You know how when a dog chases a car, the car leaves?
From the dog’s perspective, the car left because he chased it. Sure, from our human perspective, we know the car was going to leave anyway. But from the dog’s perspective, chasing cars is 100% effective. Chase a car and it leaves.
Maybe we humans are a bit like that when we think about success. We attribute success to something we did, when actually maybe things were going that way already, we just happened to be nearby.
What does that have to do with presentations? Maybe we shouldn’t take the results so personally. If our idea gets turned down, maybe it’s because it was already destined to get turned down. Maybe they didn’t say “no” because we sweated too much, or our hands were in the wrong place. Maybe it was just going to come back “no” whoever was up there.
Over the years I’ve earned a sizable chunk of my income from presentation training, so I realize that this is a little blasphemous for me to be saying. After all, I should probably be pretending that what I do is the key to your success in life.
When I say maybe we should be more like dogs, here’s what I mean:
When a car doesn’t leave, the dog doesn’t sit down and start beating himself up, saying, “You know, maybe if I had barked differently, that car would have left faster.” No, he just lays down in the sun, or he sniffs another dog’s butt.
Maybe we should be more like that. Not the sniffing butts part, that might get a little weird. But the part about thinking there was something we could do. As they say in one of my favorite movies, “Sometimes you’re up, and sometimes you’re down. It all works out in the end, Georgie.”
Oh, and before I go, one more thing (you didn’t think I was just going to walk away pretending I wasn’t at least a LITTLE bit of the key to your success in life, right?)…
If you want to make sure everyone thinks your presentation skills rock, find out how to only bark at the cars that are already leaving. Back in the early days of the podcast a couple years ago, Alper and I did an episode related to that:
