have made my living traveling to conferences, I have been out of work since March, and I am looking to reinvent myself, to find a way that I can continue to do what I love to do, which is inspire others with thoughts, stories, science, psychology, inspiration, motivation, and personal and professional development that make a difference for people.

I've been appearing at corporate events for many years, performing for over 500 associations and corporations over the course of my speaking career. Over time I have created a really unique way of entering the room and presenting myself on stage. Dressing identically to the serving staff at a venue, I pretend to be a waiter during the meal portion of a gathering or event. I begin by being a little bit awkward, and then as the meal continues I get more and more odd and eccentric, tripping and dropping things, reaching right in front of people to pick up a plate off the table, pouring water from a height of 3 ft, getting down on my hands and knees to retrieve a piece of fallen silverware under the table.

The routine progresses so that I become more and more of an incompetent spectacle in the midst of this corporate dining atmosphere. People are looking at each other, laughing, whispering, saying things like, “Did you see what he just did?” or “How did this guy get his job and how is he keeping it?” By the end of the meal, people either want to have me fired or they want to take me home and give me a safe place to stay where I won't hurt myself, and sometimes they catch on. Finally, I end up on stage and reveal the surprise, which is that I am their speaker.

This unusual lead up gives me the opportunity then to talk about the question What do you do in challenging circumstances, when you're under stress, when things don't go as planned? This question also highlights and can lead into a very useful discussion about where we get stuck and what needs to happen for us to go beyond our self-imposed limitations, both personally and organizationally.

Now this story happened quite a few years ago. I was performing my routine to a large room full of food service professionals. There were four or five hundred people in this ballroom who work in the food service industry. You would be right in guessing that they are highly sensitive to proper food protocol. Everything about how food is prepared, served, and delivered is something they care about. When I started doing my waiter bit for all these folks I was immediately getting more dirty looks than there were napkins in that hotel. People's head were snapping in my direction. Not only was I putting the fork on the wrong side of the plate, which would have been enough to raise their umbrage, but I was doing all of this totally incompetent, clumsy stuff that I usually do is a waiter. Boy was I ever getting a reaction out of these people!

I was having a ton of fun watching everybody squirm trying to figure out how they should address this. I was moving table to table in the room, as I do so that everybody in the room gets an experience or many experiences of me as the waiter when I do this bit. I had gotten to the very back row of this big room of diners, and I was working my way around it over-filling water glasses, and I got to the last table and there was a gentleman sitting there, he had a yellow tie on, a nice shirt, and I was over-filling his water glass. And instead of reacting to me with the usual irritated or puzzled look, he's just looking at me with this open expression on his face, and he's watching me fill the water glass more and more and more full, until I filled it so full that it formed a meniscus on the surface.

And then I said, “Is that enough water for you?”

That usually pushes people over the edge. “What?! Can't you see what you're doing? You totally overfilled my water glass so I can’t even move it!”

But instead of doing that, this gentleman was just looking at me with an open expression. And when I was done, he looked up at the name tag I was wearing. I always borrow a fake name badge from the hotel, and the one I had that day said Malcolm on it. He noted the name on my name tag and he said, “You know what, Malcolm? Thanks for taking such good care of us. I really appreciate your service.”

I was floored. It was such an unusual response to my ineptness. Very unusual. I've become very good at figuring out how to go right to the edge and push people just over the line. But this guy didn't take the bait. All he was doing was being kind to me.

So I walked away from the table, went about my business, working the whole room doing other bits of odd things at each table, and I came back to his table again, this time with a whole tray of silverware that I let intentionally tip over right near the table and all the silverware went clattering to the floor. Then I got down on my hands and knees and scrambled around like I was flustered and trying to pick it up. As usual, everyone else was getting very annoyed, but he was just watching me. I was close by him on the floor. He got out of his chair and he put one hand on my shoulder, and he said to me, “Hey, relax, it's OK. Everyone gets a little nervous. Sometimes everyone has a bad day. Just relax. You're doing fine,” and he went back and sat down in his chair.

Here I was, delivering my usual points of escalation to get people off balance a little bit, annoyed or confused, and instead of going in that direction, this guy was doubling down on trying to empower me. At that point, I thought, Ok, I've got to do my job, which is to get this guy off center. So I kept going back to the table with more outrageous forms of odd, clumsy ineptitude. And no matter what I did, the only response I got from this man was kindness and generosity. I was on the receiving end of his commitment to make me feel like I was completely okay as a person, as a human being, and with the job that I was doing.

Now this was truly an extraordinary moment. What happens in these ballrooms is fairly predictable when I'm performing this way, because in any industry or group of people who are meeting together there's a subculture narrative, and a way the group tends to behave. Everyone at his table and the surrounding tables was being dismissive with me and annoyed and irritated with my behavior. He could have easily fallen in line with everything else that was going on at his table in terms of the guests’ reaction to me. But he didn't go there.

He had his own commitment, how he wanted to be with me, which was empowering, kind, and generous. And he stuck to it. I walked away feeling so deeply moved by the gestures and the behavior of this man, I wanted to go back and just sit in his lap and tell him about the real me so he could actually just empower who I really am instead of this character that I was doing.  

