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The Pay it Forward Foundation with Lance Secretan

January 18, 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Dr. Lance Secretan believes in love. He recommends it as alternative way of running a business. He encourages its constant presence in relationships. He sees it as a tool in our connection with people we don’t necessarily know.

Advisor, mentor and coach to leaders through his business, The Secretan Center Inc., Dr Secretan has also taken on the role  of Chairman of the Pay It Forward Foundation (PIFF).

PIFF was founded in 2000 as a registered non-profit organization by author Catherine Ryan Hyde, who wrote  Pay It Forward. The book was also a successful film, starring Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey. Ms. Hyde is continuing to work, writing two books a year.

Basically, the idea is to perform an act of kindness for someone else without expecting anything in return, only to request that person likewise offer a kindness to someone else when the opportunity presents itself.

Ms. Hyde and Dr. Secretan met at a conference he was running in Collingwood, to which she had come to speak.

Said Dr. Secretan, “We gathered 200 people at Collingwood. We became good friends.”

Ms. Hyde started foundation teaching: “Think of something to change the world.” She wrote the Pay It Forward book in the form of a children’s book to teach children to pay it forward too.

Recently, Ms. Hyde asked Dr. Secretan to be Chairman of the foundation, confident that he would build a movement around the world to pay it forward.

Engaging businesses as “partners in kindness,” money was raised to use in the “business” of kindness. One bank raised $11 million. The foundation gives a sum to an individual, for example, to find a way to raise more money and the funds are spent aiding and encouraging acts of kindness “small and large.”

“We work with health care, schools – we do good things,” Dr. Secretan assured us.

However, always a visionary, he sees great possibilities with the philosophy. His is to promote the idea of having a dream: from individuals on the small scale to our own nation.

“I would like Canada to have a dream,” he declares. Bringing forward the notion of paying it forward – a nation that thinks in those terms.

Nowadays, the foundation uses the Internet a lot, as well as  Facebook. It is a helpful media to show the  videos they make of people doing good things.

On the Pay It Forward website there are opportunities to donate and to buy a Pay It Forward Social Media Coin which can travel from one act of kindness to another by being passed along. One person offers assistance to another and gives him/her the coin, who, in turn, passes it on to the next recipient. The coin has a unique code, as it were, so that the stories can be told of kindness, as the coin moves from hand to hand, sometimes following surprising trails.

Now, PIFF is on the move, expanding its “partners in kindness.” One of PIFFs focus is  “to support teachers and students with Pay It Forward: Young Edition Books”  as an influence on youngsters and future generations on the “importance of living with compassion.”

Dr. Secretan’s life as a mentor and coach to businesses and executives around the world eminently qualify him to spread the word of such a noble ideal as the one the PIFF espouses. A leadership coach for many years, he had a revelation born of the relationship he shared with his adored wife, Trish. It came to him that the qualities that are the formation of a good marriage must, in fact, be just as suitable for good business relationships: trusting, honest and ethical, respectful and independent, to name a few.

With his ground-breaking book, The Spark, The Flame and The Torch (2010), he exhorts company leaders to inspire – with love –  their workers and colleagues, rather than try to intimidate them with antiquated methodology. The result of such a profound change must lead to a happier work force and a more successful business.

His was, indeed, radical thinking: that operations currently run on fear, in the form of motivation as incentive and assessment as measure of worth, cannot make for well balanced workers – at the office or, indeed, at home. He observed that the culture of fear that so dominated business practices, as a matter of history, caused poor health, physically and mentally, and notes that there are lots of studies to back him up. His solutions were equally radical in that they determined the whole system of employment was “broken” and had to be overturned.

Dr. Secretan’s solutions insist that love, not self-serving, greedy, profit based policies, makes the world go round. That love based inspired relationships would move how businesses are run, to the very great benefit of all.

Ranked sixth Most Influential Executive Coach globally, Dr. Secretan is a multi- award winner speaker and coach. He was named #13 of the World’s Top 30 Leadership Professionals in 2016.

His powerful approach to running a business on a positive and supportive basis, his many accolades placed him as the best mentor to lead the PIFF. Already, his stamp of doing it well is clear as the PIFF begins to make its way internationally.

Now with a face forward and a plan to engage governments on all levels, to establish a culture of paying it forward, each citizen looking for ways to help every other, whatever their status, PIFF is on the path for the greater good.

Not simply one person to another but also in support of those helping animals and contributing to environment in definitive ways,  Dr. Secretan looks to the PIFF to be all encompassing , ready to deal with pain and deprivation  on many levels.

For more information, you can go to the website: www.payitforwardfoundation.org

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