What Did You Give Them To Remember You By?
The most persuasive I have ever been was in a camper behind a circus tent in Essen, Germany, convincing a family of performers to leave behind everything they knew. Their language, their home, which was the very camper we were crammed into, their prescribed way of life, and the audiences who already loved them, all for a different kind of life in America, a country they had never been to, with a company they knew only through me. Think about the trust that decision requires, and what it takes to earn it in an afternoon. Reputation carried some of the weight, since reputation is trust earned at scale over time, but the afternoon still had to do the rest, face to face.
That was the job, in tents, RVs, gymnasiums, dressing rooms, and conference rooms. I sat at tables with executives from Disney, DreamWorks, and Sesame Street, people whose entire job is protective suspicion, and persuaded them I could be trusted with the most beloved IP in the world. In those rooms I was fluent. I knew what to lead with, how to speak the language of stewardship, and mainly when to stop talking entirely. Then someone at a dinner says "tell me about yourself," and the fluency leaves the building.
You may know this feeling. The presentation you give gets multiple drafts, a run-through in the mirror, and a performance for your dog. The moments where opinions of you actually get formed but you underestimate are improvised: the dinner seat, the elevator, the hallway, the ten minutes after the meeting ends or the three minutes before it begins, the conference your company sent you to where you returned with no new connections. Those in-between moments have no script, no agenda, and no slide behind you doing half the work. There is no discreet earpiece with a comms department cuing you from a studio somewhere. So you meet the smart, powerful leaders in the room, and the version of you that gets described later is vaguer than the real thing, if you get described at all. Let's face it, what did you even give them to remember you by?
I want to be careful, because the easy conclusion is the wrong one. The people I'm describing are not shy and they are not underqualified. They are usually the most substantive person at the table and by all means belong in that room. The problem is that this particular failure is invisible. Blow a keynote and you know it almost instantly, be forgettable at a dinner and nothing happens at all. Nobody emails to say the seat next to you belonged to your next board chair, or investor, or partner, and that the conversation went nowhere. There is no scoreboard for the in-between moments, so we file them under small talk, or tell ourselves there was no chemistry, and move on.
Chemistry takes an unfair share of the blame. We talk about connection like something that either happens or doesn't, and I would argue connection responds to preparation the way everything else does. I built moments engineered to feel spontaneous for a living, and the performers who seemed most effortlessly themselves were the most rehearsed people in the building. Preparation is what makes room for spontaneity. It made their luck look like luck. One condition, though, and it is the whole condition. What you prepare has to be true. A polished version of someone you are not gets received quickly for exactly what it is, and confidence cannot grow in that soil.
There is a reason smart, prepared people still struggle in these moments, and after years of watching it in others and catching it in myself, I've come to believe it is one of two reasons. For some, the answers underneath are completely settled. They know who they are, what they represent, and what they bring to a room. The sentence just fails them, and everything true about them comes out sounding like a job title with adjectives. For others, the sentence cannot be written yet, because the person underneath is mid-revision. A new chapter, new ambitions, an expertise that hasn't been renamed for where it's headed next. It's the same silence at the dinner table, but two entirely different problems. I've stood on both sides of that line, and my own answer to "what do you do" has changed more than once, an evolving story I have told you before and will tell again another time.
So the useful thing to sit with this week is which side is yours? Three small assignments, none of which require you to change anything yet. After your next meeting, notice what you do with the ten minutes that follow it. When someone asks what you do, listen to your own answer the way a stranger would, then ask yourself honestly whether you dislike the words or whether the answers underneath the words are still moving. Nothing to fix, just watch yourself in the casual moments and take notes.
The words problem and the identity problem each deserve their own space, so that is where we're headed.
From Your Biggest Champion,
Nicole
P.S. This comes directly out of the work I do with executives on exactly these moments. If a specific room is looming for you, reach out and I can help. I make memories for a living and you are worth remembering.
