Archive for the ‘Self-improvement’ Category
Mentor Yourself – An Interview With Drew Dudley
May 3rd, 2012 | 
Author: Invisible Mentor: Drew Dudley, Founder & Chief Catalyst
Company Name: Nuance Leadership Development Services, Inc.
Website: http://nuanceleadership.ca/
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Drew Dudley: The way I make my living is by using more than a couple of sentences at a time. I’m a professional speaker, an educator, and trying to be a writer and I absolutely love what I do.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Drew Dudley: A typical day for me involves me consistently trying to figure out what I need to do to make sure that I never have typical days. Honestly, I don’t have a typical day, but what I spend most of my days doing is consistently saying, “How can I make sure tomorrow I don’t have to go to on an office.” What do I have to do so that tomorrow I don’t fall back into saying, “Today was just another day!” How do I avoid a cubicle? How do I avoid an office? How do I make sure that I keep doing what I love to do? And that could take a thousand different forms. Most of my days are spent trying to do the things that I need to do to keep being lucky enough to do what I love. It’s constantly thinking and trying to do the things that are going to make that a reality.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Drew Dudley: I have a great friend of mine who is a remarkable guy named George Kourounis (he used to host a show called Angry Planet). He is an adventure and TV Host. He says that in everybody’s life there are two forces, one that pushes you and push forces are things like you’re unhappy, that things are lousy, that you’re unhappy in a relationship, you’re in uncomfortable positions where things push you out of that position. But he also says there are all kinds of pull forces in our lives and those are the ones that pull us forward saying there is more for you our there, or this new idea is really exciting, or pursuing this course of action will make you better.
I think what I try to do, and how I try to motivate myself, is try to focus on the pull forces in my life and not the push ones. And every time I try to think about what are the things that are trying to pull me forward, what are the things that make me say, “That’s the direction I want to go,” that stuff inspires me. When I look at the push forces, I look at where I was pushed from and I remind myself that I don’t want to go there again. I think a big part of what motivates me is that I try to embrace the pull forces and I look back and I remind myself how much I want to stay away from the push forces.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Drew Dudley: The biggest thing I’d do is start sooner. I absolutely love what I get to do now, and even when things don’t go well I’m happy and proud of myself for taking a shot of doing this, working with Nuance and speaking professionally. I think if I got to do it all over again, I’d just start earlier, and I think that many of the messages I try to convey now, trying to help people decide that they want to start earlier. And the other one is that if you’re going to start working on your own, make sure that someone who is good with numbers works with you.
Even if you spent most of your life figuring out how you do everything yourself, wanting to be self-sufficient, saying, “I could pay someone for that, or I could just learn it myself,” that’s a great approach to look at a few things, but I also think that when it comes down to creating something that’s going to be beneficial to others and that product could be a service or a product itself, I think recognizing the things that pull you away from simply making you great at your craft are things that for other people, that is their craft, that is the thing that they’re great at. So let other people do the things they’re great at whether it be numbers, financial planning. Look around and surround yourself with people who are not only good at things, but who absolutely love it, who love what they do as much as you love what you do, and make sure that you work with them.
Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?
Drew Dudley: I don’t know the secret to happiness. But I’ve discovered that the key to unhappiness is when there is a gap between the person that you believe you can be and the person you are and how you know you’re behaving. I think this idea that I’m a very honest person, or I want to be a very honest person, this is your self-concept and then you find yourself, and you know that you are not being honest in certain parts of your life. Or you say to yourself that I’m not the type of person who settles for less, or I’m the type of person who holds out for what’s good for me, and you look at your life and see areas in your life where you are settling for less.
I think that those are the revelations whether conscious or unconscious that result in a gap between your own self-worth or how you know you are or how you perceive yourself to be. Those gaps are what lead to unhappiness. That was a major discovery for me – is that we all chase the secret to happiness and the second piece is that we don’t have to chase happiness, sometimes we identify the things that cause unhappiness, and the ways of eliminating them are more obvious than getting happiness. So why don’t we focus on the sources of unhappiness in our lives, not so that we can dwell on them, but so that we can say how can we deal with that effectively?
That was a big moment when I realized that there was a big gap between the person I want to be and the person I perceive myself to be and how I know I am behaving. My awareness of that gap consciously or unconsciously, really was a source of unhappiness for me and knowing that now allows me to address it.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Drew Dudley: The three biggest threats are myself, myself and myself. No matter what the threat is the only real threat to your business is yourself – can you handle things, or can’t you handle things? or how you handle things. So whatever threat there is to my business whether it’s the market, whether it’s how I behave or how people perceive me, the biggest threat to my business is always me, because whatever it throws at me, if I get hurt that’s really something that’s beyond my control, but how I behave if and when it happens recognizing how I can learn from this and grow from this. There are so many things in our lives that are beyond our control and I think all we can ultimately control is how we choose to respond. And sometimes it seems that we don’t get a choice because there is this powerful instinct in us to just react. Someone once told me to respond, don’t react because in responding there is one extra step that isn’t in reacting and that’s thinking.
