Ray Charles teaches us - accept no limits

No one has ever interpreted a song like Ray Charles. His incredible talent is often referred to as the “genius of Ray Charles.”

In addition to being blind and overcoming that physical disability, he surmounted the obstacles of poverty and discrimination to achieve greatness. He didn’t accept those limits, nor did he allow anybody to limit him or his music.

There is a scene in the movie “Ray”[i] that takes place in a recording studio. At first, the camera is focused on Ray at a grand piano, with a chorus behind him and a full orchestra filling the room. He is recording the tender, sentimental, Hoagy Carmichael classic “Georgia on My Mind.”[ii] With the violins swelling, the song sounds lush – just like the recording. The camera pans to the control room where we see a discussion among the record executives who are saying that this will never work. It’s such a big departure from his rhythm and blues songs like “I Got a Woman”[iii] and “What’d I Say.”[iv] They are sure a sweet plaintive ballad will never sell. Of course, they couldn’t have been more wrong, and Ray couldn’t have been more right. It became his biggest hit and is probably the one we now think of as his signature song. The same thing happened later when he decided to record country music because he liked the songs and the stories they told. The studio executives told him he couldn’t do it. Again, he had to insist. He even had to quit his record label and sign a contract with another company. Again he was proven right, becoming the biggest country cross-over artist of all time.

This is the leadership lesson we can learn from Ray Charles – Accept no limits. 

When I think of someone who accepted no limits, I think about Brenda Robins, our sons’ kindergarten teacher. Brenda was the embodiment of Albert Einstein’s rule to live by: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”[v] She was already the kind of kindergarten teacher parents hoped their children would have as their introduction to elementary school. But late in her career, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

I’m not at all sure I would go on working with MS gradually taking away my independence. Brenda Robins, however, did not stop teaching until she felt she had no choice. My wife and I feel lucky that she was there to teach both our boys. By the time our older son, Dan, was in her class, sometimes she had to use a motorized wheelchair scooter to get around, and two years later, when our younger son, Ben, had her, she was completely dependent on it.

Instead of viewing that chair as a limitation, she used it as a teaching opportunity. Her kids would do anything to be hoisted up for a ride. Do you know how many books kindergarteners will read to be able to earn the most honored place to sit and read to their teacher? A lot.

The annual elementary school Halloween parade was even more special. Teachers led their classes around the school with everyone in costume, and you could always count on the more enthusiastic teachers to be wearing costumes, too. But Mrs. Robins had them all beat. She dressed up as a cowgirl and turned that motorized scooter into her horse. She led the parade all around the school. Every kid thought she was the coolest teacher they had ever seen. That is how you work beyond the roadblocks that life sometimes has a way of putting in our paths.

If Ray Charles and Brenda Robins could persevere and succeed by accepting no limits - so can we.     

This lesson also applies to administrators and even entire schools. In 1997, Jamie Virga became the principal of Viers Mill Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, just a few miles north of Washington, D.C. – a school with a very high poverty rate with over half the children qualifying for the federal free lunch program[vi], a very high mobility rate with families constantly moving into and out of the neighborhood, and a very high enrollment of students who were new immigrants (about one-third) from forty-two countries who were just learning English. By most measures, it was a school that was only marginally succeeding. 

During his eight years as principal, Jamie held fast to two beliefs: first, his students did not have to be limited by their circumstances, and second, he and the staff did not have to see themselves as limited by the challenging situation in which they found themselves. They believed the children could overcome the limits of poverty, mobility, and the need to learn a new language, and that they were the ones who were going to make these achievements possible. They had faith in their own ability to change things for the better.  

In psychology, this is sometimes called “self-efficacy” – an idea originated by Canadian born, Stanford University psychologist, Albert Bandura[vii] – which says that, through reflection, we can have some control over our thoughts and feelings. If we can control our thoughts and feelings, we can also have some control over our motivation and eventually choose our actions. If we can determine our actions, we can alter our environments or improve our situations. We don’t have to think of ourselves as at the mercy of environmental factors, the way B.F. Skinner[viii] pictured us or at the mercy of inner impulses, the way Sigmund Freud[ix] described us. Albert Bandura’s idea was a huge shift – maintaining that we can be proactive; we can have some power over our own lives.

 I once took a graduate course in personnel management at the University of Maryland. The professor, Dr. J. Edward Andrews, a former director of human resources for a large public school system, taught us a basic rule for recruiting and hiring good employees: “Past performance is the best predictor of future performance.” He said: “You want to hire good teachers? Don’t worry about IQ. Look at their college transcripts. Did they take higher level challenging courses? Did they earn good grades? What you want are people who worked hard in college, because chances are, they will work hard in your job, too.”

While it’s probably true that a person’s track record is a good way to predict how they will perform, does that have to be the end of the story? Is it always true that a person’s past determines their future? 

What’s especially interesting about the theory of self-efficacy is that it says that people’s beliefs about themselves and about their ability to change their situations can be even more powerful than their past performance. Beliefs can trump experience – an amazing thought!

We could say that your beliefs eventually determine whether your experiences will be successful. In the saying usually attributed to Mahatma Gandhi[x]:

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

If a school has a past record of mediocre performance, but the staff changes their thinking and begins to believe that they can turn things around, can their thoughts and the actions they take as a result of those thoughts change reality? What happened to Jamie Virga and the staff and students at Viers Mill Elementary? Did they succeed? Did they ever!

As a result of their hard work and their belief in their ability to take their students beyond the limits of their circumstances, Viers Mill Elementary School was named a Maryland Blue Ribbon School of Excellence in 2004. In 2005, they won the National Blue Ribbon.  No small accomplishment, especially when you consider that the school won the recognition not only for its dramatic gains, but also for its academically superior achievement.

Many wonder if success like this can be sustained. Six years later, in 2011, I hosted a visiting superintendent from Washington state. He wanted to see a turn-around school (one that was previously failing and now succeeding), so I took him to Viers Mill. In every classroom, and we visited a lot of them, great teaching was happening and students were enthusiastically learning. The principal, Matt Devan, and his lead teacher, Susan Freiman, showed us something mind-blowing. Two years earlier, in 2009, they decided that having ninety-five percent of their students succeeding in reading and math wasn’t good enough. Why couldn’t they shoot for one hundred percent? In 2010, they did it. Even though more students than ever were living in poverty, were highly mobile and were learning English, one hundred percent of their fifth-graders were reading and doing math on or above grade level.

Einstein said, “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”[xi] If you believe the roadblocks you encounter are not going to limit you, it becomes possible to achieve incredible things. Whether you’re a teacher, an administrator, or a member of any team or office, it’s an important leadership lesson – to succeed at levels higher than ever before – accept no limits.

 If you enjoyed this excerpt, check out the book [Routledge] and the keynote: Lead Like the Legends [leadlikethelegends.com].

[i] Distributed by Universal Pictures, 2004

[ii] Hoagy Carmichael (music), Stuart Gorrell (lyrics), 1930, Hal Leonard Corporation.

[iii] Ray Charles, Atlantic, 1954

[iv] Ray Charles, Atlantic, 1959

[v] http://thinkexist.com/quotation/once_we_accept_our_limits-we_go_beyond_them/221878...

[vi] It qualified as a Title I school – a federal government designation meaning it served a large low income community.

[vii] Bandura, Albert (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

[viii] Skinner, B.F. (1948). Walden Two. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Revised 1976 edition.

[ix] Freud, Sigmund. (1949). The Ego and the Id. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd.

[x] http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4467789.Mahatma_Gandhi

[xi] http://thinkexist.com/quotation/once_we_accept_our_limits-we_go_beyond_them/221878...