Feelings

Gun’s Quote-of-the-Week:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

Last week I attended the 75th session of the American Legion Missouri Boys State as a staff member. It has become an annual tradition for me, this one being marked by the significance of a major anniversary milestone and the absence of Justin W. Stephen, a long-time friend, confidant and super-star of the program he so sincerely and passionately loved.

Boys State, for me, is always marked with emotion and this year makes this fact an understatement. There is always the joy that comes with knowing over 900 young men from Missouri have been given an extra set of tools to help them lead the world. There is the satisfaction of seeing our future leadership grow and learn and be moved to commit extra effort to our world which so badly needs someone to take the baton and move us past the challenges which face our world today. We need good leaders… we need good men… to move forward. Of course, Justin’s absence was difficult.

At the beginning of the session, the staff comes in and has a full day of training prior to the citizens’ arrival. During one of these training sessions the Dean of Counselors, Dale Wright, shared the above quote from the late Maya Angelou who died recently.

Boys State has inspired young men to take on the challenges of the world they are about to enter. It has made many young men feel powerful and perhaps less anxious about taking on a needed role in his community. While Boys State has taught civic engagement and political processes for seven and a half decades, this inspiration is probably the most likely reason why the program has produced so many of the local and even national leaders that it has. We make good men feel more powerful in a world of plenty of bad men. The education helps, too, but the reason the program excels is because it has helped young men believe they can excel, too.

Maya got it right. Good teachers aren’t revered for shoving more knowledge in to kids’ heads than “bad” teachers. They are good teachers because they have inspired a group of students in a way that “bad” teachers haven’t. Good pastors don’t just give good sermons. They genuinely love their congregation. What makes good parents? I’m sure you don’t have your opinion of your mom or dad because of something they did, but because of some childhood memory of how they made you feel, good or bad.

It’s actually psychological.

When there is a positive emotional response to a stimuli, the brain releases a set of hormones which helps seal that emotional response in to memory. (The same can be said of negative emotion) This emotional response helps the person to remember what it was that caused the emotional response. It used to be part of human survival. If you found a strawberry patch as a caveman, the joy and jubilation of finding food would be used to help the caveman remember where the strawberry patch was in the first place. Likewise, nearly getting killed by a vicious animal would seal a memory in the brain that would facilitate better recognition and an increased sense of urgency to abandon a location where that animal was then found again. (Or remember not to go to that place in the first place.)

In a world of fast-paced, intense, profit- and grade-driven success, it is very difficult to forget that our products, our tests, our homework and our reports will quickly fall by the wayside. I will never get thanked for doing for my clients what I said I was going to do. I have literally had experiences where somebody paid me tens of thousands of dollars for doing a service for them and they forgot about the fact that we had even met only a few months later. I don’t remember my grades in high school, can’t recall my GPA in college and am fairly certain I’ve already forgotten the details of half the projects I have completed after college. However, I can tell you when my boss gave me a pat on the back or put me in tears, I can recall a football coach inspiring me and encouraging me and I do remember the names of the men who have made me the man I am today by doing the same.

You will leave an impact on a person by virtue of how you make them feel. You can make them feel big or you can make them feel small. You can enhance their life or you can deflate it. Consider well what you do. We are all fighting a fight and trying to make the best out of this thing called life.

You will be remembered by somebody by how you made them feel. What do you want that to be?

…and that’s why it’s a Gun’s Quote!