An Ouch Moment!

It could have been one of those squirmingly embarrassing evenings. It was a few years ago and, along with the two other trainers, I was at the after-training dinner with delegates on the management development training we were presenting for a large multi-national.

The dinner was an opportunity for the delegates to have some ‘informal time’ with one of the senior directors, who was also the after-dinner speaker. And the  senior director was one of the ‘old school’ (he has since retired!) and by the time he stood up to begin his speech it was obvious that he had more than enough to drink.

A man ‘after’ his time

He was most certainly a man after, rather than ahead of, his time. His slurred voice, poor sense of balance, sexist comments and behaviour, and the interesting disparity between his comments and the ‘inter-personal and cultural sensitivity’ theme of our three-day training all provided clear evidence of this.

In fact he was unintentionally offering us a wonderful, live, walking (if only just) example of the type of role model we had been steering the managers away from aspiring to!

Real wisdom

But he got away with it – again, if only just. Why? Because of the wisdom which he imparted. His 20 minute speech was rambling and slurred. But… it was sprinkled with gems of wisdom that will stick with his audience, and with me, for a long time. And it was of those gems, his final one, that I have since found most significant ever since.

As he sat down, he said “And remember lads(!) – look out for the ones with the bright eyes!”

That was the bit that grabbed me. Not immediately. Initially it puzzled me – and it did take a while to reveal itself as I wondered ‘Now what did he mean by that?’

The Bright Eyes

Eventually, after a day or two, the penny dropped. And I recognised that, unknowingly, I’d been looking out for the ones with the bright eyes for decades.

It had started in the 70’s when I ran a staff recruitment agency in London. Part of my role was to ‘place’ people who came to us seeking to change jobs.  Having interviewed someone I would enthusiastically get on the phone and call likely employers telling them about my new find and seeking to set up an interview.

Many of these would-be employers, and especially if they were very experienced owner-managers, would throw me a simple question about the candidate right at the outset of the conversation: “Reg, stop just one moment – is she/he a self-starter?” And only the ‘self starters’ got interviews.

They were the ones with the bright eyes. And I pretty soon recognised they were like gold dust for employment bureaux – because they sold themselves! I didn’t really have to sell them – employers end up bidding for them!

Self starters

Self Starters don’t hang around waiting for life to get better. They ‘get up and go’. They take initiaves. They don’t need to be pushed or ‘motivated’ – they are self motivators, they do that themselves.

Yep, they really do get out of bed in the mornings looking forward to the day – rather than looking wistfully at the warm bed they’ve left.

NLP Clues

If you’re familiar with NLP you can discern a few give away clues

• NLP & Values: they are much more Towards oriented than Away From i.e. they are aspirational rather than risk averse – they seek to achieve rather than seek to not have problems
• NLP Meta Model: They are ‘at cause’ in their lives – they take responsibility for what happens to them rather than blame fate or others. And if they don’t like what’s happening in their lives they do something about it – right away!
• NLP and Reframing: They look at what’s working and, when things are not working, they energetically look for solutions
• NLP non-verbal clues:  Their voice, face and body have animation and lightness rather than seeming to lose the battle with gravity

And, yes, they do have brighter eyes..

Test this out for yourself

Think of a handful (if you can, that is, since they are a rare breed) of people with this self-starter attitude that I’ve sketched out. Now seek them out, chat with them, and watch for the Bright Eyes!

Maybe that somewhat-sozzled after-dinner speaker, and those owner-managers I used to speak with 35 years ago, knew a thing or two about people – even if they’ve never used one of those sterile personality profiling ‘instruments’.