Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
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| Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 13 | Issue 777 |
| Craig Impelman Speaking | Championship Coaches | Champion's Leadership Library Login | |
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BELIEVE IN YOURSELF (DOLLY PARTON)
Dolly Parton grew up in a two-room cabin on Locust Ridge in the Smoky Mountains, the fourth of twelve children, with no electricity and no running water. Her father had paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. Dolly Parton rose from this two-room mountain cabin to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide and record 25 No. 1 country hits.
At her 1964 high school graduation, seniors stood one by one to share their plans. Nursing school. The service. Marriage. Eighteen-year-old Dolly Parton stood to announce her plans.
"I’m going to Nashville to become a star!" she said. Dolly described what happened next:
"The entire place just exploded with laughter. I sat down, hurt and confused. They just didn’t know the fire that burned inside of me."
"It was also a turning point, because at that moment, my dream became my resolve. Their laughter made me more determined to succeed, and during many a tough time in the early years of my career, their laughter made me work just that much harder."
John Wooden said, "A great deal of talent may be lost for the want of a little courage."
The next morning, she boarded a Greyhound bus with her guitar, her songs, and her clothes in three paper grocery bags and headed for Nashville. People asked if she was afraid she would starve. Dolly said: "Well I couldn’t be any poorer than we’ve been here."
Brené Brown’s mantra is, "Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand your sacred ground."
Years before that graduation ceremony, Dolly had already built herself a stage. On the porch of her family’s Tennessee mountain home, she stuck a tin can on a tobacco stalk and wedged it between the floorboards. Her younger siblings and the animals in the yard became her audience. The tin can was her microphone. She imagined she was singing on the Grand Ole Opry.
"But I was dreaming. I was planning," she recalled. By seventh and eighth grade, she was "dead serious" about going to Nashville after graduation.
As a teenager, Dolly would slip off to Nashville with her uncle to pitch songs. They had almost no money. The two lived in "an old junked-up car" while writing, cleaned up in filling-station bathrooms, and Dolly laughingly called themselves "show business squirrels."
Nashville supplied plenty of tough times. She arrived without a car or a telephone, looking for someone who would listen to her songs. She sang demonstration recordings for other songwriters to earn money. She later recalled collecting food and condiment packets from room-service trays left outside hotel doors. Sometimes she stretched ketchup with water to make soup.
Record executives questioned whether her high voice belonged in country music. When she joined Porter Wagoner’s television show in 1967, some fans wanted the woman she was replacing, Norma Jean back. At an early road appearance, Dolly was booed. She came offstage crying.
She kept singing.
Jim Collins writes, "You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties…"
By 1974 she had outgrown Porter’s show. She wrote him a goodbye song, "I Will Always Love You," and it went to No. 1. Then Elvis Presley wanted to record it. The night before the session, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called. "Well, you know we don’t record anything with Elvis unless we have publishing on it, or at least half the publishing."
She told him, "This is the most important copyright in my whole publishing company, and I can’t do that." People around her said she was crazy to say no to Elvis. She said something in her heart told her not to do it.
As Coach Wooden put it, "The goal is to satisfy not everyone else’s expectations, but your own."
In 1992, Whitney Houston recorded the song for The Bodyguard. It spent 14 weeks at No. 1 and sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, and Dolly, as owner of the publishing, earned a fortune. Years later she summed it up: "After Whitney recorded the song, I made enough money to buy Graceland."
Her success never stopped. Dolly Parton became one of the most successful singers and songwriters in country music history. The girl whose dream drew laughter became a music legend, built a business empire, and helped millions of children discover the joy of reading.
She never stopped believing in herself.
Reflect on this idea of building Faith in yourself. How are you doing? Write it down. Share it with someone on your team.
Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman
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Circle One Nothing happens only once, Owen Dodson (1914–1983) Charity In men whom men condemn as ill Joaquin Miller (1837–1913)
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