Right Kind of Wrong by Amy C. Edmondson

Author:Amy C. Edmondson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

How We Think; How We Feel

Sixty-odd years ago a young insurance salesman in Minneapolis named Larry Wilson was miserable. Every time he was rejected by a prospective customer he felt like a terrible failure, an anxious loser unwilling to make the next telephone call. You might say he had a fixed mindset: Why bother to make a call if he was only going to fail again? He was ready to quit his job. But then his boss taught him a simple trick: he could change how he thought about those rejections. Because it took a beginning salesperson about twenty calls before making one sale and the average commission was $500, that meant on average a call was worth $25. Now, whenever Larry was told no, he forced himself to cheerfully think, “Thanks for the twenty-five dollars.” This simple change not only made him feel better, it also allowed him to do his job better because he could focus on customers instead of on how miserable he felt. Soon, he was averaging ten calls for each commission of $1,000, and whenever he was rejected, he would think, “Thanks for the one hundred dollars.” Essentially, he had reframed his thinking about failure. Larry became so successful as a life insurance agent that he became the youngest member at the time (at age twenty-nine) of the industry’s Million Dollar Round Table. Then he began designing training programs.

When I met Larry in 1987, he had become a serial entrepreneur, whose latest venture was running team-effectiveness and culture-change programs for companies. I was hired to be director of research. That meant that I took notes about things Larry said in meetings and turned them into serviceable prose for proposals and reports. Larry was a voracious reader of philosophy and psychology and an irrepressible student of the human condition. He also loved to befriend and bring together authors and thinkers who intrigued him most. Which is how the psychiatrist Dr. Maxie Maultsby arrived at the Pecos River Learning Center in New Mexico to talk about how to best translate his rational behavior therapy (RBT) into educational programs for companies.

Drinking endless cups of coffee, I spent many hours conversing with Larry and Maxie on the large balcony overlooking the conference center, the brown adobe buildings contrasting with the deep blue of the Santa Fe sky. Close friends, they were a study in opposite personalities. Larry, with his wide-open smile and exuberant, expressive style, was easily taken up with ideas and possibilities. Maxie was watchful and contemplative, relentlessly rational, wanting to look at a subject from all angles to interrogate its nuances. Together, they were a powerful combination, leaving an indelible mark on my work. Both were passionate about how we humans can live more happily and successfully if we learn how to think about our thinking.

Maultsby’s revolutionary idea was that people with healthy brains—by which he meant free from a major biological defect or injury—could help themselves escape emotional suffering without formal clinical therapy. A mentee of

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