Now class, we’re going to do downwards dog
📸 by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels
I was on a founders training programme a few years ago, in a small group with a woman who used to be a clown. An actual clown, touring Europe with a circus.
She told us what they teach you at clown school. Which is a real place, apparently, and I had questions.
First thing, she said. Before anything else. You walk out in front of the crowd and you look up. You look around at all the faces. You pause. You hold it.
And then you begin.
You don’t rush in. You choose the moment you start.
A room full of suits
A founder I worked with a few years ago used to go blank in pitch meetings.
She and her co-founders had built something they believed in completely, and they’d reached the stage of needing money to move it forward. Which meant rooms full of people in suits who held the purse strings.
She’d stand up to talk about a product she knew inside out. And she’d lose the words. Everything she’d planned to say, gone. She’d come out of those meetings sounding like someone who didn’t understand her own business, and spend the rest of the day in regret about letting her co-founders down.
She had a serious career behind her. Years of expertise, and it was her expertise the whole thing was built on. None of it helped in that room.
What was making her freeze was how much she cared.
The stakes felt enormous because the thing genuinely mattered, and the size of that pushed everything else out of her head.
You can’t care less on request. So we went looking for something she could bring into the room that wasn’t at stake, and landed on a value she’d lost track of somewhere in the funding rounds. Fun.
She was also a yoga teacher. So she experimented.
Slide deck up behind her. Co-founders ready. She’d step out, look round the room, take a breath, and think: ‘now class, we’re going to do downwards dog’.
All those suits, in their glass and steel offices. Bums in the air, heads bowed in front of her.
Then she’d smile and start. And she was good.
The job I didn’t need
I’ve had that state of confident poise myself. Most reliably when I didn’t need the job.
I’ve gone into interviews already fairly happily employed, and it changes everything. I’m assessing them. Do I want this? Do I want these people? The questions come easily because I’m not auditioning, I’m deciding.
The most extreme version was an interview years ago for a job I wasn’t entirely convinced was real. It had that quality about it. I went for the experience, half expecting to discover it was a scam, and the only thing I stood to lose was an afternoon. I was completely relaxed and I was the best version of myself in that room.
I got the job.
So I know exactly what I’m like when I don’t need something. Every time, I got that for free. The circumstances handed it to me and I didn’t have to do anything.
What’s harder to figure out is how to find it when nobody hands it to me. When I do want or need the thing, and I can’t talk myself out of needing it, and pretending otherwise would be transparent to everyone including me.
Two clients, one day apart
Two clients this week, one day apart, same goal. How to be more confident in a room where everyone else seems more senior? Both had presentations or interviews coming up.
The one yesterday said she does best when she flips it round in her head and remembers she’s interviewing them too.
The one this morning wanted to remember that the people across the table were human. I asked if she’d ever been on the other side of it. She had. And what she remembered was how much she’d wanted the candidates to do well. Being on their side. Hoping they’d show what they could do.
I’ve been on plenty of panels and it’s exactly that. You find yourself asking extra questions to give someone another chance to say more.
She also described a thought that turns up in interviews. ‘I just want this over.’ And then what it makes her do. Rush. Not pause. Answer in half sentences. Treat getting out of the room as the win.
Then she got to the useful bit herself. One of her values is courage. So I asked her. “What would someone with that value be doing in that room?”
Pausing. Asking for a moment to collect her thoughts. Not rushing. Being curious. Asking questions back. Making it a conversation rather than an examination.
That list works in a pitch just as well. The founder found her version of it in a yoga class.
You can do every one of those while feeling exactly as you currently feel.
The feeling tends to follow the behaviour rather than the other way around.
You look up. You look around. You pause.
Then you begin…