I Didn't Understand This Until My 50s - I Wish I Had ...
On Helping, and Caring, Not Manipulating
You might not get this until you’re in your 50s.
I didn’t. I wish I had.
Some time in my late-thirties, shortly after I realised that being clever wasn’t much use if you couldn’t explain yourself, I bought Blair Warren’s very short, very expensive book: The One Sentence Persuasion Course - 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding.
Twenty-seven words. Five moves:
Encourage their dreams. Justify their failures. Allay their fears. Confirm their suspicions. Help them throw rocks at their enemies.
I read it and felt icky. 🤮
It sounded like a manipulation manual.
And, in the wrong hands, it absolutely is.
I put it aside and didn’t think about it for nearly twenty years.
In those twenty years, I worked with a lot of senior leaders. And I started noticing something I couldn’t quite name. Something about how the work actually worked, beyond the methods and the frameworks.
Then I stumbled on Warren’s book again, by accident. (Don’t tell anyone, but I was looking in my Kindle library for a book about writing sentences. Turns out I own twelve books with “sentence” in the title. Long story.)
I braced myself and re-read it.
And I felt a lot stupid.
Because the five moves Warren described were exactly what I’d been doing, naturally and instinctively, with the people I help. I’d become the person he was describing. But … thankfully … that icky feeling? It was gone.
Here’s what young me missed: the moves are ethically neutral. A con artist uses them to extract. A friend uses them to support. The moves don’t change. The intent does.
And the intent comes from one thing - caring whether the other person is okay.
I’m careful about who I work with. If I don’t genuinely care about the leader (or at least about the people who work or live with them), I find a way not to take the gig. Caring is cognitively expensive, and I manage my cognitive energy carefully.
Here’s the first secret, that I’m slowly starting to believe:
Caring isn’t some soft thing wrapped around the work. It kinda IS the work.
There’s a second secret, and this one’s for you:
You can’t think clearly until there’s a smile in your mind.
You can’t solve gnarly problems when you’re stumbling around staring at your feet, feeling stuck.
You can’t think clearly when you’ve been beaten down day after day, quarter after quarter.
You probably can’t even see that it’s happening.
But when someone genuinely encourages your dreams, justifies your failures, stands in the dark with you - that pressure releases.
The smile returns.
They lift you out of the fog, out of the mud. Turn the lights on. Not a lightbulb moment - just light. And - 💡 - you see the room differently.
So, anyway, … that’s why I dismissed Warren’s book in my thirties and use it every day in my fifties. The difference? Young me grew up.
One last thing. If you help people for a living, caring might be your superpower. Not because YOU solve THEIR problems, but because you lift them up so they can solve THEIR OWN.
Just don’t care so much it breaks you.
Hope this helps, hit reply, say hello!
Clarke
p.s. heads up … I might be moving this newsletter from Substack back to convertkit soon. Substack is starting to make me feel a bit ick 🤮.
"You can’t think clearly until there’s a smile in your mind." That hits very nicely.