[This is the ninth post in a series about overcoming the setbacks we all face in sales. For the first of the series, click here.]
Our last post left Karl Wallenda and six members of his family after their tragic fall during a high-wire performance of their famous seven-person pyramid. They performed the same feat again the very next night after two relatives died and several others were seriously injured before a Detroit circus audience of 7,000.
Am I going to tell you the show must go on?
No.
I’m going to tell you about the importance of doing something successful right after you’ve failed.
Let me tell you another quick story. In high school I tried out for our annual play. My brother was stage manager, and his stories made me think it would be a good way to meet girls.
The experience was both less than I’d hoped and more than I expected.
Our play was a music comedy set in the days of chivalry. It required me to appear on stage in tights. Worse, I had to lift my dancing partner.
I am seriously dancing impaired and was not a powerhouse in the upper body.
After they realized what a mistake they had made by admitting me to the cast, the director and choreographer paired me up with the skinniest little slip of a dancer in the show.
Even so, I could barely lift Angela unless she pushed off with her legs, like a lithe little frog. With her help I could her up in the air, barely. But then I had to keep her there long enough to finish the eight count. I spent most of the weeks of our rehearsals staggering off balance and being impressed by the amount of body heat girls could generate.
Angela leapt mostly without fear into my scrawny arms. Maybe she didn’t sense how anxious I felt about catching her.
One night she proved her courage as clearly as I proved my ineptitude. I was supposed to lift her high over my head, my back to the audience and her flying toward them horizontally with her back arched. This was the equivalent of me pressing a 105-pound barbell, turned 90 degrees off its normal axis, with no solid handle to grip.
I lost my hold on Angela’s tiny waist. Her pelvis rotated slightly before she fell onto my face and landed on her hip with startling thump to the stage floor. Cast members who hadn’t seen my fumble stopped to see where the sand bag had fallen from the rigging above.
The choreographer – I’ll call her Miss Fifi — was not much bigger than Angela. She jumped from her folding chair, clasped her hands to her heart, and let out a gasp worthy of Duncan’s widow in Macbeth.
I helped Angela off the floor. She tried to walk the stiffness out of her hip. If she’d been a horse, they would have shot her then and there. I apologized till she stopped me with a withering look.
Once Miss Fifi decided Angela would need neither a pistol nor an ambulance, she walked to the center of the stage and clapped her hands twice.
“People. Listen to me here,” she said. “Scott and Angela have given me the opportunity to teach you all an important lesson about dancing. It’s also a lesson about life. When you fall, you must get up and do it again. You must execute the lift that caused you to fall, and you must do it immediately. If you don’t do this, you’ll grow more and more afraid of it. The longer you wait, the harder it will be for you ever to do it again. Your failure will haunt your memories.”
In other words, you must quickly substitute your memory of failure with one of success.
As a corollary, don’t let yourself quit trying to do someting right after you’ve screwed it up.
My story has a happy ending.
I tried the lift again with Angela while everyone watched. Adrenaline saved the day.
Our play opened and closed to uncritical reviews. No one singled out my bad dancing.
Angela endured six public performances and sustained no further injuries at my hands.
She later became a successful attorney. My friends tell me she is now a substantial matron. They say her husband spends a lot of time at the gym. He is unusually good shape for a married man of his age. Loves Broadway.
Miss Fifi clipped the reviews from our school paper and mounted them in her scrapbook alongside memorabilia from her other triumphs of high-school choreography. For years she ran a dance studio and lived in the apartment above it, caring for eight cats. If she’s still alive, I am sure she does not remember me.
I abandoned my life in theater when the final curtain fell on our production. No regrets.
I have lifted many other people over my head without a mishap. None was older than four.
I’ve learned to focus on what I do well. I know my limits. I delegate, hire out or try to avoid doing the many things I do badly.
I still can’t dance, and neither can my wife. This seems to matter only at weddings, and only to us.
Sometimes when I see a slight young woman (a rare sight these days!), I think how gently I could catch her in my arms. The thought causes me no fear for her safety and no threat to my self esteem.
What does this have to do with selling? Everything.
You screw up more often than you think you should. You cringe. You try again.
Other people quickly forget the failures that you sometimes struggle to put out of your mind. Eventually you paper them over with the memory of your successes.
Life goes on.
– Scott Silverback