Wednesday night my friend Stuart and I attended a concert by country music superstar Kenny Chesney at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Stuart bought my ticket as a surprise birthday gift for me.

Actually, the night turned out to be full of pleasant surprises.

For starters, LeAnn Rimes opened for Kenny and sang her most popular songs. It’s been 15 years since LeAnn burst onto the country music scene with her strong vocals reminiscent of Patsy Cline, but, if anything, time has just made her a better performer. She belted out the tunes, hitting every note flawlessly.

Then Kenny came on. Wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and old blue T-shirt, he seemed dressed more for a backyard barbeque than for a concert in a sold-out Staples Center. But that’s the thing about country music: The songs are so often about real-life situations that the music can make a cold, concrete concert venue feel like a summer’s day at a good friend’s home.

For those of you not familiar with Kenny’s music, he is a gifted storyteller in the tradition of Jimmy Buffet or Johnny Cash. His songs combine memorable lyrics with catchy tunes that carry you away into whatever world he sings about. In “Big Star,” you watch a young girl go from singing in local bars to performing in big-city concert halls. In “Better As a Memory than As Your Man,” you become the proverbial fly on the wall as a deeply saddened man tells his former lover why she is better off without him. Kenny’s music doesn’t just move you emotionally, it transports you into this vivid, multidimensional life experience that he creates.

He sang for two hours and it felt like 30 minutes. Actually, we sang for two hours, because that’s another thing about Kenny’s concerts: Everyone in the audience knows all the words to all his songs and everyone sings along.

To round out the night, there were wonderful surprise appearances by Uncle Kracker and Kid Rock, who played a few rock and roll numbers with Kenny and topped it off with the old David Alan Coe hit, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” which brought down the house.

But the night’s biggest surprise for me was a quiet one. It came during the break between LeAnn’s and Kenny’s performances, as the crews changed out and set up the equipment.

Let me preface this story with another. Those of you who have attended my employment law classes know that throughout my life I have experienced subtle and not-so-subtle forms of racism in America. I have been called the “N” word, I have been pulled over by the police for DWB (driving while black), and I have watched ladies clutch their purses tightly to their sides when I walk by.

But at Kenny’s concert, I experienced something altogether different. During the break, the young lady on my left asked me to watch her purse while she and her date went to the restroom. We had never met before, and the only words we had exchanged were “Hi” and “Hello” when the couple had arrived an hour earlier. So it was extraordinary for me that – rather than clutch her purse in fear – she left her purse in my care, not just a stranger, but a stranger of a different race. That, for me, was the night’s most pleasant surprise.

And it reminded me just why I love country music: People who listen to country music tend to be the nicest people I have ever met. Country music fans treat other country music fans as if they are members of the same family. A simple act, yet a powerful lesson that we could all learn and practice.

What do you think?

Coach Paul
www.lifechangingcoaching.com

“And if your home is just another place where you’re a stranger, and far away is just somewhere you’ve never been. I hope that you’ll remember, I am your friend.” – Rich Mullins

As individuals it’s important that you honor your personality preferences: It’s how you learn to reenergize, make good decisions and communicate well with others. But for those of you who are parents, or who care for youngsters, how do you nurture your children’s personality preferences? How can you know whether they have a preference for introversion or extroversion, for example, or thinking or feeling?

Kids’ preferences aren’t always easy to recognize at first. As parents, you have to be willing to hypothesize rather than draw firm conclusions. That’s because children feel a lot of social pressure to mimic the majority preference around them and behave as others do. As a result, children’s true personalities will often be masked … except at times when they feel they aren’t being watched or other moments when they feel comfortable expressing their true selves. This pattern begins to change in the teenage years, when young people begin to differentiate themselves and their preferences begin to become more pronounced.

