Lasting Lesson Learned From a State Trooper

Words he spoke one afternoon have stayed with me for two-plus decades

When it comes to reputation, successful people often think, “I don’t need to know anything about reputation. My reputation’s great. It’s always been great.” This response regularly reminds me of an important, cautionary story.

Years ago when I was married, my wife and I were in an auto accident as we were traveling home to her parents for the Thanksgiving holiday. The roads were icy as we drove through a canyon. Two lanes headed west abruptly became one lane due to an accident up ahead. 

There was, however, a lot of traffic that today so changing lanes wasn’t simple. As we moved to the other lane, our car started to skid out of control and we almost side swiped a “state trooper who was outside his vehicle and standing by the accident. 

Missed him by what seemed a hair. It was as close to hitting him as we could get without sending him to an early death or the hospital. Absolutely terrifying, maybe for him, definitely for us. Our vehicle did a 180 and hit the restraining wall, one that prevented us from falling down on top of vehicles below which were headed east.

The state trooper, as you might imagine, was understandably not happy. 

Our car was now undriveable and later determined by the insurance company to be a total loss. The trooper drove us to the nearest town so my wife’s family could come pick us up. As he drove, he made a comment that I’ve never forgotten, and this gets back to the first paragraph in this article. 

“No one wants to see a state trooper until they need one.”

The same, believe it or not, goes for reputation.

Nobody wants to see a reputation specialist until they need one.

Maybe you can get through your whole life without needing one and for many people, that’s the reality but there are people who’ve had so much damage occur in their professional and personal lives — wrecked them — and they once confidently thought they would never need anybody. 

They were sitting high atop the world when their life exploded on them, either because of acts of their own volition or something that caught them off-guard.

We see this in the news on a regular basis and maybe you’ve witnessed it in your life with people around you or that you know or have known. It’s helpful to consider beforehand, hey, who would be good to know now and potentially, down the road?

Michael Toebe writes “Reputation Notes” and is the founder at Reputation Quality, a practice that serves and assists successful people and organizations in further building reputation as an asset and responsibly, ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.