I left the table and shortly thereafter, following my routine, I stumbled onto stage to pretend I was going to apologize as a waiter. That’s the segue from which I reveal I'm the speaker, and once I reveal that fact, everyone groans and rolls their eyes, “Oh, no, I've been totally had!” I went up and I went through that bit of business, and I started delivering my keynote. But the whole time I was delivering my keynote, the man who was sitting at that back table, he was quite far away, but once again he just seemed to now be taking this in stride. He just had an open, almost curious expression as he was looking up at me, delivering my keynote.

I finished my keynote. I was up on stage talking to a few people who came up to say hello and wanted to talk a bit, and slowly the ballroom emptied out, and finally I started putting away my props and my equipment on stage. The ballroom was empty for maybe five or 10 minutes while I was packing up my things. At one point, I looked at the back of this large ballroom and walking in through one of the open doors was the same man in the yellow tie. He was walking slowly toward me. And I have to admit, I was a bit nervous at that point. I was like, “Oh, no, I hope I didn’t make this gentleman feel foolish by doing this ruse to him and the rest of the room. Maybe he's upset about that.”

I was bracing for what he had to say to me as he walked all the way across the ballroom. When he got up to the one of the round tables that was right in front of stage, I stepped off the stage. He pulled out a chair from the table and turned it to face me and sat down in the chair. But hadn't said anything yet. He was just looking at me. I thought, “Okay, whatever this man wants to say to me, he deserves every bit of my attention. Who he is, the way he treated me. Whatever he needs to say, I'm going to listen.” So, I pulled out a chair as well, and I put it right in front of him, and I sat down facing him. 

He started telling me about his daughter and his son. His daughter was 14 years old. Two years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. His son was 12. He had these two kids, the daughter with the terminal illness, and her younger brother. And she wasn't doing well. She was bewildered, betrayed by the injustice of what was going on for her, and she just didn't have any motivation to want to go on. She had medication she had to take, and she didn't want to take her medication. She was really having a tough time. This man, as he explained, quit his job as the executive chef of a large hotel in Texas to stay home and care for her full time and to champion her and to support her to just hang in there. The depth of his pain and the sadness about the situation with his daughter was really obvious. Then he said to me that the last two years had been the hardest two years of his entire life.

“I have never had more doubts about myself as a father and a person,” he said. “I didn't know that what you were doing tonight was an act. I thought you were a real waiter, but because of what you did, I got to see that who I am is a good person.” And the tears started rolling down his cheeks onto his dress shirt and his yellow tie. The tears started flowing down my cheeks as well, as I sat there and watched this gentleman whose own kindness, whose commitment to kindness to another person—me as the waiter—reflected back to him his own merit, his value as a human being, his true character.

He could have easily been upset with me, going through this very unusual corporate event piece of theater, but instead of being upset he took the whole thing and used it for an experience of personal transformation. He was crying. I was crying. I've never experienced anything quite like this at a corporate event. The strength of character of this man made an impact on me. I tell the story frequently and I'll never forget it.

Even though it happened quite a few years ago, that story deserves to be told. The reason I'm telling you this story now is because this was an act of follow through. What do I mean by follow through? How was this an act of follow through? Well, to me, follow through is  our ability to take action that is consistent with who we really are. Regardless of the situation, no matter who surrounds us, or what the peer tendency is, or the group narrative, when we act in resonance with our highest ideals and values that's called congruence.

Congruence is a term that was introduced by Carl Rogers, who was a humanistic psychologist. Congruence has to do with one’s highest values and intentions being matched by one's actions. We suffer when we fail to live up to that inner sense of what’s right because we're out of alignment. To me, this is what the essence of follow through is about, when we act on that which is most authentic to who we actually are. When we follow through by taking actions that match our inner sense of ourselves and our values, regardless of what's going on in our lives, we experience something very transformative. It transforms us because we stop using the cultural narrative that surrounds excuses and reasons and circumstances as being the culprit of why we don't follow through. It transforms us when we accept that, it's me, it's up to me whether or not I follow through, not the external conditions. When we're following through on who we really are, when we're being congruent with our highest values, there is an impact that is unmistakable, and that's what the story's about.

I appreciate you listening again. My name is Rick Lewis. This has been The Follow Through Formula Podcast. Because my aim is for this conversation to reach as many people as possible, I would so appreciate it if you would leave a review and subscribe to the podcast so you can continue to listen. I'd appreciate it. And I have issued an invitation, a challenge to anyone who is listening to consider something in your life that's important to you that you have been putting off, and take one small action every day to move that important thing forward. Instead of saying to yourself, “Maybe someday when I have enough time or energy or money or courage,” instead of doing that, just take one small action each day for the duration of this podcast—a total of twenty-one days. And that way we can do this journey together. And if you want to tell me about what you're up to or what you're taking action on, send me an email. You can send it to rick@gamesforconfidence.com. I would love to hear about it, and I promise I will reply. All right, That's good enough for today. Game on! I'll see you in Episode five. Take care.