Deep souls on Shark Tank?
Her mother never let school failure outshine her strengths
Barbara Corcoran, Founder of The Corcoran Group & Shark and Executive Producer on ABC’s "Shark Tank," was one of ten children growing up in the one-bathroom ground floor apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey. At the Corcoran’s, where the six girls shared the middle room, the four boys shared the back room, and her parents slept on a convertible sofa in the living room. According to Barbara, her mother Florence masterfully kept the house humming. She was a workhorse and domestic strategist. But the key to her success was perceiving and pointing out the individual strengths of each of her children.
Barbara wrote in her book Shark Tales, “She kept her house going by putting her finger on the special gift she saw in each of her children and making each and every one of us believe that that gift was uniquely ours.” Barbara was known as the family entertainer. She made up games and directed her brothers and sisters to create their own Broadway shows in the basement.
When Barbara was in second grade, her teacher sent her back to the first-grade classroom for an after-school tutoring session with two other kids who couldn’t read. As the teacher read from the dull Dick and Jane book, Barbara drifted into a much more interesting daydream about her newly acquired empty milk bottle, a ball of yarn, and the fish she was going to catch with them. When Sister Stella Marie called on her to read aloud, she did not know which page they were on. The teacher then uttered the words that caused her for the first time to doubt her intelligence: ‘Barbara Ann, if you don’t learn to pay attention, you’ll always be stupid.’
Barbara was rattled to the core and cried all the way home. When it was her turn to share about her day at the dinner table, her mom knew. She later told Barbara that she’d had a call from her teacher who said she was having trouble reading.
As tears began to fall, her mother Florence gave Barbara back her power. She held her shoulders with both hands, looked her directly in the eyes, and said, ‘Barbara Ann, don’t you worry about it. You have a wonderful imagination. And with it, you can fill in any blanks.’
In this instance and in many more throughout her life, Barbara Corcoran’s mother called out one of her deep soul strengths as her most important asset. Continually underlining this point throughout her childhood, while modeling and emphasizing the value of hard work, Mrs. Corcoran empowered her daughter to build on what she had.
Even when Barbara received straight D’s in high school, her mother was unfazed. Instead of chastising her for the grades, her mom said she was proud that her teacher had named Barbara as the nicest girl in class. She so clearly saw her strengths, and her good, hardworking common sense told her that grades would not predict this bright daughter’s future success. To say she was right is an understatement.
Source: Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business by Barbara Corcoran (Portfolio 2011)