Andy

One day my trombone teacher and I had a conversation about my stage fright. Stage fright can manifest both mentally and physically. Shorter breathing and quivering appendages are not great when you need to breath and blow with good posture. It’s not a pleasant experience. Perhaps the worst part though, is the non-stop thinking about whether you’ve practiced enough and what the people in the audience will think if you make a mistake (or twelve).

So it’s important to know two things – first, you can control how much you prepare and second, you cannot control what people in the audience think. But despite the fact that you cannot control what people think, what you need to be aware of is your assumptions. You’re assuming the people are thinking the worst things and that they’re thinking them about you and your performance. And, just like most situations in life, you are almost certainly wrong about those assumptions.

Unlike most situations in life, when you put yourself out there – whether its on a stage performing, or on the court playing, or in the meeting presenting – not only are the people not thinking bad things about you – most of them are rooting for you.

If you do well, they will be excited to tell people they know you. They’ll love the impact you have on them. They’ll remember your idea and how you executed it. They’ll be inspired to do their own thing.

So when you’re not sure, when you’re second-guessing, when you’re afraid – remember that if you’ve prepared, you are as ready as you can be.

And when you look into the audience, as the self-doubt starts to creep in, just remember: we’re rooting for you.

Is it because you need to fill a gap in the team skillset? Is it because you need expertise in a function? Are you hiring because you have too much work to do?

Or do people keep talking about growth and “more people” is what you think growth is?

Are other people getting promoted because they have bigger teams and so you’re making a bigger team?

Is there an initiative that you think is necessary but maybe you’re having a tough time articulating why to your colleagues?

From a business perspective there are good reasons to hire and bad, and some businesses incentivize the bad (inadvertently or not).

It isn’t always your fault when you hire for the wrong reason, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your eyes wide open about it.

It isn’t that your idea is bad. It isn’t that you’re mean. Or too agreeable. It’s not your clothes. I guess it could be your smell but here’s hoping you shower regularly.

They just don’t know you. They don’t know where you’re coming from. They haven’t experienced working with you. They don’t get your expertise and they don’t know why they need it. They definitely don’t know your sense of humor.

The good news is you haven’t let anybody down. The challenge is that you don’t have many opportunities to make an impression, so when you do get an opportunity, don’t squander it.

When you have the attention, make it worth their while.

Making it worth their while doesn’t mean they need to know you better. It doesn’t mean you talk about how great you are or how good your plan is. It means showing you understand them, so that what you do sticks to their thing in a way that makes it better.

No one wants to help someone they don’t know. But most people do appreciate someone who understands them, listens to them, and wants their thing to be great just like they do.

So figure out how your thing helps their thing. Show you seek to listen and understand. Offer to help.

Then they’ll get to know you.

Timing is everything. Where we are and when can dictate whether a project succeeds or fails, a relationship starts or doesn’t, or whether we respond well in a heated moment (or not so well).

There are definitely better times to start or quit. Better times to posit your suggestion or stay quiet. Times when you’ll be lauded and times when you’ll be shunned. So how do you judge?

One of my favorite sayings is “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.” This is a great reminder to get started on an idea, one that you’ve had for a little while. One where you’ve been using timing as an excuse (whether you don’t know the perfect time or think you missed the perfect time). Chances are if an idea is sticky enough to keep resurfacing in your mind, this is a clue you should take action.

Then of course there’s reading the room. These are the times when you really want something to work. You think something is a great idea. You may have even mentioned the idea in passing to test it’s reception. In these cases people may agree with you, but not share your excitement or verify your thinking. Or maybe people can’t understand or explain what it is you want to do. Worse yet, maybe you can’t explain it. Reading the room also includes factors outside of your direct control – the company’s not doing well, the economy is uncertain, or something generally is telling you “not yet.”

The trick is there’s no such thing as perfect timing – perfect timing is mostly hindsight bias after all. There is only knowing yourself and understanding the environment you’re operating in. There’s telling a story people buy into (or not).

So if you want to time something right, get to know yourself better. Observe the people and the world around you. Get really clear about the story you tell.

Don’t worry about perfect timing. Worry instead about using the time you have to focus on the right things. Anything else is just wasting time.

Work on the problem – throw yourself at the problem until it is no longer a problem, or at least until its diminished enough to be a headache you can live with. To do this well, you need to spend big blocks of time getting to the root of the issue; to take it a part until you understand it. Then spend more big blocks of time creating and testing the solve. Then a little less time implementing the solve. Total time depends on how complicated the problem is and how much authority you have to fix it.

Ignore the problem – if the problem is outside the core function of your work, transitory, or simply annoying, you should probably ignore the problem. If it gets more annoying, consider method 1.

Hire someone to work on the problem – if your problem is the volume of work that needs to be done and you are confident you can hire and train well, then hire – it frees up time for you to work on big problems.

If the problem requires specialized knowledge or you don’t know how to understand the problem, then pay for an expert. Be prepared to follow their advice and challenge your assumptions if you don’t agree with that advice.

If it is a big problem you already understand then consider the trade-offs between spending time to hire versus your other options. Hiring means you have to bring someone on, train them, help them deeply understand the business and the big problem, and them task them with solving the problem. Then be OK with how they solve it (because it probably won’t be how you would solve it). This will take much more time than you solving a well-understood problem on your own.

Most problems can be ignored and many problems do not require hiring. By no means should you hire someone to solve a problem that can and should be ignored. You will waste both time and money.

Volume problems aren’t really a problem, they’re a signal that what you’re doing works well and that your output is appreciated. They also mean it’s time to grow.

If you can’t articulate what your problem is in the first place, then you probably don’t have one. And no one needs a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.