The Other Tony Robbin’s

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somebody wished me happy birthday last week by calling me the other Tony Robbins.

A guy I was in Toastmasters with, years back. He wasn’t being cute about it and he wasn’t hedging — not a smaller one or a version of one. The other one.

I smiled when I read it. That’s the honest first reaction. It felt good.

And then I had to sit with the fact that I’ve spent most of this year putting distance between myself and exactly that.

I’ve written here that my worst work was the motivational stuff — younger me wanting to be the voice that fired somebody up on a Tuesday, with no settled position underneath it, producing motivational-shaped words that meant nothing.

I want to be careful, because that was true of a particular version of me at a particular time and I’ve been letting it stand in for more than it should.

By the time I got to Toastmasters I was actually doing the thing. Not performing it. Doing it.

There’s that line about life being what happens while you’re busy making other plans. That’s the part I’ve had backwards. I spent those years thinking of the club as something I was passing through on the way to whatever came next — the real career, the real work, the thing I was preparing for.

And the whole time I was in a room every other week doing exactly what I now say I want to do with my life, and I didn’t count it, because I was planning.

Here’s what I think he was actually seeing, and it wasn’t a stage.

My Toastmasters years weren’t mostly about my own speeches. Most of it was coaching. Mentoring. Leading clubs, building groups, sitting with nervous people and working on their material with them until they could stand up and be heard. Thirteen years of that.

What I wanted then is what I want now — to help somebody see themselves in a different light than the one they’ve been using, and to move on something because of it.

That’s not a keynote. It’s a conversation, and it’s the part of me he was pointing at.

I’ve noticed something about how I talk to people now.

I don’t talk about myself much anymore. Not as a discipline, and not because I’ve become humble. It’s that at some point I worked out that most people would rather be talking about their own lives than hearing about mine, and the conversations got considerably better once I got out of the way.

So I ask. What are you working on. How’s it actually going. And then I listen, and if I can hand something back that helps, I hand it back.

He’s not the only one who’s said some version of this to me over the years. Several people have told me they were glad to have been in a club with me, or that something I said landed. Every one of those has meant more than a trophy.

If I got to pick the comparison, though, it wouldn’t be Robbins.

People have differing opinions on the guy. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But I’d want to be Zig Ziglar.

Same work — motivating people, building skill, getting somebody to move. Different foundation under it. Ziglar was a devout follower of Jesus and his whole thing ran on values and skills acquisition, and the motivation was the delivery vehicle rather than the product.

I’ve said before that younger me copied the vehicle and missed the foundation. Zig’s career as a salesman set him up for his speaking career.

I didn’t feel great today. Deadline I set for myself is already past. There’s a product finished and sitting on a hard drive that nobody can buy yet.

And a guy from my old club thinks I’m the motivational one.

I’d like to be. Not as a brand — as a description of what people actually get when they spend time with me. The difference between those two is most of what I’ve been trying to work out this year, and I don’t have it solved.

But I’ll take the birthday message. It’s a good thing to be mistaken for.

The Showstring

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The truck died on the side of the road somewhere in Oklahoma City with a tank of weed killer in the back.

I was twenty-five, a month into a job spraying lawns, and I got on the radio and told my manager the truck wouldn’t run and asked if somebody could come out.

Nobody was coming out.

What I got instead was him walking me through it over the radio. Pop the hood. Look at this. Try that. I’m standing on the shoulder in the heat with a handset, describing engine parts to a man who wasn’t going to leave his chair.

The throttle linkage had come apart. And the fix — the actual fix, the one that got a company truck running again — was that I took the shoestring out of my own boot and tied it back together.

It worked. I drove the rest of the route.

He congratulated me.

Told me I’d done a great job out there. Sounded genuinely pleased about it, and I don’t think he was being sarcastic. A piece of his equipment had failed, one of his people had fixed it roadside with clothing, and as far as he was concerned the system had worked exactly as designed.

I remember standing there with one boot loose thinking: I am not going to be here long.

A couple of weeks later I told him I’d taken another job.

“All right,” he said. “This is your two weeks’ notice.”

“There’s no two weeks. I start Monday.”

He told me he had to have two weeks.

I said I didn’t care at all. The new place needs me Monday and I’m going Monday. If you want me to finish today’s shift I’ll finish today’s shift, and that’s what you get.

