Change—how it happens, how the world has changed, and how we can change ourselves—was the focus of a professional development session for BRTC faculty and staff during an inservice meeting held last week. The presenter was motivational speaker and native Arkansan Randy Frazier of Leadership Takes Courage.
The speaker’s own homespun version of life, with apologies to Forrest Gump, is this: “Life is not like a box of chocolates. Life is like a vending machine. You can get almost anything you want. It just takes a little change.”
Frazier’s uplifting message, even as he provided provocative and often humorous insights about change, challenged his audience to seek always to “give more than necessary to improve someone’s life.” Using poignant stories of his own farm family background, he reminded listeners that “not every change is good, but everything good came about by change.”
Frazier entertained as he educated his audience on such matters as how the brain works (“like a team of rivals”), how complex and capable an organ the brain is (“Our brain never totally fills up”), how we can maximize our brain’s capacity (“The human brain has incredible capacity to recall images”) and how what we see depends on our filters (“Our brains can be wrong in what they tell us we are seeing”).
Just as all people have an actual “blind spot” in each eye, a phenomenon the speaker demonstrated, all people also have blind spots in their own self-perception, he explained. For this reason, he suggested, “I should ask those I really trust if I want to learn the way I really am seen by others. We stand in our own blind spot,” he added.
Frazier concluded the presentation by advocating that “we are meant to change, we have the opportunity to change, and we have the power to change.” In so doing, he concluded, people then are able to “live along the edge.”