a break from the time he arrived in the morning to midnight
each day, taking work home with him. Sometimes he even
worked until one or two o’clock in the morning. When he
thought of how he wanted to spend his time with his family his
whole body relaxed. His speech slowed and he paused between
sentences. Also when others asked him questions he paused
thoughtfully before he answered. When he started to think of the
problems, which was often, he began to interrupt others leaving
no space between sentences, either his own or those of others.
His speech accelerated. His patterns in behavior, especially his
spoken behavior, were his patterns in life.
Our every move, every gesture, every intonation and speech
pattern reveal the patterns we run in our lives as a whole.
Peter’s lack of space in speech was a perfect metaphor for the
lack of space in his life. We cannot not communicate our issues
to the world at large, but we can learn to listen to these issues
so that we can coach ourselves and others.
At our home in France we have a well dating back to the
seventeenth century. There is a groove in the front of the well
where the rope to lower and raise the bucket has been pulled
for all these years. It would be difficult to get the rope
positioned in any other place than in this groove—the rope
naturally defaults to the groove.
It is the same with our patterns. Once the groove is cut, the
easiest choice is for us to do what we have done before.
Unfortunately, this is not a recipe for success in business. You
may be familiar with the expression “if it ain’t broke don’t fix
it.” Today it is more likely that if it ain’t broke it is probably
redundant! We don’t get many second chances—we take our
chances or our chances pass us by.
What we need increasingly to be able to do is to cut new
grooves for ourselves, and to do so daily, so that we are
continuously making new connections in our behavior and our
thinking. To do so we need first of all to find the behaviors that
we want and then we need to practice them until they become
The rope defaults to the
grooveSTRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSFUL LIVING 175