The Wacky Road To Success
Making Dreams Reality
06/28/2013
Making Dreams Reality: The Wacky Road to Success
Dr. Rachell N. Anderson
IF by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when everyone doubts you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, and not deal in lies,
Or, being hated, and not give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by villains to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If everyone counts with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be WOMEN
And You’ll be Men; my daughters and my sons !
I hope Rudyard Kipling doesn’t turn over in his grave because of my editing of his poem “IF” or because of my Mother, Emma Louise Williams who recited it to me at least once a week from the beginning of my memory. Throughout the years, when life got down and dirty, I could hear her warm southern drawl whispering in my dreams “Hold on, Just Hold on”.
I’d like to thank the board of FC-Cot for inviting me to do this Keynote address; and for being here for the past 30 years. I applaud the people who had the vision and compassion to reach back and help young people from Tunica County to have hope for a good education. Their vision has been laced with cold, hard, cash and scholarships. What a wonderful was to say to a young person, I believe in you and I’m counting on you to do your best. FC-COT has been the real foot soldiers in the war on poverty in Tunica County.
Without that academic scholarship from Philander Smith College, I wouldn’t be where I am today. It gave me hope and direction. It told me someone cared. It also kept my feet to the fire because I had to maintain a B average to keep going.
I’d also like to thank Helen Tatum Wells for those kind words of introduction and for all of you who are willing to listen.
But you didn’t ask me to Keynote this 30th National Convention just to fill the time. In preparing for the speech, I wondered what I could say that would be remembered, that would encourage students to go to school and inspire all of you to attend to your own lives and to give more, (money, time, and kind words of encouragement) for our young people of Tunica County.
So, What is the job of a keynote speaker?
I see my job as akin to what ministers seek to do every Sunday from pulpits across America- to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable and to encourage all of you to open your hearts and wallets to share the vision of FC-COT. And to do it in less than 25 minutes.
This was a hard speech to prepare after just one year into my retirement as a University Professor and Clinical Psychologist and the move back to Tunica County. My life is so different here. I wondered what I could say that would interest you.
I thought I might tell you that
For the past 40 years, I have been paid to have what, for me, is a dream job. I have been paid to read, write, think, research, teach, philosophi and to speculate about the meaning of things. Paid to figure things out, to persuade, and to share my impressions with others. I’ve been paid to travel to interesting places, to talk with people who are the most learned minds in Psychology and sit with people just like you, me, and the young people we’re honoring with scholarships; and help them to figure out how to get along better with themselves and other people.
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
I thought I might tell you that
I’ve had to become honest, open to learn, willing to accept criticism, and a willing to change. In addition, I’ve had to learn to commit myself to the job at hand with professionalism and collegiality. (collegiality is a code word used when you’re able to speak quietly and respectfully to someone you know to be conniving, back stabbing, mean spirited, trying to discredit you, and take your job.
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
Then, I thought I could tell you that:
I also have spent a lot of time with my head in books in libraries (not liberry) rather than my feet on a dance floor. In airplanes rather in canoes and my face in front of a crowd of people who were prepared to hang on every word or to pick me apart for every word. Don’t get me wrong. I did a fair amount of dancing and canoeing.
My sons tell me “Mom, that’s Not bad for a little ole, country girl from Tunica, Mississippi. Aye?”
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
Then, I thought I might tell you that:
The road to success has not been easy: Not for me, and not for most people who’ve become successful. Famous, people you know, have stumbled, fell and failed; but to be called successful, they had to begin again, again, and sometimes again. For Example
Bill Cosby quit school in the tenth grade and joined the U.S. Navy. He completed school through a correspondence course. He enrolled at the Temple University on an athletic scholarship to become an athletics teacher. But he had to work too. He took a job as a bartender. He used humor to entertain his customers and I imagine to get bigger tips. His career as a comedian began there.
Oprah Winfrey came from what in known as a Broken Home. Grew up in her Grandmother’s care on a farm in Mississippi. Even though she was abused, molested, she was adjudicated as delinquent and sent to a juvenile detention home. But luckily for Oprah, all the beds in the facility were full so she was sent to Nashville to live with her father Vernon. Vernon made her study. He required her to read a book a week and to write a book report. My guess is-Vernon’s voice continues to intrude and whisper in her ear with each accomplishment
Denzel Washington
Denzel’s parents were going through a messy divorce. The Boy’s and girl’s club was his salvation. He went to college to play basketball But he bounced from major to major then, dropped out of school altogether. He went to work as a counselor at a summer camp for children. After participating in a staff talent show for the campers, a coworker suggested he try acting for a living. His career took off from there.
