By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to stimulate your ability to more creatively use your existing resources.

Heart Patient Squeezing his Cough Buddy teddy bear

          Put your hands lightly on your stomach and cough. Did you feel how the muscles in your stomach contracted and pulled when you coughed?

Former heart patients raise their Sir Cough A Lot teddy bears during a reunion

       Now imagine your stomach as if it were a blanket full of stitches. Oh, the pain, especially when you  had to force yourself to cough up the festering poison in your stomach called phlegm, each cough resonating as if you had virtually pulled on that blanket of skin.

       Now put your hand on your stomach and press it and cough. You don’t feel as much pain. That’s why heart patients often squeeze a pillow on their stomachs to ease the necessary but painful experience  of coughing after open heart surgery. The coughing experience is so painful that many heart patients would regularly “forget” to cough up their phlegm or cough it up only perfunctorily without earning the full health  benefit.

     Sir Cough-a-Lot to the rescue.

     Sir Cough a Lot is an example of a critically important leadership skill: improvising, turning the ordinary into the extra- ordinary with no additional resources.

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