Our biggest threat to everything is our unwillingness to accept things and prepare for the unexpected and our unwillingness to deal with the fact that there is going to be roadblocks along the way. Things are not beyond our control, it’s how we decide to react to those things and that always is your own decision even if it seems it’s been taken out of your hands, or every piece of emotion in your mind is saying I don’t have control over this, you really do. As long as you fully grasp the fact that inevitably how you feel about things is going to be your call, you realize that the only real threats to your business and your success are you and do you have the strength, the discipline and commitment to say I’m going to find a way to make this work every single time. It is so easy to say, “Oh woe is me, this isn’t fair.” When you do that, you are a threat to yourself. So I think I’m the biggest threat to me.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Drew Dudley: I don’t know if there is anything unique about the service, I think what is unique is the delivery of the service. In terms of what I do offering opportunities, facilitating, running workshops and speaking, that’s not a unique service. What I hope is unique is the perspective that I bring to it and the level of skill that I try to bring to it, not that the other people don’t have the same level of skill, but how you apply it is always going to be unique. We are unique in terms of what drives us, and how we choose to deliver our ideas, so what’s unique about my service is that it comes from me.
Other than that I recognize that there are a lot of other people doing what I do, the question is, what are the kinds of things that I can bring to it that are from my experience, from my particular set of skills that means that when someone walks out of the room they just got something that no one else could have given them exactly and that is the big one. When your service is trying to use your personal set of skills to help other people explore theirs is always going to be unique. It’s always going to be different and I think that’s true of anybody who offers any service. You don’t have to go out there and try to reinvent what you’re doing. I think the key is recognizing how you do it, how is that different, and how that can bring people who cannot get it anywhere else. Focus on that and make sure that your primary goal is that whoever you work with doesn’t leave unchanged. You can do that if you are a carpenter and you can do that if you are a doctor, and you can do that if you are a lawyer. What is it you bring that nobody else can? Make sure that is your focus, not just doing what anybody else can do.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Drew Dudley: One of the things I think about is how what I am going to say will impact other people because language is such a powerful thing. If I say here is my big break, my big concern is what happens if people listening think, “Well that’s it, I have to keep spending my life looking for that one defining moment,” and I think my big break came when I realized that there are no big breaks. There are a whole bunch of little breaks that we have to take advantage of and that some of them are more immediately impactful, but the fact is that every day gives opportunities for breaks.
For those listening and reading this, the thing I want to make clear, is that we can’t live our lives for extraordinary days. There are extraordinary days in our lives, days when you get what you may think of as a big break, you get the job, or the promotion. Those are extraordinary and then there are negative extraordinary where you lose out on something you think you deserve, or you hurt somebody that you care about, where you lose someone that matter to you, and it seems to me that when we evaluate ourselves as people and leaders we tend to focus a lot on how our extraordinary days stack up to other people’s, or how big our extraordinary days were.
We can learn a lot from those extraordinary days, but I think it’s very wise to remember that those extraordinary days are always outnumbered by “every days”. The people I know who are the most successful and happiest are the ones who focus on those “every days,” what those “every days” bring to them, and what they can learn, and how they behave, so I think my big break was recognizing that my life is not determined by the big moments. Maybe the biggest moments and biggest breaks are the ones you never notice at the time, and often the things you think will be the most defining moments in your life turn out to be something that you don’t remember in a couple of years.
I don’t know when my big break was. There is a pretty good possibility that I wasn’t in the room when my big break happened – somebody decided to create an opportunity for me when I wasn’t there, they were discussing it with somebody. So I think all we can control are how we try to add value at an every day level, then the big break, the moments where we’ve added so much value that we have to break through, and something has to change. And usually it’s a positive change for us. That’s the key to building breaks.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Drew Dudley: One of my biggest failures is not asking for help when I needed it. And that could be in work and in life. I’m bipolar and that was something that I didn’t want to recognize. And when I recognized it, I didn’t want to ask for help. Bipolar disorder bounces you back and forth between clinical depression and a state called mania. Many people are familiar with depression although many people will say it’s being sad and it’s not, it’s something much more profound than sad.
