Grundl STAND UP!

The End Of All Excuses | The Story Behind Germans Top Management Coach
23001. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-8437-2986-4
Verlag: Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

In this book, Boris Grundl shows how he took his destiny into his own hands at the absolute lowest point in order to lead his life self-determined and freely. For the convinced optimist, the greatest happiness today lies in inspiring other people to develop their potential. A moving book about mental strength and personal development and the story of an incredible life. He is in his mid-twenties and a hopeful top athlete when it happens: an accident - and Boris Grundl is paraplegic. But he doesn't give up. He is the first wheelchair user to complete his studies in sports science. He becomes a wheelchair seller and rises to become marketing and sales director in a large corporation. Along the way, he becomes one of the best wheelchair rugby players in the world. Today he is a successful business coach and impresses with his authenticity.

Boris Grundl, geboren 1965, ist Managementberater, Unternehmer, Führungsexperte, Coach und Redner. Mit seinem Leadership-Institut berät er Firmen wie Daimler, SAP oder die Deutsche Bank. Er ist Gastdozent an mehreren Universitäten, hat regelmäßig Kolumnen in der Frankfurter Rundschau, in Wirtschaft + Weiterbildung sowie dem F&E Manager, er erforscht das Thema Verantwortung und setzt sich ehrenamtlich für Schüler ein.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grundl, Boris

Weitere Mitwirkende

Wilch, Marc

Leseproben

My life shattered on impact

So, that’s what it’s like when you die.

I’m in the water and there is only one thought: “That’s what it’s like when you die.” I try to swim. But I can’t. Something is wrong with me. What’s wrong? I try to keep above the surface. But I slowly sink. I command my legs the way I have done thousands of times before: Swim! But they don’t perform the usual movements that would take me back to the surface, that would let me just tread water and float. It’s just not working. I continue to sink. I try again. Nothing. Something is different. What that may be, I don’t know. I don’t understand. My brain is totally baffled. I continue to sink. My head is half-way under water. I make frantic movements, swallow water in gulps. It’s like being in a bad disaster movie. Instinctively, my arms start moving more quickly. Ah, so there still is some strength. But it’s so damned exhausting. There is no uplift because of the lack of tension in my body. I am hanging in the water like a sack of potatoes, oblivious to everything around me. I don’t call out for help, that’s how preoccupied I am with keeping afloat. Fear sets in. Pure fear for my life. The more I paddle, the more frantically my arms move, the faster I seem to be sinking. The moments when my head is above water become fewer and fewer. I will sink to the bottom of the lagoon …

At the same time, I notice how my mind is expanding. I feel tranquility, clarity, a sense of complete relaxation. My mind continues to expand — in waves, in concentric circles, horizontally. And also, vertically. My mind rises, higher and higher, until I can see myself from the treetops, sculling in the water with my arms. From above, I see the jungle. The lagoon. The people by the water. I keep on fighting for my life. But my fear is no longer as intense. Instead, a sense of peace spreads through me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if things could stay like this forever …?

From this same perspective I notice my friend Stefan running into the water. He is swimming toward me. Stefan is a good swimmer, I think. He will rescue me. At the same time, I return to my body. The peace and clarity have gone. I am terrified. I slowly realize that help is on the way. I don’t have to hang on for much longer, and I calm down to some extent. It takes a long time for Stefan to get me out of the water. My body is too heavy, and I am unable to help him. He holds me against a rock on the shore. With other people’s help, he finally manages to heave me out of the water. I lie in the sand, looking up at the treetops. I am breathing. I am alive.

My life suddenly decelerated from one moment to the next: from full speed ahead, unbridled restlessness, to slow motion. Up to that point I had been used to winning — now I had lost everything at once: my health, my prospects, my motivation for living. Everything had gone.

What was I left with? What meaning did my life have? I was full of fears and self-reproach. The same questions kept tormenting me relentlessly. Why had this happened to me? How could I have done something like this to myself? Why had I felt genuinely alive only on the brink of death? What purpose did my life have now? What would become of me? I didn’t have any idea of the consequences the accident would have for me. At first, I stubbornly refused even to give it any serious thought. Major feelings of guilt and self-pity ate away at my soul.

I was paralyzed, in body and mind. In those first weeks, I just let everything wash over me as if I had nothing to do with it. With a certain curiosity, I observed various nurses feeding me, when they attended to my incontinence, sucked the phlegm out of my bronchial tubes and did anything else that needed to be done to keep me alive. I had nothing to do with any of it. My body was alien to me. When the nurses were seeing to my needs, I felt like a sack of potatoes.

