John Maketa is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for Pearson TalentLens. Maketa is a dynamic leader in enterprise growth, developing bold and creative strategic alliances that catapult global performance and profit. Maketa is known throughout the learning and development industry as a major connector who is able to strategically align initiatives for parties on both sides of the table with unparalleled financial and professional success. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son.
Introduction
Change your thinking...revolutionize your career...transform your life might seem like an extravagant benefit to claim for a book. However, if you do change the way you think—and develop the ability to think in a manner that supports the experiences and accomplishments that matter to you—your life will be transformed.
It is literally true that you feel the way you do because you think the way you do. To be in a loving and nurturing relationship requires patterns of thinking that create and make this quality of relationship possible. To experience satisfying professional success requires the ability to think in a way that will bring you this. Steve Jobs epitomizes the fact that successful people think differently. Everything you want in your life demands the thinking styles that make it so. Anything you are experiencing that you don’t want is because your thinking style cannot bring you what you do want and instead perpetuates your situation.
If you accept that this is, in fact, the case (and it is), the question becomes can you actually learn to think in a way that brings you the life you hunger for, or did you have to be born with a mind that was hardwired for highly effective thinking? Yes, you can learn to be a highly effective thinker. And no, research reveals that nobody is born hardwired to be able to do this. Highly effective thinkers are made and not born. This is a major discovery. We have learned that the wherewithal for you to live a wonderful life is an ability you develop in the process of living. You can do it, and yes, we can help.
We have also learned over the years of supporting people in the realization of their dreams that information is mostly overrated. With the advent of the Internet, there is no shortage of information. Any of us with an Internet-enabled device has universal access to information overload. We have seen very little improvement in the quality of the human experience as a result. Do you feel emotionally more connected in this brave new information age as a result of trying to consume more information? Deep inside, do you feel more confident that you can produce the results in the world and your life that really matter to you as you attempt to devour one more morsel of information? Is information feeding your soul? Although your mileage may vary, most of the people we ask answer, “Not so much.”
So we have to conclude that there is little, if any, transformational power in the information. Transformation requires an experience that moves the human heart. Once upon a long time ago, certainly way, way back before the Internet began, or even the printed word, the kind of learning we are talking about here took place at the feet of the storyteller. With this in mind, we begin this book with a story of transformation that we hope will move your human heart.
In the story, you will meet a team of people who take it upon themselves to save the life of a little girl. Her name is Amenah and at the beginning of the story, she is living and dying in a sheepherding village in Iraq. If the process of her dying is going to be transformed to become her experience of being truly alive, a great deal of first-class thinking will have to be done by an extended group of people from a village in Iraq to a hospital in Tennessee.
After the story, we trace the patterns of effective thinking deployed by the people seeking a miracle for Amenah. Next, you will find a set of simple tools and continuing support for you to build the life of your dreams.
First then, here is the story. The names have not been changed. Please keep reading and then start doing and then you will have the life you always wanted!
Amenah’s Story
The Humvee pulled up with a soft whoosh of tires on sandy gravel as near to the house as the driver could get. Marine Major Kevin Jarrard climbed out, tugged at his winter fatigues, and looked around, taking in the places where someone might hide—where they could take cover themselves if it came to that. By 2007, most of the insurgents had been driven out of this area, but there were incidents daily and it was wise to wear caution like an extra coat. This house, on the northern outskirts of Haditha, was no mansion, yet it was no appliance box either—a humble but functioning home for a shepherd with several children. The sky showed the rumpled gray of clouds bunching for a possible December rain, even snow. A breeze that swept across the Euphrates tugged at his short hair. He reached to tug his collar up higher against the chill. Born and raised in Georgia, he had never welcomed winter. But if you want warm sunny days and white picket fences, stay back in the United States.
He nodded to the surgeon, who climbed out of the vehicle with the interpreter. As they moved toward the house, Navy Captain John Nadeau asked a question with his eyes. Kevin’s checking on Alaa Thabit Fatah, the father, hadn’t confirmed that he’d been one of the insurgents, or that he hadn’t been. He shrugged. That didn’t seem to ruffle Nadeau, though only two years ago, the local police set up by the invading U.S. troops had been taken by insurgents to the town’s soccer stadium and had been beheaded, left there to lay with orders that no one touch the bodies. Haditha was more secure now, but peace is fragile, and never so much so as here. Kevin could only hear the wind rasping against the house they approached and no sporadic gunfire in the distance, which would not have surprised him.
