With the Walker smirk of admiration, my father informed me at an early age “You march to the beat of a different drum.” He was often puzzled when I would attempt to march to the beat of someone else’s drum.Dad knew when my march was out-of-sync with my design: my changed behaviors and attitudes gave me away. Marching to the beat of someone else’s drum is akin to taking someone else’s meds: If it is not deadly, doing so will produce other negative consequences. Remember what Hippocrates said: “One man’s medicine is another man’s poison.”?
Rather than rejecting me, my father gave me a taste of his own medicine: House arrest! As an immature teenager, I had despised him for doing that. But it was within those times of detox – as the poison from a medicine that was not designed for me slowly drained away – that I began my life-long journey of learning to differentiate between the beat of my own drum and the beat of the drum of another. I began the process of learning to differentiate between what my God-given design is and what it is not!
Dad, my unofficial life coach, consultant, and mentor died in 1994. To this day, I still hear his voice of encouragement, “What the hell did you do that for?” (I am smiling as I jot that down!)
My life’s theme and the theme of my coaching business honors his legacy of encouraging me and everyone he met to Live YOUR Design!