Morgan Freeman
It was clear, early, that Morgan Freeman had talent to act. At age twelve he had won a statewide drama competition. But he turned down a drama scholarship from Jackson State University and became a mechanic in the United States Air Force. It would be much later that he would return to acting and became a phenomenal success.
And then there’s me. That Dr. Anderson (as certain of my students called me) I’d like to be able to tell you that every one of my cookie fortunes came true, that life has been a bowl of cherries without pits, and that everything I touched turned to gold, like Midas, that I’ve never had to use a plan B. and that my faith in human being has never been shaken. But I can’t.
I grew up on my family’s farm in Tunica County. I milked cows, chopped and picked cotton, peas, okra, pecans, beans, water melons or whatever the farm had to offer.
I graduated form Rosa Fort High School in 1960, second in my class after spending most of my senior year in the hospital in Mound Bayou recovering from hepatis.
I never thought of myself as smart. When I went to college. I had issues. I felt soo inadequate. So, I dropped out after a year. I went to work and saved my money. I spent 2 years working as a Nurses’ Aide in a hospital in Boston. I had wanted to be a nurse, but the Nurses’ Aide job convinced me that I’d do better as a doctor.
So I went back to school paying tuition at the university and in the school of life. I had to relearn many messages about myself, my abilities and my possibilities. I tried hard, struggling like the little ant that moved the Rubber Tree plant. Like the ant, I made it with the help, my family’s prayers and plenty of encouragement from all kinds of people. I believe it is now my responsibility to give what has been given to me.
Throughout my working life, I have moved back and forth from the classroom to the therapy room. (Most of the times as the Professor and much times as the student) (Most of the time as the psychologist and occasionally as patient). You see, you can’t teach what you don’t know and if you know incorrect information and attitudes, you’ll teach incorrect information and attitudes. And that is WHAT YOU’LL TEACH to the next generation.
I believe in getting it right.
Today, I can do whatever I want to do for the rest of my life. Lately, I’ve been raising flowers. I look at a packet of seeds and marvel and the endless possibilities. Flowers planted today can bring us beauty today and for years to come. I have a few Cockscombs in my yard that my great grandmother also raised. And so it is with beliefs and attitudes.
Like David Anderson in “Breakfast Epiphanies”, I wander around in the Flower beds and I noticed that some flowers, even when they get the same amount of water and fertilizer, just don’t make it. They just sit there and wither. Some say it’s the same with people. They say some people just give up on themselves. They just stop. Stop striving, stop expecting, stop growing, and stop learning?
I hope not. Because when you stop, just like the flower that wither, you wither and die INSIDE. What seeds are you planting?
We all have endless possibilities and it helps to have the fertilizer of encouragement to grow. Whether it’s scholarship, the customer in a bar, a fellow camp counselor, father Vernon, an inside view of the job, or the fear (as Raymond Williams once told me) that you’ll have to pick cotton for the rest of your life.
Ok. So this how I see it. I believe it will help to understand the barriers to success and show how encouragement can be valuable in your life and the lives of young people making their Dreams reality.
Psychologists study human perception of themselves, the world and themselves in the world.
Human being are hard wired or endowed by our creator (if you prefer), to seek out, connect, and cooperate with others, and a desire to improve themselves. In other words, to connect, to be competent and to count.
Most of us become aware of our selves as people when we’re about 3 years old (give or take a few months). We’re like a sponge soaking up everything that’s going on around us. But we don’t know the context and can’t make sense of what we experience, but we take it in and use it as the way to do life. We look around and see so many people who can do so many things we can’t and have so many privileges we don’t have. Oh, we can feed ourselves but not very well and only if someone puts the food before us. Sometimes, in our parents’ attempts to make us better people, they say some pretty nasty and discouraging things about us.
So we begin to feel inferior, incompetent, powerless when we want to feel connected to others, competent, and that we count.
These inferior feelings are perfectly normal, human, and I believe necessary. They drive our desire for success; but we don’t know that because they feel so bad. We assume that because we feel inferior, We are inferior. Sometimes, we act “AS IF” we are inferior. So we try to overcome those inferiority feelings by struggling to be, significant, bigger, stronger, older, sweeter, cuter, most loved, the best (or Whatever are the values in our families). This struggling then, creates patterns for thinking, feeling, and behaving. If our actions are well guided (have good information about how to be in the world) and on the useful side of life, we may strive to be the best of the best. If we are misguided, and our actions fall to the useless side of life, then our struggles are toward being the best at being the worst). We hear people bragging about how much they drank, how many women they laid or how many things they stole, or what hurtful things they said to others, to name a few.
