Winston-Salem Magazine ‘The Time I Became Dynamic and How the Pointer Sisters Got Me Over It’

Feature Writing

The Time I Became Dynamic and How the Pointer Sisters Got Me Over It

It all started with the Red Ball Jets.

At least, I can trace my compulsion toward self-improvement as far back as my pre-school days when Red Ball Jets were my sneakers of choice.

Most children insist on wearing a particular brand of shoes because they want to be like all the other children. But I made my mother buy me pair after pair of Red Ball Jets solely on the strength of a television commercial.

To this day, I remember the seductively peppy jingle: “Run a little faster, jump a little higher—the kid in the Red Ball Jets.”

To say that commercial “hit my hot button” is understating the case considerably. Indeed, the product’s simple promise to help me do better was about as compelling a message as any an advertiser could deliver to a fledgling dynamo like me.

The commercial’s implication that my current level of achievement—no matter how good—would never be quite good enough bypassed my conscious reasoning entirely, planting an obsession with self-improvement directly into the Subconscious Compulsions Department of my brain, right next to my sincere belief that “there’s a right way and a wrong way to do just about anything,” my store of revered concepts like “detail,” “background,” “foundation,” “qualifications” and “preparation,” and my insistence on alphabetizing my record collection from the Andrews Sisters to ZZ Top, even though Donna Summer ends up next to Dame Joan Sutherland as a result.

So, as my Red Ball Jets gave way to loafers and saddle oxfords, the fringed suede moccasins of my high school “hippie” years, the Clark’s Wallabees that carried me over Chapel Hill’s brick walkways, to three corporate years’ worth of what my mother calls “opera pumps,” I continued a quest for self-improvement that culminated two years, three months ago—when I became a dynamic.

Achieving personal dynamism seemed like a good idea at the time I set out to do it in spring 1985. I had left my job as an in-house editor to start my own writing business almost two years earlier, and in spite of what would appear to any objective observer to be outstanding success, I was convinced I could—and should—be doing even better in my business, not to mention every other area of my life. That’s why, when I heard about a 13-week course designed to make me more personally dynamic, I signed up immediately.

I’ll never know whether the Red Ball Jets actually made me run any faster or jump any higher, but “The Dynamics of Personal Leadership” course delivered its benefits as promised. The only problem was it worked too well.

The most powerful tools the course placed at my disposal were affirmations and visualizations. I had eight pages’ worth of them before the course ended in July ’85—all entered in my computer, printed out on bond paper and filed in a three-ringed binder, along with goal planning sheets, achievement checklists, charts, graphs and signed statements of personal commitment to improve myself as quickly as possible in every conceivable way.

And improve myself I did—with a vengeance. I visualized myself as richer and almost immediately increased my business income (and my work load) by a healthy margin. I affirmed skinniness and, as a result, lost the same 30 pounds I’d lost two times before in my pre-dynamic years plus five more. I visualized myself as a spiffy dresser and, sure enough, a shopping spree produced a new wardrobe. I affirmed myself as attractive and low and behold, I began dating a man I not only liked, but wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with in public.

With all this burgeoning dynamism going on, it quickly became apparent that the 1981 Honda Civic I was driving was the automotive equivalent of flip-flops. Accordingly, I bought a new Volvo—the car that came to displace footwear as a metaphor for my achievement of and subsequent fall from personal dynamism.

The car serves now as such a singularly fitting symbol of my dynamic image simply because they both ended up breaking down a lot and ultimately had to be traded for something more functional.

For example, September 1985 was exceptionally hot. So when the air conditioner on the Volvo stopped working, I faced the formidable challenge of maintaining my personal dynamism as I tooled around in 96-degree heat. I began to wonder what good it was to have genuine leather seats if they were going to have decidedly un-dynamic sweat stains on them. But I overcame my doubts by cranking open the sun roof, popping a “Dynamics of Personal Leadership” tape into the cassette player and deciding something to the effect that if I couldn’t stand the heat of personal dynamism, I probably should just get out of the dynamic kitchen.

Meanwhile, on our fifth date, the likeable, presentable man jokingly suggested I abandon my bungalow and move in with him. I demonstrated what a bad idea that was by outlining, in excruciating detail, the various idiosyncrasies of my pre-dynamic days. There was no sixth date.

One cold, rainy October afternoon the car broke down at the lower entrance to Reynolda Village and had to be towed in. Soon after, I too broke down, becoming physically ill from overwork and taking to my bed for several days.

Some weeks later, I again had to have the Volvo towed in after barely making it home from a dynamic meal at a trendy restaurant. Interpreting the incident as a warning against the perils of grilled fish, I began to indulge in more substantial fare.

Soon afterward, I noticed the waistbands on some of my spiffy new clothes were beginning to feel a little tight. I decided to coordinate some of my pre-dynamic skirts and slacks with my dynamic blazers as a stopgap measure to enable me to breathe and talk to my clients at the same time.

After a third tow-in and a second air conditioner breakdown, the Volvo was recalled to correct a defect that, according to the letter from Volvo Cars of North America, could “result in a high engine speed condition, making the car difficult to control” in the event of a front-end collision.

By that time, I was beginning to wonder if my personal “speed condition” had likewise become too difficult to control. I stopped checking my checklists, affirming my affirmations and visualizing my visualizations. I reread the course materials to figure out what was going wrong, using a blue marker to highlight a passage that counseled, “If you think of yourself as a failure, you will fail no matter how hard you consciously try to succeed. You may accidentally outstrip your own self-image for a time, but you will quickly readjust.”

Reluctantly—no, make that tragically—I decided I must think of myself as a failure and that my personal dynamism had been nothing but the accidental out-stripping of my true, decidedly undynamic self-image. I realized I’d been so absorbed in running a little faster and jumping a little higher that I’d failed to protect myself against falling a little harder—no, make that a lot harder—than I’d ever fallen in my pre-dynamic years. I started feeling very sorry for myself.

Fortunately, the Pointer Sisters appeared on TV in concert at a Paris nightclub just in time to pull me out of my post-dynamic decline. They opened their show with a spirited rendition of “I’m So Excited,” in which Anita avowed she was about to lose control but she thought she liked it!

During many subsequent viewings of my videotape of the concert, I pondered the revelation that loss of control could actually be enjoyable. I concluded the highly dynamic Pointer Sisters probably don’t take personal leadership courses or have notebooks full of goals and checklists and sentences telling themselves they’re dynamic. They just are. And I can be dynamic again, too. But, paradoxically, it can happen only if I stop trying so hard.

Although the Pointer Sisters changed my life, I continue to be driven to self-improvement. But now, based on my experience, I’m operating under a new policy on controlled dynamism. I still set goals for myself, but since I now understand I’m self-motivated to a fault, I’ve dispensed with the checklists, charts and graphs. I concentrate on only one particular area of my life at a time, too, to prevent the kind of rampant dynamism that left me feeling like someone else.

On March 31, 1986, the Volvo left me stranded under a bridge on 311 for the better part of an hour one morning. That afternoon, I traded it for a Honda Accord, thus placing a kind of exclamation mark at the end of my automotive image statement. Like the Volvo, the new Honda has a sunroof. Unlike the Volvo, the Honda has a tape player that has yet to play a single motivational tape.