Young Miss Carruthers brought some homework to me yesterday. I was to ask her some questions about her school day, her friends, and her classes.
Danielle is shy. As I was when I first started this public speaking gig. Terror better describes my feelings. I knew someone would tell me I was talking utter shyte. I did not know when it might happen. Nobody ever did. But something happened which haunts me to this day.
It was a CrashProof your Business seminar around 1996.
I had a simple approach to each event. I would welcome each person with a handshake. Then ask for their name so I could give them a name tag. I memorised every name before each event. People thought this was wonderful.
It was my survival technique. When you shake someones hand and look them in the eye they are less likely to heckle you. And if you remember their wife’s name, well, she’ll keep him in line.
I designed the first 90 minutes of the event to scare the hell out of everyone.
I detailed how advice from their accountants, their bankers, and their attorneys, hurt them. This was easy to point out because I had many stories showing how such advice had cost many business owners their homes.
Nobody ever left at the break. Because the answers came after the break.
Except once. Five minutes before the break a fellow at the back jumped up and stormed out. He muttered something like “I can’t take any more of this”. I thought my world would end.
I thought this might be the last event I ever did.
I refunded the man. It seemed the right thing to do.
For the next five years I waited for another such incident. It never happened again.
And then something interesting happened.
A fellow came up to me after an event, and said, “I attended a seminar of yours in Cape Town a long time ago. I left in the middle. You probably don’t remember. “
“Ah, yes, the Monte Carlo building, you were sitting on the left-hand side at the back, November 1996…” I said.
He apologised. He told me I pressed so many buttons he left before he burst into tears.
I told my daughter this story. How often we feel we are under attack. And how it has nothing to do with us. Rather, it’s something going on in somebody else’s head.
Don Miguel Ruiz says it best in his outstanding book, The Four Agreements. “Don’t take anything personally.”
This is especially true for us South Africans. We carry our hearts on our sleeves. We yell at a cyclist who swerves to avoid a child in the street and inconveniences us by falling under our wheels.
When somebody else does something which hurts us, we think he did it just to hurt “me”. We build up this story in our heads. It gets much more airtime than it deserves.
Rather invest your headspace in finding a way round this new cloud. Somebody sent me a wonderful segment of a poem this morning. It set me chasing the poet, Rabindranath Tagore. One of his famous quotations says it well:
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.
What a fine approach to the issues we face each day. Enjoy yours…