Well guided goals of significance are designed to contribute to the good of the world, to connect us with others, and allow us to cooperate and to develop ourselves fully so we can contribute to the welfare of others.
(We see this all around us; the best that society has to offer and we see the worse). People can be significant by being good or they can be significant in their own minds by being bad. But it only take a little encouragement to turn a bad into good.
1. So are you done yet? Are you where you’ve always wanted to be? If so, congratulations.
2. Have you realized your passion or did you just settle for the life you have?
3. What’s your passion? It may be some unresolved wish, Some long gone dream, Some deep desire, some once prided action.
4. Sometimes we stray from that path but it’s never too late. You saw that with the famous people. You’ve seen that with me and I know you’ll see it in you. If you’re not there, you still have time. It’s not how many times you fail but how many you try that’s important. Since you’re going to die someday anyway, you may as well be an old doctor, or teacher or whatever that was you always wanted to be.
5. Nobody said life would be easy. Struggling creates character. Without difficulties, you never know what you’re capable of or what you’re made of.
That’s my encouragement to you, my pat on your back, my wish for your future, my kind words. Pass it on; to young and old, whether you’re co-worker, a father Vernon, a camps counselor or customer in a bar, or someone’s lover. You have endless possibilities for making a difference. Join in the spirit of hope and encouragement for the good of us all.
I’d like to leave you with one final poem my mother often recited to me.
Set your goals on Younder’s mountain
And press on with all your might.
The road is steep and hard to climb
You won’t reach it overnight.
You may venture into darkness
You may face the rain and cold
But keep your eyes on the mountain
and your mind on your goal.
If you stumble along the wayside
into life’s dark sinking sand;
arise with a double determination.
Renew your courage and try again.
Never count your self a failure.
Always do the best you can.
Just keep pressing on and upward
Though you may not understand.
You won’t have a lot of friends
if your journey’s the upward way.
Let the watchman of tomorrow
Find you closer that today.
Set your goals on Younder’s mountain
and press on with all your might.
The road is steep and hard to climb
You won’t reach it overnight.
As I close, I’d like to leave you with a blessing sent to me by our own Neddie Ray Winters who I remember as the bad little boy from the Winters’ Family.
May the Lord bless and protect you;
may the Lord's face radiate with joy because of you;
may He be gracious to you, show you His favor,
and give you His peace. Thank You Thank You. ou.
Making Dreams Reality
06/28/2013
Making Dreams Reality: The Wacky Road to Success
Dr. Rachell N. Anderson
IF by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when everyone doubts you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, and not deal in lies,
Or, being hated, and not give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by villains to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If everyone counts with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be WOMEN
And You’ll be Men; my daughters and my sons !
I hope Rudyard Kipling doesn’t turn over in his grave because of my editing of his poem “IF” or because of my Mother, Emma Louise Williams who recited it to me at least once a week from the beginning of my memory. Throughout the years, when life got down and dirty, I could hear her warm southern drawl whispering in my dreams “Hold on, Just Hold on”.
I’d like to thank the board of FC-Cot for inviting me to do this Keynote address; and for being here for the past 30 years. I applaud the people who had the vision and compassion to reach back and help young people from Tunica County to have hope for a good education. Their vision has been laced with cold, hard, cash and scholarships. What a wonderful was to say to a young person, I believe in you and I’m counting on you to do your best. FC-COT has been the real foot soldiers in the war on poverty in Tunica County.
Without that academic scholarship from Philander Smith College, I wouldn’t be where I am today. It gave me hope and direction. It told me someone cared. It also kept my feet to the fire because I had to maintain a B average to keep going.
I’d also like to thank Helen Tatum Wells for those kind words of introduction and for all of you who are willing to listen.
But you didn’t ask me to Keynote this 30th National Convention just to fill the time. In preparing for the speech, I wondered what I could say that would be remembered, that would encourage students to go to school and inspire all of you to attend to your own lives and to give more, (money, time, and kind words of encouragement) for our young people of Tunica County.
So, What is the job of a keynote speaker?
I see my job as akin to what ministers seek to do every Sunday from pulpits across America- to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable and to encourage all of you to open your hearts and wallets to share the vision of FC-COT. And to do it in less than 25 minutes.
This was a hard speech to prepare after just one year into my retirement as a University Professor and Clinical Psychologist and the move back to Tunica County. My life is so different here. I wondered what I could say that would interest you.
I thought I might tell you that
For the past 40 years, I have been paid to have what, for me, is a dream job. I have been paid to read, write, think, research, teach, philosophi and to speculate about the meaning of things. Paid to figure things out, to persuade, and to share my impressions with others. I’ve been paid to travel to interesting places, to talk with people who are the most learned minds in Psychology and sit with people just like you, me, and the young people we’re honoring with scholarships; and help them to figure out how to get along better with themselves and other people.