But the other side of it is the opposite, is your brain being incredible fast, your brain being inspired and feeling incredibly confident and that may seem like a really good thing but the difficulty is that sometimes it can cause you to lose touch with who you are. It can cause you to lose touch with what is socially acceptable because you think there are no consequences. You think everything is going to work out because it always has and mania on the side of bipolar is like having a gear that other people don’t have.
And that in many ways was very beneficial along the way when you are younger and you tend not to have to deal with the depressive side of the disease, but what really seems to drive you is the more manic side and before you head into true mania. Before you lose touch of who you are and what’s acceptable there is this little place they call hypomania where what has really happened is you’re in that extra gear that other people don’t have and you don’t need to sleep and ideas come to you incredibly quickly and you’re able to accomplish things that other people can’t in much shorter periods of time and that drove me a lot through my life.
When the depression started becoming part of my life, there was a denial side of it saying, “Well, this is the piece you have to put up with to be who you are.” I once heard someone say, “Too be a visionary, you have to be a little bit delusional.” I thought this is the curse I have to deal with being given gifts that I notice other people would really like – the ability to do really well in school, the ability to come up with ideas and be driven. I thought there are two sides to every sword and I think my biggest failure is that when it became clear that the disease was having a negative impact on me, being afraid to do anything about it because I thought that people weren’t interested in who I was, they were interested in who I could be. They were interested in me because of the events that I could run or the speeches I could deliver. And as a result, when it started to be more difficult for me to deal with those things as I dealt with depression, I wouldn’t tell anybody and that was a tremendous failure on my part.
The biggest failure in my life was thinking that people only cared about me because of who I might be, or what I did and not who I was. I needed to give more credit to the people around me. What I learned from that failure is the fact that asking for help is not a weakness, it’s strength. I failed to understand that for a long time, particularly in regards to my disease, and it cost me a lot of happiness moving along. I can’t change that, but what I make sure to do now, and what it taught me now is to do not deny yourself things that make you happy. Do not fail to get things fixed or ask for help with things that are holding you back and you know it.
I went to get new glasses and they said, “Oh my God, why didn’t you do this a year and a half ago?” I didn’t make time for it. A comedian once said, “How can drastically improve your vision not be on your list of to-dos?” I knew something would help me and I just didn’t do it. My biggest failure is for most of my life I was thinking that asking for help was looking weak and I tried to handle things on my own. That’s not the case now, it doesn’t make you weak asking for help, it makes you strong.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Drew Dudley: It was to do what I do, to decide to work for myself, to take my own advice and say, “You know if you love something and you’re good at it, you have an obligation to try to make a living out of it.” I had a job that paid me and had a union, built in raises and benefits and everything the list in our heads say we’re supposed to have. I had to decide whether or not to acknowledge the fact that I was incredibly unhappy even though I had everything I was supposed to have.
I had a woman I met ask me, who I had met randomly for a couple of hours one day, “How far would you be willing to go for the chance to be happier?” In my life I realized the answer is I wouldn’t go very far because I had everything I was supposed to want and I was unhappy. The toughest decision I had to make was to ask myself quite strongly, “In what part of your life are you settling?” and to try not to accept it one more day because I think we have an obligation to ourselves to keep making changes in our lives so it’s the life we want and the life that we deserve and we don’t do it because we think that what we’ll end up with is worse than what we have now.
I think the toughest decision in my life was to take a leap of faith and say, “I bet what I’m going to end up with and embrace change in my life is going to better than I have now.” That was an incredibly tough decision and I’m glad I made it but it was a tremendously tough thing to do to say, “I’m going to walk away from the money, I’m going to walk away from the security in the honest belief that more of that will come along with more happiness,” and I learned that you have to make that decision. And you have every right to and the obligation to yourself to make that decision, to keep making changes in your life until you have the life that you want and deserve.
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Mentor Yourself: Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Scottish Explorer, Fur Trader, and Businessman
Alexander Mackenzie was a Scot who discovered the Mackenzie River in the Canadian Arctic and was the first European to cross North America north of Mexico.
Name: Sir Alexander Mackenzie
Birth Date: 1762 – March 1820
Job Functions: Scottish Explorer, Fur Trader, and Businessman
Fields: Business and Exploration
Known For: First European to cross North America north of Mexico
Alexander Mackenzie was born near Stornoway on Lewis Island to a prominent military family. Upon the death of his mother, his father took him to New York in 1774 when he was 12 years old. During the American Revolution, his father, a loyalist, joined forces loyal to the King of England and died during the revolution. As the Americans gained strength and the war turned against England, the Mackenzie family moved to Montreal, Canada in 1776.