Me, the super athlete! I felt utterly defenseless. The bed I was lying in was what they called a rotating bed. It was meant to keep me from developing bedsores. Every couple of hours it flipped my body like a hamburger on a grill — from my back to my stomach and then onto my back again. I stared at the ceiling, turned, and stared at the floor.

Ceiling. Floor. Ceiling. Floor. An endless loop between ceiling and floor.

My field of vision was that of a baby in a crib: Anyone who did not bend over me closely enough was invisible to me. Even my consciousness became increasingly limited.

Ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor.

My little world was confined to my cramped hospital room. Beyond it, nothing else existed for me anymore. This rotating bed would become a metaphor for my life: Everything had rotated in a radical way.

I knew I was no longer the person I had been, although I frantically tried to cling onto my image. This strong, handsome, and successful young man had gone. I could not yet accept the fact. It wasn’t me, Boris Grundl, the tennis star, the golden boy who was always in high spirits, the charmer and ladies’ man. Now I was a cripple.

Well, and how about today? Today I am one of the most sought-after leadership experts and keynote speakers in Europe. I write books and have founded the Grundl Leadership Institute, an organization among the top destinations for transformational management training. My financial means allow me to live in Spain and Germany. I am married to a fantastic woman and have two wonderful adult children who are forging their own paths in a remarkable way.

Learning to understand life

Perhaps you are now asking yourself: How can someone experience such a defeat, such a deep fall into a bottomless abyss and turn it into victory? How did he achieve this? How was it even possible?

I had to learn to understand, to understand deeply what had happened. Initially, I needed to understand myself and my new situation. And then I had to learn to understand others. To understand relationships, my family. Later, professionally, I needed to understand markets, companies, production, sales. Understand meaning, human growth and development, transformation. To understand life. And that is precisely the point: First, it was about learning to understand life and its principles. Not my life. That is the crux of the matter: Most people first want to understand their own life so they can then understand life in general. That is a cardinal error! It’s necessary to first understand life and then to understand your own life. That’s the right approach, and it lets you achieve a healthy distance from yourself.

My life: This life map emerges almost solely from my own experience.

Life: This life map emerges from my own experience and the experiences of others.

Today I know that individuals who intelligently reconcile their own experiences with those of others will recognize the powerful laws of life more quickly. They will make wiser and more far-reaching decisions, which will lead to substantially better results.

I was first preoccupied with myself and my life, so I had to learn to ask myself better questions. Instead of: Why did this happen to me (my life)? It would be: What lesson does life want to teach me through this experience (life)? Instead of: How could I do this to myself (my life)? I needed to ask: What good came from the whole experience (life)? I admit, it was anything but easy — it took a lot of discipline.

The ideas behind this different kind of thinking must meet three criteria. Firstly, they must inspire me to move from self-reflection to action, because inspiration is the result of wise self-reflection. Secondly, they must deliver the desired results after action is taken. And thirdly, they must also be able to deliver the desired results for aspiring students at our institute. Only then do I dare to write and speak about them.

I don’t mean to imply in any way that I’m always in control of all these principles myself. All too often, I fail in applying them. I’m aware that I fail daily to abide by these laws of life — as a husband, a father, a colleague, an entrepreneur or simply as a human being. Getting yourself to fail less and less is not easy. Practicing transformation, not just preaching it, means exactly that: to fail less and less. Because every winner stands on a mountain of defeats. That is clear to me today, crystal clear.

I now manage more and more often to live my life like this. After all, the point is not to achieve perfection. Nor is it to live a perfect life. The point is to live an inherently consistent life. A life you are called up to live. To my mind, it’s not a matter of what “I want” or “don’t want”. It’s a matter of “what is my purpose on this earth?” That sounds completely different: It’s a life full of meaning, a calling, a vocation. This meaning in one’s life stems from a highly individual journey of self-discovery. And this inward journey makes every life unique and exciting. I am convinced of that.

I wouldn’t like to be the man my parents see in me. Neither would I like to be the man my spouse wants me to be. Nor my boss. Nor society, for that matter. And I am also not the man I once was. I am the man I am now!

For me, the power of living a free and self-determined life is encapsulated in these statements. I’m convinced that these ideas become more and more crucial for every human being, every...