Joan Emery (of Belvedere Consultants) recounts an anecdote from workshops run for MasterCard International where she served as a "third" chair. After asking a senior colleague to present her as a "second," he told her it would be dishonest and that she should accept being a strong third and work toward becoming a second. The story illustrates the value of honestly acknowledging your current position to plan realistic growth.
So my name is Joan Emery, and our company is called Belvedere Consultants. And there's a little saying that says, if you want to get to where you want to go in life, you need to be very clear about where you are. And this little mistake that I made really allowed me to see clearly that I wasn't telling the truth about where I was. In our organization, we worked with companies, and for the last 15 years, we worked very exclusively with MasterCard International. And we put on five day workshops for them in three day workshops. And in one of these workshops, in the beginning, we had what was called a first. Who was the first chair, who conducted a second and a third. And it was my first time. And every one of those levels were paid accordingly to the level that you were at. Well, I was the third. And at the end, I sat down with the man who was our first, and I said, can't you just tell them that I'm a really good second? And he looked me in the eye and he said to me, if I were to tell them that you were a good second, I would be lying and you would be spending the rest of the year trying to prove to everybody that you were a second. He said, you're a very good third. And he said, and you can work your way to being a second. In that moment, I completely and totally relaxed. Because what I realized was I couldn't get to being one or two without really acknowledging where I was. And from that point on, I was really clear about where I was, what I needed to do, and the value of that. Instead of trying to be somewhere I wasn't.
