Gordon Flett

That sense of not mattering or not sure if you're mattering, very insidious and potentially destructive.

And I've seen cases where I say, you know, it's too bad the person never realized how much regard others had for him or her or they.

Yeah, it's such an excellent and underscored point that, you know, the quality of the relationships, the quality, that sense of somebody truly caring and you know they care and they're not going to forget you is a huge thing here.

you know, in terms of that one-to-one relationship, I always come back to the famous book by Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Maury, and referring to a former professor as coach and going to see him right through to his final days due to his illness as he's approaching the end of his life.

That's, I think, what made that book so famous, is that people could relate to that basic feeling of having somebody who cares that much about you.

And

Nobody can take that kind of a relationship away and nobody can take that kind of feeling away from you.

Yeah, that focus in part comes from the school that's just two blocks away from where we live here, where it was an incredible, what I call a mattering milieu, because the principal, Peggy Morrison, knew even though there was almost 1,000 children in the school, knew every child by name, would go up and talk to them while waiting to go into school or at recess, could mention a brother or sister, something that was important to them.

So it's partly, you know, acknowledging somebody, showing them the personal attention, knowing and remembering something about them.

If they've been away for a while, tell them that they've been missed.

Peggy Morrison is also the master of the lost art of writing a personal note to somebody.

Bottom line is when you give attention to somebody and more importantly, you give time to someone, you're locked onto them in a way that they can feel unmistakably that they matter.

And this is a story that's in a book by Jerry Kramer, one of the offensive linemen who grew up to be one of the stars and became a member of the Football Hall of Fame.

And Kramer made a horrible mistake where he let the guy go by him, and the star quarterback, Bart Starr, he was hit so hard they wondered if he was going to be able to play from that point on.

So on Monday, practice came along.

They have film session, and Vince Lombardi, the famous coach,

put Kramer right at the front.

And then he showed the video of Kramer blowing the block that almost killed the star quarterback about 30 times.

And it got to the point where Kramer said, I guess this is my last day with the Green Bay Packers.

I'll be clearing my stuff out of my locker because why is the coach doing this humiliating me with all the teammates there?