Mackenzie attended school briefly, and in 1779, he was employed to work as a clerk in one of the main Montreal fur-trading companies, Gregory and McLeod. He remained there for five years and in 1784 went to Detroit as a trader for the company. June 1785, Mackenzie was chosen to head the region of the Churchill River, with headquarters at Ile-a-la-Crosse in what is now northern Saskatchewan. At Ile-a-la-Crosse, Mackenzie managed a trading territory which stretched from Lake Athabasca to the Great Slave Lake and the upper regions of the Churchill River. Shortly after, Mackenzie and his cousin Roderick established Fort Chipewyan on the shores of Lake Athabasca.
Control of the Churchill allowed the Native American trappers to do business with the North West Company rather than having to travel hundreds of miles further down the river to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company at Prince of Wales Fort. In 1787, Mackenzie’s firm merged with the larger North West Company.
At the time, the North West Company and the Hudson Bay Company were the two key trading companies in Canada. The Hudson Bay Company was doing business from outposts along the shores of the bay, and the North West Company had established trading posts in the country’s interior where Native Americans trapped furs and exchanged them for manufactured European goods and rum.
When the two companies merged, Mackenzie was now working with trader Peter Pond who had widely explored the Canadian interior. Over the years, Pond had gathered a lot of information from the Native Americans who he traded with, and he now had a general idea of the river system of the Canadian northwest.
“[Pond] learned of a large river (the Slave) that flowed into Great Slave Lake from the south and of a second river that flowed out of the western end of the lake and flowed to the Arctic. About this time, Pond became aware of the discoveries of Captain James Cook who had found Cook Inlet on the south coast of Alaska. Pond then came up with the theory that the river that flowed out of the Great Slave Lake flowed westward into Cook Inlet rather than north. If so, this would provide the much-sought-after route to the Pacific.”
Pond retired in 1788, a year after the merger, and Mackenzie was left to test the trader’s ideas through exploration. The North West Company wanted to expand its knowledge base on western Canada’s geography, and the various Native American tribes who inhabited it. To succeed in the lucrative fur trade, it was essential that traders be familiar with not only the land in which they trapped and transported animal skins, but also the relationships that traders fostered with the tribes that they traded with.
On June 3, 1789, Mackenzie set off in canoes on his exploration with a large party of traders and Native Americans from Fort Chipewyan in what is now far-northern Alberta. Included on this exploration was Nestabeck, a member of the Chipewyan tribe, who had previously guided Samuel Hearne on his historic overland trip to the Arctic Ocean along the Coppermine River.
Mackenzie and his team were hoping to discover a passage westward by way of a river, described to him by the Indians, which flowed out of Great Slave Lake. Travel was slow at first because of the large number of rapids on the Slave River. Once they entered the river flowing out of the lake – which has since been named the Mackenzie River after Alexander Mackenzie – the expedition covered approximately 75 miles a day and reached the river’s outlet to the Arctic Ocean on July 14, 1789. The team stayed for four days on an island in the Arctic Ocean before they embarked on the return trip to Fort Chipewyan.
Though Mackenzie discovered one of the world’s greatest rivers, he was very disappointed because it was of no practical use to traders. He decided that he would embark on another expedition to determine if he could find another route. Mackenzie spent the next three years on company business. In the winter of 1791-1792, Mackenzie went to London to learn more about navigation and surveying so that he could make more accurate measurements of locations. He studied longitude calculations and collected instruments. Mackenzie returned to Canada with a supply of rudimentary measuring instruments that he was to put to good use.
In the fall of 1792, Mackenzie met with his cousin Roderick to plan his second and greatest expedition. On October 10, 1792, Mackenzie set off on his second great expedition from Fort Chipewyan for the Pacific coast of Canada. He hoped that he would make contact with Russian traders to establish a trading route across Canada to the Far East. Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese explorers who wanted to get rid of the Russians, Mackenzie thought they could act as intermediaries in the lucrative Pacific trade with China.
This time, Mackenzie travelled west up the Peace River as far as its juncture with the Smoky River where he established Fort Fork. While on the expedition, Mackenzie stopped at trading posts along the way and traded rum and tobacco for furs and information. Before crossing the Continental Divide and beginning the descent to the ocean, the expedition was met by members of a western tribe that offered guidance in reaching the Pacific in hopes of establishing a trading relationship with the North West Company.
Mackenzie spent the winter to have an early start in the spring. Mackenzie set out again on May 9, 1793 with six voyageurs and began his quest for the Pacific again. After crossing the mountains, the party descended along the Fraser River for 150 miles and traveled overland to the Pacific coast of what is now British Columbia. This expedition and the voyage down the Mackenzie River combined to form the first crossing of North America above Mexico by a European.
Mackenzie found no Russian or Spanish traders, but instead Native Americans who were hostile to the Europeans. Mackenzie took a defensive position on a small island off the coast where he traded with non-hostile Native Americans who approached them.
