Do What You Love and Love What You Do – LESSONS FROM A MECHANIC

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Something super funny just happened. So I am here at my local car dealership where I take my car to get worked on and I just got like a lecture by the service department, almost like yelled at. And it has a really important Solution Focused lesson, something I’m trying to convey to all of you watching my trainings, attending my event and watching my videos for a really, really long time. And I want to use this as an example. I want to use me as an example to help you guys know this. So let me tell you a really quick story. For many, many years, like, I’m not really a car guy, cars are not my jam. Cars are not my thing. And for a lot of years, as you guys know, I’ve been traveling around the world. I’ve only been home like, you know, less than 50% of the time. I’m always on the road. So my car has really, really suffered from just complete lack of attention, not taking care of it in the way that I should have. It just wasn’t a good deal.

So when the pandemic happened, I’m home all the time and I now need a reliable car and I bought a really cool car. I mean, it’s older car, cheap car, like I’m not showing off I got this great car, but just like a cool car that I liked. Like something that I wanted to buy an older kind of convertible thing, little sporty coupe kind of thing. And I was super excited to have this car. I had this car for a month and I was sitting at a red light and someone ran into the back of me and completely damaged the back bumper back fender.

And I was coming in today to pick this car up. I was coming in today to get my car picked up. And when I came to pick it up, I was actually talking to somebody in the service department and they were explaining to me all of the things they did to my car beyond just fixing the fender, like they washed it, vacuumed it, they went through to make sure all of the fluids, like all these crazy things that I didn’t ask him to do. And they didn’t charge me for it. They were just sort of telling me like, we are taking care of this car and we want to make sure that this car works and all these kinds of things.

So I said to them like, why’d you do that? Like, I just asked you to fix the fender. Like, what made you do all of these other things? I ended up in a conversation with a guy who said, because we love taking care of cars. And I was like, really? And he’s like, I’ve always loved cars. Mercedes is my favorite car. I went to school to learn how to work on cars. And I applied for a job to a Mercedes dealership. And like, this is my dream job. So every time I get a car, I just want to make sure I give it back to the owner, like in pristine shape and ready to go. And he said, you can’t be a good mechanic unless you love cars.

And I was like, Oh my God. And then he asked me, this is where I got yelled at. He was like, did you love this car? I was like, I dunno if I love any car. And he’s like, if you don’t love this car, you won’t take care of it. You’ve got to love this car. And I was like, how do you love a car? And he said, because this is the car that gets you from where you are to where you need to be. This is the car that is going to get you to your loved ones. This is the car that causes you to not have to think about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. This is the card that you can depend on.

That’s how you can love it. Like, you have to love this car in order for you to take care of it. And if you don’t love it, you not going to take care of it. He’s literally telling me this. And I was like, okay, you actually bring up good points. I hadn’t thought about that before. He’s like, when you have a convertible.

So it’s so important that we remember, you know, the techniques of Solution Focused Brief Therapy matter. You can, you know, you need to know how to scale and how to ask about exceptions and how to do desired outcome. You need to know all that stuff, but if you just learn that and don’t learn love and passion, then you’re just a normal mechanic, but we want to be exceptional and give people back pristine things. You’ve got to love it.