Adding Narrative to Life
B E H I N D T H E B O O K
In essence, I started writing Winning with Your Body, Mind, and Soul simultaneously with Gambling with Your Soul. While I didn’t set out to write a second book on the same topic, after about the tenth revision of Gambling with Your Soul, it became obvious there was too much information to include in one book. So, the thought took hold in the back of my mind and sat there for the next five or six years. Then, once Gambling with Your Soul was published, my sister, Deborah, introduced me to an organization to which she belonged. NMA – The Leadership Development Organization. They invited me to participate in their webinar speakers’ program. The presentation for that talk – “The DNA of a Winner” – became the introduction for this book.
Since the two books address the same topic, there is certainly some overlap. Much of the research and data for Gambling with Your Soul was applicable for this book. However, I wanted to ensure that Winning with Your Body, Mind, and Soul could stand alone if an individual had not read Gambling with Your Soul. And at the same time, if an individual had read Gambling with Your Soul, there would be enough new material in Winning with Your Body, Mind, and Soul to make reading it a meaningful and worthwhile experience.
Structuring the book into 3 parts flowed quite naturally from the approach taken in Gambling with Your Soul of examining the fate of each component (body, mind, soul) of a human being. There was also a goal to incorporate more of myself/my story into this book. Writing part 1: Winning with Your Body was a joy! It allowed me to reconnect with some of my crew teammates, who were a significant part of my Yale experience.
Celebration after defeating Harvard and Princton.
Henry and Kevin Griffith after Eastern Championships.
First race between Yale (in the foreground) and Dartmouth in early spring of 1983. Yale wins by 0.4 seconds.
Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC) championship in late spring of 1983. Yale wins by 0.2 seconds.
In addition to the data utilized from Gambling with Your Soul and gathered from online sources, I also read many books. Some during the writing of this book and some earlier in my professional career. Notable among books on leadership are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey; The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, by John C. Maxwell; Good to Great, by Jim Collins; In Search of Excellence, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.; John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do, by John P. Kotter; Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus; Leadership Is An Art, by Max DePree; Leadership Jazz, by Max DePree; Monday Morning Leadership: 8 Mentoring Sessions You Can’t Afford to Miss, by David Cottrell; Sun Tzu: The Art of War, translated and with an introduction by Samuel B. Griffith; and Woke Leadership: Profits, Prophets, and Purpose, by Priscilla H. Douglas.
Some of the books I read to support Part I: Winning with Your Body are The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown; Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan; How I Play Golf, by Tiger Woods with the editors of Golf Digest; For The Love of The Game: My Story, by Michael Jordon and edited by Mark Vancil; The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara; and The Race: Life’s Greatest Lesson, by Dee Groberg.
A sampling of the books I read to support Part II: Winning with Your Mind include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Meditation, by Joan Budilovsky and Eve Adamson; The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman; Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff at Work, by Richard Carlson; The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation, by Joseph Goldstein; Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones for Success, by John C. Maxwell; Mindfulness Without the Bells and Beads, by Clifton T. Smith II; Nightmares to Miracles, by David C. Asomaning; and Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson.
Notable among the books I read to support Part III: Winning with Your Soul are The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker; Doing Business by The Good Book, by David L. Steward with Robert L. Shook; Faith Is Like Skydiving: And Other Memorable Images for Dialogue with Seekers and Skeptics, by Rick Mattson; The GOD Delusion, by Richard Dawkins; The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, by David Whyte; Honesty, Morality, and Conscience, by Jerry White; Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring, by Henri J. M. Nouwen; The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Timothy Keller; and There Is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Anthony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese.
Celebrating 100 years of Yale Lightweight Crew with teammate Charles "Chip" Gately (left photo) and fellow coxswain Anderson Cooper (right photo).