On the morning of June 22, Mackenzie painted a simple inscription on a large rock in Dean Channel: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22, 1793.” It is preserved today in a provincial park. Mackenzie started his return on July 23 and reached Fort Chipewyan onAugust 24, 1793.
Following the winter of 1793-1794, which he spent in Fort Chipewyan, Mackenzie headed back east with big ideas about uniting the two largest fur-trading companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, and together they would cooperate with the East India Company to open a new trade route to China. He continued to advocate these ideas for years although they never materialized in quite that form. On his return to Montreal, Mackenzie became a director of a trading company and traveled every year to the annual meeting in Grand Portage until he retired and left for England in November 1799.
Mackenzie wrote and published the account of his expeditions –which he titled Voyages from Montreal Through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in 1789 and 1793 Vol. I
Alexander Mackenzie’s Steps to Success
- In the years before the first trip north, Mackenzie gathered essential information about the geography of northern Canada from the tribes that came to trade at the newly established Fort Chipewyan.
- On his second trip, Mackenzie took a plan outlined by officials at the Northwest Company five years earlier, Mackenzie set out to make contact with the Russian, Spanish, and newly independent American traders conducting business on the Pacific coast of what is now British Columbia.
- Went to London to learn more about navigation and surveying so that he could make more accurate measurements of locations. He studied longitude calculations and collected instruments.
- Mackenzie was very persistent in his endeavors.
Why Alexander Mackenzie’s Contribution Matters
Alexander Mackenzie was an explorer who contributed greatly to his field. He also documented his travels in a book so that others may read about his experiences.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Book links are affiliate links.
Works Cited/Referenced
Science an Its Times, Volume 4, pages 19 – 21, 71
Science an Its Times, Volume 5
Encyclopedia of World Biography
Explorers & Discoverers of the World
Mentor Yourself – Book Review – Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) is a play which was published in 1912. In Greek Mythology, Pygmalion is the name of a gifted sculptor who falls in love with one of his masterpieces, which he names Galatea. The interesting thing about this myth, is that for some reason, Pygmalion despised women, and vowed that he would never marry. He placed all his time and effort into his craft.
Now back to his sculpture Galatea that he falls in love with, he has outdone himself this time. Galatea is the most beautiful sculpture he has ever created. I guess in his mind, Galatea possesses the qualities that he never saw in real women. Pygmalion is so enamoured with his creation that he wants her to become his wife. The sculptor prays to the Goddess Aphrodite, imploring her to transform his masterpiece into a real woman, and guess what? she grants him his wish. Galatea and Pygmalion marry with Aphrodite’s blessing. Nothing like a good love story!
Later, the word Pygmalion evolved to mean, “A man who “shapes” an uncultivated woman into an educated creature.” In Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, Professor of Phonetics, Henry Higgins is Pygmalion and Cockney Eliza Doolittle is Galatea.
Many authors of literary classics wrote as a response to the social injustices they observed in society. According to Wikipedia, “Nearly all his [Shaw] writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege…. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively.”
George Bernard Shaw date between 1900-1910 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The play starts out with the key characters seeking shelter from the rain under the portico of St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. The mother and daughter are waiting for her son Freddy to return with a taxi. Freddy is not portrayed in a very good light, he is seen as very spineless. A flower girl appears and is trying to sell flowers to the people under the shelter. She is very uncultured and speaks cockney. A gentleman comes out of the rain under the shelter and the flower girl tries to sell him flowers. All during this time, you have who is called a note taker, who is writing down what he is hearing.
The flower girl becomes very upset because she thinks he is a copper. There is much debate about whether or not he is a copper because of the appearance of his shoes. The note taker accurately guesses where people are from based on their speech patterns. The rain stops falling and people vacate the shelter except for the flower girl, the note taker and the gentleman.
We learn that the note taker is none other than Professor of Phonetics, Henry Higgins, and the gentleman is Colonel Pickering. It so happens that both men are interested in each other’s work and had plans to meet other which was unknown to each. Higgins claims that with the work he has done in his study of phonetics and the science of speech, he can make anyone more refined. The men exchange addresses, but Pickering suggests that they get together for supper.
While they are leaving, the flower girl is still trying to sell her ware. Higgins is very condescending and rebukes her. However the church clock strikes at that moment, and he is feeling like a Pharisees, so he throws a handful of coins into her flower basket.
The next morning, the flower girl takes a cab to visit Higgins because she wants to become more refined, and she is using the money he dumped into her flower basket the previous day to pay for her lessons. Pickering is present when the flower girl appears. We soon learn that her name is Eliza Doolittle. Higgins is very unconventional and has no tolerance for high society and doesn’t follow their rules. He can also be viewed as being very curt, and some might say a bully.
