My mentor once stood in the middle of a packed restaurant, picked up his wooden chair, and lifted it over his head. On purpose. To prove a point about me.
Some of us grow up in cultures that teach us to respect authority, not question it. Mine did. My early childhood years were in India, and that belief followed me straight into corporate meeting rooms.
About twenty years ago, I had a mentor at Cisco who noticed I went quiet in meetings with executives, especially when my opinion differed from theirs.
He tried to fix that one evening in his office. Executives are people too, he said. Ordinary, often wrong, working off limited information. I nodded and agreed. He could tell I was not convinced.
So he said, “Let’s go to dinner.”
We ended up at a busy restaurant, in the middle of the room. He picked up where he left off, telling me my fear of embarrassment was holding me back. I kept saying yes, yes, while my body language said otherwise.
That is when he stood up, walked behind his chair, gripped it with both hands, and said, “I’m going to lift this chair over my head.”
And he did. Right there, in front of everyone.
Chair over his head, he looked at me and asked, “Am I embarrassed right now? You bet I am. Look at everyone wondering what in the world this guy is doing.”
Twenty long seconds later, he set the chair down, sat back, and took a sip of water.
“Now look around,” he said. “They’ve already moved on. Nothing happened to me. It was all in my head. Stop being afraid of embarrassing yourself.”
I carried that lesson into every room after. The fear of being embarrassed is almost always louder than anything that actually happens. Once I knew that, it stopped being the reason I stayed quiet.
It is not a perfect analogy. The executives in that room would have remembered. But the fear I was carrying was never really about consequences. It was about the moment itself.
Those of you who worked at Cisco with me already know exactly who I mean: Michael McNally. He was my manager for a decade and has been my mentor ever since. Much of the career that followed, I owe to him.
This is one of the stories I bring into coaching sessions because a lesson lands harder as a memory than as advice.
A question for you
What is one lesson a mentor or coach taught you that you still carry? What made it stick?
Answer on LinkedIn →First published on LinkedIn on September 9, 2026.
