You Become What You Listen To

Does Our Brain Absorb What We Hear?

After college and a few journalism jobs, I worked in the editorial department of Year Book Medical Publishers at 35 East Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. I reported to a cranky senior editor named Ken. It was the late 1970s. I typed correspondence using an IBM Selectric typewriter using carbon paper for our file copy. YBMP published hits like the 1978 Year Book of Psychiatry and the Year Book of Diagnostic Radiology.

In the late 1970s the building also had an entry directly from the Illinois Central train (now Metra.) The Little Corporal Restaurant occupied the ground floor then.

My life completely changed when I was chosen to provide administrative support at the company’s national sales meeting. The lead editorial assistant was ill. The sales meeting may have been at the Palmer House hotel. I remember it being ornate.

I took notes during the meetings and typed them at home on my electric typewriter each night. I surprised senior management with next day recaps instead a report of the entire sales meeting the next week. Afterwards, the sales team wanted me to interview for a sales position. Ken wouldn’t allow it.

One of Ken’s peers thought my situation was unfair and introduced me to his former colleague hiring an Illinois-based sales representative. I got the job! My first professional sales job was with a college textbook publisher based in Boston, The Allyn & Bacon company. I made about $13,000 in base pay, a sales bonus and summers off with pay. (We sold textbooks into college bookstores. The most tenured professors, making text selection decisions, usually didn’t teach summer school.)

The position included a company car, a shiny new beige 1978 Caprice Classic with brown plaid cloth seats. There were two other women in my sales training class, Joyce from Michigan and Jeanette from New York City. I was a first for the A&B sales team in many ways. What fascinated my colleagues most was that I was 21-years-old. Our conversations were both redundant and, in a way, refreshing because their focus was about my age and educational journey.

LISTENING TO UPLIFTING WORDS

Once I left the Chicago metro area and my R&B stations, WVON and WGCI, there wasn’t much music on the radio except WLS. When the music became static, I listened to motivational cassette tapes for hours. Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar, and Jack Canfield, before his “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, were my companions to Galesburg, DeKalb, Peoria, Carbondale, Valparaiso, Indiana, Charleston, Lake Forest, Urbana, Edwardsville, and other college towns.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Wayne Dyer, motivational speaker (1940 to 2015). Often mistakenly attributed to Max Planck.

Most weeks, I’d leave my apartment in Harvey early Monday driving with a file box of handwritten notes about my last visit to the professors I was going to meet with and return home Friday afternoon.

Every night at the hotel, I would check in with my mother or grandmother (sometimes both) with my hotel information, room number and what college I was traveling to the next morning. I would often fall asleep to those motivational tapes playing on my portable cassette player.

Like, “The Little Engine that Could” with its mantra—-”I think I can, I think I can,” listening to the stories of perseverance on those cassette tapes had a profound effect on me. Decades later, I still think I can. Sometimes it doesn’t work out; I gave it my best. Win or lose, I was in the running.

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” Henry Ford