More on the story about Fred

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For those of you who've asked about Fred, who I spoke about in my presentation, it was actually a story from the book "Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future", told by one of the authors, Peter Senge (the others were C. Otto Schwarmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers). Using my dramatic license, I changed the wording a bit, but the story remained the same.

How it was actually told by Peter Senge was:

Several years ago in one of our leadership workshops, a Jamaican man from the World Bank named Fred told a story that moved people very deeply. A few years earlier he had been diagnosed with a terminal diease. After consulting a number of doctors, who all confirmed the diagnoses, he went through what everyone does in that situation.

For weeks he denied it. But gradually, with the help of friends, he came to grips with the fact that he was only going to live a few more months. 'Then something amazing happened,' he said. 'I simply stopped doing everything that wasn't essential, that didn't matter. I started working on projects with kids that I'd always wanted to do. I stopped arguing with my mother. When someone cut me off in traffic or something happened that would have upset me in the past, I didn't get upset. I just didn't have the time to waste on any of that.'

Near the end of this period, Fred began a wonderful new relation¬ship with a woman who thought that he should get more opinions about his condition. He consulted some doctors in the States and soon after got a phone call saying, 'We have a different diagnosis.' The doctor told him he had a rare form of a very curable disease. And then came the part of the story I'll never forget. Fred said, 'When I heard this over the telephone, I cried like a baby – because I was afraid my life would go back to the way it used to be.’

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