He tried to be angry about it and I watched him try. And there was a second in there — I’ll admit it — where the younger, more agreeable version of me almost apologized.

I didn’t. I have never once regretted it.

That job was a month out of the wilderness year, the stretch after the church work ended when I took whatever would have me. Art gallery, pizza place, lawns, and eventually an insurance office that turned into twenty years of something else entirely.

I’ve thought about that manager since, and what gets me isn’t that he was harsh. He wasn’t, particularly. He was cheap and he was checked out, and those are ordinary failures.

What gets me is the notice.

He wanted two weeks of formality from a man he wouldn’t send a mechanic to. He wanted the protocol observed — the professional courtesy, the proper interval, the way it’s supposed to be done — from a company that had let one of its guys fix a truck with his own shoelace.

I don’t think that ever occurred to him. I don’t think it occurs to most people who ask for it.

I’ve given proper notice at every job since. Two weeks, sometimes more, handoff documents, the whole thing.

Because it was earned, every time.

Lunch and Honesty

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We had lunch today at a pizza place in the city. Shared a pepperoni on cauliflower crust between us, I had wings, and somewhere in there I started telling my wife about the rest of the year.

Not telling her the way I’ve been telling her all year — the running commentary, here’s what I’m working on, here’s what shipped. Actually asking. What do you think matters. What should I be doing right now.

I cannot tell you the last time we sat down and did that on purpose.

She had answers ready, which tells you she knows me and knows how I work. She’s a planner, and she had good questions before she had any advice.

Pivot to the Christmas book I’m revising. Finish the rewrite and get it out by the first of October so the promotion lands in the Christmas season instead of after it. That one’s been sitting half-finished for months and it’s the only thing I’ve got with a seasonal window, and she’s right that a window you miss isn’t a window.

Park the newest novel. Not forever — after. Her reasoning was that until the Christmas book is out, and the piece on intent is out, and the books I’ve already published are actually being promoted, working another novel is spinning the creative wheels while the operational work sits there.

As usual, she’s right on the money.

That’s not encouragement. That’s a plan, delivered over pizza.

Then she said the thing I’ve been turning over since.

When it gets hard, it’s easy to go back and keep creating instead of pushing through the hard part. She’s done it herself, which is how she knew.

That’s the whole diagnosis of my year in one sentence. Two books, an album, something written and posted every single day since January first — and almost nothing sold, because selling is the difficult part and making another thing is the part I’m good at. Creating has been my most productive way of not doing the promotion work.

I’ve circled that conclusion for months. Long conversations with myself, walks, notes, a mid-year review I dragged around on vacation and never opened.

She got there over a shared pizza.

What gets me isn’t that she was right. She’s usually right.

It’s that she knows me and has been paying attention the whole time. She’s seen the work I’ve put in this year, every stack of drafts, every project. She has the most trusted vantage point on me that exists, and I don’t pause often enough to ask for what she can see from it.

There’s no dark reason for that. I’m not protecting anything. We just get busy, and the days go, and the conversation that requires sitting down across from each other and being still for an hour keeps losing to the ones that can happen while somebody’s loading the dishwasher.

She told me she’s proud of me. That she’s watched me work harder this year than she’s seen before.

I needed that more than I’d have admitted before lunch.

I meant to have the intent piece finished a few days ago. I missed that deadline.

I’m not going to dress it up. What I’ve done since is put real accountability in place — people who will ask, out loud, on a date.

My wife is the first of them, and she’s had the best view all along.

I’ve had my head down for most of this year. The voice I trust most is right here at the door, and she’s glad to help.

The Table

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a crack down the middle of my kitchen table. You can’t see it anymore. You can feel it if you know where to run your hand — a faint seam under the finish, right where the two halves of the top were pulled back together.

The table is somewhere around a hundred and fifteen years old. Built, best we can tell, between 1910 and 1915, with fold-down sides so it could shrink against a wall when it wasn’t needed and open up when company came. It isn’t fancy. It’s a farm table, the kind that got built to be used rather than looked at, and it’s where we eat breakfast, where we eat lunch, and where most weekend mornings I set my iPad down with a cup of coffee and think about the day before the day starts.

We didn’t go looking for it. We go looking for old things in general — estate sales, garage sales, antique stores, the kind of Saturday where you drive around with no plan and a little cash and see what somebody’s ready to let go of. My wife and I have done that for a long time. Some people collect a thing. We collect the habit of looking.