The reenergizing preference for extroversion or introversion can be one of easiest to detect early on. I saw this in my own sons. My oldest – a clear introvert – tended from an early age to have one or two close friends, and that was it. My youngest – a clear extrovert – has always seemed to have a million friends. While my older son was going narrow and deep, my youngest was going broad and wide. My wife and I are both introverts, so we naturally understood my oldest son’s preference. But here’s where, for many parents, this dynamic can get tricky.

Introverts are the minority in America and in Western cultures, generally. As such, the tendency in our culture is to question introverted behavior or misunderstand it. Had we been two extroverted parents, we might have bombarded my oldest with questions like many parents do: What’s wrong with you socially? Why are you home all the time? Why don’t you go to your friend’s house? But there are a lot of negative judgments loaded in those seemingly simple questions. You know what you need for you, and so you think you know what they need. That’s not always the case – particularly when your preference is different from that of your child.

It’s important to nurture your children’s true personality, recognize their preferences and help them live lives that are in sync with their true nature.

But that’s not all. As parents, you’ll also do well to educate your kids about the “shadow side” – the pitfalls of preference and how to work around them. So I’ve pushed my oldest to stretch beyond his preference; I don’t want him to fall into the trap of becoming isolated and disconnected, because as an introvert he has the potential to do so. I went so far as to ask him – on his first day of high school – to get three pieces of basic information from 10 new people. Being a natural introvert myself, I understood the magnitude of what I was asking him to do. But it worked: He talked to 10 new people and two became his good friends. So here’s to stretching beyond the bounds!

And here’s to striking a balance with your children: Recognize and honor their preferences, but remember to guide them beyond the bounds of their personality. After all, in the real world we all have to stretch our boundaries. Introverts (like me) choose to speak in public; extroverts sometimes have to work alone. Hey, that’s life.

What do you think?

Coach Paul
www.lifechangingcoaching.com

“And if your home is just another place where you’re a stranger, and far away is just somewhere you’ve never been. I hope that you’ll remember, I am your friend.” – Rich Mullins

Just as thinkers can fall victim to the negative labels applied by feelers, the opposite is also true. Feelers who get stuck with be labeled as overly emotional, sensitive and soft have their preference-based reasons for behaving the way they do when making a decision. If you are a thinker interacting, living or working with a feeler, take note of what’s behind these negative labels. Let’s take a look, one by one:

Too emotional. It can be frustrating for thinkers to see how feelers weigh the emotional side of a situation before taking a decision. But thinkers should realize that feelers need to consider the emotional component to make the best decisions for them. In questions of fairness, thinkers should also realize that fairness means something different to a feeler, who believes that the circumstances of a situation should carry as much, if not more, weight as the basic facts.

Too sensitive. Feelers are highly attuned to their own and others’ emotions. On the one hand, that means they are very good at promoting social harmony. On the other hand, they can get their feelings hurt easily. When you as a thinker don’t take feelers’ feelings into account, you can expect they’ll be offended.

Pushovers. Thinkers may be prone to see feelers as “softies” when it comes to decision-making, because they take time to consider the emotional component of a situation. It’s not that feelers aren’t assertive or capable of taking tough decisions, it’s just that they believe that considering the circumstances of a situation will lead to the fairest decision for all.

We all have blind spots: Thinkers have theirs and feelers have theirs, too. Getting along with people of the opposite preference type is in part about understanding where the other person is coming from, what their natural preference says about their behaviors. But getting along with people of the opposite preference type also requires you examine your own blind spots. If you sense you are being tagged with a negative label – that you don’t believe is fair – take a second look at your own behavior. Did you run into one of the pitfalls of your preference? If you are a thinker, you may need to think about being more considerate of a feeler’s feelings next time you interact with him or her, for example. Or if you are a feeler, you may need to try not to take a thinker’s criticism so personally; he or she was likely just trying to be helpful. Try paying greater attention to this dynamic in your relationships, and take every chance to make improvements.

What do you think?

Coach Paul
www.lifechangingcoaching.com

“And if your home is just another place where you’re a stranger, and far away is just somewhere you’ve never been. I hope that you’ll remember, I am your friend.” – Rich Mullins