Hammarskjold was met at the airport in Peking by Chou En-lai, the urbane second man behind China’s revolution, who was known as a sophisticate and an intellectual by Western standards. Chou didn’t ask Hammarskjold, “What brings you to town?” And Hammarskjold didn’t tell him. Dr. John Stoessinger, a former high-ranking official of the UN Secretariat, tells us the conversation between Chou and Hammarskjold took a decidedly different tack.
Chou noticed the top of a book jutting provocatively‘from the pocket of Dag Hammarskjold’s raincoat. It was Martin Buber’s I and Thou, not exactly the kind of reading a flight attendant is likely to hand you instead of Newsweek.
Chou could see only a word or two of the front cover. He bit. “What are you reading?” Chou asked.
That gave Hammarskjold the chance to flash the rest of the cover.
“Are you a Martin Buber fan?” asked Chou. Hammarskjold was more than a fan. He was, in fact, translating Buber’s work into Swedish at the moment.
Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski would have greeted that news with only limited enthusiasm. Hammarskjold, though, had “prepared his brief’ on Chou En-lai. The Chinese Communist leader, as Hammarskjold knew he would, instantly mirved into eighteen different conversations, all animated, about literature, translations, poetry, philosophy, education, the Orient, the Occident, illiteracy, escape reading, writers’ egos, and Great Thoughts.
The conversational trickle between Chou and Hammarskjold had already broadened into a brook before the official party even cleared the airport. It grew into a creek, a stream, a river. Then it developed rapids. By the time Hammarskjold was set to return to New York it had become a raging torrent.
The two men embraced warmly before Hammarskjold mounted the steps to the plane. They exchanged congratulations, best wishes, a few laughs, and promises to work together for “peace.”
Not one word, however, was ventured by Hammarskjold— nor volunteered by Chou—about the twenty-one American fliers.
Neither one Got to the Point.
That did not mean, however, that the point was ungotten to.
Three weeks after his return to UN headquarters, on the occasion of his birthday, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold received a telegram from Peking informing him that all twenty-one American fliers were about to be released!
Rudyard Kipling said, “Softly, softly catchee monkey!”
Cousin Guemey in North Carolina puts its slightly differently. “When you’re in too much of a rush,” says Guemey, “you’re liable to pass more than you catch up with!”
Whose style is preferable?
That’s an easy one.
It’s the style of whichever of the parties is the one who’s supposed to wind up saying yes.
Talking Up to the Intimidator
The young lieutenant was paying his courtesy call on the commanding general of the base to which he’d just been assigned.
Captains are occasionally offered coffee by the general’s wife. A major or a light colonel might be offered something stronger. A bird colonel or a brigadier general might even be invited to remain for dinner.
A lieutenant, though, is supposed to arrive on time, remain no longer than ten minutes, then rise and crisply take his leave.
The lieutenant’s timing was stopwatch perfect. At precisely ten minutes after his arrival he stood up, marched across the living room toward the general, and, hand outstretched, said, “General, I’m very happy to be assigned here. I’m sure you and I are going to get along very well together.”
“You, Lieutenant,” replied the general without offering his own hand for shaking, “will do the getting along!”
“All men are created equal” may be nice poetry, but it’s lazy and misleading civics. By the time we’re old enough to deal with anybody outside our family, it’s too long after each of us was created for us to be equal anymore. Besides, what that “equality” really means is that all of us are created equal in the eyes of the law.
That doesn’t help you feel too much equality with the Intimidator behind the desk who’s kept you waiting thirty minutes, looks like he’d love to get rid of you in thirty seconds, and whose yes or no by the end of the meeting decides whether you win or lose this chronological comer of your career.
Every conversation falls into one of three categories. You’re either talking down (giving an order to a waiter), talking up (applying for a job) or talking straight ahead (to the great ole bunch of boys and girls at the party). The young lieutenant’s failure was forgetting which one of those situations obtained for him at that moment.
A lot of people simply don’t stop to ascertain the rank of the various players (“where the power lies”), or they’re in a constant state of one-man guerrilla warfare against the system. They refuse to talk like an underling merely because they’re the one asking for the job. Their attitude is “That firm has a need. I have services to offer. We will bargain eyeball-to-eyeball as equals.”
Those people usually wind up asking for jobs a lot.
If King Solomon, in all his wisdom and fairness, were to come down and rule on the “system” of today, his ruling would probably read, in part, “Yes, it is lamentable that those you want to reach are so hard to get, that they don’t return your calls, that they always suggest you call back after the first of the month, that thereupon they say their hands are tied until after Thanksgiving, that they can’t get their hands untied before Christmas, that they grudgingly make appointments and casually cancel them through robot-sounding secretaries on the very day of the meeting after you’ve spent all that time and energy psyching yourself up for the challenge, that they keep you waiting in a room with no coffee and dull magazines, that they do all they know how to do to make you feel weak and unimportant—all that is lamentable. It is all, however, thoroughly legal, and if those you seek favor with and favors from choose to play according to those rules, there’s nothing you can do except (a) not call them or (b) swallow it and pay the price.
