We have worked with thousands of professionals to help them get ready for formal presentations, and one of the very consistent things that everyone has said over the years is they want to be fully prepared. Now, we’ve also worked with folks who want to be prepared for more spontaneous things. The thing about spontaneous things is, you can’t fully prepare for them. You can’t be ready for everything at a moment’s notice. You can’t expect what’s going to happen, and you can’t know that you know how to respond to anything that will happen. It’s kind of like going into an interview and feeling like you have figured out every possible question that interviewer could ask you so that you have exactly the right words at the ready for any contingency.
Instead of being prepared, it’s being what we call walking prepared, which is having a handful of principles in your head in any circumstance. Principle number one for being walking prepared is: get a sense of what the question actually is or what the problem actually is. Something can happen, or somebody can ask a question, or somebody can need something, and it can come with a fair amount of urgency, a fair amount of emotion. What you’ve got to do is take a beat to make sure that you and the person that you’re talking with, and anyone related to it, are all on the same page about what the problem actually is.
So, because there is emotion around this situation, that can sometimes be a little bit foggy, and it can sometimes take a little bit of time to get clear on and get an agreement about what the situation actually is, you’re going to want to take a little bit of time to talk it through, ask a few questions, get clear on who’s affected here, and what is the situation that defines the problematic situation. It could be relatively simple to get to that clarity. It might take a little bit of time.
Now, the second principle is getting an agreement on getting clear on what the flip side of the problematic situation is. What the goal situation is, what does it need to look like for the folks who are affected, and how are they going to feel there? Now, again, that can take a little bit of time to get clear on, and it’s okay. It’s okay to take that time to ask the questions and to talk it through with the people that you’re talking to.
Then, the third principle is to get clear on who’s going to do what to address this current problematic situation and bring about the better situation at the end. And it’s quite possible that the immediate response to that question is, “I don’t know.” It is okay to say, “I don’t know.” But you don’t want to just leave it there. You can say, “You know what? I don’t know what the right answer is right now. I don’t know who should do what, but here’s what I’m going to do to figure it out,” or maybe more likely, “Here’s what we’re going to do to figure it out.”
It is perfectly fine to not know an answer in an interview, to win a project, in a job interview, when they’re asking a question. It’s perfectly fine for you to say, “Hey, you know, I don’t know the answer to that, but here’s what I’m going to do to figure that out. Here’s what I’m going to do to address that question.”
As long as you’re able to cover those three bases – the current situation right now, the target situation that’s going to be better, and what we’re going to do to go from here to there – as long as you can be confident as you say those things, you can be confident presence in any situation, and you don’t have to have anything figured out in advance.
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