After much back and forthing between Higgins and the sassy Eliza, he decides to take her on as a project. The outcome is that in a few months time, the flower girl will become so refined in her speech, manner and dress that she is able to fool the other guests at a garden tea party into thinking that she is a woman of class.
Higgins asks his housekeeper Mrs Pearce to bathe Eliza and get her some new clothes. While that is going on, Eliza’s father Albert Doolittle shows up and demands money for his daughter, but he does so under the guise of asking for the return of his daughter. Higgins pays Doolittle five pounds.
As the play unfolds, you see Eliza blossoming and becoming more refined. One day Higgins and Pickering decide to take Eliza to visit Mrs Higgins to get her impressions of Eliza, but they want to pave the way first. Higgins’ mother is a very refined, stately, and well-to-do woman in her sixties. Mrs Higgins views their experiment as idiocy. During the visit, the mother and daughter who were under the portico while it was raining, also visit Mrs Higgins. We later learn that they are Mrs Eynsford Hill, Clara Hill. Higgins signals Eliza to come into the parlour, and with a gesture, which the others do not see, lets her know which of the two older ladies is his mother.
Mother and daughter do not recognize Eliza as the flower girl they previously met because she has changed so much.
With much effort and hard work and the determination on the part of Eliza, the experiment is a huge success, and Eliza pulls it off at the garden tea party. She passes for a woman of refinement and means. The problem is that Pickering and Higgins didn’t think beyond that outcome. They didn’t think about what would become of Eliza after the experiment. They took her for granted and probably thought that she would continue to live with them, after all she is their creation. They never quite defined what Eliza’s role is in their lives.
The last third of the story is simply amazing with dialogue between Eliza and Higgins. She is exceedingly upset with him and hurls his slippers at him, but he doesn’t get it. He calls her a presumptuous insect, and she calls him a selfish brute. At one point in their conversation Eliza says, “What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?”
Higgins’ response, “Oh, that’s what worrying you, is it? I shouldn’t bother about it if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, though I hadn’t realized that you were going away. You might marry you know. You see, Eliza, all men are not confirmed bachelors like me and the Colonel….” And the description of the nonverbal communication that’s going on is priceless.
The next morning, Pickering and Higgins go to his mother’s home because they cannot find Eliza. Mrs Higgins tells them that they are like children. Eliza is there and she eventually speaks to them. There is a lot more conversation between them and much is centered around what Eliza will do next. It’s worthy to note that as it is with the Pygmalion myth, Higgins also does not like women, and the reader doesn’t know why. He too is proud of his creation.
Higgins says, “I’ll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?”
Eliza responds, “I wouldn’t marry you if you asked me; and you’re closer my age than what he is.”
What does the foolish Higgins do at that point, he corrects her grammar and she tells him she will talk as she likes. Eliza lets Higgins know that Freddy has been writing to her and that the he is in love with her. Higgins views Freddy as a fool. In this story, Galatea does not wed her Pygmalion. “Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-thought out decision.”
Eliza marries Freddy and they struggle to make ends meet. Pickering solves the problem by helping Eliza to establish her own flower shop. Freddy isn’t very good at business and Pickering has to explain to him what a cheque book and bank account mean. The two still struggle financially. But, Eliza always makes the most of the opportunities given her. Eliza and Freddy attend night school, learning bookkeeping, shorthand, typing and taking polytechnic classes. They also take classes at the London School of Economics, but they are not learning about the flower business. After a while, business starts to improve and they are able to take care of themselves.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw highlights the complexity of human relationships, and the interaction between classes. One of the biggest lessons is from Eliza and it is if you keep on elevating and making yourself better in life, it’s virtually impossible to return to the way you were. My Fair Lady [Blu-ray]
I recommend Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw because it’s an excellent play and the reader cannot help but enjoy it while learning many lessons. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Book links are affiliate links.
CAUTION: Do not watch the film in lieu of reading the book because film adaptations are usually not exactly like the book.
PYGMALION (1938) – Full Movie – Captioned
Cannot view this video? Click here. Uploaded by dcmpnad on Nov 4, 2010
My Fair Lady -Horse race scene
Cannot view this video, click here. Uploaded by sandynr20 on Aug 17, 2008
Why You Must Read Broadly – Tip 2
Reading broadly is a great tool for creative problem solving.
Are you a fountain of great ideas? When issues inevitably arise in your life, are you able to resolve them effectively? Are you known as someone who applies creative solutions to pesky problems?
