I also shed the suit and tie (after three days of suit-and-tie workshops and presentations — the business culture in Mexico is often more formal than in the United States) and showed up jeans. Both choices turned out to be good moves.

My CutterLA colleague Cuitláhuac Osorio was in a blue suit and we kidded as we entered the auditorium that the audience probably thought Cuitláhuac was the speaker. By the way, if you are wondering how to pronounce “Cuitláhuac,” it is Kwit-lau’-ick.

A journalism major at the university named Victor Soto interviewed me earlier in the day and covered the talk. You can read his article online. If you don’t read Spanish you can try a web page translator like Babelfish.

I was very impressed with the connection I was able to establish with the students. They spoke English quite well and I worked without a translator (I’d had simultaneous translators earlier in the week at a 2-day workshop). They listened —not just politely, but intently. And they laughed at all the right places and asked a few astute questions. I told them I was very impressed with them. I confessed that when I was in college, I probably would not have invested my Thursday evening going to a talk about Responsibility. They laughed at that too.

I have another college presentation coming up in a few months. I’ll post about that later, but I wanted to mention here that I’d love to spend more time on the college lecture circuit teaching Responsibility Redefined™ to college students.

It was during the Q&A time of one of the presentations I made last week in Mexico to a variety of industry and education leaders.

I’ve heard this kind of spontaneous wonderment from top leaders before after introducing them to Responsibility Redefined™. Some of those comments have  been offered as testimonials and we include them with name and company information in the client endorsements sheet we send out with my “speaker kit” (that’s industry jargon for the package of information a meeting planner reviews when evaluating a speaker like me for an engagement).

And this leader immediately spoke to my host and invited me to give the same introduction of Responsibility Redefined™ to his company soon. I look forward to returning to Mexico soon for that engagement.

The leader went on to lead a discussion among the other leaders in the room about the problems facing industries of all types in Mexico, and how the problems cannot be solved by regulations, politics, technologies, or even market strategies, but only by responsible leadership at all levels. He said “the value of understanding how responsibility works in the mind and systematically applying this discovery to develop a culture of responsible leadership at all levels is so great it can not be calculated.”

What do you think?

I’ll repeat his words as best I remember them. He spoke English for my benefit rather than his native Spanish. He began speaking with a gentle, satisfied smile on his face:

I want to share a personal story with you. I have enjoyed a very successful 18-year career. Four months ago I suffered the worst failure of my career—a major mistake.

As he acknowledged this failure, he did not look like a failure. His smile actually expanded, his eyes twinkled, and he beamed expressions of freedom and joy:

Until this morning I had not known how to deal with my failure except through Shame. I assumed there was something wrong with me and I deserved punishment.

After learning about the Responsibility Process™ and the Keys to Responsibility™, and seeing you Christopher demonstrate the ‘pseudo-responsibility’ behaviors of Shame and the behaviors of true Responsibility, I realized I had been stuck in Shame for 4 months.

And I realized I was the one keeping myself there.

I am happy because now I am freed. I can take complete ownership of my mistake.

And then he proudly announced new choices immediately available to him:

My team has been hurting for 4 months. Now I know what to do to help them release their Shame. We will clean up this mess I led us into. We will learn our lessons and we will make amends.

We will be stronger, not as a result of failing, but as a result of acknowledging our honest mistake, and  learning, correcting, and improving as a result.

As you can imagine, you could hear a pin drop on the plush carpet in that room.

I smiled back and said “thank you.” And then I did something else. I beamed a broad smile and I shouted “Congratulations!” I crossed the room to where he was sitting and, standing in front of him, offered two high-fives. He slapped my hands and we laughed together.

I don’t know that everyone in the room understood why the high-fives. Here’s why. Getting yourself over the top from Shame to Responsibility is a huge win, and it deserves acknowledgment, celebration, and even congratulations. This man was reporting a wonderful win to us—a win that happened right there in the room that hour as he learned about Responsibility Redefined™. That deserves more than a mere “thanks for your story.”

Many people are teaching Responsibility Redefined™ now in a variety of settings. If you have similar stories to share, I’d love to read them. Please comment.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sHkPJhZHts[/youtube]

I’ve been invited to Mexico City and Monterrey (a northern industrial city in the state of Nuevo Leon) many times in recent years. With their passionate nature, maybe Mexican leaders will be faster than leaders in other countries to embrace Responsibility Redefined™.

I was teaching a 2-day workshop called Mastering Personal Agility for Executives. I was embraced warmly by these 40 men and women executive leaders. Most had never heard of Responsibility Redefined™ and were inspired by what they learned about how to take responsibility for their life, teamwork, and situations.

The workshop producer was Cutter Latin America, the Latin arm of the Boston-based think tank I work with.