A few years ago we pulled up to a garage sale and realized we knew the people.

The table was sitting out there with the rest of what they were selling, and it had a problem. The top was split right down the center and they didn’t know what to do about it. It had been in their family the whole time, as far as they knew — more than a century of it — and now it was cracked and they were moving things on.

We stood in that driveway a long while before any money came out. Where it had come from. How long they’d had it. What it had been to them. They told us and we listened, and then we paid them a fair price and put it in the truck.

My father-in-law is a carpenter and a very good one. He’s shown up here before.

We took him the table and he repaired the top, closed the split, made the two halves one piece again. I did the rest, which was mostly getting the fold-out sides to swing up and hold the way they were supposed to instead of sagging. Nothing about it was hard for him. It took me a couple of tries.

Now we sit at it every day.

I like to think about who else has. A hundred and some years is a lot of breakfasts.

Somebody sat at it at two in the morning with a cup of coffee going cold, trying to decide something. There were arguments at that table and there were the mornings after the arguments. And there were a hundred meals nobody remembers, because they were Tuesday.

I don’t know any of that for a fact. But I know tables, and I know families, and a piece of furniture doesn’t make it to a hundred and fifteen without sitting at the center of a great deal of ordinary life.

We’re careful with our things, so I expect it will outlast us.

But what I keep coming back to is that it had a family before it had us. It wasn’t ours to find. It was theirs to let go of, and they let it go to people who stood in a driveway and asked about it first.

That’s a handoff more than a purchase.

So we look after it. We’ve added a few years to the count.

This morning it held my coffee.

Second Place

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was holding the trophy when he got to me.

Second place. I hate second place trophies. Nobody builds a shelf for them. I’d worked on that speech for weeks, rehearsed it in the truck, rehearsed it in the kitchen, ran it for people who’d tell me the truth, and I walked into that contest expecting to win. Then they read the names in the wrong order and handed me a piece of wood with a little plate on it, and I walked off the stage trying to figure out what had just happened.

I got maybe ten steps.

A man I’d never met stepped in front of me, put a hand out, and said, “Let’s talk about what you could’ve done better.”

Here’s the part I’ve had to be honest with myself about since. He wasn’t wrong to think I needed that conversation. I did. Walking off that stage, the only thing in my head was how did he beat me? I truly didn’t understand. The other speaker was good. I thought I was better. Call it pride or call it competitiveness, whichever fits. I wasn’t mad about losing so much as confused by it, and confusion is worse. Somebody was going to have to explain it to me.

It just wasn’t going to be him.

I’ve given more evaluations in Toastmasters than I can count, and taken more than I’d like to admit.

Feedback is the whole point of the place. Every speech gets one. There’s a person whose job that night is to stand up after you sit down and tell you, in front of everyone, what worked and what didn’t. That sounds brutal from the outside. It isn’t, and the reason it isn’t is the room.

You know the evaluator. You’ve watched them bomb a speech in March. They watched you lose your place in April. You’ve eaten bad cookies together during the break. By the time they stand up to talk about your delivery, you decided months ago whether they get to. The evaluation lands because everything around it was built first.

And when you want feedback from somebody outside the club, you go find them. You pick the person. You ask.

What almost never happens is a stranger walking up cold with a diagnosis.

So when that man opened with what I could’ve done better, I wasn’t hearing an evaluator. I was hearing somebody who’d watched a contest, formed some opinions, and decided my ten seconds off the stage was the right moment to deliver them.

He may have been dead on. I’ll never know.

I said something polite and kept walking, which is about the best I had in me.

I think about that when I’m the one in the audience.

I’ve sat through a lot of speeches from people I don’t know and I’ve had plenty of thoughts about them. What I say afterward, if I say anything, is this: I really enjoyed your speech — if you ever want to talk about it, I’d be glad to.

Then I let it sit.

Most of the time they smile and say thanks and that’s the end of it. Every so often somebody finds me a week later and asks what I saw. Those conversations are good, and they’re good because they asked.

The other contestant beat me.

It took me a while to be able to say that without the word “probably” in front of it. The explanation came eventually, from a couple of people who’d known me for years, who’d heard early versions of that speech and could tell me exactly where it had gone soft.

They were right. He was better that night, and the reasons weren’t mysterious at all once the right people said them out loud.

The trophy’s in a drawer.