Graham Wallas Image published in Pease, E.R.: The History of the Fabian Society, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York 1916. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In his 1926 book The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas, the English political scientist and psychologist, adopted and expanded Hermann von Helmholtz’s process to idea development. Wallas describes a four-stage creativity process for generating great ideas — preparation, incubation, illumination and implementation. The preparation stage is the one where you gather data, whether it is interviewing people, reading books, reviewing what’s been done before. It’s the input section – you take in information.
In James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas, in the preparation section, where you gather information, he added an activity to data collection step, which is a process you continue for your entire life – gathering general information. Whenever you come across useful information, you record it so you can access it easily. Reading broadly allows you to discover lots of interesting information, and over a lifetime you build an immense body of knowledge, which is at your fingertips during problem solving.
In computer programming, they have a concept called Garbage In, Garbage Out. The concept is appropriate for reading as well. What you read (your input), will impact the quality of your ideas and solutions (output). And when you read, never do it in a vacuum. Connect the new information with what you already know. Innovation occurs when an old idea intersects with a new one.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
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Additional Reading
The Formula for Generating Great Ideas
Related articles
Posted in Adventures in Learning, Professional Development, Reading, Self-improvement | 
Tags: Graham Wallas, Hermann von Helmholtz | 
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Mentor Yourself: Interview With Joann Lim, Making It Happen Specialist & Professional Coach, Part II
“No matter how much it rains, or how much it pours, the sun will always shine again. It may not be today or it may not be tomorrow, but it will shine.” Joann Lim
Invisible Mentor: Joann Lim, Making It Happen Specialist & Professional Coach
Company Name: Big Picture Fine Focus
Website: http://www.bigpicturefinefocus.com/
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Joann Lim: I’m a connoisseur of life and a make-it-happen specialist. I’m a lover of all things food and world travel.
Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?
Joann Lim: Most of the time it’s fairly synergised in the sense that what I do professionally comes into my life personally. The context and the discussions pieces that I have with clients are things I internalize as well. I often give make-it-happen opportunities in my client sessions, and they are pieces that I would never give somebody that I wasn’t willing to do myself. Part of my work is to help people grow within themselves, to have a deeper connection to their lives and to others, by having a deeper connection with themselves.
My work is simply an extension of who I am personally and the more I am as a person the more I am able to offer, the more enriching my professional life becomes.
Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?
Joann Lim: I love to travel. I love seeing the world. I think it’s one of the best and most nurturing ways to learn about people and life. I love spending it with family and friends – the people who inspire me, and help me to see things from a different perspective. I love cooking, for me it’s a freedom of expression and creativity, taking ingredients and making it into something of value, of nutrients of nurturing. It’s just a wonderful experience. The last part is just having quiet time. I think that it’s in the silence that I get inspired the most.
Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?
Joann Lim:
- To truly embrace life we must be willing to face death. And face death in the sense of coming to terms with what death means to us, and how it’s going to impact our lives, and how we may live life differently.
- To be completely free, I have to be completely me. We embrace who we are and take responsibility for our lives, and then we can experience true freedom.
- Richness and abundance is available to all of us. There are a lot of people who think materialistically, which isn’t abundance that stems from within, and it’s when we have that attitude and perspective that everything in our lives becomes more valuable, meaningful, richer and more abundant.
- Let love rule! Love is the ultimate power in our lives. As human beings we have the capacity to love and be loved, and it’s when we open ourselves up, when we’re vulnerable, when we’re willing to give the very best that we can that we truly set ourselves up to receive the very best that life has to offer.
- Laugh! Life is not that serious. Have fun, and for some people it may be scheduling fun. If you need to do that, then that’s great. Life isn’t meant to be serious, we’re meant to have a great time. Make it a point to celebrate each day. Find time to make “now” moments “wow” moments because this is your life. Make it one of purpose, meaning, richness and amazingness. Celebrate each day and have fun.
Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?
Joann Lim: I listen to a play list every day, it called my big picture play list, and it has artists of all genres that inspire me. Just listening to their words, and the way they communicate truly inspires me. It’s in reading all sorts of different books. Dr Seuss is probably one of my favourite, and sometimes even just looking at a blank journal. Seeing a blank page and having colourful markers in front of me, that’s sometimes all I need to just let loose and be free.
Avil Beckford: What’s your favourite quotation and why?
Joann Lim: “Dying is an inevitable consequence of life, living is man’s privilege.” In that quotation we are challenged or invited to think of living as no longer an obligation of “I have to,” but it’s a privilege of “I get to.”
Avil Beckford: How do you define success? And in your opinion what’s the formula for success?