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
I thought I might tell you that
I’ve had to become honest, open to learn, willing to accept criticism, and a willing to change. In addition, I’ve had to learn to commit myself to the job at hand with professionalism and collegiality. (collegiality is a code word used when you’re able to speak quietly and respectfully to someone you know to be conniving, back stabbing, mean spirited, trying to discredit you, and take your job.
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
Then, I thought I could tell you that:
I also have spent a lot of time with my head in books in libraries (not liberry) rather than my feet on a dance floor. In airplanes rather in canoes and my face in front of a crowd of people who were prepared to hang on every word or to pick me apart for every word. Don’t get me wrong. I did a fair amount of dancing and canoeing.
My sons tell me “Mom, that’s Not bad for a little ole, country girl from Tunica, Mississippi. Aye?”
Then I told myself, They don’t want to hear that.
Then, I thought I might tell you that:
The road to success has not been easy: Not for me, and not for most people who’ve become successful. Famous, people you know, have stumbled, fell and failed; but to be called successful, they had to begin again, again, and sometimes again. For Example
Bill Cosby quit school in the tenth grade and joined the U.S. Navy. He completed school through a correspondence course. He enrolled at the Temple University on an athletic scholarship to become an athletics teacher. But he had to work too. He took a job as a bartender. He used humor to entertain his customers and I imagine to get bigger tips. His career as a comedian began there.
Oprah Winfrey came from what in known as a Broken Home. Grew up in her Grandmother’s care on a farm in Mississippi. Even though she was abused, molested, she was adjudicated as delinquent and sent to a juvenile detention home. But luckily for Oprah, all the beds in the facility were full so she was sent to Nashville to live with her father Vernon. Vernon made her study. He required her to read a book a week and to write a book report. My guess is-Vernon’s voice continues to intrude and whisper in her ear with each accomplishment
Denzel Washington
Denzel’s parents were going through a messy divorce. The Boy’s and girl’s club was his salvation. He went to college to play basketball But he bounced from major to major then, dropped out of school altogether. He went to work as a counselor at a summer camp for children. After participating in a staff talent show for the campers, a coworker suggested he try acting for a living. His career took off from there.
Morgan Freeman
It was clear, early, that Morgan Freeman had talent to act. At age twelve he had won a statewide drama competition. But he turned down a drama scholarship from Jackson State University and became a mechanic in the United States Air Force. It would be much later that he would return to acting and became a phenomenal success.
And then there’s me. That Dr. Anderson (as certain of my students called me) I’d like to be able to tell you that every one of my cookie fortunes came true, that life has been a bowl of cherries without pits, and that everything I touched turned to gold, like Midas, that I’ve never had to use a plan B. and that my faith in human being has never been shaken. But I can’t.
I grew up on my family’s farm in Tunica County. I milked cows, chopped and picked cotton, peas, okra, pecans, beans, water melons or whatever the farm had to offer.
I graduated form Rosa Fort High School in 1960, second in my class after spending most of my senior year in the hospital in Mound Bayou recovering from hepatis.
I never thought of myself as smart. When I went to college. I had issues. I felt soo inadequate. So, I dropped out after a year. I went to work and saved my money. I spent 2 years working as a Nurses’ Aide in a hospital in Boston. I had wanted to be a nurse, but the Nurses’ Aide job convinced me that I’d do better as a doctor.
So I went back to school paying tuition at the university and in the school of life. I had to relearn many messages about myself, my abilities and my possibilities. I tried hard, struggling like the little ant that moved the Rubber Tree plant. Like the ant, I made it with the help, my family’s prayers and plenty of encouragement from all kinds of people. I believe it is now my responsibility to give what has been given to me.
Throughout my working life, I have moved back and forth from the classroom to the therapy room. (Most of the times as the Professor and much times as the student) (Most of the time as the psychologist and occasionally as patient). You see, you can’t teach what you don’t know and if you know incorrect information and attitudes, you’ll teach incorrect information and attitudes. And that is WHAT YOU’LL TEACH to the next generation.
I believe in getting it right.
Today, I can do whatever I want to do for the rest of my life. Lately, I’ve been raising flowers. I look at a packet of seeds and marvel and the endless possibilities. Flowers planted today can bring us beauty today and for years to come. I have a few Cockscombs in my yard that my great grandmother also raised. And so it is with beliefs and attitudes.