“It may feel that lengths of your small intestine are being unraveled and minted into coins that you must lay upon the counter to gain admission.” Unkind, yes. Unfair, no.
“He who needs the warmth,” King Solomon would conclude, “must fan the flame.”
You need not grovel, crawl, flagellate yourself like a Portuguese priest, or push a peanut with your nose from the reception area to die door of the office whose occupant you seek to persuade.
You need only “salute”—and do the “getting along.” President Harry Truman is supposed to have been the first to say, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
If you can’t do the salute, get out of the parade.
Dogs get a lot of praise from people for their ability to “smell fear.” People, in this case, are uncharacteristically modest. People can smell fear as well as dogs. The difference is, dogs who smell fear usually just bark. People bite!
So stamp out fear! That’s not quite as easily done as said, but neither is it anywhere nearly as hard as most fearful people fantasize.
Early in his political career, Winston Churchill, the man who later literally used the English language as a weapon against Hider at a time when England had little else, had a terrible fear of public speaking. He conquered it, biographers tell us, with a device a California-based entrepreneur today might well stretch, flesh out, repackage with a touch of Eastern philosophy, and make millions marketing in books, seminars, and cassettes.
Churchill, upon rising and taking the podium, would search the crowd to find the stupidest-looking face in the hall. Once he seized upon it, he’d say to himself, “Who am I to be intimidated by a roomful of those>"
As a talk show host, I tried to test all the whacky-sounding things that came across my broadcast windshield over the years: transcendental meditation, biorhythms, biofeedback, the Canadian Air Force exercises, telepathy, levitation, teleportation, foot reflexology, and at least eighteen different kinds of yoga including one upside down. (By far
the most life-lifting and effective was cutting down on sugar!)
People on radio and TV get interviewed a lot by eighth-graders assigned to write theme papers on people in various professions. They ask great questions. A typical eighth-grade question is, “Was there ever anybody you interviewed whom you didn’t start taking seriously until much later?’’
The answer is yes; several, in fact, and none more towering in that category than Dr. Gyula Denes.
Broadcasting is a religion that requires no confessional; nonetheless, I owe a big one to Dr. Denes. I brought him on the air several times in the early 1960’s—not to accord serious attention to his work but to ridicule it! At least I was gentle with him. Other broadcasters dismissed him as a nut.
Dr. Denes, an exquisitely accented Hungarian psychologist, had a studio in New York where he taught self-assertiveness before it was fashionable or even known. He specialized in the quick fix. Was your problem fear of asking your boss for a raise? No problem. Dr. Denes put you on a “stage” in the middle of his studio with a dummy made up to look like a boss. He then invited you to go ahead and ask him for a raise.
Dr. Denes would sit like a film director or a fencing coach in the shadows and act like a Hungarian thunderstorm. He’d ridicule his client, criticize his technique, taunt him, tease him, coach him, and bawl him out until he saw and heard what could pass as a proud employee convincingly asking a boss for a raise.
If you were also fearful of asking beautiful women for a date, Dr. Denes didn’t try to sell you another round of therapy.
He simply removed the “boss” hat from the dummy, slapped on a woman’s wig (of the appropriate color), and ordered you to get out there and ask! He’d wince and complain when he heard nervousness. He luxuriated when he heard progress. He kept on exhorting you to increasingly better “performances” asking that dummy for a date until he was ready to pronounce you “cured.”
You may not believe it until you try it, but that kind of earnest make-believe becomes real. If England’s wars were won on the playing fields of Eton, dates and raises were surely won in Dr. Denes’s humble little studio in the days just before the media made stars of oddball innovators like Dr. Denes.
Nothing is easier than deciding which encounters you find -difficult. Once you do, you can be your own Dr. Denes. Go into a room somewhere and “rehearse” your way through the difficulty. Let the lamp be the boss, the woman, the man, the personnel director, the judge, the IRS investigator—whomever you find formidable. Don’t just think your lines. Don’t whisper, don’t mumble. Belt them out exactly the way you’d like to in real life.
Don’t relent until you’re convinced you’ve wiped away that slimy, oleaginous fear that you know is gumming up your projection lens.
A variation on Dr. Denes’s principle is the scripted telephone call. When you know that your nervousness and insecurity will rupture through your crust and send forth those giveaway plumes and fumes of fear, when you know good and well your confidence will emulsify immediately after “Hello,” when the silence on the other end of the line says, “Okay, what do you want?”; when you know you will “break under torture” and instead of good, strong traffic utter nothing but a mess of “uhhs” and “aahs” and weak phrasings and flimsy chuckles—when you know all that, write it down.
Once I was trying to get friendly with a woman who inadvertently did me a huge favor by being so intimidating that I could hear myself dissolve right there on the phone whenever I called her. Usually your tendency is to suppose you’re doing more or less okay; you don’t realize how much “fear gas” pours through your sundered fissures when the pressure rises.
I decided to write my part of the phone call, beginning with “Hello”! Down the page a few lines the script forked into two columns, spelling out two different options depending on how she answered my questions on whether she intended to go to Rome the next weekend,.
