Is Your Hair Style Your Choice?

 

I got a haircut tonight, after putting it off for maybe, an extra month, or was it two?

Why did I procrastinate?

I told my cutter the last time around to leave it a little longer, and I think she must have been tuned into a different galaxy at the time.

I left bereft of heft, at least on my skull, and I wasn’t happy about it.

So, like a teenager who is rebelling against his parents or scholastic authority, I opted to stay away from the clippers, and you know what?

An amazing thing happened.

I started to like what I saw, and a terrible haircut became a glorious non-cut.

My head morphed into something nearly stylish. Hey, it WAS stylish, but I don’t mean contemporary.

It was a throwback, locks dangling in my eyes, requiring head-snaps to arrange. Better yet, my hair felt FULL, maybe for the first time in decades.

In the old days when I was a teen, my dad and I shared President Reagan’s Beverly Hills barber, Harry Drucker. Harry told me, “Gary, never let a barber thin your hair; it’s thin enough, you don’t need that.”

Well, I made the mistake over the following years of forgetting this wisdom, opting instead for something that looked undoubtedly corporate.

Big mistake; and I came to appreciate this, recently, as my hair grew and grew and grew even more.

And I had an epiphany: I haven’t been cutting my hair to suit myself, at all. I’ve been doing it for approval, and this perennial adolescent inside finally said, “Enough!”

Tonight’s cut was performed by a new stylist, completely directed by yours, truly, and nobody noticed I got one.

Perfect!

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC's Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations from Santa Monica to South Africa. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com. For information about coaching, consulting, training, books, videos and audios, please go to http://www.customersatisfaction.com