Like David Anderson in “Breakfast Epiphanies”, I wander around in the Flower beds and I noticed that some flowers, even when they get the same amount of water and fertilizer, just don’t make it. They just sit there and wither. Some say it’s the same with people. They say some people just give up on themselves. They just stop. Stop striving, stop expecting, stop growing, and stop learning?
I hope not. Because when you stop, just like the flower that wither, you wither and die INSIDE. What seeds are you planting?
We all have endless possibilities and it helps to have the fertilizer of encouragement to grow. Whether it’s scholarship, the customer in a bar, a fellow camp counselor, father Vernon, an inside view of the job, or the fear (as Raymond Williams once told me) that you’ll have to pick cotton for the rest of your life.
Ok. So this how I see it. I believe it will help to understand the barriers to success and show how encouragement can be valuable in your life and the lives of young people making their Dreams reality.
Psychologists study human perception of themselves, the world and themselves in the world.
Human being are hard wired or endowed by our creator (if you prefer), to seek out, connect, and cooperate with others, and a desire to improve themselves. In other words, to connect, to be competent and to count.
Most of us become aware of our selves as people when we’re about 3 years old (give or take a few months). We’re like a sponge soaking up everything that’s going on around us. But we don’t know the context and can’t make sense of what we experience, but we take it in and use it as the way to do life. We look around and see so many people who can do so many things we can’t and have so many privileges we don’t have. Oh, we can feed ourselves but not very well and only if someone puts the food before us. Sometimes, in our parents’ attempts to make us better people, they say some pretty nasty and discouraging things about us.
So we begin to feel inferior, incompetent, powerless when we want to feel connected to others, competent, and that we count.
These inferior feelings are perfectly normal, human, and I believe necessary. They drive our desire for success; but we don’t know that because they feel so bad. We assume that because we feel inferior, We are inferior. Sometimes, we act “AS IF” we are inferior. So we try to overcome those inferiority feelings by struggling to be, significant, bigger, stronger, older, sweeter, cuter, most loved, the best (or Whatever are the values in our families). This struggling then, creates patterns for thinking, feeling, and behaving. If our actions are well guided (have good information about how to be in the world) and on the useful side of life, we may strive to be the best of the best. If we are misguided, and our actions fall to the useless side of life, then our struggles are toward being the best at being the worst). We hear people bragging about how much they drank, how many women they laid or how many things they stole, or what hurtful things they said to others, to name a few.
Well guided goals of significance are designed to contribute to the good of the world, to connect us with others, and allow us to cooperate and to develop ourselves fully so we can contribute to the welfare of others.
(We see this all around us; the best that society has to offer and we see the worse). People can be significant by being good or they can be significant in their own minds by being bad. But it only take a little encouragement to turn a bad into good.
1. So are you done yet? Are you where you’ve always wanted to be? If so, congratulations.
2. Have you realized your passion or did you just settle for the life you have?
3. What’s your passion? It may be some unresolved wish, Some long gone dream, Some deep desire, some once prided action.
4. Sometimes we stray from that path but it’s never too late. You saw that with the famous people. You’ve seen that with me and I know you’ll see it in you. If you’re not there, you still have time. It’s not how many times you fail but how many you try that’s important. Since you’re going to die someday anyway, you may as well be an old doctor, or teacher or whatever that was you always wanted to be.
5. Nobody said life would be easy. Struggling creates character. Without difficulties, you never know what you’re capable of or what you’re made of.
That’s my encouragement to you, my pat on your back, my wish for your future, my kind words. Pass it on; to young and old, whether you’re co-worker, a father Vernon, a camps counselor or customer in a bar, or someone’s lover. You have endless possibilities for making a difference. Join in the spirit of hope and encouragement for the good of us all.
I’d like to leave you with one final poem my mother often recited to me.
Set your goals on Younder’s mountain
And press on with all your might.
The road is steep and hard to climb
You won’t reach it overnight.
You may venture into darkness
You may face the rain and cold
But keep your eyes on the mountain
and your mind on your goal.
If you stumble along the wayside
into life’s dark sinking sand;
arise with a double determination.
Renew your courage and try again.
Never count your self a failure.
Always do the best you can.
Just keep pressing on and upward
Though you may not understand.
You won’t have a lot of friends
if your journey’s the upward way.
Let the watchman of tomorrow
Find you closer that today.
Set your goals on Younder’s mountain
and press on with all your might.
The road is steep and hard to climb
You won’t reach it overnight.
As I close, I’d like to leave you with a blessing sent to me by our own Neddie Ray Winters who I remember as the bad little boy from the Winters’ Family.
May the Lord bless and protect you;
may the Lord's face radiate with joy because of you;
may He be gracious to you, show you His favor,
and give you His peace. Thank You Thank You. ou.