Joann Lim: Make success part of the journey. If success is the journey, every day will be a success. Love what you do, give everything that you have, give your best every single day, and you will set yourself up to have the very best that life has to offer.
Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?
Joann Lim:
- Identified what success meant to me. To make success meaningful to me I needed to understand how I defined it.
- Asking myself what it would look like to give my best to the world.
- How can I be more completely me? And that ties into the step above. How can I give more to this world? What do I need to give my best?
- Sharing, sharing with everybody. Sharing honestly and authentically. Just being me with the people around me. Be willing to be vulnerable, sharing the ups and the downs. And beyond that, giving them a space to be completely them.
- Perseverance – to not let one closed door end the dream. More often than not, one closed door results in another amazing door to open. Embrace opportunities as they come, and maximize very ounce of who you are, everything you know and everybody you know, take them along the journey, and the journey will be a success.
Joann Lim:
Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?
Joann Lim:
- Jesus Christ
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Mother Teresa
- Pope John Paul
- Dr Seus
The question I would ask is, on the days that you may have not felt good enough, what pulled you forward? What helped you to keep going, what inspired you, and what pulled you to the next level?
Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?
Joann Lim: One of the books that had the most profound impact on my life was a journal that was written personally to me. It took place over the course of a year, and this person as opposed to writing a journal recounting things to him, he did it to me – he wrote it to me. There is only one in this entire world and I have it. it was beautiful because this person wrote this intentionally for me, sharing in an experience from a different perspective, and it is something that I will always hold close.
Avil Beckford: You are one of the 10 finalists on the reality show, So, How Would You Spend Your Time? Each finalist is placed on separate deserted islands for two years. You have a basic hut on the island and all the tools for survival; you just have to be imaginative and inventive when using them. You are allowed to take five books, one movie and one music CD, and whatever else you take has to fit in one suitcase and a travel on case. What would you take with you and how would you spend the two years? T he prize is worth your while and at this stage in the game there really aren’t any losers among the 10 finalists, since each are guaranteed at least $2 million?
Joann Lim:
Two Years
You know what, I actually don’t know how I’d spend my two years. I was thinking to take each day as it comes. I’d spend a lot of time reflecting, exploring, and just being in the moment. There is a great saying that says, “Man plans and God laughs.” We can plan all we want to the nth degree, but more often than not, it’s not the way it happens. So it’s embracing the here and now and making use of every moment, and giving my best into every moment.
Five Books
- Blank journal: For the inspiration, for the empowerment, for anything that came to mind.
- SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions
by Rainn Wilson from The Office: It’s really a fun book, but has all sorts of questions that probe deeper, let us challenge who we are, that help make meaning in our lives.
- Dr. Seuss Beginner Book Collection #1
(Your Favorite Seuss (58 Volume Set)
): A large book that has 12 of his most famous books. They are fun and inspiring.
- Daily Readings from Love Your Life
by Victoria Osteen: She is a spark plug from Houston, Texas, who speaks with passion and vigor, and has a zest for life. She is someone who women can learn from.
- The journal that was written especially to me. It’s a reminder of how somebody feels for you, how somebody sees things, and what it means to care for somebody, and what it means to create a customized experience for someone.
Movie & Music CD
My one movie would be Something’s Gotta Give
Something’s Gotta Give – Trailer
Cannot view this video, click here. Uploaded by TheMovieSceneUK on Jul 20, 2010
Soweto Gospel Choir – Amazing Grace (Most beautiful version!!)
Cannot view this video, click here. Uploaded by scutter4christ on Mar 4, 2009
Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?
Joann Lim: The potential of it. There is so much to experience and so much joy to be had. The potential is truly outstanding, and I think it’s when we embrace what life has to offer with very little attachment to the outcome, life is amazing. It’s an adventure, and it becomes like a maze where we don’t necessarily know where we’re going to go next, but at the end, we know where we’re going to be.
Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?
Joann Lim: Surround myself with amazing people, spend quiet time with my Heavenly Father, reading great books, spending time with mentors, and showing up every day. And not just showing up, but asking myself what I need to do to give my best, and to do it – to really give everything that I have, everything that I am, everything that I know to each and every day are the best ways I know to nurture my soul.
Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?
Joann Lim: The group of people I would use it on are the people who feel most alone in this world, the people who have never been told that they matter, those are the people I would use this wish on. To let them know that they do matter, to let them know that they are loved, and no matter how dark it may seem, there is light and to offer them that glimmer of hope to remind them that you matter and there is more to life than what they have experienced.
Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..
Joann Lim: I’m happy when the sun is shining. I’m happy when I’m surrounded by people who I love, care about, and am fascinated by. I’m happy when I’m giving the world the very best that I have.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.
Book links are affiliate links.
Related articles
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