Everyone’s Got A Future
We are riding in a cab from the airport in Buffalo NY to our hotel. I’m thinking about the upcoming week: facilitating an accelerated learning experience with an intense, focused format that allows real work to be accomplished. By the end of the week, people will have a stock pile of tools and strategies to successfully participate and support change in their teams and organization. They will not only know how to foster a culture of change and innovation within and across teams—they will have developed creative and innovative solutions for current problems in their organization!
“How are you?” asks the cab driver.
“Good!” I am about to go back to my thoughts, when I think about his life, his work and his purpose; driving people safely and harmoniously from place to place. I think of the many people he interacts with on a daily basis. “What do you think makes people amazing?” It’s not the typical question.
But after a moment he says, “Education. People who are educated have conversations with me, and I learn from them.” I catch his eye in the rear view mirror and nod. “Doctors talk with me about medicine and what is the new thing that is happening. Even though I am not a pharmacist or a doctor they talk with me.”
He goes on to tell me that he has lived in America for 15 years. He is an economics graduate from India. But since he couldn’t get a job in his area of expertise, he became a cab driver. “I am putting both my sons through university. I still love economics, I read about it all the time. Education is very important. My sons are becoming doctors.” I nod again. “I may be just a cab driver, but I am helping my sons be educated. That is good.”
“That is AMAZING.” I say. And I think about the participants in our upcoming class. They are learning what this man already knows. He is a change champion who encourages and supports change initiatives that lead to success for his sons, and inevitably our world. One day when you or I need a doctor, it may be one of his son’s performing miracles.
We always have an opportunity to support a network of change leaders who continue to work together and support one another as other change initiatives are identified and addressed throughout our world. Maybe the most AMAZING LEADERS are not in classrooms, universities or political offices, but in cabs, and homes and the conscious thoughts of AMAZING leaders supporting change at the grass root level.