It worked—not in some fairy-tale way with us flying to Rome together, but she definitely began to regard me as a legitimate player. Up to then I’d been nothing more in her perception than a little goldfish sucking oxygen along the inside of a tank. I changed. I improved. My telephone personality became more resilient, al dente. I no longer appeared gelatinized in fear.
The reason Dr. Denes’s dummy drills and my scripted phone calls pay off probably harks back to the old Boy Scout handbook command (remember?) to find the exit you’ll use in case of emergency the instant you take your seat in a movie theater. If there’s a panic, you’ll panic, too. You, however, will panic in the right direction.
Nobody has ever gotten into legal trouble taping his own end of a telephone conversation. Try it. Try it before you take any corrective measures. Can you smell your own fear? Then try it again after a few minutes of actual rehearsal. Or use a script to carry you well into the conversation. The contrast is amazing. It’s inspiring to hear and feel how much can be accomplished merely by making the effort to stamp out fear!
The exercise may make you feel foolish.
You will, however, no longer sound foolish to the one you’re talking up to who makes you nervous.
You can lose those personal battles just by revealing fear. That’s not the only way to lose, just the quickest. You can also wind up losing, no matter how confidently you come across, if you squander that confidence on stupidities or on ill-advised or unproductive lines of approach.
Don’t forget, you asked for this meeting. Don’t expect the Intimidator, smug behind his command desk, to give you much more help than, “Why don’t you have a seat right there?” You must “fan the flames.”
You can score good early points by knowing precisely when to knife in and get to the point, if the Intimidator doesn’t bring you to it first. You win applause, even if the Intimidator tries to cover it with a professional semi-frown, by sensing precisely when civilities, small talk, preliminaries, and getting-to-know-you’s are exhausted and bringing things down to business then—and not two and a half seconds later than then!
I once interviewed an extraordinarily successful insurance executive who’d built many empires in his industry, starting as a salesman. I asked him if he had one recipe for success he could boil down to fit on a bumper sticker, or inside a fortune cookie.
He staggered me with the power of his reply.
He was walking down a hotel corridor past an open door one day early in his career and overheard a seminar going on inside a conference room. He wasn’t a participant. He hadn’t even known it was going on. He was just a passerby, and he heard one and only one thing the speaker said.
“The formula for success is to concentrate first on doing the things the failures hate doing most and don’t get around to until last!”
To adapt this wisdom to Making People Talk and apply it to your next “up-talk” situation, change it around to this: “Avoid all the small talk the ‘failures’ instinctively jump to first.”
You’re there. You’ve cleared the downstairs receptionist, the floor receptionist, his or her receptionist, and you’re seated, emotionally tumultuously but physically quite comfortably, before the throne.
Regardless of how many times you’ve seen modem headquarters of successful businesses, you’re wiped out anew every single time. You marvel at the bold sweep of the architecture, the imaginative spacings, the green belts and the flowered squares that suggest life, possibility, happiness, and success. You admire the elevators outside the buildings that make even tough cookies like you want to sit down and write a poem. You marvel at the expense of it all. You’re impressed.
And you sally into your interview and get things rolling by saying, “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Nice place you’ve got here” is English all right, and does indeed seek to express a quite appropriate approval of a workplace that shows the investment of a lot of money, talent, and love.
But one wonders if an ant really understands die planetary globe. One wonders if the gull really appreciates the ocean he spears
fish out of. And one wonders if a person capable of coming on with a line like “Nice place you’ve got here” really understands the niceness of that place.
Let’s do better, rung by rung up the ladder.
“I couldn’t believe your headquarters was as nice on the inside as I’d always heard.”
“I’ll bet you can really get inspiration working in a setting like this.”
“No matter what happens to you on the outside, you’ve officially beaten the system during the third of your life that takes places inside here.”
“Do you mind if I talk slowly? I hate the thought of leaving here!”
The objective is to get as far away from “Nice place you got here” and occupy the high ground. Much better than lobbing in a compliment, kerplunk, is starting with an assumed compliment built into your remark, then asking an intelligent question or making an intelligent comment from there.
The Yankee Cool approach can also rankle the proud host of an outstanding workplace. Ignoring the magnificence of what you’ve just been led through as though “All of us successful types these days surround ourselves with goodies like these,” and proceeding straight to your agenda without so much as a laudatory peep in praise of the environment, puts a subtle extra weight on your wings. Pilots call it drag. You don’t need any.
One of two things will happen after you are hand-shaken, seated, and either offered coffee or told through silence that no such offer is forthcoming. The Intimidator will hand you a conversational hook on a platinum platter (much to be preferred over coffee!), or he’ll sit there and wait to see what kind of stuff you do when you’re thrust onstage without a warmup.
If you’re handed a hook, play with it, stay with it. If you’ve done your homework properly, studied his company’s history and activities and combined that information with a blurb fresh from that very morning’s financial pages, you may not want to delay your stardom by playing with the Intimidator’s offering. Like a comic who knows his opening will annihilate them, you may be itching for the chance to get “on.”
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