Kevin could see his breath as he knocked at the door. The father opened it and they entered a room that had no fireplace or heat. John Nadeau rubbed his hands together and glanced toward Kevin, who could smell something cooking slowly in the kitchen that Amenah’s mother had left to be in this room. Garlic, rice, maybe a touch of lamb, or sheep—not much, probably, and for a large family. He’d timed their visit away from a meal hour, knowing the Iraqi custom of lavishing whatever food they had on any visitor first.
The mother waited across the room beside the little girl. He’d been surprised during his last visit when the mother had come out into the front room. Usually, the women stayed in a back room when other males visited. Now, Maha, the mother, gave the child a gentle nudge. Maha sat her down on the floor and Amenah looked at the visitors and started toward them with a flicker of mischievous eagerness in her eyes that quickly faded as the two-year-old stumbled, caught herself, struggled for her breath, and then kept coming. As she did, her complexion changed from its normal coloration to a dark blue that heightened in her lips and fingers.
John knelt, had his stethoscope out, warmed it with his hands, and started to examine the child, a customary practice in Iraq, where all examinations are done in front of the extended family. John had the bald pate with vestigial buzzed tonsure of silver hair of someone in his sixties. That and his confident manner evoked confidence among those who didn’t know he was also a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt. Kevin liked to watch John work, whether at the sheik’s home, or as they were now, in the home of a shepherd. He owed his life to John, as did many of his men. John wasn’t really here to practice medicine on the civilians, but the mission of the Marines had shifted in the past couple of years, and troops were in the active role of trying to ease control over to the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army. So, when Sergeant Velasquez, Lima Company’s squad leader, came across Amenah and her father, who had asked for help and said she would probably die without it, Kevin had made his first visit to the house and had seen enough to bring battlefield surgeon John along this time.
Figure 1 Captain John Nadeau with Amenah and her family
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
While John made his examination, Kevin eased closer to Maha with the interpreter. He reached to his wallet and took out a worn and frayed-at-the-corners photograph of Kelly and their four kids. He held it out to her. His youngest daughter, Rachel, was not far from Amenah’
s age. Maha nodded, smiled, and returned the picture. It was something Kevin often did. It told the people there he was just like them, a man with a family, one with a wish for a peaceful, prosperous life for his children, just like they desired.
John finally put away his things and stood. That was that for now. “Can you help our daughter?” her father asked. As a devout Christian and honorable man, Kevin looked him in his brown, pained eyes and said, “I’ll do all I can.” At that precise moment, he could have no idea of the enormity of all that loomed ahead.
Out in the Humvee, as they closed their doors, Kevin turned to John.
“It looks like cyanotic congenital heart disease,” John said. “I’d say a Tetralogy of Fallot, but that’s something I don’t have the equipment to confirm, not here or even in the largest cities of Iraq.”
“Is that common here?”
John nodded. “It sure is. They drink water out of the Euphrates that you wouldn’t even wash in, let alone drink. They use insecticides and pesticides everywhere without any thought. God knows what these women are exposed to when they’re pregnant. So birth defects are much more common.”
Kevin asked him, “What might we do about this?”
Nadeau said, “Well, not much in Iraq.”
“Is this girl going to live long?”
“No. She’s going to get a chest infection and that’s death for her.”
“Is she fixable?”
“Probably. But not here in Iraq.”
“How might we go about getting her fixed?”
“We’d have to send her off to America somehow, get someone there to do it.” John looked out the window at the buildings going by, probably not seeing them, but already flipping through the Rolodex in his mind.
Back at his command post, which was a bombed-out school building in the downtown area, Kevin sat on his little makeshift cot, his head in his hands. He spent some time in prayer. This was something much, much bigger than him. He felt insufficient to the task. If this was something that the Lord purposed to bring about through him, he prayed that the Lord might give him the wisdom and discernment about how to proceed.
* * *
The next morning, John looked up from his mug of coffee, the steam providing some warmth against another chilly day. Kevin Jarrard was walking toward him, his face a tangle of determination and worry. Only thirty-five years old, Kevin was through and through a man of unflinching resolve once he’d decided upon something.
Before Kevin could speak, John said, “I take it you’ve decided to do this impossible thing.” Now didn’t this just seem like a scene out of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John set off on some wacky, well-intentioned mission.
Kevin laughed, and sat down. “So, how do we go about it? I know I’ll have to clear it with Lieutenant Colonel Bellon. But there are a lot of other t’s to cross and i’s to dot.”
“Well, there sure are,” John chuckled. “I can do what I can with the folks back at Vanderbilt as far as the operation and the hospital goes, but there’s a lot of money involved. I’m going to need to be pretty persuasive.”
“Well, you’ve been with them long enough. They might come through.” Kevin rubbed at his right temple. “Then there’s the cost of getting them to and from the states. You know we can’t use military aircraft to transport them.”
“Right. And then there are the five tribes. You have to clear this with them. The idea of sending a child off to a foreign place is going to light a few fuses.”
One aspect that led Nadeau to believe Bellon might let them go out on this particular limb was that when Bellon took over as commander of the battalion, he allowed and encouraged Nadeau to see that every Marine in the battalion was trained to be comfortable in dealing with the common causes of death on the battlefield: bleeding from an extremity wound, tension pneumothorax, and an obstructed airway. All this was something that had never been done before, and there’s no doubt it had saved lives. Bellon’s was the kind of leadership that gave opportunity to do such things.
John said, “In America, if you show up in the emergency room and you’re Amenah, it doesn’t matter what it costs; somebody’s going to take care of you. But here, that couldn’t be done. So—Marines being Marines—I guess I can’t tell you that you can’t do something, because you’ll just go and get it done. So I’d better do all I can to help you.”
Kevin rose and started to walk off. But he stopped and turned his head back. “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?” It was a rhetorical question, but John nodded.
“You know, a lot of what we have to deal with over here is about death. Why can’t it be about life just for once?”
John grinned. “No reason at all.”
Kevin walked away. Well, there were a lot of reasons, but possibly they were fixable, just like Amenah.
As soon as he got back to his computer, John fired off an e-mail to Dr. Karla Christian, a pediatric cardiac surgeon at Vanderbilt. He had known and worked with her for years and was confident she would help. She had the expertise to do open heart surgery. She had the facilities too, at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. If she said yes, this was still, by no means, a slam dunk. As Kevin had said, there were lots of “t’s and i’s” to go.
Figure 2 Major Kevin Clark, Major Mark Lamelza, Captain Krumenacker, Lieutenant Colonel David Bellon, Captain John Nadeau, Sergeant Major Wayne Rumore
Source: Marines—Mark Lamelza
* * *
Major Mark A. Lamelza, operations officer, sat behind his desk talking with the battalion’s executive officer, Major Kevin Clark, who leaned against one side of the doorjamb. He suddenly straightened. Lieutenant Colonel David G. Bellon, the battalion commander, came barreling into the office.
Mark stood. David waved for him to sit back down as he lowered himself to the corner of the desk.
“You’ll never guess what Kevin Jarrard and Captain Nadeau want to do,” David said. “They want to send a two-year-old Muslim girl halfway around the word to Nashville for an operation she can’t get here.”
“What?” Mark said. “Are you kidding me?”
“Wish I was.” David filled them in on all he knew so far and then asked, “What do you think?”
Mark shook his head. “There are just too many things that could go sideways. We’d have to check it with higher up.”
Higher up meant their regimental commanding officer, Colonel H. Stacy Clardy III. And he would have to clear something like this upward through his chain of command.
“Do you know what he told me the first day he met me?” Mark said. “He said, ‘If you mess up, I will fire you.’”
“He told me the same thing,” David said. They laughed.
“Well, I don’t think we should do this,” Mark said.
“Let me tell you about my chat with Kevin Jarrard,” David said. “You know how it is. As you’re listening, you’re processing—you know, active listening. You’re picking up on the critical vulnerabilities. Where could this thing go wrong? You know, I’m watching the guy talking to me, who I know very well, and I’m looking at him. Is he tired? Has he thought this out? What kind of game is he on right now? Is he on his ‘A’ game, or not? Because sometimes even your best guys have bad days. You start by listening to their words, but you are really taking inventory of them. Sometimes you’re thinking, ‘Okay, this guy needs some coaching and how can I apply my social energy to help him succeed today?’ But it was pretty clear to me, almost immediately, that Kevin had thought this out. He and Nadeau had talked this over before he talked to me, and he was dropping little data points along as he talked. He mentioned he’d talked with Nadeau because he knows I admire and respect Nadeau. So, very quickly, my mental inventory was, ‘Okay, this thing isn’t half-baked. They have already done some pretty solid work here.’”
“It sounds like you want to do this crazy thing,” Mark said. He knew that technically, as a Navy Captain, John Nadeau
outranked both Kevin Jarrard and David Bellon. But John wouldn’t push himself, though his word had quite a bit of weight to it, “currency” in Mark’s military view.
“Well, I do want to do it. But you two talk it over. I’m going to step out of the room for a spell.”
As soon as David was out of hearing, Mark and Kevin Clark began to talk. Mark had already given the hard push back. It was like David to drop a little bomb like that in their office and then leave. They talked it over, debated the fine points, and by the time David returned, they had shifted to problem solving. They laid out the risks, and he laid out what he wanted to do.
“The mother has to go too,” David said. “The tribes won’t let a little girl travel alone, and the father’s still on a watch list. Too iffy. Can’t leave the country.”
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