The Mark of a Leader
VOLUME 15

Welcome to Volume 15 of The Mark of a Leader E-zine.

We're fresh off a great National Sales Meeting for ADP in Las Vegas where, among other things, we launched a new interactive rock and roll module. Ask for it by name: Not Fade Away!

Thanks to all the ADP Major Accounts team for such a great week, and thanks Tom, Stefan and Mike for being excellent rockers.

Thanks also to Foresters for letting us help keep storytelling alive inside your great organization.

This month in our E-zine we're featuring Helen Keller and her white knight, Alexander Graham Bell (who knew?). Most people know her name, but many don't know her story, her struggles, and her unique triumph. We hope you find inspiration in this remarkable tale.

Have a great summer. And please keep The Mark of a Leader in mind for your fall and winter events. We'll use our amazing stories to turn your next conference into a remarkable one!

Yours in leadership


Doug Keeley

Please visit our website at www.themarkofaleader.com
FEATURE

QUOTABLE QUOTES

"In life, you can never do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late."

Ralph Waldo Emerson



"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own."

Benjamin Disraeli

HELEN KELLER - VOICE OF THE DISADVANTAGED

It is 1882. Alabama.

At that time in the south there were no rural hospitals.
If you got really sick, you were likely to die from your ailment before the doctors in the city could figure out what was wrong with you.

If your name was Helen Keller, an otherwise healthy little girl just shy of your 2nd birthday, the card that fate would deal you would not be death. It would be darkness, and its evil partner, silence.

Imagine if, one day, you could no longer see or hear?
Close your eyes and cover your ears for just, say, five minutes.
Most people can't.

If it happened to you for real, you'd probably do what young Helen did. You'd vent your unimaginable frustration with fits and tantrums.

Relatives thought her a monster who should be institutionalized.

Fortunately she had someone in her corner.

A man named Bell. Alexander Graham Bell. The man behind the telephone.

Bell's own life had been changed by the deafness of his beloved wife Mabel. He had turned his life's work and genius to the advancement of those without hearing.

He saw hope in young Helen's predicament and recommended an unusual pairing. He would team Helen with a young woman named Anne Sullivan. The Teacher, as Anne would become known, had lost her sight at a young age. Through two miracle operations, she had regained enough sight to be able to read for short periods.

The nearly blind leading the blind and deaf. An usual pair.

DID YOU KNOW?

Percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28%
Percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%



The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.



Jet lag was once called boat lag, back before jets existed.

Anne's role was to teach Helen to communicate. And in doing so, teach her he lessons of friendship, caring, and trust.

Helen's role was to be a friend, and to give Anne her life's work and meaning, though she didn't know it at first.

It was slow and arduous.
Imagine how you would teach someone who could neither see nor hear you. Where would you start?

Finger spelling was the solution. Associating letters with objects. Teaching was every day. After a month, a breakthrough occurred. As Anne pumped water over Helen's hand, she spelled "water" with her free hand.

Helen reminisced of this life changing event, "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."

This was only the beginning.

Helen soon learned to read, beginning with raised letters and Braille, writing on both a traditional and Braille typewriter.

Braille is significantly more complex then the common alphabet most of us are used to. Instead of learning 26 letters, she had to learn 64 combinations of raised dots, used for letters, numbers, and small phrases.

She grasped them fast, confirming Bell's assertion that it was not her abilities holding her back, but opportunity and training.

As her language skills improved, she applied and was accepted to Radcliff College, becoming the first known deaf/blind person enrolled in university, anywhere.

With Anne at her side, working as diligently as ever, Helen became the first deaf/blind person to receive an undergraduate degree.

After graduation, Helen turned her efforts towards activism. She knew that she was one of the lucky ones because she had been given Anne. Many others in her situation were not so fortunate.

Her motivation for activism came in part due to her concern about blindness and other disabilities, and society's seeming lack of care about how they were being caused.

In 1920 she became one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. She who had so little herself, who had been cruelly cut off from the world as a baby, became a beacon of hope and a voice for the blind, deaf, and otherwise disadvantaged around the world.

She did fundraising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind, and fought to advance the living and working conditions of blind people, many of whom were poorly educated and living in asylums.

Her efforts held a major part in changing these conditions and in helping to change the way society viewed the blind and deaf.

QUOTABLE QUOTES

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."

Janis Joplin



"How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts."

Jackie Robinson

Then tragedy struck again.

Following numerous illnesses, Helen's lifelong mentor and companion, Anne Sullivan, died in 1936. While it was a staggering loss to Helen, she knew that Anne would want her to continue their work. So she did. Astoundingly, for another 30 years.

After WW2, Helen and her secretary circled the globe fundraising for the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind.

She was always the voice, always the beacon, never tiring of standing up for people like her who had been robbed of the gift of sight and hearing and were expected to function in a society that neither understood them nor, for the most part, gave a damn about them.

In her last years, Helen was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. A year later she was voted to the Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair.

On June 1st 1968, after 88 years of struggle, Helen died silently, and peacefully, in her sleep.

What is the Mark Helen Keller leaves us after a life spent bettering the world for people with sensory disabilities like her?

"The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, and ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realize, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself so that he can win light through work."

Most of us are fortunate to be born, and to retain our senses throughout most of our lives.

Some people, though, are dealt a different card. But that does not mean we are any less deserving of living a full and meaningful life.

Helen Keller showed us that our value as human beings is not how well we function physically, or even mentally.

Her Mark was showing us all that greatness is determined by what we give, not what we are given.
 

Please visit us at www.themarkofaleader.com.

Copyright 2006 Mark of a Leader