Ivan Joseph - You Got This: Mastering the Skill of Self-Confidence

To each and every one of you who has felt the pain of defeat and the paralysis of failure: believe in yourself and find that one person who believes in you no matter what.

This book is dedicated to my rock: Polly Joseph.

If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.

MAHATMA GANDHI

O NE SUNDAY NIGHT in 2014, I sat looking out over the Dallas skyline from the window of a fancy room that had been provided for me at the Hilton Anatole. It was late and I needed to be up early to deliver the keynote address at the general session of the Womens Foodservice Forum ( WFF ) Annual Leadership Development Conference. There would be three thousand people in the roomfar and away the largest group I had ever spoken toall seeking guidance for their personal leadership journey. My topic, the skill of self-confidence, was familiar to me. I had delivered it dozens of times, mostly to students and small groups of leaders. And though my 2012 TED x Talk, much to my surprise, now has over 8 million views, the idea of speaking to three thousand professionals had me quivering, thinking to myself, Im going to do this? Are you kidding me?! Speaking to a group in return for a T-shirt, coffee mug, bottle of wine or warm pat on the back is easyyou just go up there and do it, no pressure. But the WFF folks were serious about achieving success and were paying me a lot of money to speak. For goodness sake, Maya Angelou was one of the other speakers! I was way out of my league.

Since I had arrived at the conference, the organizers had treated me like royalty. Id attended their opening-night event, which included the presentation of the Trailblazer Award to one of the prominent leaders in their community. I had toured the space where I would be speaking. I had walked around the opulent hotel and taken in the stunning lights, pools and spaces. And now I was sitting in this huge room with my head spinning, ready to curl up and die. Self-doubt had taken over. Forget about being an expert in self-confidence: I felt lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut. I sat there looking out over the city and asking, What am I doing here? Note the emphasis on the I.

Part of my struggle that night had to do with my history. I came to Canada from Guyana at age five when my older sister, Pam, and I flew to Toronto with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. There, we met our parents, who had left home five years before, two weeks after my birth. They were part of the bright flightan exodus of educated Guyanese who were fleeing from the Communist regime and seeking a better life in England and North America. Back home, my father had been a sugar plantation manager, but when he completed a bachelor of science degree at McGill University in Montreal, there was no job to be found in his field and no prospect of returning to Guyana. So when Pam and I joined our parents, we lived at Jane and Finch, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Toronto, known equally for its honest, hardworking, low-income population and for the highest concentration of criminal gangs in the country. We were as poor as potatoes; my father sold encyclopedias door-to-door at night to get by. He also got up at 4 a.m. every day to hitchhike north to a dairy farm outside the city limits, where he worked as a laborer. In time, we moved closer to that farm once we could afford a small apartment. And then eventually the farm owner, Lorne Goodwill (his actual name!), offered us a small house on his property and even provided us with some furnishings and clothing. When I was old enough, I worked the farm side by side with Lornes son, Robert, who was the same age and like a brother to me. It was the classic immigrant upbringing where nothing is taken for granted. It was also a life filled with the love of family and the certainty that only hard work will get you where you want to go.

Sitting in that elegant hotel magnified my sensation that I was out of place. What did I have to offer a room full of successful business leaders? So I tried to focus on how I ended up in that room. Random images came to mind. Moments in my life when I had faced adversity or started something new. Times when I had overcome an obstacle even though it seemed unlikely or even impossible that I could succeed. Thinking about it, I came up with a pretty long list.

First, I thought about my experiences at Joseph A. Gibson Public School, north of Toronto. I stood out like a raisin in a sugar bowl theremy sister Pam and I were two of only four black kids in the entire school. Color stopped at Steeles Avenue in those days because public transit only ran that far north. I used to get in fights when local kids picked on me for my Guyanese accent because I had not yet learned to speak Canadian.

Then I remembered the weekend Robert and I were put in charge of the entire dairy farm at age 11. We ran ourselves ragged, alternately panicking and laughing hysterically as we milked and mucked and oversaw the entire operation.

I remembered growing up playing rep soccer with kids three years older than me. Pam played with the boys because there were no girls teams and my dad only had time to coach one teamso I had to play up every year. I remembered attending Bayview Secondary School and being so poor that my track coach gave me a gym bag so I wouldnt have to carry my clothes and shoes around in a plastic grocery bag.

Then I thought about my university education. When I was in my senior year of high school, a recruiter from Graceland University in Iowa offered me a dual track and soccer scholarship. At the time, I thought going to school in Iowa would be like an episode of Green Acres, so I turned it down, opting instead to attend Laurentian University in Ontario. I had been a gym rat throughout high school and Laurentian had a renowned sport management and kinesiology program. When I got there, I fell in the trap that so many first-year students faceI lost my sense of purpose and starting living the country club life. I missed classes; I socialized; I had fun. And long before I realized what was going on, my lifestyle caught up with me. I failed some courses, misunderstood the guidelines for probation and was, eventually, kicked out. Only when I was working at Foot Locker and McDonalds did the reality of what had happened sink in. I hated feeling stupid. (The failure was so humiliating that I didnt tell my parents about it until I was 39!) Eventually my determination to change kicked in and I contacted Brian Shantz, the recruiter who had offered me the scholarship at Graceland, to see if I could get a second chance. Thankfully, Brian made it happen and I went to Graceland to start overas a black student-athlete in an almost entirely white town consisting of a mere thousand people in the middle of the corn desert. (Talk about living in the sugar bowl!) Having learned my lesson, when I got there I focused on my courses and logged immeasurable hours in the library. I got top grades. I went on to become Student Body President. I played soccer and ran track. I turned my life around.

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

HAIM G. GINOTT

Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers

That night in the hotel, I also remembered the stages of my career. At first, I was balancing the demands of coaching mens soccer and being a residence director of Gunsolley Hall at Graceland with studying for a masters degree at Drake University. Then I added being an assistant professor to the list and enrolled in a PhD program, while coaching the soccer team to the national championship. My wife Polly and I also started a family, owned 10 houses that we fixed up and rented out, and operated a Laundromat. Later, when we left Iowa, I accepted a position at Ryerson Universitya huge urban university in Torontotaking over an athletic program that had been the laughingstock of the country for decades. When I was hired, the president was very clear: he wanted teams that could unite the campus by competing for the national championship every year. Oh, and he wanted me to oversee the $ 100-million renovation of Maple Leaf Gardens (Canadas onetime version of Madison Square Garden or Fenway Park), which had been acquired by Ryerson.