Change the industry instead of letting the industry change you

Sept. 24, 2014
We have to accept personal responsibility for our own destiny, and not wait for something or someone else to determine our direction.

Are you controlled by your circumstances, or are you taking charge of your own destiny?

I don’t use the term life-changing experience very often, but I recently had one. A lot of people I respect and admire in this industry, people I consider to be successful or even my mentors, had told me about attending (or sending key employees) to Discover Leadership Training in Houston, Texas. I was intrigued, so I signed up and attended. I’m not getting paid to endorse it, but I can honestly say it was life changing.

I won’t go into all that I came away with, but one of the key things Mike Jones of Discover Leadership said that really resonated with me was this: Do you want to be the flag, or the wind? The flag is visible and gets all the attention. But think about it: The wind controls the flag. The wind determines whether the flag moves at all, and sets the direction for the flag.

The lesson for our industry (and really for our country) is this: Not enough people are striving to be the wind. We tend to blame our situation on all sorts of things: the economy, insurance companies, aftermarket parts, etc. I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate concerns about all those things. But at some point we have to accept personal responsibility for our own destiny, not just be a flag waiting for the wind to change our direction.

Mike Jones’ analogy took me back to my days in high school. I attended a new school, so my class was the first 9th graders at the school, the first 10th graders, etc. When I was a junior, all the student officers for my class were female. They all must’ve been dating older guys, because they made a rule that no underclassmen could attend the junior prom.

But my girlfriend at the time was an underclassman. I wanted to take her to that prom. I went to the class officers, but they said the rule was the rule. I went to our class faculty sponsor, and then to the principal, but they both said, “That’s the rule your class officers made, and you have to abide by it.”

Now I could have easily just told my girlfriend that I couldn’t take her to the prom. But I made a decision that no one but me was going to choose my destiny.

So I had my mom type up some petitions demanding that the rule be changed. I distributed them to some friends, and between us we gathered more than 100 signatures. I also called the local newspaper and TV stations and told them about our effort.

The next day when I got to school, there were news cameras there. The principal called me into the office and said, “You called all these people. You need to tell them to go away.”

I told him I couldn’t do that. When he said he was going to call my father, I told him to go ahead, that my dad also thought I should be able to take my girlfriend to the prom.

The end result: I took my girlfriend to that prom. And the next year, I was elected as a senior class officer.

I could have just sat back. But I decided I was going to be the wind, not the flag. I changed my situation. I didn’t expect someone else to change it for me.

If you’re a body shop having a hard time, choose your destiny. Choose to be the wind, not the flag. To learn how to do that, how to become a better person, a better leader, a better spouse or parent – to learn how to be less passive and instead be a game-changer – consider checking out Discover Leadership Training. I’m sending some of my employees and even my sister and my niece and nephew. I told them that for me to use the phrase “life-changing” to describe something is a pretty big deal.

But the bigger question I urge you to think about is: At the end of the day, do you want to say the collision industry changed you, or that you changed the collision industry?

I choose to be the wind, not the flag.

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