I found it interesting. I personally don't know if I would have the strength. Mike from Milton. I think Hyrum makes some excellent points. How hard it is for the ex'd person to come back -- that the majority just throw in the towel. What does that say for our culture? In a conversation that proved to be prophetic, he discussed his situation with Elder Holland early on and was told, "You know, Hyrum, you're about to find out who your real friends are.
There were people who took me apart publicly. If you screw up and admit it, you get chewed up by the culture. That's a scary number, and you ask yourself why. They get worn out and say they're not going to tolerate it anymore.
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. The guy was one of the best known Mormons in the 90s due to the popularity of the Franklin planners. Finding out he had an affair was like a betrayal to everyone in a way. Before the "I'm a Mormon" campaign, average members looked to this guy as a great example of gospel principles in action. And he was a huge hypocrit as he points out.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I don't think it's true that someone needs friends in high places to come back into the fold. I know many who were exed and rebaptized later. It made him productive. It helped make him famous. And sharing his philosophy with hundreds of thousands of people around the globe also made him wealthy. So when he failed to heed his own advice about living daily in a manner consistent with his life goals, it nearly destroyed him — personally, professionally and spiritually.
He came full-face with the duality of his life on an October day in , when a voice he could no longer deny told him to stop pretending he was something he wasn't, to face up to it and fix it.
Watching television at home near St. George with his family that weekend, he saw his longtime friend, Elder Jeffrey Holland, address fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the faith's semiannual general conference. Elder Holland's topic was repentance. Smith told himself then: "I'd better start practicing what I preach. Of all the meetings he had called during his long career in business, he convened the most difficult one he'd ever held inside his own home.
It was the beginning of what he calls "walking into the meat grinder. Because faithful Latter-day Saints, like many religious believers, live by a strict moral code of conduct that explicitly prohibits such behavior, Smith found himself explaining actions for which — as a lay leader in his congregation — he had excommunicated other Latter-day Saints.
Behavior that, particularly because of his public persona and past church leadership, made him unfit for membership in the LDS Church and threatened what his family considered to be their eternal future together in the hereafter. The bombshell meant much more than an indiscretion.
The two brothers died as martyrs to the fledgling faith in a hail of gunfire while being held in a small-town Illinois jail in June of Today, thousands of LDS pilgrims visit the site each year to pay their respects to the Smith brothers, and the LDS Church has built a visitors center there where missionaries share the message of what they believe is Christ's true gospel restored to Earth.
The man who founded Franklin Quest in the basement of his Centerville home nearly 20 years ago cut his teeth on stories about his direct-line ancestors, which also include two subsequent presidents of the LDS Church — Joseph F. Smith a great-grandfather and Joseph Fielding Smith a grandfather.
So the fact that a young Hyrum served an LDS mission and got to know many of the church's top leaders is little surprise. To say that a certain level of personal behavior was expected is an understatement. He counts cousins and many personal friends among the ranks of LDS general authorities and was called to serve as a mission president for the church in — seven years after graduating with a degree in business from Brigham Young University.
Three years of shepherding hundreds of young missionaries and giving both spiritual and motivational speeches convinced him he had what it took to persuade others, and in , he paired with his wife, Gail, and longtime friend Richard Winwood to launch Franklin Quest. Its specialty: teaching clients to manage time and improve personal productivity by identifying what is most important to them, and using that as the foundation for action. He put the principles to work at home as well as on the road, awakening his family of six children at 5 a.
When he wasn't speaking to business executives from major corporations, he was serving his family and his faith in public ways — lending support to local academic and business groups, carving out time for horseback riding with his children and accepting a variety of LDS leadership positions. After managing the fast-growing company among themselves for a time, Smith and his partners realized they needed help.
He called on Bob Bennett, a former Washington, D. They took the company public, and the resulting cash infusion not only helped expansion, it created a "heady sense of self-importance," Smith acknowledges. As staffing grew, the company set up shop in West Valley City, eventually creating a campus of buildings to house oversight of not only the seminars, but the production and distribution of day planners, calendaring systems and other accoutrements that made Franklin — and its signature profile of Ben Franklin — something of a household name among major corporations.
The company estimates its planner is used by some 5 million people worldwide. A merger with motivational guru Stephen Covey's company in resulted in a name change and additional growth for Franklin Covey, which at its peak trained more than 40, people each month and employed 4, people.
A company profile says its client portfolio "includes 82 of the Fortune companies, more than two-thirds of the Fortune companies, thousands of small and midsize companies, educational institutions, government agencies, communities, families and millions of individual consumers worldwide.
At the height of it all, Smith was traveling extensively, admired endlessly and honored profusely by organizations local and national for his leadership, business acumen and philanthropy. Among his accolades: three honorary doctorate degrees, leadership with the U. Chamber of Commerce, public service awards by national organizations, membership on several boards, the S. But there was an underside to the public face of a man who was — from all appearances — the epitome of success in every sense.
A side so hidden, in fact, that Smith managed to "hide" even from himself. No gazing out the window, casting about for words that soften the admission of wrongdoing.
No "buts" or verbal gymnastics about "unmet needs. Though Smith moves easily in a world that worships the politically correct, the carefully groomed public image, the wordsmithing that drives politics and courtroom battle, there is no shaping or shading now about the reason he chose to be unfaithful. The process of self-rationalization, he says, "that is the mistress, really. You start dancing with a bear and you stay doing that and it will kill you.
But for Smith, that dance came only after long experience in church leadership, sitting "on the other side of the table" from fellow Latter-day Saints who had also waltzed their way into circumstances they came to be controlled by, only to find that in seeking "freedom" from moral restriction they had imprisoned themselves spiritually.
He had seen it dozens of times. He had warned and pleaded with others to run or be run over. And somehow, he decided he was big enough to dance with the bear. In his new book, "Pain Is Inevitable, Misery Is Optional," Smith describes how mentally framing one's improper actions through rationalization leads to self-deception and the consequences that process has not only for relationships and business transactions, but for spirituality.
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