When Things Don’t Go According to Plan You “TQ”
How I dealt with presenting to a potential business partner that should’ve been canceled
My phone buzzed as soon as the plane landed.
Two text messages came from my boss:
- Jack missed his flight. You’re gonna have to go on your own.
- Do you have the presentation?
Jack is our Salesperson — the only one who knows our product in and out. I was on that flight as his apprentice. Oh, it gets worse…
I don’t have a backup copy of the presentation. I don’t fully understand our product to sell it well to another company. Talking in front of people makes me very uncomfortable.
I was put in a very uncomfortable spot.
So uncomfortable that all I could think of was backing out. I didn’t wanna go through all of that. I texted back, “I don’t have a copy of the presentation? Should we call it off?”, to my boss. He responded, “No, just go anyway to say hi”.
Shoot me!
When you are new, your boss trusts you to represent his company, and you hate disappointing other people, you feel like you have no choice but to push through what’s making you uncomfortable. TQ!
That stands for “Think! Quick!”. I only have two choices: to go or not to go. I can keep figuring out ways to back out from the whole thing or just Nike the hell out of it. But there’s a twist! I didn’t have a choice but to do it.
The more you overthink, the less likely I’m going to do it.
Here are the reasons why I can’t back out:
- I’d look incompetent not only to my boss but also to myself.
- Backing out may relieve me from the uncomfortable situation I was in temporarily. The shame of backing out, however, could haunt me forever. What’s so difficult in showing to say hi anyway?
- It’s an opportunity for me to face my fear of embarrassment.
So I kept going to see how this whole thing panned out.
It was me against me.
To avoid getting into a clash between my two selves, I had to pretend I was someone else. At this moment, the TV Character that came to mind was Harvey Spectre from the show Suits. He is slick, confident and smart.
If I could pretend to be like him, even for a moment, I’d be able to suppress the shy-boy-incompetent aura I typically give off when going through an uncomfortable situation.
Took the cab. Went into the building. Then, Iheaded straight to the meeting room.
I started the meeting by apologizing for how our salespersoncouldn’t make it. And that, I didn’t have a backup of the presentation deck. But because I’m already there, I might as well use the time to meet them.
Now, I wasn’t sure how to do that, but it was too awkward that I managed to pull a TQ!
“That said, I didn’t wanna waste your time. Perhaps we can do instead is have an Ask-Me-Anything session. I could at least educate them with what I know about our product.”
Crickets…for about a few seconds.
Then one of the employees says, “We were hoping to see the presentation first, learn more about the product, and then ask questions about it.” TQ!
I took the marker and started drawing simple shapes on the whiteboard to explain the main parts of our products and their functionality.
I could do that because I’m responsible for the product’s design and manufacturing. We were a start-up company with three employees: the owner, the sales guy and me — the engineer. After explaining my doodles on the board, I prompted another Ask-Me-Anything session.
They asked a couple of questions. But all the questions they asked told me how they don’t really give a crap about our product offering and why I was there in the first place. They were just being polite. And so, the meeting ended early.
The whole thing felt like I wasted their time. But I did not feel any shame or embarrassment. Instead, I was very proud of myself. Why?
I conquered my fear of embarrassment and I didn’t look incompetent to myself.
It’s as if, I unlocked the superpower of heading straight to my fears — without overthinking it.
