The Website of Dr. Mark Goulston

When you demonstrate poise under pressure,
you stop being a service or product,
that people will commoditize
and instead become a person
they will want esteem from.
That is the leverage of “personal authority.”

The following is excerpted from Chapter 3: Move Yourself from “Oh F#@&” to OK from my upcoming book, ““Just Listen” – Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (which you can pre-order).

The best example of coolness under fire I’ve ever seen involved former Secretary of State Colin Powell. In 1996, Powell was the keynote speaker at a national conference for a leading residential real estate company’s top producers. By that point, he’d achieved tremendous popularity with the American public and was being considered as a presidential nominee.

I happened to be in the audience that day, and General Powell had me (and everyone else) in the palm of his hand. He urged the audience to give back to their communities. He spoke passionately of his gratitude for his family, childhood, and friends. And he exhorted us all to “do well by doing good.”

At the end of his talk, he called for questions. Still feeling the warm glow of his inspiring words, we were totally unprepared for what happened next.

“General Powell,” the first questioner said, “I understand that your wife once suffered from depression, had to take medicine, and was even in a mental hospital. Do you want to comment on that?”

You could hear all 8,000 people in the auditorium gasp at the inappropriateness—not to mention the cruelty—of the question. In the silence that followed, we all wondered how Powell would react to being blindsided. Edmund Muskie had thrown away his presidential hopes years earlier, when a reporter asked about his wife’s sanity, and he started to cry. What would Powell do under similar circumstances?

Here’s exactly what he did. He looked at the questioner. He paused for a moment. And then he simply responded: ”Excuse me—the person you love more than anyone is living in hell, and you don’t do whatever you can to get her out. Do you have a problem with that, sir?”

I was in awe. His response was brilliant. It was calm. It was perfect.

And believe me: it wasn’t the first thing General Powell wanted to do. For a split second, he probably wanted to walk down from the podium, grab the idiot who asked the question, and knock his teeth through the back of his head. Because that’s what every one of us would want to do in his place.

But he didn’t give in to anger (even though he had every right to). And he didn’t cry, like Senator Muskie. Instead, he went from “Oh F#@&” to “OK” faster than I’ve ever seen anyone do it.

As a result, he reached me even more deeply than he had with his speech. He reached everyone in the audience and touched them to their core. And I have no doubt he reached the questioner just as powerfully as a fist in the face would have—without having to lift a finger to do it.

That’s poise under pressure. And if you can achieve that same poise, it’ll get you successfully through any stressful, high-stakes encounters that life hands you.

To demonstrate YOUR personal authority, please sign up for the FREE RESOURCES above to learn “Two Questions to Gain People’s Respect and Have Them Treat You Better.” Please leave a comment on this blog post to let me know how it works out for you.

Tags: colin powell, leadership, mark goulston, poise, poise under pressure, respect

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Career, Usable Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.