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Lance Secretan to address Headwaters Arts fundraiser May 26

May 19, 2016   ·   0 Comments

Although Dr. Lance Secretan’s business, Secretan Centre Inc. is ranked as number one International Leadership Consulting Firm, Mr. Secretan himself is still climbing. His is an ambitious soul, seeking to share and direct others in his changing and developing ideas of how to improve the human condition.

“I am a radical thinker,” he declared in a telephone interview. “I have been around the issue of leadership for a long time now and I’m talking about what’s wrong.”

What is wrong, so he tells audiences around the world and especially in large numbers in the States, is the old thinking, the old ways of mission statements, motivation and leadership. All of these fail in their purpose which is, after all, to encourage employees and associates to want to work, want to love their jobs and be productive within them.

Dr. Secretan had written 15 books on the subjects of leadership and motivation until he had an epiphany during which he realized how broken “leadership” is and how wrong minded so-called motivation is.

He finally understood: motivation is based on fear at the source: do this and win that (“but what if I can’t achieve this then I can’t win that!”); worse: if you don’t do this, you will lose that. Fear based provocation can never lead to happiness in the work or, indeed, living place. Fear depresses nature which leads to poorer health, both mentally and physically: hence, the dread of Monday mornings. There were plenty studies and statistics to prove it.

“There are thousands of books on leadership,” Dr. Secretan pointed out, “which is broken everywhere. All this we’ve been doing all these years – how have  we screwed up so badly?”

His new awakening led to his 16th book, The Spark, the Flame and the Torch, written in 2010, this time about inspiration and how inspiration, being a positive, is much better at helping people to feel good about what they are set to do and, even, why they are doing it. Associates and employees become happier people, they feel more involved in their work  and  begin to enjoy both their employment and their private lives.

To be an inspiration on any level is to create positive feed back, make the shop keepers happy to serve you, inspire the clerk at the flight desk to get you that seat, even enjoy a passing conversation with a fellow passenger. Inspiration and the way to inspire have become the great focus to Dr. Lance’s subsequent talks to audiences far and wide.

All this revolutionary thinking came from his relationship with his wife Tricia.

Before he met Tricia, Dr. Secretan was a confirmed bachelor, dedicated to his work and his crusade of improving the business lives of other people. He was doing alright with this life until he  met Tricia or Trish, as he also called her, on a ski hill connected to her members-only ski club which he had joined just three weeks previously.

Tricia had fallen on the slopes and he happened to be there to assist her. Lifting her up and blowing the “snow from her ear,” Dr. Secretan fell truly in love. Tricia soon reciprocated his feelings and the life they shared from that time was made many times richer by the power and passion of their affection.

Crushingly, after 30 years of marriage, cancer claimed Trish’s life. “She died and my heart broke,” he related.

Some time before this tragic moment, the two of them wrote down to share with the world what made their relationship so special: “We began to write emphasis points of a perfect relationship: empathy, love, passion.

“We didn’t get to finish it,” he said.

However, inspiration is about the love story and not too long after Trish’s passing, Dr. Secretan found himself writing his very personal story about himself and his beloved Trish, as tribute to her and their life together, as well as a proffered standard, as it were, for others.

“Usually,” he began by telling us, “I have a plan for the book I’m going to write. When the book was half cooked, I had clear intentions about its finish. This book wasn’t like that. I just wrote and cried.”

The resulting book, A Love Story, is filled with his love poetry to and about Trish, which he had rarely published elsewhere, and his diary of their growing passion for each other, their life together and her demise.

From this latest book has come his evolving philosophies for mentoring both for the corporate and, by natural extension, the private lives of people, to establish the Grand Theory of Corporate Mentality which is about inspiration.

To take the empathy, love and passion of his and Trish’s relationship into and use them in the business world is to turn corporate thinking on its head.

Dr. Secretan is speaking as a fundraiser for Headwaters Arts next Thursday, May 26 at Caledon Golf and Country Club at 7:00 pm. 2121 Olde Base Line, Caledon. Tickets at Scotia Bank, 97 First St., Orangeville; by telephone at Headwaters Arts 519-943-1149 or online at www.headwatersarts.com

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