Howling Your Way to Success

What Ray Charles Can Teach Us About Converting Grief and Mistakes Into Positive Emotional Catalysts

 

“You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there"—Edwin Louis-Cole

 

Ray Charles was a howling success as a human being and musician. 

 

But many people don’t know the tragic story of his childhood.  Later in life Ray Charles had to battle his way through addiction and dysfunctional relationships.  But in his struggle to overcome the demons in his life he discovered an important principle about letting our feelings inform and guide our behavior.  I call that principle “Howling Our Way to Success.”

 

Ray Charles Robinson was born to sharecropper parents in Albany Georgia.  When he was five his younger brother drowned in a washtub despite Ray’s efforts to save him.  That same year Ray began to realize he was losing his eyesight.  By the time he was seven he was totally blind.  Shortly thereafter he was institutionalized at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind.  At the age of fourteen his mother passed away and three years later his father died as well.

 

In his autobiography he described his mother’s death as “the most devastating thing in my whole experience—bar nothing, period.  From that moment on, I was completely in another world.  I couldn’t eat.  I couldn’t sleep—I was totally out of control.  The big problem was I couldn’t cry.  I couldn’t get the sorrow out of my system and that made things worse.”

 

Ma Beck was an elderly friend of the Charles family.  She saw how despondent and withdrawn Ray had become.  She took him aside and told him that his mother had prepared him to be independent and would have wanted him to carry on with his life.  That day was the first time that Ray allowed himself to cry.  He “howl(ed) like a tiny infant, crying for all the pain that had been stored up, crying for the loss and...the sweet memories Mama had given me.”  That was the day that Ray began to “howl his way to success.”

 

He developed an ability to let his sorrow manifest itself in his music.  Howling screams became his musical trademark.

 

The gift that Ma Beck gave Ray—the permission to cry and to turn his grief into growth—was, in Ray’s own words, “strangely enough, extraordinarily positive.  What I’ve accomplished since then, really grows out of my coming to terms with those events [the deaths of his mother and younger brother].”

 

Too often we expect perfection of ourselves and of our children and grandchildren.  The arrogance of perfection denies us the opportunity to view weaknesses and mistakes as potential opportunities for growth.  When we can, as Ray Charles did, convert tragedy and other negative emotions into self-awareness, it opens up the door for amazing personal growth.  We need to view our mistakes and emotional challenges as the positive catalysts that help us see what we should be doing differently.

 

Peter Drucker, the guru of management consulting, was fond of pointing out that both individuals and companies had to discover their own arrogance along their path to better management.  Is there something which you are dismissing as not being important in your emotional and relationship frameworks?  Is it possible that you are—in the same way Ray Charles did—attempting to bury an emotion rather than use it as a catalyst?

 

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself”—William Faulkner

Comments

[Tim]

Interesting. There is increasing evidence that emotional trauma of one sort or another manifests itself somewhere in the body as a physical ailment. Therefore, being emotionally healthy can translate to physical health as well.

[John A Warnick]

Hence, Art Linkletters wisdom about laughter being a wonderful cure is worth paying attention to.  Thanks Tim.